attacked for not having a spin bowling or wicketkeeping

Scotland lock Jonny Gray reckons Argentina have proven their credentials as a top-class team with performances against South Africa and New Zealand. Gray has been particularly impressed with hooker Agustin Creevy, but he believes the Pumas are also well equipped with backs and wingers.And the 22-year-old is anticipating a tough encounter when Argentina visit Murrayfield for the Autumn Test on Saturday. Are they up there with the best sides in the world now? Id say so, the Glasgow Warriors forward said.Argentina are a great team. They can attack from anywhere. Look at the players they have got - guys like Agustin Creevy, some of their backs and their huge wingers, so they have some dangerous strike runners. Argentinas Agustin Creevy (C) is tackled by Brodie Retallick of New Zealand They are always keeping the ball alive so you can never switch off.When it comes to facing them up front, in the scrum and in the line-out, its going to be a huge challenge. Across the board, we have to be switched on.You just have to look at some of their recent results in the Rugby Championship to realise they are a world-class side. They beat South Africa and then pushed New Zealand all the way. Six months half price Upgrade to Sky Sports to watch Man Utd v Arsenal on Saturday and get the first six months half price We have to be on it from minute one to the final whistle. We need to be clever, we cant be coughing up ball to them.But while Gray is preparing to face a side who have made significant strides forward in recent years, he believe he still has some way to go before he himself can claim to be among the worlds top performers. Jonny Gray scores Scotlands third try against Australia Gray has been tipped for a call-up to the British and Irish Lions squad set to tour New Zealand next summer.His performance in Saturdays loss to Australia, where he made all of his 24 tackles stick, will have only improved his chances of making Warren Gatlands travel party.Gray is not putting too much emphasis on the statistics though.He said: I dont look at numbers. As a defence, we all work for each other. Whoever is there makes the tackle and whoever misses the tackle is there to help clean up.We play for each other, we play with a lot of heart, so its a team effort, always. British and Irish Lions coach Warren Gatland Im just lucky Ive got the coaches at Glasgow and Scotland who will sit down with me and show me where I can improve my game.Its really special getting to play for your country and to come up against some of the best second-rows in the world like we did at the weekend against Australia.Its a great opportunity to test yourself against these guys. I think Ive got a lot to improve on and a long way to go before Im at that level.But Im lucky Ive got players around me pushing me on. Were always pushing each other here.Upgrade to Sky Sports now to watch Man Utd v Arsenal this Saturday and get the first six months half price! Also See: Laidlaw has eye on rankings Scots to take the positives Scotland 22-23 Australia Wales 24-20 Argentina Wholesale MLB Jerseys . The phone hearing is scheduled for 4:30pm et/1:30pm pt. 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Authentic Baseball Jerseys Outlet . - Chris Tierney snapped a tie with a power-play goal late in the third period as the London Knights rallied from a 3-0 deficit to beat the Erie Otters 5-3 in Ontario Hockey League action on Wednesday. Darren Lehmann seems fond of his caricature as a coach who believes there are few problems in a cricket team that cant be solved over a pint or three. Asked recently whether one reason for Australias poor Test performances is the absence of a full-time specialist spin coach - John Davison, a spin coach who appears to have a beneficial impact on Nathan Lyon, rarely tours - Lehmann guffawed: So you want another staff member on tour?Lehmanns curt response was a window into an issue of growing tension in the sport: whether international teams, long mocked for being behemoths in which the players are outnumbered many times over by the support staff, actually suffer from having too few specialist coaches. Just as Australia have been criticised for their lack of a permanent spin coach, so England have been attacked for not having a spin bowling or wicketkeeping coach who always travels with the team; indeed, they now no longer have a full-time fielding coach either. Throughout international cricket, it remains the norm for teams to recruit consultant spin and wicketkeeping coaches intermittently; actual full-time specialist coaches in these two areas remain extremely rare.Bill Gerrard has worked in professional sport, both in analytics and in coaching, across baseball (for Oakland Athletics), rugby (for Saracens) and now football (for AZ Alkmaar). In these sports, Gerrard observes a salient contrast with cricket. I had assumed that cricket would have been more advanced in using specialist coaches. There is massive scope for specialisation.As in most areas off the field, American sports have traditionally led the way in using coaching specialists. It is difficult to put a time on how far behind cricket is, since coaching specialisation goes back a long way in both baseball and the NFL. Cricket seems to be only slowly catching up, Gerrard reflects. Even at Saracens, a leading rugby union club in England, but one with far fewer resources than Full Member cricket teams, Gerrard was struck by how specific each coachs role was. Each coach had a specialist area of responsibility - attack, defence, kicking, scrum and line-out, he says. Never mind specialist wicketkeeping and spin