On Wednesday (June 28), Nathan Lyon will join an elite set of cricketers when he plays in the Lord’s Ashes Test. Alastair Cook, Allan Border, Mark Waugh, Sunil Gavaskar, and Brendon McCullum are the only other five cricketers to have played 100 consecutive Test matches. It demonstrates both the consistency of a player’s performances and their impeccable physical conditioning.
It seemed unlikely exactly a decade ago when Lyon was left out of the Ashes-opening Test match at Trent Bridge, with left-arm spinner Ashton Agar receiving a debut in his place. Lyon, the eighth-highest wicket-taker in Tests history and only five short of the 500 marks, distinctly recalls the events surrounding his exclusion.
“To be honest I remember that day at Trent Bridge pretty clearly when I got told I wasn’t playing,” Lyon said. “I thought I’d had a decent Test match only a couple of weeks beforehand in Delhi and I just remember sitting on the end of Brad Haddin’s bed and talking about it.
“It’s a weird feeling when you get dropped, especially as a young cricketer. Young in your international career, you tend to think your career is done, what are you going to do next, will my family still love you and all that stuff. These are the thoughts which go through your head. It wasn’t until Brad said, mate, you just need to talk to the selectors and find out what the reason was and go out and prove them wrong. I did that, I’m proud of that, and proud of the way I went about it.
In the weeks that followed his axing at Trent Bridge, Lyon shadowed Michael Clarke at every practice because the selectors claimed he was ineffective against right-handed batters. “The rest of the batters were nervous because they wanted to face Graeme Swann, while all I wanted to do was bowl to right-handers.”
“It’s part of my journey and was really good advice at that stage to allow me to try and get better and figure out how to get better. It’s been an incredible journey.”
Four years after a deflating final-day performance at Headingley, which he was reminded of by umpire Marais Erasmus in the final moments of Australia’s dramatic victory at Edgbaston last week, Lyon is central to Australia’s counter of England’s uber ‘Bazball’ approach.
“I didn’t think about it [Headingley 2019] until Marais, the umpire, said ‘this is a bit similar to Headingley, isn’t it?’ Thanks Marais, that’s one way to calm my nerves,” Lyon said. “But Pat [Cummins] and I didn’t talk about it. Pat was really calm.
“Every time us bowlers tend to bat we try to lighten each other’s mood up a bit and try to get us to smile and relax a little bit. Pat played a pretty amazing role just with me personally. But thanks Marais, I wasn’t thinking about Headingley until that moment. We still needed about 30…”
Lyon did concede that Australia was not at their best in the first Test, despite sneaking home with a 1-0 series advantage, and that the team had a great deal of room for development if they were to withstand England’s aggressive game strategies.
“It’s [Bazball] just a very aggressive brand of cricket So it’s new, it’s exciting. Hats off to ’em because they’ve been playing unbelievable brand-new cricket and to be honest with you, and I’ve said this many times before, I think we just constantly need to concentrate on what we’re doing,” Lyon said.
“And I think to be honest, we’ve I don’t think we’re at our best at Edgbaston. I feel like we’ve got a lot of improvement to do, if we want to keep competing really well and play each Test match to win it and so I know we’ve had a really good chat today as a team and each individual has had the chance to work on the skills and now tomorrow will be a top up some guys won’t come and try to rest up mentally and prepare for Wednesday. It’s going to be a challenge. We know that we love it and playing here at Lord’s. It’s the home of cricket which is level pegging with Adelaide in my eyes, but we’ll come out and enjoy it and see how we go.”
