David, I’m struggling to understand what you’re getting at, perhaps you should clarify. Obviously there were several appealing candidates for the coaching job, and only one was going to get it while the others were going to miss out. On one hand you write that Arthur is a quality coach who helped lift SA from 5th to 1st in the test rankings and 6th to 1st in the ODIs, yet you are still saying that his appointment over Australian candidates is the ‘latest disaster’. Given Arthur’s credentials aren’t in question, why exactly is his appointment the ‘latest disaster’? I don’t want to prejudge but if it’s because he’s South African, then I think that’s a fairly narrow-minded attitude in today’s world. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on this, but it would be nice if you could clearly explain why Arthur’s appointment will, in your eyes, prove to be the ‘latest disaster’ from CA.

Sure, I said the team is rebuilding. A rebuilding team is bound to have some weak areas and inconsistencies. It takes time to develop the sort of team England has or of the type we had in the 90s and 00s and Australian cricket probably got a bit complacent about this in recent seasons. So I’m not popping champagne corks. However after playing so poorly in the Ashes it seemed like these two away tours to SL and SA would be hard painful slogs and yet we’ve got the results so far. I thought it was a good sign that we survived a difficult situation in the 3rd test against SL and I’m not convinced that obtaining a 237 run first-innings lead in the rain-affected second test equated to us being ‘under the kosh’.

Yes Marsh is 28 but he is still young enough that if he keeps suceeding at test level he is potentially a top-order batsman for most of this decade, so that’s a good thing. I also agree that Clarke does need to score some 1st innings hundreds, but give him credit where it’s due as well. He made some key contributions. It seems like the team gets criticised after every loss and after every win these days.

All I’m saying is let’s see what happens in the tough series ahead. We have some young players showing promise and let’s support them and see how they fare.

Well I don’t have the intimate knowledge of junior-level cricket so I can’t speak on that issue, but as far as the national team is faring then yes I guess we will have to disagree. Argus was in the wake of a very poor 2010/11 season. This is now a new season. I can’t see how winning away from home as we have been doing can be construed as the team not travelling well at the moment.

Considering how Clarke has been at the helm in those victories, and how he has batted well in both ODIs and tests (including an important 60 in a low-scoring test victory and a hundred which helped save the 3rd test) I also can’t see how ‘the most obvious and essential decision in the near future’ is to drop him.

I must be following a different Australian team than most others. Since the World Cup, we’ve won 3 away one-day series (one of which was against a world cup finalist) and a test series. Several younger cricketers have shown great promise, one of whom made a hundred on test debut followed by an eighty. So I don’t see us hopelessly stuck in the mire at all and I can’t understand all the pessimism. I suppose it’s easy to be constantly negative all the time, but maybe we can assess Howard’s and Inverarity’s performance after they’ve had a chance to do their job. As it is there are big series againt South Africa (only 2 test unfortunately) and then India later on and I think it’s an interesting time with a rebuilding Australian team testing themselves against these nations.

Well I thank you for having read and noted my comment! No one else did but then I’m not surprised that the discussion from the Roarers about this is basically the same Clarke v Katich one that occured last June. What does surprise me is that no ‘expert’ or sports journalist has written about Katich’s remarkable contradiction of himself. I say it’s remarkable because his comments cast serious aspersions on another person’s character. I don’t claim to be highly perceptive nor do I write about sport for a living, so it’s dismaying to see the reporting of this by the professionials dumbed down to a Clarke v Katich tussle, instead of there being a critical analysis of Katich’s accusations and why he has suddenly changed his story. For example, I’d like to know if the Australia captain ever sits in on the selectors’ meeting to determine the contracts, does he have input into the process, does he ratify the final dicision? Does the captain have a role in any of the process? Perhaps some of the Roar experts can investigate this insteas of fanning the anti-Clarke flames, because I’m not clearer to understanding any of this and it goes to the heart of the issue of whether Clarke was directly involved in Katich’s omission. I realise many people claim he was involved, but that appears to be based on their dislike of him, not on any evidence.

Telling it like it is? In his first press conference Katich said the Clarke incident wasn’t behind his axing. Now he says it was. So when is Katich telling the truth?

No matter what he says Katich will win over the broader sphere of public opinion on this on most websites at least, because so many are anti-Clarke, anti-selectors and anti-CA. I initially did feel bad for Katich when his contract wasn’t renewed, but the more he talks the more I feel it’s probably for the best to select younger players and leave such a negative person out of the team. Spraying everyone involved in Australian cricket, including the captain, is pretty undignified, particularly when he starts changing his story.

First games for Australia in a while and they didn’t have any warm-up games or proper acclimatisation. I wouldn’t be too critical at this stage. If we are to take international T20 seriously then shouldn’t there be some proper practice games beforehand? This aversion to playing tour games is costing India dearly at the moment as well.