bowling coaches, crickets equivalent would be more like a range of batting coaches for different needs - say, attacking spin, defending against spin, attacking pace and defending against pace.That would surely be going too far, and Lehmann clearly has a point when he argues against bloating the backroom staff for its own sake. Yet that cannot obscure the curious truth that while cricket is richer than ever, its financial and professional stakes so high that teams take nutritionists and even chefs on tour, many countries still do not bother with full-time specialist coaches for two of its most important skills. It is certainly not as if the wealthiest Test nations cannot afford specialists; the resistance, as Lehmann implies, is all cultural.One only needs to listen to Lyon eulogise about the importance of Davison, or Adil Rashid praise Saqlain Mushtaqs role in his palpable improvement in India, for evidence of how the best specialist coaches can improve performance. Neglecting to bother with permanent specialists amounts to a bizarre acceptance that keeping and spin bowling are somehow of secondary importance compared to other skills in cricket: third-class citizens, as Graeme Swann has lamented.We should have full-time spin coaches, not just for the main team but on the county circuit as well, Saqlain said last week. It is not just to look after the spinners but it is to help the batsmen as to how the spinners think as well. His view is hardly surprising, given that he wants to become Englands first genuinely full-time spin bowling coach. (Mushtaq Ahmed, who coached spin from 2008 to 2014, did not always travel with the team.) But the fact that Saqlain departed Englands tour of India after the third Test, when he had clearly aided their bowling of spin, seemed to touch the coonfines of lunacy.dddddddddddd Andrew Strauss, Englands director of cricket, will soon review the coaching support for spinners, but is said to be unconvinced that a full-time coach is needed.Cricket has made huge strides in embracing specialist backroom staff. Witness how only one out of 14 countries had a specialist fielding coach in the 2003 World Cup, but all 14 did by last years tournament, and Englands extensive use of specialists at Loughborough and on England Lions tours. Yet in international cricket teams, a certain lingering resistance to specialism remains.Prospects for greater specialisation apply not only to roles within a cricket team, but also between the different formats. As more players specialise, Gerrard asks, Why not have coaches specialising as well?Trials with specialist coaches for white-ball cricket have so far been mixed, with the overriding impression from the job-share between Andy Flower and Ashley Giles with England in 2013-14 being that the notion was a necessary evil, at best. Yet, as teams become more distinct in red- and white-ball cricket, a system of separate coaches will become easier to manage. In time, specialist coaches not just for different formats, but for different disciplines within the formats, could become increasingly common. There is almost no crossover between what batting and bowling coaches need to hone before a Test match and a T20.And, given the saturated international schedule, specialist coaches will bring a clear benefit, making it easier for national boards to tie down the best coaches for longer, in the knowledge they will not have to surrender a palatable work-life balance to coach at international level. This could make coaching at international level a little more attractive relative to coaching T20 franchises, increasingly the favoured option for many leading ex-players. Naturally, greater specialism will bring new challenges. Head coaches will need to adapt to a changing environment: more specialist coaches could mean that head coaches become a little less hands-on and adopt more of an overseeing role. Other sports suggest that this can be done without undermining the head coachs authority, but the scope for disagreement between coaches is certainly exacerbated if there are more of them around.And the risk of simply overwhelming a player with a surplus of information and advice, some of it contradictory, will increase. Recall the Suns list of 61 guilty men - including 29 non-players - involved in Englands disastrous Ashes tour in 2013-14. Trent Woodhill, a leading T20 coach, warns that a bad appointment as a full-time spin coach could relegate spinners to being fourth-class citizens.But these dangers are no reason to ignore how cricket teams can benefit from moving towards the levels of coaching specialisation that are the norm in other sports. During a tour, such coaches might rarely actually coach in the classical sense of working on a players technique. Any technical change you make for a player is unlikely to hold up under pressure unless groomed for a minimum of six months, says Woodhill. Specialists are most valuable when theyre providing support and guidance around decision-making and game awareness. You can provide different training options, as a specialist, that can enhance and repeat good performance. Normally, then, the greatest value of a specialist coach on tour is simply in deep understanding of their craft, and being a voice to talk through tactics or methods, just as Saqlain has been for Rashid in India.Batsmen and fast bowlers do not have to deal with such relationships being curtailed by their coach flying home midway through a tour. While cricket teams ruthlessly seek how to find any competitive advantage, it is perverse that wicketkeepers and spin bowlers still face being estranged from the coaches who can help them the most. ' ' '