Gideon Haigh on Langer and the Selectors:
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/opinion/gideon-haigh/tradition-lost-by-a-secret-knock-at-the-selection-door/news-story/db651760d3663915fd5fd046c68cdb73
Australian cricket has a new obsession. “The line” has been replaced by “the door”, on which selectors have for some time been bemoaning the absence of insistent pounding.
“Try being a selector at the moment,” coach Justin Langer complained after the Boxing Day Test’s contribution to the #nationalbattingcrisis.
“We’ve got to be careful not to reward poor performances but … it’s not as if the guys are absolutely banging the door down. Most of our batters knocking on the door are averaging in the 30s (in the Sheffield Shield).”
Langer is an appealingly frank sort of fellow, and probably unused as yet to having his every word parsed.
Yet this hardly stood up to scrutiny. For a start, there is no “door” of first-class cricket for anyone even to scrabble at at the moment; there is the five-bar gate of the Big Bash League, on which is being scribbled graffiti such as “Darcy Short 4 Me” and “I Heart Marcus Stoinis”.
Also, as my colleague Peter Lalor noted yesterday, Langer’s remarks lack empirical support.
Since moving back to Tasmania after losing his Test spot, for example, Matthew Wade has made 1225 runs at 51. Maybe that’s not banging from the golden age of doors, but it deserves respect.
Over the same period Queensland’s Joe Burns has ground out 1197 runs at 52, Victoria’s Glenn Maxwell 833 at 49, NSW’s Daniel Hughes 1123 at 43.2 and Kurtis Patterson 1110 at 40.7.
Again, not perhaps comparable to those imagined glory days when every batsman in the Shield averaged 50 and every bowler 15, but still solid performances sustained over extended periods despite being compromised, as is the modern way, with ceaseless interruption.
After all, it’s hardly possible to talk about a “first-class season” in Australia since the Shield was cleft in twain by the BBL.
Historically a huge advantage of home countries staging Test matches has been their wider pool of active talent available for selection. A touring team in practice has only its own ranks to draw on; a host has in theory the whole of its first-class competition as a field of candidates.
We decided we were so good seven years ago that we could safely forfeit this edge. Now we’re stuck discussing piecemeal remedies such as more second XI games and shadow squads, or musing sagaciously about “rapid format changes” as though this is somehow a skill rather than simply a necessity.
Under these circumstances, the selectors deserve a measure of sympathy, as they are frequently relying on form with a time decay element. Yet they do not help their own cause by their seeming lurchings from one theory to the next. Just what are the criteria for Australian selection at present? Character? Cover drives? Heredity? Horses-for-courses? Mentions in Ponting’s commentary or on Warnie’s Twitter?
One inference that can be drawn from Langer’s remarks is that the door has a secret knock which you need to know. For the problem appears to be not that nobody is making runs, but that it’s not the people the selectors want.
Wade is 31, Maxwell is 30, Burns is 29. They’ve been tried; they’ve, apparently, been found wanting. There’s already a specialist batsman in the Australian team, Shaun Marsh, with an average less than his age. The selectors seem to dream of a wunderkind, who would not only alleviate the pressures on the Australian team but also vindicate the cricket system — a new Ponting, a tyro Gilchrist, a kid Clarke.
One suspects that these are the “batters knocking on the door” to which Langer refers. Unfortunately this generation are actually not averaging 30 this season; they’re averaging 20.
That’s your Hilton Cartwright, Jake Weatherald, Sam Heazlett, Josh Philippe, Ben McDermott, Jason Sangha, Jack Edwards et al, into whom years of coaching and managerial resources have been ploughed, and for whom enormous futures have been prophesied, almost mandated.
Cricket Australia’s high-performance empire has hardly had a better day than in early November when teenagers Sangha and Edwards put on 180 for the sixth NSW wicket against Tasmania. But that memorable occasion aside, the pair have 286 first-class runs at 17.9 to show for this season.
For his club Manly-Warringah, meanwhile, tall right-hander Edwards has actually never made a century, from fifths to firsts; at first-grade level he has just two fifties.
Strip these from his first-grade record, in fact, and it contracts to 121 runs at 8.64. Yet in some eyes, Edwards will be closer to Australian selection than Wade, Maxwell and Burns.
It’s unkind to single Edwards out: he’s hardly picked himself. He may yet succeed; one hopes he does. But so far he’s been offered opportunities well in advance of his performances. What door has he banged on? Or has he simply tapped politely on an open one?
Anecdotally, too, there’s quite a bit of this going on, since the advent of a pathways system that encourages subjective analysis and rather deprecates mere performance. If you’ve an idle few hours, drill down into MyCricket and check out some pathways cricket averages. Some kids sure seem to get a great run. Just sayin’ …
So perhaps there’s fewer issues with the banging than with the doors themselves, traditional measures of merit having been so thoroughly subverted — often with good intentions, it needs be said, but subverted just the same. To this has lately been added an additional layer, post-Cape Town. The search for “good people as well as good cricketers” is laudable; but what if those the search overlooks end up being regarded as in some ways personally deficient and those who benefit court scorn for being part of the in-crowd?
