A look back at Brett Lee

[James]

A look back at Brett Lee

Brett Lee's Test career was a mixture of both superb match-winning performances and periods of barren form. Overall, how good a Test bowler was he?

by Marco Trevisiol

[Manee]

Solid article, but missed out on the illness that Brett Lee developed on his tour of India, where he shed a great deal of weight and therefore lost pace, that he regained after returning from injury against England Lions in the Ashes tour. However, the overall theme that inconsistency and injury have plagued him and will continue too as he gets even older ring a great deal of truth about them.

[Scaly piscine]

My enduring memory of Brett Lee will be his spell at the end of the 2005 Ashes against Hoggard where Matthew looked like he could have played him with a stick of rhubarb despite everything including the kitchen sink being thrown at him.

I agree about the general lack of bowling intelligence. It was evident again in the IPL. He just kept on bowling half volleys looking for non-existent swing when all he needed to do was get it straight and back of a length.

[slippyslip]

You can make a lot of criticisms of Lee in tests. He did bowl poorly at times though sometimes that was due to injury, or being rushed back from injury.

But his ODI performances are outstanding. His ODI record puts him up there as one of the best ever 50 over bowlers.

[GuyFromLancs]

I heard it said a number of times that people struggled to express in words why McGrath was so good. I think the case with Lee is that people stuggled to express why, for sustained periods, was he so bad.

In his physical prime is stock delivery was about 92 MPH, easily taking it up to 95-96 when he wanted to and he wasn't famous for being overly erratic in the same way, say, Steve Harmison was/is. That said, and playing in one of the greatest sides in the history of cricket you would have thought he would have tore a new one in every team he played.

The reality was somewhat different, even mediocre batsman found that they could get through the bluff, bluster and wannabe filmstar heroics. Despite the odd vicious bouncer (often directed at feared strokemakers like Matthew Hoggard ) I was amazed at how readily milked he was by our batsman in 05. Despite memorable cameos he may have been the worst bowler in the series with the exception of the then totally blunted Jason Gillespie.

Overall, I am afraid that Brett Lee the bowler does not stand up to much scrutiny outside the ODI arena where to be fair he was very effective.

[Richard]

Originally Posted by GuyFromLancs

In his physical prime is stock delivery was about 92 MPH, easily taking it up to 95-96 when he wanted to and he wasn't famous for being overly erratic in the same way, say, Steve Harmison was/is.

Lee was erratic in a totally different way to Harmison. Harmison is famous for being so erratic that it's sometimes difficult to get bat on him - there are not a few examples of Harmison spells in the longer game (in the shorter it just leads to heaps of wides) where he's conceded a low economy-rate and routinely struggled to hit the cut strip. Lee tends to be more conventionally erratic and easily scored off.

[lockton2skipper]

i thought brett lee was a top guy loved his competitiveness and will miss him in the test arena.

[Uppercut]

Frustratingly he never quite reached the heights it looked like he would after McGrath's retirement. When he got the ball reversing in the England Lions game last summer it looked like he was going to take the country by storm- but he broke down, Oz lost the Ashes and his terrifying performances in the ODIs left us with a feeling of what might have been.

He's bowled some spells that were as good as anything I've seen, and always threatened to become the world-class bowler he was at the start of his career. But he never quite got there for any longer than a few series. Still, he had a fantastic mentality and especially in the last four or five years of his career I always felt that a team with Brett Lee in it was better than one without.