Cricket: Critics give Lee a taste of friendly fire

Australia were forced on to the defensive for the first time in the tour yesterday, but only after being fired on by critics from behind their own lines.

Influential Sydney cricket writer Peter Roebuck managed to score a hit where most of the New Zealand players failed, calling for Brett Lee to be dropped from the team for bowling a beamer in the third one-dayer at Auckland.

His supplications saw Australian captain Ricky Ponting and coach John Buchanan playing one of the deadest bats of the tour at yesterday's pre-match press conference, where both rejected any suggestion that Lee would deliberately bowl a beamer.

Ponting opted for the character-reference approach, claiming that Lee was far too nice a bloke to stoop to such levels.

"Anyone who knows Brett Lee knows there isn't an ounce of that in him," Ponting said. "There's no way he'd ever try to do that on purpose.

"He doesn't want to wake up and read some of the stuff that's in the papers this morning. He's going to do his absolute best to make sure it doesn't happen again."

Buchanan was the more defensive of the two, telling reporters that "anyone who knew anything about fast-bowling" would understand that - at Lee's extreme pace - it took only a slight variance in timing to produce a wide margin of error.

"He only has to be a fraction out with his action and the ball could potentially go anywhere," he said.

Asked why then, instead of going anywhere, Lee's invariably headed straight at the opposition batsman's throat, Buchanan said it was because his initial target was the base of the stumps, and the line had remained the same.

"Brett's one of the few players in the world right now consistently bowling above 150 km/h, and his control has been absolutely brilliant," he said.

"Anyone who actually understands fast bowling wouldn't make those comments."

Roebuck's Sydney Morning Herald column followed some strong comments from New Zealand coach John Bracewell, who complained that Lee had a reputation for bowling dangerously high full-tosses, and suggested that he knew what he was doing on Saturday.

Lee was involved in a tit-for-tat beamer exchange with Pakistan all-rounder Abdul Razzaq this summer, and Bracewell claimed the Australian had bowled four at his batsman over the past season, including Saturday night's shocker at Brendon McCullum.

Buchanan said he believed Bracewell's comments were designed to distract his team.

"Obviously an opponent tries to find ways and means of bridging our defences, and at the moment they've been unsuccessful in the field."