The Australian selectors need to have a good hard long look at themselves. Just over two years ago, they made the unpopular and unjustified decision to drop Simon Katich from the Australian Test side.
Katich is in the top echelon of Australian first class cricketers in the last decade and was one of the most consistent batsmen during his tenure in the Australian side. His statistics back up this proposition.
Dressing room politics aside, Katich was a victim of the selectors’ decision to embrace a ‘youth over experience’ policy. The problem with that policy was that there were no young batsmen in the country at the time whose performances warranted selection.
The selection of Chris Rogers in this Ashes series represents a departure from the youth policy and the closest thing to an admission that the decision to drop Katich in favour of a youth policy was the wrong call.
Don’t get me wrong. ‘Blooding’ young players is key to maintaining team competitiveness in the long term. However, players still have to earn their baggy green cap. Batsmen, purely and simply, are judged by how many runs they have on the board.
The problem with Australian cricket at present is that very few batsmen in the first class (i.e. Sheffield Shield) arena are performing to a level which warrants international selection.
Despite this, the selectors have shown a tendency recently to elevate young players with modest first class records into the Test squad at the expense of more experienced campaigners. David Warner and Steven Smith have been two beneficiaries of this policy.
This author contends that a number of the younger Australian batsmen who have been parachuted into the Test side in the last 12-18 months have not deserved to be selected.
Most of these players have been selected based on their Twenty20 and one-day form, rather than Sheffield Shield form. Basing Test selection according to form in the limited overs format is the wrong approach.
The Sheffield Shield is Australia’s nursery for players to learn how to construct an innings and bat for long time. This fact, however, appears to have been lost of the current crop of selectors.
Players of previous generations had to display such attributes consistently in four-day cricket to just catch the eye of selectors. Mike Hussey had to wait a painstaking 10 years to get his crack at international level.
Many commentators criticised the selection of Rogers as a step in the wrong direction. Quite frankly, it is one of the few sensible decisions that the Australian selectors have made in a long time.
The selectors had no choice but to pick Rogers. He has been one of the most consistent run-scorers at the first class level over the past decade, both at home and abroad. Not surprisingly, he has repaid the selectors’ faith in him.
The selectors need to learn from this experience and choose the batting line-up according to ‘four-day form’, not one-day form.
If this means selecting more experienced players at the back end of their career because their four-day form warrants it, so be it.
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