17 November 2017
Gentlemen (and I’m beginning to use the term very loosely),
Once again, I feel the need to sit down and compose a letter to you, given the situation that has occurred in the past 24 hours in regards to the selection of the Australian team for the 1st Test against England next week.
While I retain full respect for the three gentlemen of the National Selection Panel in regards to your own cricket careers for Australia, I must say that you have reached a new low in regards to your opinions in selecting our national team. This comes not only for the team that has been selected, but the way in which it was deliberately leaked to the media the night before the official announcement, to ensure that the full effect of the decisions you have made would have worn off before you actually had to stand up and face the media and cameras to read out those names.
So let’s attack that part first. The selection panel of chairman Trevor Hohns, Australian coach Darren Lehmann and high profile youth co-ordinator Greg Chappell, sit down on Wednesday evening and talk about the Test team. There is still a day to play in the Sheffield Shield matches around the country, but they have obviously seen enough. The team is selected, and the day for the announcement of that team is still on Friday morning. And yet, the team is leaked to one person in the media, and within minutes – MINUTES! – the whole world knows the team, despite the fact that it isn’t officially announced until Friday morning. And there is no doubt it is a deliberate ploy, because there are no rants about a leak, no call from James Sutherland or Trevor Hohns to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again, which if it wasn’t a ploy would certainly have occurred.
No, what this turns out to be is a cowardly release of the team more than twelve hours before the official announcement, to ensure that the controversial selections – and there are a couple of them – have already been played out in both the media and in Australia’s homes and workplaces before the Chairman has to stand up in public and go through the ludicrous rites of reading out a team everyone already knows. It is a sham, and it plays out so poorly it makes our selectors look incompetent and it makes Cricket Australia look like a circus. Again. Have you not learned anything from the past twelve months in regards to your actions over the Memorandum of Understanding? What on earth are you thinking?
To the selections at hand, and my mother could have chosen nine of the twelve players for the 1st Test. They were locked in, and obvious selections. Where the problem lies is that more should have been done to ensure other selections were already in place. What place does loyalty have at the selection table anymore? Why do we no longer respect the efforts of a player or players who have done a job asked of them on foreign soil, and then abandon them as soon as we return to our own surfaces? And why has the Sheffield Shield become a plaything of Cricket Australia to meddle with as they please in regards to the competition, and not allowing first class teams to pick their own players to try and win matches?
The dropping of Matt Renshaw is a disgrace, no matter how many runs Cameron Bancroft had made. Renshaw was selected twelve months ago from nowhere – by you gentlemen – to be the future face of the top order. He has been fantastic. We needed a different element opening the batting, and he provided that. His grit and determination in India was magnificent, his catching at first slip solid. He is 21 years old, and Brisbane is his home ground. Everything married up to let him play, and that has been taken away from him. No one is desecrating Bancroft’s form, but surely the most logical selection was to play him at number six, and work his way into Test cricket from there. Of course it was. But no, you have turned your back on a tremendous young batsman who did all the donkey work for you in Asia this year, and you have then sent him to the scrap heap. Wonderful loyalty shown there.
The selection of Tim Paine again defies belief. You ditched the best keeper in Australia in peter Nevill last year because he wasn’t scoring runs. You brought in an inferior keeper in Matthew Wade because you believed runs were more important. In that twelve months he hasn’t done the job, and now you find yourself in a fix. Do you accept you were wrong and go back to Nevill, who batting form since being dropped has been excellent? No, can’t admit error there, don’t do that. Do you go with Alex Carey, who you chose as Australia A keeper before the tour to South Africa was canned? No, hasn’t scored enough runs, can’t do that. What we’ll do is go back to a keeper who, though is admittedly one of our best glovemen in Australia, is currently playing as a batsman only because he is in the team with the man who WAS the Test incumbent. And in doing this, you manipulate his selection in the Tasmanian team for the third match after he had not played in the first two rounds, and then ensure Tasmania bat well beyond what they needed to when setting a target to try and win their Shield game, all to ensure Paine batted long enough to justify your selection of him in front of everyone else. Are you kidding? This is what we’ve come to? Can you not see the hypocrisy in everything to do with this selection? Or do you just not care how it looks, because you three know better than everybody else?
OK. Let’s calm ourselves down… wait… what do you mean YOU HAVE FUCKING SELECTED SHAUN MARSH IN THE FUCKING TEST TEAM ONCE A-FUCKING-GAIN?!?!? ARE YOU THAT FUCKING DELUDED?!?!? Are you just mixing him up with Shane Watson?! (which now that I’ve stooped so low as to bring up his name… would Shane Watson have been sacked from the opening position if he had the same figures as Matt Renshaw? No way in hell, he’d have been the first one picked).
So you can’t pick Bancroft as a number six because he’s an opening batsman, but you CAN pick Shaun Marsh as a number six… because he’s an opening batsman? Can you see how this piss poor mixed up logic is just making you seem even more insane? Don’t you remember? He went to India, and then you didn’t take him to Bangladesh. You DROPPED him!! And now, FOR THE EIGHTH FUCKING TIME, you are recalling him to the Test team.
Back in the 1990’s, an English colleague told me how hard it was to continue to support English cricket, given the cock-ups that constantly occurred at board level and at selection level, let alone how the team tended to perform on the field. I sympathized, though secretly grinning inside because those days had passed Australia over forever. Never again would we have a situation where what occurred of the field would be to the embarrassment of the viewing public, or to cricket tragics such as myself, who look for Australian cricket to be the leaders in every aspect of the game, both administration and playing.
Suddenly, this morning, I have that deep sickening pit in my stomach where I have begun to question my loyalty to Australian cricket, and to those who are charged with doing the right thing in regards to our cricket at all levels. If I’m just a fan I could probably live with it. But I’m not. I am a complete tragic of the game, but especially of our country’s game. I am watching junior cricketers walk away from the game, I am seeing grade cricket slowly wither and die from the lack of people coming into the game. And when I see things like this happen, is it any bloody wonder why? Two days ago James Sutherland came out publicly wondering whether Test cricket could survive. Isn’t that your bloody job? Aren’t you supposed to be charged with MAKING it survive, by doing everything in your power to make sure it does survive, and not come out and suggest it is in its dying throes? If you said the same thing about grassroots cricket you’d be thrown out the door before you could finish the sentence – but that is most true than your worries about Test cricket!
Apart from the ridiculous selection of Shaun Marsh and the mystifying terms of the Tim Paine selection, and the complete destruction of any loyalty a player can expect from selectors for the way they play for the team, the fact that the powers that be felt it necessary to leak this team to avoid major confrontation and to buffer the response is a disgrace.
If this team succeeds the selectors will claim the credit for their selections. If the team fails then we are left with an amazing number of questions to be answered. No matter what happens from this point, my heart bleeds for Matt Renshaw in particular today, a kid who has been betrayed by those who should know better. I feel sorry for Glenn Maxwell, who has fought hard to make a place for himself in the Test team, and on his performances deserved the chance to cement it here in Australia. And yes, I feel some disappointment for Matthew Wade, who appears to have been given little support from above with the constant speculation over his place in the team, and then been passed over for a player who he keeps in front of for his state.
Everyone at Cricket Australia has been placed on notice. If this season goes belly-up, then your time has come to move on. I for one will be at the front of the line looking to take over and restore Australian cricket to the position of respect and success that it once had, and deserves again.
Yours in Absolute Anger,
Very Agitated Cricket Tragic.
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