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Time for Cricket Australia to bite the bullet over selectors

11th December, 2017
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Australian selector Trevor Hohns plays things too safe. (AAP Image/Gillian Ballard)
Expert
11th December, 2017
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It’s time Cricket Australia gave the national selectors the recognition and the pay they deserve, but in the process make sure the panel is high quality.

Far too often in the past CA has appointed just anyone to make up the numbers, treating selectors as a necessary evil when in fact the panel is by far the most important group in the Australian cricket family.

The players they name carry the immediate future of the sport, sponsors, and themselves who determine how many fans flow through the gate, and the television ratings.

No other group in cricket has so much responsibility.

Yet over the years, Cricket Australia has appointed some selectors who never deserved to be there but got the nod because the better quality selectors were too successful elsewhere.

Trevor Hohns (1993-2006, and 2014 to current) is a prize example, closely followed by Andrew Hilditch (1996-2011).

Others who made up the numbers were Jim Higgs (1985-1995), Merv Hughes (2005-2010), and Jamie Cox (2006-2011).

Don Argus didn’t help the cause with his review that surfaced in 2011.

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Cricket Australia appointed Argus, without argument one of Australia’s leading businessmen as a former chairman of BHP Billiton, to look into why Australia lost the Ashes.

On the subject of selectors, Argus lost the plot completely.

He suggested a panel of chairman, two part-time selectors, plus the Australian captain and coach.

The latter two were absurd suggestions – players play, coaches coach, and selectors select, but nair the twain shall meet.

But CA thought otherwise, so from 2011 the panel was John Inverarity (chairman), another disaster, Rod Marsh, Andy Bichel, Michael Clarke, and Mickey Arthur.

How do you have a full-time chairman, and two part-time selectors, to do the identical jobs?

And it was reported at the time Inverarity was on $200,000, with Marsh and Bichel on $75,000 apiece.

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Rubbish.

When Arthur was booted as coach, Clarke resigned his place on the panel.

Any captain worth his salt would never have accepted the selector’s job in the first place as it would obviously impact on his team.

And the same could be said of the coach bowing out, for the same reason.

But when Darren Lehmann took over from Arthur, he also took on a selector role.

Rod-Marsh-Darren-Lehmann

Rod Marsh and Darren Lehmann (AP Photo / Nick Potts, PA)

Bad call.

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So the current panel stands at Hohns (chairman), Mark Waugh, Lehmann, and Greg Chappell as an ‘interim’ selector, which just happens to be permanent.

Time for CA to bite the bullet, and correct all the panel’s wrongs.

Make Mark Waugh chairman, with Mike Hussey and Glenn McGrath as the three-man panel – all on $300,000 a year.

That will allow Greg Chappell to concentrate on producing the Australian cricketers of tomorrow in Brisbane.

But there has to be two side-bars to the three selectors that none of them appear on television or radio shows, as Waugh does on Fox on a regular basis.

And only the chairman makes any public statement on selections.

That might sound draconian, but if the panel is to be recognised as highly as they should be, there’s no room for the likes of Lehmann letting the cat out of the selection bag as he’s done lately with Mitchell Marsh.

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