With batsmen it’s more difficult, because great batting is as much about making no errors over hours of batting as it is about being able to play great shots. Almost anyone can play a great cover drive. What very, very few people can do is to bat hours and hours against quality bowling without making a mistake. It can take a season or longer to tell if a batsman has that essential skill.

I really get the feeling Hussey in particular is holding the Aussies back of late. In the modern game you can’t carry players through bad patches like this. Mark Taylor was lucky, his streak went on for almost a year from memory and there were calls after just a few tests to drop him but he kept his spot. Then, like now there was plenty of players waiting in the wings but they just didn’t get their chances.

I’d rather see a team picked with one eye on the future, we can’t afford to go to England every 4 years and bring 3 or 4 players with Ashes experience along. Teams shouldn’t change that much inside a 4 year period that you’re taking an entirely new squad away, there needs to be a focus on bringing in players and allowing them to gain experience before we expect them to hold the Australian team together which is what is expected of Johnson now with his 26 tests he is supposed to carry the bowling?

No, I kid.. You are quite correct in a lot of what you say, and you’re right, the Futures League is not about finding Test stars by Christmas. If this revamped comp produces a handful of Test players within five years, I’d imagine CA will be doing proverbial and literal cartwheels.

Fisher, something you said about promotion of youth ahead of experience hit on a point. What I think will happen from this comp is that the State squads will get progessively younger over time, in that a lot of these guys under 23 now will be better prepared for further honours by the time they graduate. What I’m getting at is that each state squad won’t be able to hold onto those fringe players in their late 20s or early 30s when there’s young guys ready for First Class earlier. So the average age of the state squads will decrease, and eventually, this will translate to the Australian side.

I’m sure CA aren’t expecting miracles from the Futures League, but I’m also sure they were pretty happy with what they saw from last weeks scorecards.

An update on something I mentioned in the article too: neither Cullen Bailey or Wade Irvine made the final XIIs for the Shield match that started in Adelaide today.

Anyway, thanks to all for your feedback. If the interest’s there, I’ll report back on the Futures League from time to time…

“…..Mallett, who was born in Sydney but moved to Perth when he was 10, credits former Australian leg spinner Clarrie Grimmett with launching his career.

When he caught the train across the Nullarbor to Adelaide to visit Grimmett, Mallett had been 12th man for Western Australia a few times but wasn’t taking enough wickets. Within a year, he was selected to play for Australia.

His first coaching session with Grimmett, then age 76, did not go well. Grimmett handed him a bat, bowled one ball to him, then asked Mallett to bowl one ball to him.

His verdict? “Give up bowling and become a batsman.” Grimmett told Mallett he was too predictable and proved it by facing the next ball with a handkerchief tied across his eyes and deflecting it with the middle of the bat.

“It was a brilliant reality check,” says Mallett, who paid Grimmett $6.50 a lesson over the next year, learning to pitch the ball higher above the batsman’s eyeline to make it harder to judge the trajectory.

It’s this sort of coaching that Mallett believes is now lacking in Australian cricket, especially at junior levels.

“You have the little 10-year-old bowling leggies, then he grows taller and the ball goes over the wicket-keeper’s head because he’s tossing it too high,” Mallett says. “It’s not rocket science – it’s all a bit sad really.”…..”

I agree with you to some extent in relation to not using Test cricket as a finishing school, but would stand-out youngsters not benefit enormously by exposure in their early 20s as well as their mid and/or late 20s?

I also wonder whether that slowly slowly approach comes from a historic position of strength; one that Australia has now surrendered somewhat.

For years other leading Test-playing nations have blooded 20-22 year olds with regularity and many of them go on to become integral Test players by the age of 24-25.

There was a time when Aussies could merely say something like, “We’re the best. We don’t need to pick youngsters like our rivals; we only the pick the finished article” and point to the eternally youthful Michael ‘Pup’ Clarke as representing the younger generation.

Well the facts are that Australia has lost on its past 2 trips to England, so too on two of past 3 trips to India, and also recently losing at home to South Africa. Is Australia in such a strong position to rigidly stick to its policy of leaving promising youngsters to do 5-6 years of hard yards in first-class cricket (with some, perhaps, getting a go in ODIs) and waiting for each and every incumbent to more or less choose his own retirement?