Reading the web traffic on Cricinfo and the responses of the Irish and Dutch boards in praise of the recent decisions concerning the World cups and Associates has left me a bit baffled. The 2015 decision is barely sugarcoating the fact that the Associates are going to be worse off than before. What’s the reasoning given for the reduction of teams in the T20, and why is the 2019 WC still a 10 team tournament? It’s pretty clear that in the long run the ICC (or the Full Member nations) want minimal Associate involvement in what they perceive as the elite competitions.
There’s been plenty of speculation that the Associates’ votes would be bought – a 14-team 2015 WC in exchange for a vote to scrap rotational presidency. I hope it’s not the case because overall the Associates are getting a pretty bad deal. (I’ve just read that the presidency decision has been deferred til October)

Katich has a right to say he is disappointed, but I also feel he went over the top. Is his axing really going to be ‘the straw that breaks the camel’s back’ as he hopes? I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s going to be a putsch at Cricket Australia over this – the best chance of that happening is the Argus review and even that’s a very long shot. Katich’s career was probably over the moment he wasn’t given a contract, and all he’s done is let off a lot of steam. In doing so he’s made a lot of frustrated fans happy, but once the heat dies down I think we’ll all realise that Australian cricket will go on without Simon Katich. I’m not unsympathetic to Katich. It was a tough, harsh decision. It’s not the first time these tough calls are made and it won’t be the last.

Katich at least has a right to be emotional. Some of the other commentaries going around are overblown to say the least. Apart from the web commentary, Stephen Smith calling his axing an ‘atrocity’ (I don’t quite think it’s up there with Bahrain and Syria), yesterday Stuart Clark said in all sincerity on Channel 9 that as an opener Katich was one of the top 3 or 4 batsman in the world. Now Katich was one of the top 2-3 batsmen in the Australian team (which is why he probably should have got a contract), but 3-4 in the world? I don’t think so!

All this bluster around Katich obscures the fact that the more pressing questions from the list of 25 which we should be discussing, particularly in the bowling department, especially the spin bowling, the non-selection of Copeland and O’Keefe, the role of Steve Smith and Doherty next season, and then there’s the future of the ODI team – we should start preparing for the 2015 world cup now but we still have Lee, Ponting and Hussey and we don’t know how long they will play on. I feel these things are more important than the Katich issue. The trend these days in political and sporting discussion is to go for the extreme, sensationalist angle, and this is the case with Katich. A bit more balanced, sober media analysis of what’s going on would be better.

Isn’t it enough that Katich himself said that the incident with Clarke 2 years ago isn’t a factor in this? His sights were firmly set on the selectors and administrators, not Clarke.

It was one of Ponting’s complaints that he didn’t have a seat on the selection committee, so are we now supposed to believe that Clarke is making decisions on the same committee?

I’d just like to see some facts and evidence about Clarke’s so-called involvement in Katich’s axing, rather than guesswork based on suspicion and dislike of him. In the absence of anything substantial or concrete, there’s nothing to suggest that the contract decision on Katich was anything other than a selectorial decision.

For the record I disagree with Katich not getting a contract from CA on the basis of him deserving the chance of regaining his opening position, and because Hughes’s suspect technique and Khawaja’s unfamiliarity with opening don’t make them equal or better replacements for Katich at this stage.

In saying that, I’m surprised with the overreaction to the non-renewal. Katich wasn’t talked about too much even when he was doing well as an opener – in fact many complained about how Hughes was dropped too early (for Watson) in England ’09. I can’t remember the line ‘If only Kat was playing’ being bandied about too much when England flogged us in Melbourne and Sydney. He is a good solid opener, but suddenly Katich has become something greater, the could-have-been ‘saviour’ of Australian cricket, and the reason he’s not there – he was stabbed in the back by everyone’s villain, Michael Clarke.

If Hughes and/or Khawaja did fail in SL/SAf, and Sir Donald Katich averaged his customary 99.94 in Shield cricket, surely there would be a strong argument for his reinstatement. If the decision is as illogical and boneheaded as many say it is, the door to a recall surely can’t be closed for him (even though he slagged all and sundry off in a press conference – that must have felt good for Kat and his band of supporters, but I felt it was a touch immature).

Then there’s the other side to all this – apparently Michael Clarke, like his namesake Michael Corleone, has bided his time and now knocked off his enemy. There’s no evidence for this by the way, but it must be true because it’s Michael Clarke after all. People don’t like his tatts, and his ex-girlfriend and the media-driven saga his relationship with her was, and in general feel he’s a bit too slick. But unlike other Australian cricket legends (whom I loved watching play), Clarke has never taken thousands of dollars from a bookie for info, been banned for drug use, got punched out in a Kings Cross bar, called journalists ‘a bunch of ###holes’, broken dressing room windows…you get the drift..he doesn’t behave badly, he’s just disliked for being a product of his times. You don’t have to like him, but the constant criticism of every action he does (and the ones he doesn’t do, like Katich’s non-selection) is to me unfair to the extreme. And yes, he has had a poor run in test cricket lately but at 30 he has time to find his form again and he has proven in the past that he can make test hundreds and be a good test batsman.

II actually am more annoyed with some of the bowling choices then the batting – I think Hilfenhaus and Doherty in particular are lucky to be on the list ahead of S O’Keefe and Copeland. A number of selections, and the reasoning for them (2013 Ashes, ignoring all the tough series we have ahead of us) are clearly flawed, but it should be remembered that the door isn’t shut on those who didn’t make it either.

Again, like many I disagree with Katich not getting a contract, but I think the whole reaction to this is quite overblown.