While some may argue a poor performance in India was always on the cards, the sequence of events arising from Mickey Arthur’s decision to leave four players out of the third Test has done more damage than a dispirited 4-0 series loss in India could ever have.
As you would expect, everyone has an opinion. If Mickey Arthur and Michael Clarke had already not produced enough ambiguity, Pat Howard took a turn at explaining the axing decision on Tuesday.
His statements has only added more doubt to an already complicated situation.
Judging by what Mickey Arthur and Pat Howard have been telling us, the one lingering issue with Australian Test team was lack of discipline and this issue was so critical that it had to be addressed immediately.
This was despite the expense of making four players unavailable for selection, in a Test match that we desperately needed to win.
Since this real issue behind Michael Clarke’s team’s non-performance has been addressed in the most appropriate way as Pat Howard would like you to believe, Australian team should now go back to their winning ways from the third Test.
It sounds obvious from the logic we have been told but highly unlikely to happen in reality.
What Mickey Arthur, Michael Clarke and Pat Howard have really done is that they have picked the wrong problem and addressed it in the worst possible way.
The real issues are completely different and shouldn’t surprise many people as I am merely stating the issues that have been identified by the people other than team management over and over again in last few months.
Here is a list of ‘five real reasons’ behind the current mess we are in:
1) Wrong Selections
John Inverarity and Co have done an extremely poor job over and over again at selecting the best team. A selector is similar to a recruitment manager and should be judged on the success of the people they hire.
If bulk of the people you hire either get fired or don’t find a good fit with the role, you must be doing something wrong. John Inverarity has made too many bad hirings for Australian cricket and there are very few successful recruits.
An example is Phillip Hughes, who was about to be axed for a third time at the end of second test and at best will last one more test.
Ed Cowan has been a chronic underperformer yet is being persisted with and Maxwell has simply been hired for a wrong job.
Enough has already been said about the stupidity of the rotation policy if selections were not already bad enough.
2) Michael Clarke and Mickey Arthur shouldn’t be part of selection panel
Shane Warne has been saying it all along. Michael Clarke and Mickey Arthur shouldn’t be selecting the team.
When you give the captain power to choose his players, he will automatically pick those who are easy to work with but those may not be the best people around and this seems to have happened in Michael Clarke’s case.
3) Michael Clarke and Mickey Arthur are sitting on the wrong side of table
Michael Clarke and Mickey Arthur should represent players instead of trying to represent management. What trust are players are going to have in Mickey Arthur with the knowledge that anything between them and Mickey could result in Mickey calling a media conference and handing out punishments in public?
They need to now work very hard to re-establish the culture of trust within the team.
4) Lack of Accountability
There seems to no accountability whatsoever from top to the bottom.
If an embarrassing loss or an emphatic win doesn’t change much the way people are paid, treated or retained in the set up, they will eventually become indifferent to outcomes and this is exactly what’s happening to Australian cricket.
Arthur, Inverarity and Howard don’t even seem bothered to make an explanation for humiliating losses to India in first two tests.
Similar to the way selection panel makes call on dropping players for non-performance, it is about time that a similar call should be made for a lot of people involved with the administration of cricket in Australia.
5) Pat Howard
Pat Howard have not played any professional cricket in his entire life and probably doesn’t understand the game that much either.
His ‘high performance unit’ has distracted the management and player away from focussing on real ‘match performance’ and so far he has nothing to show for his work benefitting our cricket in any way.
On top of this he seems to have rather poor people skills and publicly questioning Australia’s vice captain’s commitment to the team should get him sacked if not for the lack of any tangible contribution to Australian cricket.
Not everyone will agree with these reasons and there may be more to the crisis than we know publicly, but one thing is certain that we can’t get out of this mess by keep doing things that have led us to this crisis to begin with.
A change is needed and sooner we recognize the issues, the quicker we can get to the solutions.
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