I think it’s time to ditch the sentimentality and favouritsm and pick sides in the hope of WINNING. This doesn’t seem to have been the case of late (eg: the selection of Brett Lee and Andrew Symonds in the last Perth Test; the exclusion of Andrew McDonald in England)

Should the likes of Mike Hussey and (in particular) Lee be holding back strongly performing youngsters? Will Nathan Hauritz, Shane Watson or Cameron White (how on earth did he even play ONE Test?) be holding back younger (and arguably more talented) rivals in the next couple of years?

Ian Chappell tells the story that the young Ashley Mallett was invited around to Clarrie Grimmett’s place for a bowl in his Adelaide backyard. A stump was placed in the ground and Mallett bowled a ball. Much to the youngster’s surprise, Grimmett then pulled out the stump and announced “I’ve seen enough”.

One point of this story is that it generally only takes a couple of balls to tell if a bowler has the goods, especially a spin bowler. Tell me that your first sight of Warne or Harbhajan (or Vettori or MacGill or …) was not enough to convince you that these guys had something special.

The other thing you would know from years of following cricket is that it’s only really the special spinners who make it long-term. Journeymen come and go and have the odd good season (is Graeme Swann in this category?), but it’s rare for them to make big improvements that last long-term.

I mean, just look at Cam White. His bowling started to decline, so he spent a winter under the tutelage of Shane Warne, after which he played tests in India as a specialist spinner. Unbelievably, that was just a year ago. Where is he now? Well he’s off to India again with an Australian team, but this time as a specialist ODI batsman who basically has stopped bowling. In other words, the progress under Warne has amounted to nothing in the long term for White. Why should it be any different with bowlers artificially advantaged by the special rules of the new competition when they hit hard reality? (e.g. bowling to the top Indian batsmen!).

Maybe I’m overly pessimistic, and certainly I’m taking a different angle here from my initial comment about “creat[ing] some kind of false economy” (you make my comment sound far more lucid than it really was!), but really I’m of the belief that a top-level international spinner is propelled by his own natural talent, rather than being created by special inducements in first-class cricket.

As I’ve said before, my belief is that we just have to wait for the next special talent to arrive. Maybe it’s Jon Holland (I don’t know – I haven’t seen him bowl), maybe it isn’t. But I’d be very surprised if this new competition speeds up this process.

At the same time, I’d be happy if you are proven right and I am proven wrong on this, because we really need a top-class spinner or two!

And the good news is that spinners who have what it takes will stand out in this new competition, regardless of the special incentives. In other words, these changes cannot do any harm.

A young kid has to demand selection, not have it gifted to him on a silver platter.

And I do agree with you about Phillip Hughes, but I don’t know that someone like Brad Hodge would offer much agreement about rough treatment..

Philip Hughes was an exception. And we all saw what they did with him.

Again, despite this article focussing on the spin-promotion of the Futures League, that’s not the sole purpose of the comp, and so I wouldn’t say the comp has been tweaked to give them more opportunities. There’s definitely incentive to use spin bowlers, but if the spinners aren’t there to use, then they won’t be. The Futures League revamp is all about developing young talent of all categories.

You mentioned harnessing the talents of young bats – something else I said to my concerned mate yesterday was that I did notice in the scorecards that there looks be a lot of all-rounders coming through: bats who bowl a bit, bowlers making handy runs. So I think this could be happening sort of organically.

Did you know Michael Bevan was a pretty reasonable left-arm quick when he made his first grade debut in Canberra?? Like a lot of young quicks, I believe it was a back injury (something about a bike crash too, I think) that forced the move to spin.

And just on the West Indies and their use of spin over the years (or lack thereof), Trinidad & Tobago took 3 spinners into last night’s CLT20 game in Bangalore, and did quite the job on Somerset. So they’ve got spinners in Caribbean somewhere…

Australia has always produced good-to-great fast bowlers and will continue to do so into the future, spinners will only come sporadically. As Vinay mentioned, we should focus on getting some good coaching in for them rather than tweaking competitions to give them more chances. Further, you need 3/4 quicks and a spinner for a “balanced” lineup and more teams have had success without a good spin option than without good pace options, the Windies being the prime example.

I think we should focus on both aspects, we can’t force talent which isn’t there.

Australia will however continue to churn out batsmen like they’re going out of fashion, perhaps we should look at harnessing the bowling talents of some good batsmen, someone like Michael Clarke or Michael Bevan are good examples. Both could have been a pretty good bowlers, we’re unlikely to find a leg-spinner that turns it square but we’ve seen Clarke in both Tests and ODI’s and he can be a handful. If we could harness these bowling talents and make more of our batsmen into batting all-rounders it would be a better solution than picking spinners for the sake of having a spinner.

