- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
There’s one last Twenty20 International left to be played in Brisbane tomorrow night, but given it’s being played with Australia’s best cricketers having now landed in India, it seems fair that this retrospective of the summer can take place without it.
This scenario being played out this week is probably the perfect illustration of the Australian cricket summer we’ve just been through.
The best players aren’t available, but the team is still playing.
It’s been an international summer of highs and lows, sheer brilliance and mind-boggling confusion. And if we are to believe the top brass, it’s precisely how they planned it.
If only they could get that message across to the paying punters.
A successful summer…if you tilt your head and squint
Coming into the summer, it was very much a case of David taking on Goliath, with the rising Australians readying themselves for a battle at home against the best Test cricket side on the planet, the mighty South Africans.
Yet such was the compacted nature of the ICC Test rankings, a series win would’ve catapulted Michael Clarke’s team to no.1. But for a healthy third seamer in Adelaide to combat the heroics of Faf du Plessis, that unlikely series win might’ve occurred.
The Australians clean-swept the Sri Lankans over Christmas and New Year, a task made easier by the injury to Kumar Sangakkara and simultaneously difficult by the divisive yet contentious decisions of a set of self-cornered selectors.
With the switch to coloured gear came more strange selections, a drawn series with Sri Lanka, who are a completely different beast with the while ball, and the farce now known as not-enough-rain-at-the-SCG-gate.
The West Indies arrived for what was promoted as a rebirth of a super-power (seriously, for how much longer can Channel 9 dine out on the success of Howzat?), but turned into a comprehensive 5-0 series rout by the hosts.
We did get to see Manuka Oval used on the national stage for the first time though, and a great game in front of a new capacity crowd should mean return scheduling in the national capital in the future.
I’ve lost count of fingers, and may not have carried the one, but I think all this equates to a reasonably successful summer.
Retirements
It’s been a topic of discussion for the last couple of summers, but I don’t think that too many of us could foresee losing both Ricky Ponting and Michael Hussey before the summer was out.
In Ponting’s case, his early Sheffield Shield form proved to be a false dawn, and his last three Tests against South Africa belied his standing as Australia’s best batsman since Bradman.
Ponting himself would make light of his departure by season’s end, joking on-stage with actor/comedian Stephen Curry at a film industry awards that “everyone thinks we should’ve retired four years ago.”
Nevertheless, while Ponting may have stayed too long, Mike Hussey floored Australian cricket by declaring before the Sydney Test that his time was up. Thoughts of being away from his family for upwards of seven months on tours to India and England became too much, and Hussey went out on his own terms, and at the top of his game.
As if it wasn’t already the case, the Australian cricket team was suddenly entering a new era, whether it wanted to or not.
Abundant opportunity and a lack thereof
It’s only because I went back through the cards to count them, but Australia used 17 players during the six Tests against South Africa and Sri Lanka, and an astonishing 22 players during the ten ODIs against Sri Lanka and the West Indies. 33 different players wore Australian caps this summer, all told, and that’s without the Twenty20 specialists.
Injury and selection table-experimentation has forced a lot of this copious personnel turnover, and it was here that the increasingly blasphemous words ‘Rotation Policy’ and ‘Informed Player Management’ started to dominate headlines and discussions.
There were the ‘select and forget’ players, the likes of John Hastings, Kane Richardson, Stephen Smith, and Rob Quiney, who were at stages seen as part of the solution, but would ultimately be discarded quicker than Lance Armstrong memorabilia.
And there were also the ‘can do no wrong’ players, like Glenn Maxwell, Aaron Finch, and Xavier Doherty, who in spite of their on-field showings continue to enjoy the goodwill of the selectors. Doherty, along with Moises Henriques, has even scored the bonus of Indian Tour selection based on no other fit or useful alternatives.
We’ve seen the baby steps of Jackson Bird and Ben Cutting at international level, and we can only hope we get to see more of them in a somewhat important coming year.
We also saw the rebirth of Brad Haddin, and Mitchell Johnson, and rather spectacularly, Phillip Hughes. George Bailey’s star is rising as much as James Faulkner’s is skyrocketing, and both were unlucky to miss out on a ticket to India.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the mishandling of Usman Khawaja, of course. His move to Queensland has seen him rack up over a thousand runs in all forms of the game, and at numerous levels. He’s been Australian cricket’s bridesmaid this summer, and yet despite persistent public lobbying, is still no certainty to crack the Test team for the First Test in Chennai.
He does have the runs on the board, but he’s also the poster-child for always needing to do more, and to take advantage of whatever slim opportunity may be presented.
Rotation is not a dirty word
When teams are trying to build depth, and regain their previously lofty heights on the world cricket stage, there is often very little alternative but to rotate players through a series.
Ultimately, the goal will be to develop a wider squad of players of genuine international standing and ability, so that should the need arise, making changes of personnel does not lessen the quality of the team overall.
But teams at the top rarely have to worry about this. South Africa certainly aren’t rotating players currently, and only retirements and foot-in-mouth disease has forced the introduction of new players into the England side in the last year or so.
Back in the glory days, Australia didn’t do a whole lot of rotating, either.
However, times are different now, and with Australia’s first class ranks providing a solid, if unspectacular grounding, there unfortunately aren’t many options for building international depth other than rotating players through the national side.
On paper, rotation is a sound concept. If handled well, and carefully planned, there is no doubt squad depth will increase. Handled poorly though, well you end up using 33 different players over 16 matches in a season.
And yes, sure, not all 33 of those players got a start on the back of rotation. However, Cricket Australia has also admitted in recent weeks that not only has the squad rotation been mishandled, but that the communication of this plan has been similarly poor.
“We do know what our best XI is,” NSP Chairman John Inverarity assured us a few weeks back, but sending a 17-man squad to India would seem to contradict that. As does the desire to play an allrounder for what feels like the sake of playing an allrounder.
The 2012/13 summer will be remembered – in the short term at least – for the rotational mess that Australian team selections became. ‘Rotation’ should not have become a dirty word, yet that’s the point we’re at currently.
There may be a point in the next 18 months or so where it becomes apparent that it was all worth it, and cricket fans around the country will be hoping that this is the case. With no clear message on what’s being planned, it will have been a strange old summer if it amounts to nothing.