Don’t Drop Hughes ‘Cause Shield Cricketers Can’t Catch??

This is the ideology held by Phillip Hughes’ former coach Steve Thomlinson, reveal in this SMH article. The underperforming New South Welshman should not go back to Shield cricket, because he will get away with ‘stuff’ and therefore not correct his technique.

Ah! A great point by this man, the New Zealand fielders won’t let Hughes get away with anything. Their safe-as-houses hands and lightning reflexes meant that they only dropped 4 catches in the last test match! Those bumbling, hopeless state cricketers, all they would do is get Hughes’ confidence up, and let him get some runs on the board! Silly! In fact just look how much NZ are loving their cricketers’ fielding performance!

Seriously, a) if this bloke thinks the quality of fielding in state cricket is worse than the New Zealand test team and/or b) that Hughes getting away with ‘stuff’ in Shield cricket is going to be the reason he does not develop then this guy has rocks in his head. If anything, the reason would be that the quality of bowling isn’t as good (and it probably is anyway! Chris Martin and Vettori get a tick but there are billions of state bowlers I would have in front of the others).

Hughes got away with something in the 2nd innings of the first test and then did the exact same thing to get out! Gee he is a quick learner.

Australia can’t afford to have someone not scoring runs, all for the good of the eventual development of a fundamental flaw in his technique. This is exactly what shield cricket if for. Players don’t get ready FOR test cricket IN test cricket.

Back to Mr Thomlinson, perhaps he wasn’t quite thinking straight when he gave comments for this article. It is strange (or perhaps not) that the SMH would publish such flawed opinions.