'A bit lazy': Winless Blues hit new low

As South Australia's players celebrated a rise to the top of the Marsh Sheffield Shield ladder with a few celebratory drinks while stretched out on the sun-soaked Adelaide Oval turf yesterday, their New South Wales rivals were bunkered in a briefing room working through what had gone so dramatically wrong.

In getting knocked over for 183 then skittled for 136, the Blues recorded their lowest total for two completed innings (319) in Shield games against the Redbacks stretching back more than 130 years.

It also represented just the third time across those 236 Shield matches between the competition's foundation states that no Blues player has reached 60 in either innings, and their 186-run defeat was the biggest since the 257-run hammering they copped at Adelaide Oval in 1994-95.

In fairness, the current NSW team carries few parallels to that '94-95 outfit that boasted Australia regulars Mark Taylor, Michael Slater, Steve and Mark Waugh, Michael Bevan and Glenn McGrath.

But by the same token, the thumping they copped almost 30 years ago could be written off as an aberration whereas this iteration of the Blues has endured an unprecedented 14-match streak without a Shield victory having finished winless in the Shield last summer for the first time since 1938-39.

Compounding their pain, the most recent defeat was completed inside the opening hour of day four when NSW born-and-bred pair Harry Conway (4-43) and Nathan McAndrew (5-19) cleaned up the final four wickets, with McAndrew snaring 10 scalps for the match.

Having undertaken changes to leadership structure and strategies in the wake of last year's wooden spoon, NSW looked to have turned a corner when they came within a handful of wickets of defeating Queensland in their Shield season opener and then a solitary scalp short of defeating the Bulls in a subsequent one-dayer.

After winning the toss at Adelaide Oval last Sunday to give their five-man seam attack first use of a well grassed pitch under low cloud with rain in the air, perhaps the Blues felt their fortune would roll into game two of the Shield season.

However, skipper Moises Henriques believes the sudden slump in form over recent days might, in part, be attributable to the frustration that fermented within the group at coming so close to ending their drought against Queensland, only to be denied by a couple of pesky tailenders.

"There's a bit of that," Henriques told cricket.com.au in the wake of his team's bruising defeat.

"A very near win in the Shield game against Queensland, then a very near win in the one-dayer against Queensland means you can kind of feel like you've had points robbed from you.

"But the game owes us nothing, and then we come here and just didn’t play well enough.

"In fact, it was the opposite of those two games where we actually played some pretty good cricket.

"Here, I felt like we were just a bit complacent, a bit lazy and just expecting to play good cricket without having full engagement in the contest.

"It was pretty disappointing, but that starts from me and some of the senior players as well."

Among the post-play discussion points in the Blues dressing room was the example set by player of the match, SA's Nathan McSweeney, who posted the game's two highest scores with 64 and 100, and how the visiting batters had failed to learn from the way he went about it.

In Henriques' typically honest and pragmatic view, rather than adopt McSweeney's studied approach to defending his stumps, leaving balls that didn’t threaten them and waiting to score from the ones too straight or short, they instead took their lead from free-scoring tailenders who hit out at the end of SA's first innings.

With the demonstrable exception of in-form opener Daniel Hughes who top-scored for NSW with 58 across almost three hours in the second innings, the Blues batters showed a collective unwillingness to stay patient and pounce on bowler errors.

Henriques readily admitted his complicity, having gone to the wicket in the over before lunch on day two and flashing an expansive drive at the third delivery he faced only to nick off for a duck.

"I was guilty of that this game, feeling like I'm hitting the ball well off the field and then getting into the middle and thinking I can play cricket shots, but not actually getting into a contest with the bowler," he said.

"Whether that's the same for all the batting group I don’t know, but it was definitely the mistake I made and a couple of the other batters said they felt the same, especially after seeing how some of the SA lower-order batted on day one.

"They felt 'okay, this wicket is starting to look pretty good now' and thought it was flattening out and it would be nice to bat on.

"But as we saw, the scores only got lower and lower.

"I just felt like maybe we were a little bit plan-less, either that or we didn't quite commit to the plans that we had.

"We were just in the rooms talking about next time we face conditions like this or somewhere else where it could be completely different conditions, whether it's spinning or whatever - we can't just bat like we're facing throw-downs in the nets.

"We've got to actually have a plan.

"We've got to accept that maybe there's a ball or a type of delivery that's most likely to get us out, and we've got to find a way to keep that particular ball out, and score off the rest."

If there was a silver lining on a grey few days for NSW, it was the Shield debut of 20-year-old seamer Jack Nisbet who followed an impressive first-up outing in the Marsh One Day Cup against Queensland with a strong all-round performance with ball and bat at Adelaide Oval.

In addition to becoming the first NSW quick since Conway in 2015-16 to claim a five-wicket bag in his maiden Shield match, Nisbet contributed an unbeaten 21 to his team's first innings total batting at eleven which earned him elevation to number eight in the second, where he scored a further 18.

"He was actually nightwatchman last night, but I daresay he might be getting promoted in the future," Henriques said.

"He was very impressive and he's quite a harsh critic on himself with the ball.

"If he bowls five good balls and one that's too short, he's mumbling off to deep fine leg talking about the one bad one.

"But there's some really, really positive signs from him and he's been showing that almost the whole pre-season, so I'm not surprised he came out and took three wickets in the one-dayer at North Sydney Oval in fairly batter-friendly conditions and then five wickets in the second innings here.

"He's shown us he's ready to play at this level, and I think now he's shown the opposition as well."

Sheffield Shield 2023-24 standings

Team	Matches played M	Wins W	Losses L	Drawn D	No results N/R	Deductions Ded.	Batting Bonus Bat	Bowling Bonus Bowl	Total points PTS
1 Western Australia Men WA	10	5	2	3	0	0	5.53	9.4	47.93
2 Tasmanian Tigers Men TAS	10	5	2	3	0	0	6.06	8.3	47.36
3 NSW Men NSW	10	4	3	3	0	0	6.31	9	42.31
4 Victoria Men VIC	10	4	4	2	0	0	4.74	8.2	38.94
5 South Australia Men SA	10	3	6	1	0	0	5.19	9.3	33.49
6 Queensland Bulls QLD	10	2	6	2	0	0	3.54	8.3	25.84

Legend

M: Matches played

W: Wins

L: Losses

D: Drawn

N/R: No results

Ded.: Deductions

Bat: Batting Bonus

Bowl: Bowling Bonus

PTS: Total points