Australian Cricket Season 2018-2019

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I think it is hard to believe that, according to Ponting, both Marsh bros will front up again. Burns' Test average is mid-30's and in recent times (for him, 2016 and Wanderers earlier this year) it has been poor. However, he is in good form now. That can not be said for many of the others. I'd probably pick him but not with a lot of conviction that it would change very much for this team.

I do not know how Glenn Maxwell has soiled the coughy's cage but it must be bad (attitude/temperament?). He has at least had moderate success against subcontinent teams in the subcontinent and has never been tried anywhere else at Test level. I guess, like Burns, he is not a West Australian.

Agree re the Maxwell issue. It’s strange that we haven’t heard what he’s done if it’s bad behaviour or similar. Normally you’d hear something in the media about such things. It’s like he has upset someone really important.
 
I really do like Geoff Lemon's articles surrounding Australian cricket, and this one hit's the nail on the head once again.

Another Test selection embarrassment after Australia's Melbourne meltdown

he unfortunate thing is that it’s not Marnus Labuschagne’s fault. But the latest selection for Australia’s Test team is embarrassing for those who made it.

Where other people use the New Year to take stock, cricket finds itself halfway through a season. There’s no chance to gain the wisdom and perspective of distance from the middle of it, like the thrashing India just gave Australia at the MCG.

To be fair, that should already have happened. Australian cricket has had plenty of opportunity in 2018 for self-examination. Yet ending this torrid year we still have a team picked by fumbling guesses and half-hearted excuses, informed by prejudice and passing thought bubbles.

The selection accidents by which Labuschagne first made the team were embarrassing enough. Playing some one-day games on an Australia A tour, he was retained for two first-class games after Matt Renshaw was injured.

A fifty and a pair of ducks were somehow deemed enough to get Labuschagne into a Test squad to play Pakistan in the UAE. Then he made the starting XI after Renshaw was injured again.

New coach Justin Langer had recently given a spiel about restoring pride in the baggy green by setting the most demanding possible standards to get one. This move made that a mockery.

For context, this was a player with a first-class mark of 33. He had promise for the future, but not the standard for the present. He played his two Tests and was dropped after a lacklustre showing. Two months later, he’s coming back.

See, selectors want a spare bowler for Sydney. They think it might spin. And Labuschagne took a few wickets in the UAE rolling down leg-breaks. Serviceable, but a part-timer picking up players who’d already piled on 80 or 90.

Now, off the back of a Shield season averaging 28 with the bat and 60 with the ball, he’ll be classed as an all-rounder and bat at six. Unless it’s a raging greentop, in which case the similarly bits-and-pieces Mitchell Marsh will remain.

The Mitch Marsh experiment has failed, and the foolishness of promoting to vice-captain a player without a sure place in the side has been exposed. A Test batting average of 25 is barely ahead of Pat coughmins, and while he bowled well in Melbourne in his support role, it’s not enough to be in the top six.

Mitchell Marsh with his brother Shaun. (Photo by Lee Warren/Gallo Images/Getty Images)

It’s hard to know what happened. For a run of five Tests since his Ashes comeback in late 2017, Marsh looked so good: Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Durban, Port Elizabeth.

He defended with total conviction and attacked with purity of purpose. Even late in 2018 he made big hundreds in the UAE warm-up match and the opening Sheffield Shield round.

But somehow at the top level that resolute defence slipped away, and his Test returns since Port Elizabeth last March have been 5, 16, 4, 0, 12, 0, 13, 5, 9 and 10.

The only way Marsh can credibly play for Australia again is to produce serious domestic results for a couple of years, not a couple of games. He’s been allowed leniency by selectors for four years and counting.

The Aaron Finch gambit hasn’t worked either. It was fair to try: his white-ball form earlier in the year was imperious and there was a chance he could replicate it. Having him open in Tests worked in the UAE, despite the fact he’s a middle order player in domestic first-class cricket.

But once he was formally made captain in the T20 and ODI formats in October, his form disappeared. At one stage he made six single-figure scores in a row. Come the Tests against India, he’s made three more in six innings.

Aaron Finch opens for Australia in the first Test against India. (Photo by Daniel Kalisz – CA/Cricket Australia/Getty Images)

Against a quality seam attack moving the ball, Finch isn’t an opener. The analysts at CricViz isolated it: when the ball moves more than three quarters of one degree off the pitch, Finch averages 11.5 runs per dismissal.

