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In some ways, it was a good thing Marcus Stoinis wasn’t able to pull off the miracle win at Eden Park in Auckland yesterday.
Australia should’ve had their backside handed to them on a plate, and a most improbable of wins would have given the ballsy but foolish national selection panel reason to crow.
Stoinis deserves praise for his innings, don’t get me wrong. Until the 42nd over of the Australian run chase, it all looked forlorn; a solid red ink in the 80s was on the cards for the Victorian allrounder, but it was highly unlikely it would come in a match Australia won.
Until that point he was going along at a strike rate in the mid-80s.
And then he suddenly launched into Jimmy Neesham, hitting three 6s, getting dropped off the second-last ball and ultimately taking 21 off the over. Just as suddenly, he was in the 90s, and with three wickets in hand, maybe there was life left in this game.
Stoinis made the boundary another nine times, before Josh Hazlewood found himself short of his ground, and Australia fell an agonising seven runs shot of the target.
Along the way, Stoinis brought up his maiden international century, with back-to-back sixes, and in doing so became the first Australian to take three wickets and make a hundred in the same match. Obviously, we all became instant Marcus Stoinis fans.
I’ve always rated Marcus Stoinis… #NZvAUS
— Brett McKay (@BMcSport) January 30, 2017
But it really shouldn’t have been anywhere near this close.
At 6-67, Australia deserved to lose the game by plenty, from which the tour selections would’ve been rightly highlighted, and more vigorously lampooned than had already been the case.
At 6-67, Australian cricket fans had ‘ha, told you so’ locked and loaded. And it would’ve been justified. It still is.
Questions have been appropriately asked whether Cricket Australia were treating this tour seriously, and events leading into the first game don’t help the selectors’ cause.
The decision to rest David Warner from the tour did make some sense. He’d played a fair bit of international cricket in the last few months, and a week off while missing three ODIs actually added up ahead of his departure on a very important Test tour of India.
The decision to rest Usman Khawaja on the same grounds? Whoah, back that one up, chief.
Since the end of the Sydney Test, Khawaja played in only three of the five ODIs against Pakistan, and was left out of the final match of the series in Adelaide, on January 26. From the end of the Test to when the team left for New Zealand, Khawaja had played three days of cricket in 20.
When skipper Steven Smith was ruled out with an ankle injury – remembering that he’d played the same amount of cricket as Warner – that should’ve been the trigger to end Khawaja’s rest right there.
Instead, they opted for a largely unknown young batsman from Queensland. Sam Heazlett may well go on to be a great of the game, but there were plenty of batsmen around the country more deserving of his place on the plane across the ditch.
What made the Heazlett selection worse was his sudden call-up to debut. Matthew Wade was supposed to captain his country for the first time, but he instead tweaked a back injury late on Sunday. He hadn’t recovered in time for the toss on Monday, and Heazlett became Australian ODI player No.220 in the same manner non-playing scorers often end up with a game at the end of a cricket tour – by being there.
With Wade now out, an Australian side already thin on experience was captained by Aaron Finch, a player who a week ago was nervously wondering if he’d earn a recall to the national side at all. And the wicketkeeper was a super-talented young batsman on the most meteoric of rises, but who despite being only a part-timer at first-class level, has now twice kept internationally.
And coming in at No.6 was a potentially very good batsman, but one who hasn’t actually played a domestic one-dayer for his state yet.
So when Heazlett walked to the wicket at 4-48 in the 12th over, after Shaun Marsh had horrendously misjudged a delivery for a player of his age and experience, we shouldn’t have expected a miracle. In truth, it was surprising Stoinis didn’t come out instead.
At that point, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the likes of Cameron White, who led the runs in the Matador Cup earlier in the summer, or the dozen other players who cracked more than 250 runs for the tournament at averages at least in the 40s.
One of them was Callum Ferguson, who not too long ago was seen as Australia’s next Test No.6. Or Moises Henriques or Joe Burns, who – like White – had carried their solid domestic one-day form forward and scored reasonably heavily in the Big Bash League.
Or especially George Bailey, who finished just outside the top ten run-scorers in the BBL, but who was outscored in ODIs in 2016 by just three other players – and two of them, Warner and Smith, were back in Sydney with their feet up, albeit for different reasons.
The only upside to this is that Heazlett may yet get another game, with Wade no certainty to take his place for the second ODI in Napier on Thursday.
But once Smith was ruled out, Australia needed experience, not a work-experience kid.
And what’s worse, the selectors nearly got away with it.