Australia's all-rounder problem isn't really a problem

Apparently Australia has an all-rounder problem, and what’s more, Hilton Cartwright is not the answer to it.

I realise that this kind of suggests that there was someone who thought Hilton Cartwright was the answer to it, and as unlikely as it seems, apparently these people do exist.

The all-rounder problem, in a nutshell, is this: Australia, I am reliably informed, simply cannot be a successful Test team unless they have a player who is simultaneously a worse batsman than the top five and a worse bowler than the main four.

Cartwright actually seems to fit this bill pretty well, but not well enough, it would seem: bowling coach David Saker says he has to “upskill his bowling as much as he can”, so that he can pose a greater threat to opposition batting lineups, although obviously he doesn’t want to upskill too much, or he might become a frontline bowler and then he’d have to drop down the order and force the selectors to find another human halfway house.

If the road to solving the “all-rounder” problem is just picking a batsman and getting him to “upskill” his bowling, I don’t see why we don’t just get Steve Smith and David Warner to “upskill”, and pick the best possible batsman for the number six role. Or just pick that best possible batsman and get him to “upskill”.

Nic Maddinson bowled OK when he was in the team, after all. He batted horribly, of course, but as I understand it that’s a big part of the all-rounder’s job in this day and age: batting appallingly was the role Mitch Marsh performed for an extended period of time.

But of course the fear that comes with choosing a specialist batsman is that there’ll be nobody to “take the pressure” off the strike bowlers. 

However, given that current selection policy seems to be that someone is needed to bowl a few overs to give the fast bowlers a rest, but that at the same time it doesn’t actually matter whether those overs are bowled well or badly, again, why not just get the batsman to do it?

If the job description is just “bowl”, rather than “bowl well”, you could share the fifth bowler’s workload between Matt Renshaw and Usman Khawaja and the job would get done.

Or is the issue that a batsman bowling too many overs could suffer a serious back injury that makes it impossible for them to bat, so the responsibility for the fill-in overs must fall to the all-rounder, whose batting is poor enough that having them sit out the innings injured won’t hurt the batting effort too much?

Perhaps that’s it – the all-rounder’s job is simply to be dispensable enough that any mishap that befalls him will make little difference to the team’s fortunes. In this light, the constant search for a player who is equally mediocre with bat and ball makes a lot more sense.

Of course, there are other ways of doing things. For example, we could pursue the path that, as Sanjay Manjrekar points out, is that which generally leads to the discovery of great all-rounders: picking the best batsmen and bowlers you can find, and considering it a bonus if one of them can perform a secondary skill to an outstanding level.

We could consider that given that most of the “all-rounders” in Australia actually good enough to bat in the top six are really just batsmen who bowl a bit, we might as well just use the batsmen who can bowl a bit who are in the team already.

Alternatively, if a fifth specialist bowler is such an urgent requirement, we could bite the bullet, accept that prioritising a fifth bowler will inevitably weaken the batting order, push the keeper up to six – you know, the one who was picked for his reportedly outstanding batting ability – and Starc up to seven – he’s got a better batting average than Mitch Marsh anyway – and just pick the five best bowlers.

The crucial questions, in assessing this “all-rounder problem”, are:

Would a team in which a few relief overs are bowled by Steve Smith, David Warner, or even, say, Shaun Marsh or Adam Voges, be a team with a significantly weaker bowling attack than one with Hilton Cartwright floating his wobblers up every now and then?

Would a team with Wade at six, Starc at seven and, say, Pat Cummins or Chadd Sayers somewhere in the tail, be a team with a significantly weaker batting order than one with Mitch Marsh flailing haplessly in the middle order?

And finally, if we consider that the last player Australia had who could genuinely merit selection in the Test team as both a bowler and a batsman was Keith Miller, have we perhaps become slightly too obsessed with making room in every lineup for a player who can merit selection as neither?

Of course, literally every problem in Australian cricket, and probably in several other sports as well, would be solved by picking Glenn Maxwell, but the selectors are just jealous.