Opinion
Australian selectors optimistic at best in ignoring T20’s A-kid
Malcolm Knox
Journalist, author and columnistFor the two months of the year when the Indian Premier League consumes world cricket – is world cricket – many will stick their fingers in their ears, shut their eyes and go ‘la la la la!’ until it’s over. This circus will pass.
Those fans will find solidarity in the Australian selection panel, who treat the IPL with the attitude they normally reserve for the Sheffield Shield. I’m not there, this isn’t happening.
Radiohead’s How To Disappear Completely has been the Australian selectors’ theme song for some time, and it was well demonstrated when Steve Smith selected himself as Test opener. It has been faithfully continued for the team they’ve selected for last year’s 50-over World Cup, and the team for the upcoming T20 World Cup. Experts at not-selecting, the panel has woken, signalled ‘Steady as she goes!’, and gone back to bed.
Twenty20 is a young form of cricket and this year’s IPL has undergone one of those quantum leaps every sport goes through in its early development. Hitting has reached a new audacity. Inventiveness for shot types and scoring areas has found new imaginative range. Bowling and fielding have responded with new craft, new athleticism. Even allowing for the middle-aged men risking their health in lung-busting TV commentary – this is one spectacle that doesn’t need over-egging – it’s been exhilarating to watch. I know it’s not cricket but whatever it is, it’s eye-poppingly good.
Where are the Australian selectors when this is happening? I don’t know either. In their Jason Demetriou-esque wisdom, their World Cup selection has retracted into the shell of known quantities. They have picked two veterans, David Warner and Glenn Maxwell, and a captain, Mitchell Marsh, who have not coped with the demands of an IPL season. They have picked Mitchell Starc, constantly beset by small niggles and a ricked neck from watching balls sail over his head. Only two selections, Travis Head and Pat Cummins, have shone consistently in this breakthrough IPL season. Another handful (Cameron Green, Marcus Stoinis, Tim David) have had intermittent impact. Most of the Australian squad can’t win places in IPL teams.
The focal point is Jake Fraser-McGurk. Like many emergent Indian talents, Fraser-McGurk is a native to short-form cricket. Since superseding Warner for the Delhi Capitals, Fraser-McGurk has played some innings that have to be seen to be believed. His strike rate of 233.33 is fourth in the IPL and everyone else in the top 10 is a lower-order slogger while Fraser-McGurk comes in at the top. He has treated Jasprit Bumrah and the best bowlers in the world as if their best balls are hung up a hitting sock from the garage ceiling. Even in his prime, let alone now, Warner has never matched this.
Jake Fraser-McGurk.Credit: Simon Letch
Chairman of selectors George Bailey said these performances had been ‘really eye catching’ and ‘really exciting’, but not enough for selection. Instead, the priority is ‘to structure the way we want’ and ‘the way we’re functioning at the top of the order with the three guys we’ve had there has been really strong as well’. In other words, the incumbents’ hypnotic hold on the panel continues. You are getting sleepy…
If the selectors looked to the next rank of Australian T20 batting, they might have looked at the last Big Bash League. The top-performing locals who scored more than 200 runs with a strike rate of more than 150 were Maxwell, Jake Weatherald, Chris Lynn, Fraser-McGurk and tournament top-scorer Matt Short (whose 542 runs at 60.11 with a strike rate of 153.25 were 180 runs more than the next highest scorer, making him the Cameron Bancroft of T20 cricket). Aaron Hardie scored 334 runs, at a strike rate of127.96, and also had a bowling economy rate among the best in the league. These players, Bailey said, ‘were all part of long conversations’ and surely also journeys, deep dives, hot takes and circle-backs, but where they ultimately landed did not move the needle. Somebody spare us.
So what’s going on? Do the Australian selectors just not really enjoy selecting? Is omitting Smith their idea of looking to the future?
There’s an argument that experience trumps all other values, and under World Cup pressure, the only trusted players are the ones who’ve performed before. But there again the brains trust can’t have been watching the IPL, where the atmosphere is brain-bleedingly intense, every match has the fervid atmosphere of a World Cup final, and the individual stakes are what cricketers really value: millions of dollars in contracts. It’s anything but hit-and-giggle. It’s almost ridiculously high pressure, and the biggest Australian stars in this biggest league have been Head, Cummins and Fraser-McGurk.
Jake Fraser-McGurk has been on fire with the bat for Delhi Capitals.Credit: AP
Another interpretation is that selectors get trapped in the mindset of a loyal race jockey who will ride their champion horse until it gives out. The champ might have one more campaign left. It’s an understandable mentality for the individuals who play, but very hard to understand for those off-field who have been entrusted with stewarding the present into the future. You look back, you stand still, you’re creating nothing but a hole.
One saving grace for Australia is that India, the putative World Cup favourites, have also sought shelter – or cover - behind big names. But even if Virat Kohli is past his peak, he still ranks second in IPL runs. India’s selection, while conservative, still includes four of the top 10 IPL run-scorers. (Australia’s best, Head, is 11th.) At least India’s selectors (like England’s, like South Africa’s, like the West Indies’) give every appearance of having been watching and responding to the past five weeks of a new cricket revolution.
It’s hard to ignore, but Australia seems to have managed it. In ways that extend far beyond mere selections, franchise T20 cricket is tightening its hold and broadening its reach. Very soon, with EPL football as its model, this game will be a global entertainment product. Australia, not just its selectors, are at risk of being stuck at the station after the train has left. Cricket is no longer a leisurely game played at a leisurely pace. It’s off and racing. Australian domestic tastes now represent a small, diminishing and insufficiently fanatical proportion of the cricket audience. It’s hard to credit, but many among us are stuck thinking this Twenty20 thing is a distasteful fad that we’ll accept for the moment while we wait it out.
The guardians of the Australian game, by risking nothing, are risking much. It’s not really about one tournament or one player. The rejection of youth is a symbol of one faction standing still while the world dashes into the future.
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