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Australian cricket fiddles while Ashes burn

Roar Guru
7th January, 2011
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Just as Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Australia’s cricket leadership spent the summer fiddling while the Ashes burned.

Officials fiddled with team selection, most notably dumping off-spinner Nathan Hauritz in favour of comparative unknowns Xavier Doherty and then Michael Beer.

They fiddled with player preparations. Nothing was more puzzling than their treatment of Doug Bollinger. They told him to rest then decided not to pick him because he hadn’t been playing.

They fiddled with team announcements, most ludicrously naming a huge Ashes squad way too early for commercial reasons, when players fighting for selection still had Sheffield Shield matches to prove their claims. The initial squad looked like an electoral roll.

They fiddled with players’ minds. Selector Greg Chappell suggested to captain Ricky Ponting before the first Test that he might consider dropping down the batting order from number three to four. Ponting had a woeful series at first drop, averaging barely 16, and admitted doubts had crept into his mind about where he should bat.

Officials will soon be forced to fiddle with the team captaincy, long rated the second highest public office in the land. Ponting may have already played his last Test. But heir apparent Michael Clarke is scarcely worth his place in the team on current form. And who else is there? An overworked wicketkeeper in Brad Haddin? The list of options looks as short as the original squad was long.

Fiddling seemed to catch on out in the middle. Clarke had a fiddle with the batting line-up when he replaced the injured Ponting as skipper in Sydney. He promoted Haddin to number six at Steve Smith’s expense. It didn’t work. He may have had his reasons, but no such fiddling was remotely contemplated in the victorious England team.

Highly successful teams don’t tend to fiddle overly much and, when they do, it is usually a bit of fine tuning to extract every last scintilla of advantage.

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When losing teams do it, it often smacks of desperation arising from a paucity of ideas.

It can also hint at a lack of bottle.

Sometimes what is required is not a fiddle but a bulldozer.

Some feel that time has arrived for Australian cricket.

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