If that’s how things have gone in Australia, imagine facing Jimmy Anderson on a green wicket under cloudy skies in Birmingham halfway through 2019.

Travis Head could and probably should be dropped were it not for the players around him in even worse nick. Head keeps making decent starts, but has been out four times running to inexplicable slogs.

In the meantime, three batsmen in particular sit watching on. Back when the Cape Town suspensions knocked out half of Australia’s top six, the three reserve players flown in were Glenn Maxwell, Matt Renshaw and Joe Burns.

All of them have Test hundreds. All of them have better first-class records than most of the current side. None of them are playing.

Nine months ago, those three were considered to be next in. Nine months later, they are apparently not in Australia’s best 11 batsmen.

Ahead of them – at least – are the suspended players, the Melbourne six, the discarded Peter Handscomb and the replacement Labuschagne. In a team that without hyperbole is Australia’s weakest since Kerry Packer broke cricket in the 1970s, none of these players can get a gig.

It’s worth recapping that Maxwell was told not to play county cricket in 2018 so he could rest for the Australia A tour, then told he would miss that tour because he was a lock for the UAE Tests, then told he wasn’t in the Test squad because Labuschagne had made a fifty on the A tour.

Maxwell couldn’t make a case for a recall in November because he missed most of the Sheffield Shield playing with the one-day team.

It’s worth recapping that Renshaw dominated county cricket mid-year, then was ostensibly left out of the Dubai Test because he was short on match practice, but was kept in the squad where he had no chance of getting any match practice, and now has seen his domestic form suffer after being mucked around.

The suggestion only grows more credible that there’s more at play in these decisions than cricket skills. If there’s nothing deliberate about these inexplicable sequences of behaviour from administrators, it can only be incompetence.

The upcoming Sri Lanka Tests are bogey games. Worse than the prospect of losing is that winning could lock in players who aren’t suited. Times are tough for the Test team at the moment, but selection has to pull itself together before anything else can follow.
 
Same as Ronan O'Connell, two journalists who aren't hamstrung by their 'sources' and tell it how it is.

Labuschagne's Test selection is a farce

Marnus Labuschagne has averaged 25 with the bat in his past 15 first-class innings yet somehow is on the verge of a shock recall for this week’s deciding Test against India.

The 24-year-old was a wacky selection to make his Test debut against Pakistan in the UAE, having never once averaged 40 or better in a Sheffield Shield season.

Then Labuschagne averaged 20 with the bat in two Tests, went back and averaged 28 in five Shield games and now finds himself in Australia’s 14-man squad for the final Test in Sydney.

So farcical is this squad that it contains four players who inarguably did not deserve selection and another who is fortunate to be included.

Mitch Marsh has averaged 10 with the bat in his past dozen Test innings, Shaun Marsh has averaged 18 from his last 18 Test knocks, Peter Handscomb’s dodgy batting technique has been brutally exposed at Test level, and Labuschagne isn’t in the best dozen batsmen in the country.

Aaron Finch, the lucky one I mentioned, has averaged 16 from six innings in this series, and is being played completely out of position as an opener.

When Australia named a bizarre squad for the recent Tests in the UAE I thought the selectors could not soon match this incompetence. As it turned out, I didn’t have long to wait.

Many Australian pundits and fans have spent the past few days moaning about a problem which should not exist. They’ve railed against the lack of batting talent in Australia, as if the top six selected for Boxing Day was the best available.

That is merely a distraction. The more pressing concern right now is the utterly bemusing refusal of the selectors to pick the most accomplished batsmen in the country.

1. Joe Burns
2. Matt Renshaw
3. Usman Khawaja
4. Kurtis Patterson
5. Travis Head
6. Glenn Maxwell

There you go. Done and dusted. Four of those players have first-class averages above 40 (Burns, Khawaja, Patterson and Maxwell).

Another has made six first-class tons in 2018 alone (Renshaw) and the last guy is a 24-year-old who is easily Australia’s leading runscorer in the current series (Head).

Instead, what does Australia have? Two batsmen in deep and prolonged Test form slumps (Marsh brothers), a player with a hugely flawed technique (Handscomb), an out-of-form cricketer with a first-class batting average of 33 (Labuschagne) and a middle-order batsman floundering as a makeshift opener (Finch).

If Australia had gone with the top six I listed above to start this Indian series I find it hard to believe they would not have performed much better than the Marsh-laden mess served up.

