‘Smith, Warner left young batsmen without teachers’

MELBOURNE: Australia fast bowler Josh Hazlewood has said that the absence of Steven Smith and David Warner deprived the group of young batsmen of first-hand experience and advice.

Neither Shaun Marsh nor Usman Khawaja are universally regarded as seniors, according to Hazlewood, and his comments reflected the fact that advice provided exclusively by coaches was unable to get any further than the boundary’s edge.

Hazlewood said that the likes of Marcus Harris, Travis Head and Marnus Labuschagne, all new batsmen in the Test side, suffered for the lack of guidance at the other end from players who had found ways to be consistently high scorers at Test level.

“It’s probably been the first time when you’ve had the top six with no real senior batsmen to feed off, I guess, around training and games, so they [the newcomers] have had to do all their learning from the coaches,” Hazlewood said.

“It’s just so important to have those couple of senior guys when you bring those couple of young guys into the top six to learn from.”“It was great to have them (Smith and Warner) around - it’s better than bowling to a stump if no-one’s available,” Hazlewood said