With the Australian captaincy, Tim Paine has already been handed one of the hardest jobs in the country – even in the cheeriest of times, it is seldom a picnic. So it is perfectly understandable that he doesn’t want to do as several of his predecessors have by signing himself up as a formal selector. Not now, at least. Not when the job of picking this team is one of the most scrutinised in the country.
As substandard as some of the sectorial answers have been since the fateful day in Cape Town, the questions – in the short term at least – are increasingly puzzling. Paine knows this, realising that the best he can do right now is mine for positives, both in a couple of months, when he has at his disposal two of the best players in the world, and further into the future when trying to calculate the longer-term benefits of blooding batsmen before their time.
“No,” he replied bluntly when asked if he would like to join the panel. “I’ve got enough on my plate at the moment. I’m happy when I’m asked my opinion and will give it. I’m happy with that,” he added, noting that he has never had an issue communicating with Trevor Hohns’ trio, emphasising the “difficult situation” they are also in through this disastrous period.
The skipper acknowledged that “in an ideal world” younger players, such as Travis Head, would have required a lot more runs before getting to pop on a baggy green. “We can’t help that we haven’t got Michael Husseys, Michael Bevans, Jamie Coxs – it’s fantasy,” he said. “We’ve got what we’ve got and our playing group are working as hard as we can.”
It makes harrowing reading that over the last 12 months, as calculated by cricket writer Brydon Coverdale, no Australian averaged more than 32 in Tests with only one ton posted – Usman Khawaja’s epic in Dubai. It is the latter point that Paine emphasised before the Test, wanting to see three-figure scores. It didn’t happen, Marcus Harris top scoring with 79.
“If you are batting top six in Test cricket you need to be scoring hundreds,” Paine lamented, noting that they were disappointed not to get the chance to bat a second time on the washed out final day in Sydney. “For some of the guys in their third, fourth Test maybe it’s hard to look and say ‘I haven’t scored any hundreds’ but Marcus (Harris) and Travis (Head) showed, and Marnus (Labuschagne) in the first innings, that they can score runs at Test cricket.”
This was an example of Paine going out of his way to group Head with Harris when dishing out praise, a sign that Paine wants the South Australian retained for the Sri Lanka Tests despite a string of reckless dismissals since Christmas. “They are two examples of guys who might not have played any Test cricket at this stage,” he said. “They’ve got an opportunity through an unusual situation and I thought both those guys acquitted themselves really well.”
On the other side of the ledger, Paine is also hinting that Shaun Marsh, despite averaging 18 over the last 12 months with only one half-century in this series, will have his support when the squad for two Tests against Sri Lanka is named on Wednesday. “I don’t think it was just those two,” he said of questions of Marsh and Khawaja’s output against India as the team’s senior batsmen. “Both of those players we know are absolute class, we know they can score a lot of runs. We have faith in them going forward.”
As for the fast bowlers, who experienced their share of days in the dirt in Melbourne and Sydney, Paine doesn’t anticipate change or rotation. “At times they bowled really well in this series and at times they didn’t,” he acknowledged. “Sometimes that was due to the pressure they were put under by the Indian batsmen. The group of bowlers we have in this team have been fantastic for quite a while now. They didn’t have their absolute best series but it’s not easy at this level and that can happen.”
A 2-1 series defeat has been tough for the host nation but just as India’s sides of the 1990s credited much of their hardening up through punishing tours of Australia, Paine wants this hurt to have a similar steeling effect. But on the available evidence, that’s too far away to even start to consider. This might not even be the end of the beginning.