To be fair to Marcus Harris, he was a worthy Test debutant in Adelaide and has done better than his average of 29 in this series would suggest.

Against a quality Indian pace attack on what have been some fairly tricky pitches, Harris has done a good job of blunting the new ball, scoring 20-plus in five out of his six innings. His next step is to begin making the most of those frequent starts.

Harris at least forced his way into the Test team via sheer weight of runs, making nearly 2,000 at 48 over the past three Shield seasons.

The same can’t be said of Labuschagne. Reports have suggested it was his all-round ability that swayed with the selectors, with his leg spin bowling seen as valuable at the SCG.

There are two problems with this logic.

Firstly, Labuschagne is in rank form with the ball, having taken five wickets at an average of 60 in the Shield this summer, while leaking almost four runs per over.

Secondly, the SCG is no longer a spinner’s haven at Test level. Australia’s premier spinner Nathan Lyon averages nearly 50 there across seven Tests, despite it being his home ground. The idea the SCG is spin friendly is a hangover from an earlier Test era.

If the Australian selectors were determined to have a second spin option, without dropping one of the Big Three, they could have picked Maxwell, who has seven wickets at 30 from his four Tests against India.

Instead they made another blunder. Another galling choice. Another out-of-season April Fool’s Joke.
 
I just followed Australias youngest Test captain, Archie, into the QF Club at Melbourne.

Lovely gesture of them to upgrade the family to Business Lounge !

Can we select him again ?

PS the champagnes the same as QF Club bad luck being 7
 
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I was watching them all shake Archie's hand yesterday and even the Indians - it was good to see so many of them crouch right down to shake his hand and be at eye level with him.
 
The Maxwell decision is baffling.

The selectors don't have a clue what's going on. The toss may be the only way we could win next test.
 
What's most worrying about the future of the Australian team are the reports of dissension. The self serving statements of Smith and Bancroft, the reported fury of Warner as being hung out to dry, the refusal to accept reality that it is not the best team etc. This has the makings of a very difficult few years.
 
The Australian team has always been a hard club to get into but an even harder one to get out of.
Unless your name is Dean Jones - dropped from the test team at the start of the 1992–93 season, despite having topped the averages in the previous Test series.
 
Unless your name is Dean Jones - dropped from the test team at the start of the 1992–93 season, despite having topped the averages in the previous Test series.
Another example of someone not fitting a mold. He did have a mouth on him though.
 
Just like Andrew Symons. Definitely no mould for him.

The next Test will be interesting - player changes and their ability to fit into a team structure.
 
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What a load of absolute garbage JL!!! Does he seriously take the public for fools, what a joke this is now turning into to.

Batting depth a major worry for Langer

"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)."

What a completely false statement, if he thinks that is the case then he isn't even following any shield and shouldn't be coach.

And for him to say they have to be careful not rewarding poor performances is hilarious because of two words, Mitch Marsh.
 
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There is an Australia A v Australia game in the ashes warm up. I would love to see some of the burns/maxwell/renshaw string team outperform the current lineup.
 
Some year's ago, in the then regular tri series 50 over games, the ACB decided to put on a Australia 'A' side as well.

This didn't work as they had wanted as many Aussie supporters barracked for the 'A's rather the the main team. Anyway both Australian teams made the finals. For those finals, new teams were picked with the series' best for bowler for the 'A' team moved 'up' and promptly made 12th for each finals game.
 
From twitter.
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And MMarsh it would seem.

Replaced by Labushagne o_Oo_O & Hanscombe (who must have miraculously adjusted his technique in a week that the Indian paceman severely exposed) :rolleyes::rolleyes:

Neither dropping would surprise me. It seems that Khawaja will open but I would prefer Shaun Marsh to open with Hanscombe to come in before Head.

What does worry for the future me is that Marcus Stoinis was being promoted on the radio today as an addition because of a good score in BBL.He may be a perfectly good player but BBL has as much relevance to Test cricket as hitting a tether ball.
 
Neither dropping would surprise me. It seems that Khawaja will open but I would prefer Shaun Marsh to open with Hanscombe to come in before Head.

What does worry for the future me is that Marcus Stoinis was being promoted on the radio today as an addition because of a good score in BBL.He may be a perfectly good player but BBL has as much relevance to Test cricket as hitting a tether ball.
Totally. Look at the shots they play on BBL. ridiculous.
 
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