Shane Watson – No place to hide anymore

Where has the magic gone?

Failure can freeze the surest of hearts; it can numb the most confident of minds. Failure can silence the most certain of men, and can plant seeds of doubt in the most assured of souls.

Shane Watson has not been scoring runs in Tests, period. He has been opening the batting this series, and his bat has been nothing more than a very large, extremely silent piece of wood. He batted at one drop in India and made no noteworthy contribution there. He came in after the fall of two wickets at Old Trafford. No luck at that position either – nothing seems to be working for him.

Rewind to four months ago. Back to fonder memories, back to the IPL – the magical time when Shane Watson was actually delivering the goods. The runs were coming thick and fast, and Watson was effortlessly, consistently, and single-handedly winning games for the Rajasthan Royals. He was at his outrageous, unshackled, and intimidating best. He batted like he owned the ground and every single person in it and could not have made his dominance clearer if he had convinced NASA to launch a satellite named after him.

The IPL seems light years away now. We are into a different format, and we have a different version of Shane Watson – a Watson who meekly surrenders to the fast bowlers, and a Watson who allows himself to be easily bamboozled by the spinners. He has scores of 13, 46, 30, 20, 19 and 18 in the three tests this Ashes – a string of extremely disappointing numbers for a batsman possessing such surreal, unquestionable talent.

Yet again, Watson has been doing what he does better than most batsmen in the world – getting decent starts, and then throwing his wicket away. He has averaged above 32 in only one of his last seven series, and his last Test century came over three years ago. His average of 20.41 in 2013 is his worst over the last five years.

Clearly, all those failures have taken a toll. Gone is the confidence with which he used to drive Steyn through the covers, and gone is the arrogance with which he was able to freely dance down the wicket to Ashwin and smash him over his head. The harder he tries not to focus on his failures, the faster his failures come back to haunt him.

Twenty four of his eighty dismissals in Test cricket have been leg-before-wicket – a whopping thirty percent. And now, it is almost inevitable. Somehow, magically, if Watson is not dismissed lbw to one of the pacers in their opening burst, he successfully confuses himself when the spinner comes into the attack. Suddenly, he has nowhere to hide. He has a clear weakness – there are gaping holes in his technique, and every opposition is well aware of it.