Calcutta: Mitchell Marsh’s proper and highly effective medium fast bowling will lengthen Mitchell Johnson’s reign of terror as the latter would then be able to shorten the length of his bowling spells, Australia's assistant coach Craig McDermott believes.

According to McDermott, Marsh's addition to the bowling attack was a critical ingredient in Australia’s resounding victory over England at Lord's.

Talking to a cricket-specific website, the former Aussie pace spearhead said: “Mitchell Marsh's hard work over the last four months or so is really starting to pay off and going to strengthen us. His approach to the wicket, his speed through the crease and his pace is up. He almost clocked 140kph in the Test. 

“He's excited about being fit and swinging the ball while bowling fast. He’s chasing 140kph. He wants to generate more speed and that’s good for us.

“If you've got an all-rounder who’s capable of bowling 140kph, it certainly makes your bowling attack quite different.

And the better he bowls the more he will be capable of doing in an innings, from 8-10 overs to 12-15, and that allows the other blokes like a Mitchell Johnson to bowl three or four-over spells and just be on the money, bowling fast all the time. It changes Michael Clarke’s dynamics quite a lot as a captain.”

McDermott reckoned that while the batsmen scoring a bagful of runs at Lord’s was helpful, the pacemen could now be expected to be far more incisive if asked to bowl first.

“I think we’ll be better for the gallop that we had in the first Test and I think the way they’ve prepared the wickets certainly favours the team batting first. But if we bowl the way we did in the second innings at Lord's, whether we bowl first or second, we’re going to knock teams over. We're in the right gear now, so we've just got to keep going,” McDermott stressed.

“In Cardiff, we bowled too much on both sides of the wicket. We didn't bowl terribly, but we didn't bowl well either. And we didn't really get the rub of the green.”