This is actually unfair to both groups. Perception can be hard to shift; it can even be self-reinforcing, and damaging of the culture it seeks to build. Because doors bear heavily on the rooms into which they open.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/opinion/gideon-haigh/tradition-lost-by-a-secret-knock-at-the-selection-door/news-story/db651760d3663915fd5fd046c68cdb73
Australian cricket has a new obsession. “The line” has been replaced by “the door”, on which selectors have for some time been bemoaning the absence of insistent pounding.
“Try being a selector at the moment,” coach Justin Langer complained after the Boxing Day Test’s contribution to the #nationalbattingcrisis.
“We’ve got to be careful not to reward poor performances but … it’s not as if the guys are absolutely banging the door down. Most of our batters knocking on the door are averaging in the 30s (in the Sheffield Shield).”
Langer is an appealingly frank sort of fellow, and probably unused as yet to having his every word parsed.
Yet this hardly stood up to scrutiny. For a start, there is no “door” of first-class cricket for anyone even to scrabble at at the moment; there is the five-bar gate of the Big Bash League, on which is being scribbled graffiti such as “Darcy Short 4 Me” and “I Heart Marcus Stoinis”.
Also, as my colleague Peter Lalor noted yesterday, Langer’s remarks lack empirical support.
Since moving back to Tasmania after losing his Test spot, for example, Matthew Wade has made 1225 runs at 51. Maybe that’s not banging from the golden age of doors, but it deserves respect.
Over the same period Queensland’s Joe Burns has ground out 1197 runs at 52, Victoria’s Glenn Maxwell 833 at 49, NSW’s Daniel Hughes 1123 at 43.2 and Kurtis Patterson 1110 at 40.7.
Again, not perhaps comparable to those imagined glory days when every batsman in the Shield averaged 50 and every bowler 15, but still solid performances sustained over extended periods despite being compromised, as is the modern way, with ceaseless interruption.
After all, it’s hardly possible to talk about a “first-class season” in Australia since the Shield was cleft in twain by the BBL.
Historically a huge advantage of home countries staging Test matches has been their wider pool of active talent available for selection. A touring team in practice has only its own ranks to draw on; a host has in theory the whole of its first-class competition as a field of candidates.
We decided we were so good seven years ago that we could safely forfeit this edge. Now we’re stuck discussing piecemeal remedies such as more second XI games and shadow squads, or musing sagaciously about “rapid format changes” as though this is somehow a skill rather than simply a necessity.
Under these circumstances, the selectors deserve a measure of sympathy, as they are frequently relying on form with a time decay element. Yet they do not help their own cause by their seeming lurchings from one theory to the next. Just what are the criteria for Australian selection at present? Character? Cover drives? Heredity? Horses-for-courses? Mentions in Ponting’s commentary or on Warnie’s Twitter?
One inference that can be drawn from Langer’s remarks is that the door has a secret knock which you need to know. For the problem appears to be not that nobody is making runs, but that it’s not the people the selectors want.
Wade is 31, Maxwell is 30, Burns is 29. They’ve been tried; they’ve, apparently, been found wanting. There’s already a specialist batsman in the Australian team, Shaun Marsh, with an average less than his age. The selectors seem to dream of a wunderkind, who would not only alleviate the pressures on the Australian team but also vindicate the cricket system — a new Ponting, a tyro Gilchrist, a kid Clarke.
One suspects that these are the “batters knocking on the door” to which Langer refers. Unfortunately this generation are actually not averaging 30 this season; they’re averaging 20.
That’s your Hilton Cartwright, Jake Weatherald, Sam Heazlett, Josh Philippe, Ben McDermott, Jason Sangha, Jack Edwards et al, into whom years of coaching and managerial resources have been ploughed, and for whom enormous futures have been prophesied, almost mandated.
Cricket Australia’s high-performance empire has hardly had a better day than in early November when teenagers Sangha and Edwards put on 180 for the sixth NSW wicket against Tasmania. But that memorable occasion aside, the pair have 286 first-class runs at 17.9 to show for this season.
For his club Manly-Warringah, meanwhile, tall right-hander Edwards has actually never made a century, from fifths to firsts; at first-grade level he has just two fifties.
Strip these from his first-grade record, in fact, and it contracts to 121 runs at 8.64. Yet in some eyes, Edwards will be closer to Australian selection than Wade, Maxwell and Burns.
It’s unkind to single Edwards out: he’s hardly picked himself. He may yet succeed; one hopes he does. But so far he’s been offered opportunities well in advance of his performances. What door has he banged on? Or has he simply tapped politely on an open one?
Anecdotally, too, there’s quite a bit of this going on, since the advent of a pathways system that encourages subjective analysis and rather deprecates mere performance. If you’ve an idle few hours, drill down into MyCricket and check out some pathways cricket averages. Some kids sure seem to get a great run. Just sayin’ …
So perhaps there’s fewer issues with the banging than with the doors themselves, traditional measures of merit having been so thoroughly subverted — often with good intentions, it needs be said, but subverted just the same. To this has lately been added an additional layer, post-Cape Town. The search for “good people as well as good cricketers” is laudable; but what if those the search overlooks end up being regarded as in some ways personally deficient and those who benefit court scorn for being part of the in-crowd?
This is actually unfair to both groups. Perception can be hard to shift; it can even be self-reinforcing, and damaging of the culture it seeks to build. Because doors bear heavily on the rooms into which they open.
