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Interesting times lie ahead for Rod Marsh and his national selection panel. After two decades of the Australian cricket team essentially picking itself, injuries and retirements have thrown the pecking order of a rebuilding squad into disarray.
A team that was already trying to re-establish itself has now, in consecutive Tests, been dealt the rough hand with a Mitchell Johnson retirement and the loss of Mitchell Starc for the remainder of the Australian summer.
The bowling attack in Hobart next week is almost unprecedented in the risk stakes.
It will likely be formed around a young quick who the selectors concede won’t get through all six Tests in Australia without a rest, a Victorian workhorse who not that long ago wasn’t sure he’d ever wear the baggy green again, and a younger, quicker Victorian fast bowler who admits himself that he could break down tomorrow.
Playing the West Indies, related to the glory days of the Calypso Kings by name only, could not be timed any better in hindsight.
Ryan O’Connell and I touched on this in the pink ball special edition of the Cheap Seats Podcast this week, when I asked my occasionally astute co-host if this current Australian side is only one or two injuries away from mediocrity.
“Yeah,” Ryan replied, with a knowing, but probably slightly worried chuckle.
“I’m not sure we’re above mediocrity anyway, at the moment,” he continued. “We’ve just come back from an Ashes Tour in which we absolutely had our pants pulled down, we’ve beaten a team 2-0 – that flatters us – who is beneath us on the rankings, and we’re about to play the West Indies.
“I don’t know if you can say we’re above mediocrity anyway. We’re going through a re-build.”
And this is the whole thing.
Right now, Australia’s bowling depth is being tested like it hasn’t been in a long, long time.
The same sort of logic and selection reason around ‘showing promise’ that has been the hallmark of the Shaun Marsh and Shane Watson’s careers is being applied to bowlers now. Nathan Coulter-Nile is one back strain or one sore landing foot away from a Test debut, because the selectors have “had our eye on him for a long time”.
Scott Boland, who until a week ago was just another Victorian bowler, has one good bowling innings in one Sheffield Shield game, and he’s being picked ‘on form’ as the bowler on standby. If both back strain and sore landing foot strike the current members of the fast bowling cartel, he’ll be a Test player.
So not only is the concept of depth being stretched by the aforementioned retirements and injuries – plus injuries to other options like Pat Cummins, Jason Behrendorff, and James Faulkner, and Bangladesh tour bolter Andrew Fekete being dropped by Tasmania – but now we’re stretching what we really consider ‘form’.
For the time being, though, this is how it’s going to be with the national side.
State performances – even one-off state performances – that not that long ago would’ve been considered run-of-the-mill, or dare I say it, the expected standard of a first-class cricketer, is now enough to have a case for selection made.
Batting-wise, it feels like those ‘next in line’ have been identified. Even if there is an injury or form concern at the top or in the middle order, people expect that Cameron Bancroft and Peter Handscomb will play Test cricket sooner rather than later.
Marcus Stoinis is another who appears to be earning the coveted mention from selectors on occasion while Bancroft is battling a little this Shield season. But the young Victorians are rocking along nicely and doing their chances no harm at all.
Michael Klinger is in the middle of another very typical Michael Klinger season, and though there was plenty of support for him to earn a Test debut in Adelaide, you always rather expected that famed Shaun Marsh promise would again win out. At 35, Klinger may well finish his time as this decade’s Jamie Siddons.
Callum Ferguson was having a very typical Callum Ferguson season until last weekend in Hobart when his career-high 213 doubled his season tally and pumped his average 25 points higher. He followed it up with a second innings 11, and with the average still north of 55, had barrow-pushing articles written.
Meanwhile, there’s been precious little written about the two leading Shield run-scorers to date, Tasmanian pair Ben Dunk and George Bailey. They sit just either side of 500 runs at 70-plus each, if you’re interested.
So while a few days after the event it isn’t surprising that Coulter-Nile and theoretically Boland are suddenly in the frame, it’s no less worrying to ponder the thought.
If you then consider how solid the Australian side looked even just last summer, it’s downright depressing how quickly things have deteriorated.
Needless to say, the national selection panel will earn their remuneration over the rest of this season and probably the next 12 months after that, too.
The days of ‘dialling in’ Test sides capable of world domination are well and truly over.