I’ll say the same thing to you as I did him: Australia doesn’t and won’t ever have the pitches to produce an endless line of spinners. None of the teams last week played any more than two spinners, and a couple had only one. The post Warne and MacGill years have proven that even in boom times, Australia’s spin well hasn’t been that deep. The rejig of the old 2nd XI comp to actively promote young players, but young spinners especially is a really good idea, and hence the forward look of the article. It’s natural that when we try to look forward we end up looking back at Warne and co, but the truth is we’ll never see another Warne in my liftime, and probably not in my kids lifetime either. I’m kidless, by the way.

I mentioned in a post above that tours to the subcontinent are becoming much more commonplace in the younger rep sides, and that’s a very good thing. Australia A also seem to be playing more and more series now, and the selection of Jon Holland for the ODI tour to India comes directly from the A series against Pakistan.

The Futures League is a positive move, not just for the development of young spinners – despite that being a major focus – but for all young players. I’m glad you picked up on the young captains point too, because I think that’s almost as important as developing young spinners. You only have to ask who should replace or succeed Ponting to know that there isn’t necessarily any standout candidates. We need to get back to the situation when Mark Taylor retired, and there were three genuinely good options (S.Waugh, Healy, and Warne).

It’ll be interesting to track these young guys through the summer..

The point has already been made that such talent is rare and comes only every generation or so and hence building a league that is focused on developing talent that doesn’t exist at the moment seems a little silly although as the name implies, perhaps “future” minded. However I can’t imagine the sole purpose behind it is to improve spin-bowling, of course young players will face more spin-bowling which will be advantageous for their development and I like your point about the captaincy Brett, an important point which shouldn’t be underestimated but look at Hughes for example, his problem is with the short ball, something a lot of young Aussies have had over the last decade. At the height of the Windies power their batsmen were fantastic playing the short ball because they practiced against top quality fast bowlers.

My point being we can’t look to develop a team like India, excellent against spin but with a few weak points against the seamers because SAF and Pakistan will continue to churn out excellent quick bowlers.

I for one though would like to see more tours for the younger guys, get them some good experience on the sub-continent before they make that step up to international level. It would be worth it for CA to look at a feeder-club type system with some of the Indian and South African domestic teams allowing the best Aussie players (not just spinners) to go and play abroad for a season – even if this costs us money, the development will be worth it in the long term.

Cullen Bailey was brought on first change in the second innings against Victoria, so there’s good signs. And you’re right, this should remain a key program, not just a five year plan…

Good signs but as I say dont stop here.

Your couple of points are very valid too, and I’m sure GRJ Matthews would be the first to support your push for a bar at the SCG to be named after him. I love that at almost 50, he still thinks (or did, until recently) he’s the best spinner in NSW!

You could take your second point even further actually. Whereas once our youth teams toured England religiously, in the last few years the young squads have toured India and the subcontininent almost exclusively. The U15 side are just back from a 10-day tour to India, and the U19s have just wrapped up a series against Sri Lanka (in Darwin, admittedly).

So where once the tradtional development for a young Australian player was to make rep squads and then maybe have a couple of seasons in English leagues and county 2nd XIs, now they’re getting extra exposure to subcontininental teams and conditions too. And then there’s the IPL as well, for the best of them. You’re right, all this can only be a good thing…

A couple of point to note to Spinners in Australia.

1. Great spinners don’t seam to dominate at State level in Australia. Warne famously had limited success at Shield Cricket. G.Matthews would have to be the only cricketer of the last 20 to say he dominated at Shield level(?) The West Australians use to tremble at the crease with Mo running in from the Randwick end. (He owned that end of the SCG and there needs to be some sort of recognition to his contribution to state cricket for me with a stand of at least a bar named after him at the SCG.)
2. All this spinning promotion at the under 23 level means that we also have batsman facing a lot of spin bowling. Combine this to this the amount of cricket we will be playing against India in the next 20 years & this can only be a good thing.

It’s interesting you mention Warne being a rare case, which of course he is. I’ve said on these forums on many occasions that Warne and MacGill are quite possibly the best and worst thing to happen to young spinners in Australia. Best for the obvious reasons, but worst because now every young spinner – especially young leggies – are expected to turn it square while conceeding no more than two an over. That attacking and containing ability may not materialise again in my lifetime, yet we expect this of 15 year olds now.