You don’t have to spend long in bars or cabs around the country to know that nearly every Australian fan thinks he or she would do a better job of selecting the Test team than those presently tasked with doing it.
It’s a role that looks easy from the outside but has time and time again made mugs of cricket sages. Take Australia’s last three chairmen of selectors. Former Test opener and lawyer Andrew Hilditch seemed right-thinking and diligent for much of his reign as the country’s last part-time selection boss and brought with him some empathy having been a fringe player in a transitional Test side himself. But he will always be remembered for being railroaded by Cricket Australia marketing apparatchiks into naming a dithering 17-man squad for a single home Ashes Test and then losing the series convincingly. Hilditch was gone from the job within a year, buried under a duluge of criticism and, you’d imagine, a mountain of overlooked paperwork from his day job.
So Cricket Australia finally moved with the times and went for a full-timer, appointing cerebral and schoolmasterly John Inverarity, who appeared at first like one of those existentialist European football managers, until he started picking the uninspiring likes of John Hastings and Rob Quiney in important home Tests. Those were among a series of head-scratchers that made people forget Inverarity’s fortitude in sticking by David Warner, resurrecting both Mitchell Johnson and Chris Rogers, while empowering limited overs star George Bailey. For most of his tenure he was viewed as the nutty professor of Australian cricket, and a sense of relief greeted his succession by salty and old fashioned Rod Marsh.
We all know how that went. Marsh returned as a macho purveyor of common sense, and had long been renowned for calling a spade a spade. Then he caught a glimpse of Mitchell Marsh. By the second Test of his third summer in charge, one of Australia’s last great alpha males was huddled behind a glass partition at Bellerive Oval like some fretful grandfather watching his whole family being operated on by Dr Nick Riviera. Marsh’s early, self-imposed departure from the job might actually have received a little more praise for its selfless and accurate reading of the national mood.
The lineage of these men and the long-range impacts of their decisions are not often considered in totality, but the concept of the selector as hate figure stretches right back to 1912 and Peter McAlister, the man who felt national captain Clem Hill’s wrath during a selection meeting in an office overlooking Sydney’s Martin Place. “You have been asking for a punch on the jaw all night, and I’ll give you one,” fumed Hill as he lunged across the table and did just that, biffing his adversary before an impromptu wrestle nearly sent McAlister flying out one of the room’s windows.
It’s no wonder then that only one prominent Australian selector has ever written at length about his experience (John Benaud in 1997’s Matters of Choice) nor created a definitive manual – selectors rarely last long enough and the experience of such a thankless task tends to embitter even hardy souls. Benaud himself had once famously made selectors look stupid, belting 142 in the Melbourne Test of 1972-73 in furious reaction to the news he’d been left out of the team for the next game.
As Mike Brearley once said, selectors are a bit like families – only acknowledged when there is blame to apportion. We hammer them for picking the Quineys, Mennies and Mullers of the world, but then ascribe the successes of our Warnes and Waughs to the intestinal fortitude and talent of the player alone, not the foresight and courage of the men who identified their ability and then stood by it against prevailing public opinion.
Currently in the hot seat on a fill-in basis is Trevor Hohns, who last held the top job in 2006, after a reign in which the toughest decisions were identifying which of Brad Hodge, Martin Love, Matthew Elliott or Michael Bevan could tag along on overseas tours as a reserve batsman. With the first Test team of his current stint he has certainly entered into the spirit of the national debate, making six changes, which probably would have swelled by another if NSW spinner Steve O’Keefe was fit enough to replace Nathan Lyon.
The rest of us can’t make up our minds, nor agree on anything close to a consensus team. Only 14% of the 3,439 respondents to a Guardian Australia poll had Nic Maddinson in their ideal Test side, and for all the umbrage at wicketkeeper Peter Nevill’s demotion, only 38% of respondents gave him the nod as opposed to 41.8% for Matthew Wade – a result which contradicts the tenor of comments sections and talk radio chatter around the country when the topic of Wade’s glovework is broached.
