MacGill, Mallett to spin Australia in a new direction Stuart MacGill was bamboozled by so many coaches during his career that he has become one. Ashley Mallett was so critical of Cricket Australia's spin program that he has been invited to join it. MacGill began his work as a spin consultant at Cricket Australia's Centre of Excellence this week, striking up a rapport with lone Ashes spinner Nathan Lyon, aspiring leggie Fawad Ahmed and rookie finger spinners Ashton Agar and Ashton Turner. MacGill accepted the job because he believes a generation of spinners has been "horribly mismanaged." "I was in their shoes once and I got messed around," he said. There's no professional resentment or jealousy here, but when Shane Warne started playing everyone got excited because of all the spin bowlers that were going to come out of the woodwork, now everyone is scratching their head going, where are they all? My point is we have been churning out spin bowlers for years, there's been heaps of them, it's just that they've been horribly mismanaged and badly coached. That doesn't mean they've been coached by bad coaches, it means they've been over-coached," he said. Any spin bowler my age or older, we have all got a thousand stories about how we were bamboozled by coaches through the years. Every coach has a different way of describing the same thing when really the outcome is you want to be able to bowl the ball down the other end and get as much on it as possible before it gets down there. Rather than pick apart their actions, MacGill wants the spinners to know their own stock deliveries intimately so they have something to fall back on when, as happened to Lyon when M. S. Dhoni was on the rampage in Chennai, the heat is on. He backed Lyon but believes he would benefit from the presence of Ahmed, who is likely to join the off-spinner in England if he receives his Australian citizenship in time for the Ashes. Shane Warne's first series in England, Tim May was up the other end. I can't see any reason why Nathan Lyon and Fawad Ahmed shouldn't be playing the first Test if he's got a passport," MacGill said. Nathan is a good bowler and I think he would do him the world of good, take a hell of a lot of pressure off him. It would do a lot of favours for the quicks as well. Based on the way Peter Siddle and Mitchell Starc bat, I don't think [playing] five bowlers is unreasonable. Mallett, the elder of off-spin in Australia, ripped into both Lyon and CA's teaching methods in his column for Fairfax Media during the disastrous India tour. Why has Cricket Australia allowed the standard of spin bowling to slip so dramatically? What are they doing at the Centre of Excellence in Brisbane? At one stage they were wiring the spinners up to music. The official line was that it was all to do with focusing and relaxing," he wrote. My take on that load of incomprehensible rubbish was our emerging spinners would get to know a lot of tunes and be whistling Dixie as the ball flew over their heads into the grandstand. Centre of Excellence head coach Troy Cooley said Mallett was invited to Brisbane because of his experience in England, where Agar and Turner are also headed to join Hampshire's scholarship program, and "to show him what we do and clear up any things he thought we were or weren't doing." Said Mallett: "It's a bit unusual [to be invited] after you criticise the place but I just felt that spin bowling needs a bit of a boost. We've got quicks coming out of our ears but not too many spinners. We've got a few spinners who have the potential to be very good, but some of them have got their actions inhibiting what they're trying to do. Lyon, who has confirmed he will play for New South Wales next season, said he would relish the chance to work more closely with Sydney-based MacGill. "There's a few things I'm working on, just to be more consistent with my bowling and keep improving," Lyon said. India was disappointing result-wise, but I learnt so much about the way I need to go about my cricket and different conditions. I'm feeling much more confident in my game after going to probably the hardest place to play Test cricket.