Cricket world has its bats to the wall apart from India, says Mark Taylor

POOR batting is not just Australia’s problem but a worldwide malaise, according to Mark Taylor.

Mark Taylor and wife Judi at his induction into the Bradman Foundation at the SCG. Picture: Szilvasi Attila

POOR batting is not just Australia’s problem but a worldwide malaise, according to Mark Taylor.

Speaking before his presentation as a guest of honour to the Bradman Foundation dinner at the SCG last night, Taylor claimed that only India was producing good young batsmen.

"I don’t exactly know why that is," the former Australian captain told The Daily Telegraph.

"I look at guys from England like Joe Root and Jonny Bairstow who played in the last Ashes series.

"They’re not bad looking players but they don’t look to me like Ricky Pontings or Sachin Tendulkars, and you could say the same thing about Australian cricket, West Indies cricket, Sri Lankan cricket.

"It seems to me that when Test matches are played at the moment we are still looking at the senior players, the 30-year-olds and beyond, to make most of the runs.

"We’re not saying here comes the new Sachin Tendulkar, put him down for 500 runs in the Ashes series.

"England are here and we’re all looking at Alastair Cook or Ian Bell or Kevin Pietersen to make the runs. They’re going to be considered the big wickets.

"It’s not just an Australian problem, it’s right around the world save for a few Indian batsmen like Virat Kohli."

Taylor wondered if it was a generational problem.

"It’s all about quick-fire success," he said. "Batting for more than about four hours is a monumental effort.

"Obviously the rise of Twenty20 cricket and the fact everyone wants to play it is having an impact.

"It’s a great game to play and a great way to make money."

One of Australian cricket’s leading statesmen and now back on the Cricket Australia board, Taylor claims that the performance of the Test team was not an accurate guide to the health of the game in this country.

"The finances are good, the numbers are up in terms of people who are playing, so I think overall the game’s quite healthy," he said.

"If our Test team was winning like they were five or six years ago there would be a lot of positive talk about cricket at the moment.

"But that’s the way it is. The Test team is often the shop window to how the game appears to be going in this country.

"It’s a bit narrow to say that if the men’s team is not going well the game is not healthy.

"If I look back at my time of playing I didn’t realise until I retired and started to join a few boards the number of cricketers didn’t increase at all during the 1990s.

"There were about 400,000 registered cricketers from about 1990 to the year 2000 and in that time we went from contenders to world champions.

"Yet the numbers around the game weren’t going anywhere. They were quite stagnant.

"Everyone was saying the game was never healthier but no more players were being attracted to the game.

"If you look from 2000, and the side continued to play well until 2007, while the performances may have fallen away, the numbers of kids playing out there has almost doubled."