Michael Vaughan, the former England skipper is quite an outspoken character. He always comes up with an out of the box opinion and gets trolled by the fans on the majority of the occasions. His tweets usually hog the limelight for different reasons. Now, he has taken a dig on the caliber of Aussie off-spinner Nathan Lyon saying that he is not enough talented to take 800 wickets.
Vaughan played in the golden era of spinning legends. He faced bowlers like Shane Warne, Muttiah Muralitharan, Anil Kumble, and Harbhajan Singh. They are reckoned as the all-time legend in international cricket. But, the former player feels with the advent of the T20I format things have changed.
Michael Vaughan Feels Nathan Lyon Is Not A Bowler That Can Take 800 Wickets
He feels that white-ball cricket has changed the scenario in international cricket. Earlier, games used to finish on Day-5. But, now the tracks are created in such a fashion that we get results in the first three days only. The former player asserted that as per Muralitharan only Ravichandran Ashwin can break his record of 800 wickets from current bowlers,
Vaughan added to that saying Nathan Lyon has grabbed 396 wickets. But, he lacks the ability to take 800 wickets. As per him, the Aussie office will have to play more matches in order to reach that milestone or in breaking it.
“When I played, the batsmen were technically so good and wickets were flat; now, they try to finish matches in three days. The bowlers in my day had to do extra work to get spin and do something magic to get results. Nowadays, if you bowl line and length over a period of time, you will get five wickets. It is guaranteed because batsmen cannot stay for long without attacking,” Michael Vaughan wrote in his blog for The Sydney Herald
“You have a better chance of taking wickets, which is why spinners only have to set the field properly, bowl line and length and let the pitches and batsmen do the rest. Spinners used to have to work hard for wickets, which is why they worked hard on developing other deliveries. Now they do that in T20 cricket instead. The bowl different variations because batsmen are coming after them. But in Test cricket, you don’t need to do it.”
Will we see another golden age of Test spin bowling? Will a spinner reach 700 or 800 wickets? “Ashwin [who has 377 Test wickets] has a chance because he is a great bowler,” says Murali. “Other than that, I don’t think any younger bowler coming in will go to 800. Maybe Nathan Lyon is not good enough to reach it. He is close to 400 [396] but he has had to play many, many matches to get there.”
