dedja wrote:I agree Jamie Smith is a poor keeper, that’s unlikely to change anytime soon, so my point was about his batting.
It begs the question though, in the main, excluding Alex Carey who is up there as a very good one, are the days of a specialist keeper now a bygone era?
It goes to some of the previous commentary, are cricketers being raised for Test cricket or the riches in the other forms of the game which are dominating because of the cash cows they are to not only the players, but to the cricket boards and the tournament operators.
Unless a keeper can bat well, he's not getting a chance, but I don't think it's the era of big money T20 tournaments that has made it this way.
I think the standards have been raised and keeping is still very much a specialist skill. You have to be a good keeper and a good bat to last the distance, however, you're more of a chance to get an opportunity if you show high quality with the bat and I'm not sure the likes of Ian Healy are getting a look in any more - even though he was considered a good batsman (for a keeper) of his era.
How many Tests did Matthew Wade play as keeper? If they had ignored Wade's keeping, Lyon would've been stuck at 100 Test wickets.
We've seen the tactics used this series with Carey up to the stumps to Boland and Neser, which were brilliantly thought out and even more brilliantly pulled off by Carey. Similarly on the sub-continent to spin, if you're not a high class keeper you're doing the team a huge disservice.
I'm no expert on how good keepers' around the world are and how they might rank to those gone before them - especially on the subcontinent. But I remember Alec Stewart getting the nod in front of Jack Russell, watching as a kid, so this argument has been going on for a fair while. The Sri Lankan Kaluwitharana revolutionised the white ball game in a similar era and was followed by the great Sangakkara, who along with Gilchrist, forever raised the batting expectations of keepers in Test cricket, albeit Sangakarra's top order batting saw him play as often as a specialist batsmen as he did also donning the gloves, which says something of the speciality of the skillset at least in his era.
I'm not sure how the fundamentals of keeping would change if you were raising a kid to be a T20 keeper vs a Test keeper and with regards to batting, long before T20's were a thing, keepers had a bit of a licence to be aggressive batsman in Test cricket.
