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Australia bizarrely used eight bowlers during their T20 loss to England on Monday, as stand-in skipper Steve Smith tried to involve all of the four batting all-rounders.
There is great value in limited overs cricket in having a versatile XI boasting multi-skilled players. Specialists still have a crucial role though, as we saw in Cardiff where batsman Smith and frontline quicks Pat Cummins and Nathan Coulter-Nile were standouts.
Australia went overboard in fielding four all-rounders in their top six. Victorian Marcus Stoinis was the strangest of selections.
A top-order batsman and gentle medium pacer, almost all of his domestic success has come in the Sheffield Shield. While he has considerable potential as a long-form player, thanks to his tight technique and admirable patience, Stoinis has zero achievements in T20. In that format he had a meagre 79 runs and two wickets to his name across nine matches.
Stoinis had not played a T20 game for 18 months, having missed last year’s Big Bash League through injury. His mystifying selection smacks of Australia’s lack of respect for the format.
It took them years before they treated T20 as anything but a sideshow. Meanwhile, other nations were steadily honing their skills and tactics, earning a headstart over a country whose playing stocks were tailor made for the game.
Australia have begun to treat T20 more seriously in the past few years yet we still see left-field selections like Stoinis. The Australian hierarchy has seemed to use T20 to blood players they see as having some kind of potential for the longer formats but whose performances are not good enough to warrant a place in the Test or ODI sides.
Whatever you think of Stoinis’ selection in the current ODI and T20 squads for the matches against England, there is no debating the fact he was surplus to requirements at Cardiff.
In Shane Watson, Glenn Maxwell and Mitch Marsh, Australia already had three-batting all-rounders in their top five, with Smith and David Warner the only specialists.
That gave Australia seven bowling options. There was no need for an eighth. Australia would have been far better placed had they a specialist batsman at five instead of Marsh, with the young Sandgroper pushed down to six.
In fact, you could even argue that either Marsh or Watson also could have been replaced with another batsman. That would further have bolstered their batting while giving them six strong bowling choices – as many as England fielded.
If Australia wanted to test the mettle of a young cricketer with potential to perhaps become a Test player, as they did here with Stoinis, they should have gone with batsmen Nic Maddinson, Jordan Silk or Chris Lynn.
Maddinson and Silk, both just 23 years old, were among the elite strokemers in the BBL last season, both finishing in the top four runscorers. Lynn, 25 years old, is a murderous hitter of the ball and had the highest strike rate among the top 10 runscorers in the tournament.
With the T20 World Cup, a tournament Australia have never won, only six months way, they also should be considering the best possible players, regardless of age or potential.
Perth Scorchers batting lynchpin Michael Klinger should be in the Australian line-up. His T20 numbers are phenomenal. While Stoinis got picked for having scored 79 career runs at an average of 11, Klinger has 3058 runs at 37, including five hundreds and 17 fifties across a brilliant T20 career.
And Klinger’s touch in the format is better now than it ever has been. He was the leading runscorer in last season’s BBL and averaged 45 with the bat the previous year.
You would think those numbers would make him impossible to ignore. Now consider the fact that in the recent English domestic T20 competition, Klinger was a cricketing version of Godzilla, swatting attacks mercilessly en route to 654 runs at an average of 82, including three centuries.
Yes, that’s correct, three centuries in one T20 tournament. If the Australian selectors actually want their side to lift the World T20 Cup, Klinger simply must be in the XI.
The T20 World Cup will be played on the dry, slow decks of India, so Australia surely will not select a team with six pace bowling options. Why, then, are they employing such strange tactics now, when they have just six more T20 matches before that tournament?
Australia were in a dominant position batting second in Monday’s match before their all-rounder-stacked middle order came unstuck. Had the likes of Klinger or even Silk, Maddinson or Lynn come to the crease in the dying overs, instead of both Stoinis and Marsh, Australia probably would have won.
They can’t take such risks in the World Cup. It’s time for Australia to quit the meddling and pick a proper, first-choice T20 team.