The only “locks” readers established were captain Steve Smith (97% approval), David Warner (96%), Mitchell Starc (94%), Usman Khawaja (89%) and Josh Hazlewood (87%). The drop-off between them and every other candidate was drastic (Peter Handscomb came in next, picked in 60% of teams) and in line with the dramatic overhaul the actual selectors have settled on.
Of the batsmen, Guardian voters picked all of Glenn Maxwell, Shaun Marsh, George Bailey, Cameron Bancroft, Travis Head, Kurtis Patterson, Joe Burns and Callum Ferguson ahead of Maddinson and Matt Renshaw, which was fair in the latter case, as we didn’t even include the 12-game first class rookie among our extensive list of options. Australians were in accord on only one other issue: that flow charts and Sun Tzu quotes no longer belong on the team whiteboard. So John Buchanan received only 4% of the vote for the coaching job.
But all of this guesswork and debate glosses over grander themes of Australian cricket we’ve long ignored, perhaps because they’re so hard to fully comprehend at a distance; primarily the structural changes to the game at club and state level in the past two decades, and the legacy of those changes with respect to performances at Test level.
Until the 1990s, the rough and tumble path to international cricket was via hardboiled grade cricket, the Lord of the Flies world of state second XIs and an uncompromising Sheffield Shield competition. Yet in the fully professionalised, managerial age of the 1990s, this tried and true method was binned off for “pathways” programs, centres of “excellence” and the state Future’s League, the latter of which sounded sci-fi in a good way when it was first introduced, but is now being reappraised by some close observers as sitting within the genre of dystopian fiction.
Cricket Australia can’t say nobody foresaw the consequences of those dramatic changes to the structure of the game at elite levels. Well into old age Richie Benaud was an evangelist for grade cricket’s virtues and maintained the lifelong habit of checking the papers for the progress of promising batsmen in NSW grade ranks. In 1997 he remarked: “I have never lost the belief that the Australian game completely revolves around the club matches which are the prelude for some to the Sheffield Shield.”
There was also this from Gideon Haigh in Wisden back in 2005, when Australian cricket still felt content with itself:
There are strains in Australian cricket, too, that are deeper and longer-term. For much of the country’s cricket history, for example, the first grade or district clubs has been the game’s principal organising unit, talent nursery and social institution...
But the reality is that Test players now have precious little to do with their clubs, and nor, increasingly, do promising juniors, given the sophistication of youth cricket programs designed to identify and incubate talent. The implications of this steadily attenuating connection between cricket’s higher and lower levels, with a concentration of riches and resources in the elite game may not be apprehended for a generation.
Well, that generation is now upon us, and the outlook is indeed grim. Australian cricket’s problems stretch far further down the supply chain than the men whose job it is to formulate the Test team. What is beyond question is that for a good 15 years, the loosely-defined concepts of “talent” and “potential” have trumped the traditional measuring sticks of actual output and consistency.
Hence in the last decade Australia has picked as its national Under-19 captain a batsman with only one century to his name in any form of cricket, and on Sunday elevated another to Test ranks who had not scored more than a single century in a Sheffield Shield summer since his debut season of 2010-11. In the five Australian summers before this one, Nic Maddinson has averaged 26.20, 53.66, 27.30, 35.46 and 39.72 respectively.
For the latter type of selection there should be fewer reservations about probing the thought processes of selectors. What can really be expected from Maddinson at Test level, and how confident can we be in the soundness of such selection strategies?
Said Hohns on Sunday: “We see him as a player of enormous potential. He is definitely a game breaker and if we can get the best out of him at that [Test] level as I think we can, he could be a very, very important player for us down the track.”
A game breaker? Who watching the shemozzle at Hobart thought this Australian team was crying out for a game-breaker, anyway? Aren’t there any game-steadiers left in Sheffield Shield cricket?
The most telling phrase Hohns used here was “if we can get the best out of him”, which is a most unfortunate motif for all of Australian cricket of this era. After all, Maddinson has already shown he can’t get the best out of himself, or if he can, it’s clearly not good enough.
“Patience will be required,” Hohns said at one point on Sunday. But here was a man also admitting that for all the upheaval wrought on the Australian game in his lifetime, some things never change. “Sometimes,” Hohns conceded, “you do of course go with your gut.”
