Review review review! LBW candidate extraordinaire Shane Watson
Lewis Hamilton, World Motor Racing Champion, once claimed that racing on his PlayStation was the perfect way to learn new circuits. It certainly seems to have worked for him. But would a similar approach work for cricketers? It seems so according to Will Pucovski, who made his debut against India at the SCG in January.
The 23 year-old opened the batting alongside Stuart Broad’s bunny of choice David Warner.
“I actually genuinely felt like I like was playing PlayStation game, it was like International Cricket 2011 or something. I still remember faking illness to get a day off school when the game came out,” Pucovski said.
But who did the young Pucovski pretend to be via his playstation controller? Was it a great Aussie opener like Mathew Hayden? Was an English run machine like Sir Alistair Cook or perhaps a stylish dasher like Sachin Tendulkar or Brian Lara?
No, it was none other than Guerilla Cricket’s favourite LBW specialist and Lumley Castle Ghost botherer Shane Watson.
“I loved Shane Watson at that time” said Will. “So, whenever he was opening the batting they had this new view. I thought it was pretty cool where you were like a bit of a spider cam above the batter, so you’d be almost facing”.
“I had played a PlayStation game at the SCG, getting Shane Watson a 100 on Ashes cricket whatever year it was when I skipped a day of school. So, I still remembered it as Bumrah was at the top of his mark, and I’m like I know this because this is what happened when I was facing England with Shane Watson,” he added.
So how did it go for Will? Not too bad at all in fact, with a credible 62 in his first innings.
But we all know Shane Watson’s LBW record. At 27.4%, the highest of any Test batsman in history to have played at least 100 innings and Will was pretending to be Watson versus England where he fell LBW in no less than 40% of his dismissals. No prizes then for guessing how Will Pucovski’s debut innings ended. It was of course LBW although perhaps the scorecard should have read Pucovski 62 LBW b Sony rather than Saini.
