There are reasons why players aren't selectors

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the situation regarding Australia's wicketkeeper went something like this. Brad Haddin is the incumbent in the Test side, while the selection panel wanted to use Matthew Wade for the T20s and the first part of the three way ODI series.

Beyond that (and we're not going to be searching back to find the verifying links, so the old memory might not have it exactly right) Wade was going to be headed to the West Indies with the limited overs squad and would stay on as reserve wicketkeeper and reserve batsman in a situation where flying in replacements at short notice will be nigh on impossible.

Now, without having access to a convenient phone tap or getting fly on the wall status you're not going to know exactly what had been said in any conversation between wicketkeeper and national selector, but one suspects the comment from Inverarity was along the lines of we want to have a look at Wade behind the stumps for the first part of the one day series at least.

On that basis, it might be safe to conclude that the selection panel are still looking. It's not as if there's a whole lot riding on this particular series.

Actually it would have been interesting to have been able to check in to that conversation to see whether Tim Paine was mentioned in despatches, because had Paine been fit at the start of the series against New Zealand Mr Haddin may well have found himself on the outer.

That prospect of a spot in the outer seems to have behind recent remarks from Shane Watson as well, and one starts to suspect that Messrs Ponting and Hussey are definites to go to the West Indies. At least that's the way it seems to look from where Watto's sitting.

He seems to be assuming Shaun Marsh will force his way back into his spot at Three through weight of Shield runs (should make the Shield game that starts later today at the WACA interesting, that feller) and with Punter and Mr Cricket in the XI the only spot for Watto is going to be one of the two opening positions.

From where I'm sitting, however, things aren't quite that cut and dried.

We've got a series against South Africa coming up later this year, and it's going to be a case of dealing with a four man pace attack that will more than likely include Morkel, Steyn and Philander. Should be interesting.

Player self interest, of course, means they'd prefer to see the squad selected from no more than seven batsmen, with the incumbents there until they either lose the desire or encounter a run of form that's too horrendously bad to ignore.

Assuming Watson stays fit and Marsh doesn't score a squillion Shield runs in the next couple of weeks, on the other hand Watson for Marsh would seem to be a logical move for the Caribbean. On that basis you could also move Ponting to Three with Watto to slide into Four or Five, depending on where the captain sees himself.

All well and good, I hear you say, but what about Hussey?

From the comfy chair in the office at the Little House of Concrete the answer's straightforward. He stays at home. Forrest appears to be the next cab off the rank (or maybe Christian if we're looking for an all-rounder to cover a non-bowling Watto) so he goes to the Caribbean to bat Six. Hopefully he scores enough runs to stay in contention at the start of the South African/Sri Lankan summer, which would result in the following rather interesting scenario.

You would have Warner and Cowan, the probable incumbents, being pushed by Hughes, Quiney and Marsh for the two opening slots.

With four batting berths in the middle order you'd be looking at Ponting, Clarke, Watson, Hussey, Forrest, Khawaja and Christian, along with Ferguson, Cooper, Smith or anyone else who sticks his hand up in the meantime.

And the whole dozen or so candidates for the six positions in the batting order would be setting out to stake their claims against a fast bowling lineup that would include (working clockwise from Queensland) Harris, Cutting, young McDermott, Cummins, Copeland, Starc, Pattinson, Siddle, McDonald, Hilfenhaus, Faulkner, Christian, George, Mitchell Johnson and Coulter-Nile. I've probably missed a few on the way through but that's enough to make the point.

That's fifteen possible contenders for four quick bowling slots. You wouldn't, under the circumstances, be overly keen on being a batsman would you?

So what else have we learned since the end of the Test series against India?

Well, for a start there have been a couple of interesting Shield clashes between South Australia and Victoria that saw a couple of centuries to Quiney and five wicket hauls o McDonald and Siddle. Faulkner took wickets for Tasmania against New South Wales in a game where Bailey and Steve Smith got runs and the Tigers ended up winning. Shaun Marsh got runs for the Warriors at the Gabba and they just scraped home with one wicket in hand as young McDermott took 7-24). Cutting got wickets as well, as did Coulter-Nile.

Meanwhile we've got Queensland taking on Tasmania at Bellerive and Western Australia at home to New South Wales. Cricinfo doesn't have teams up for those games just yet, but there'll be a number of players with points to prove.

On the ODI side of things we've got a reasonably close competition where no one's firing at 100% and the result could go any way, right down to a Sri Lankan win in the final. Without much riding on the series the main points of interest from here has been Wade, who has been long on promise and potential and short on actual delivery and Forrest, who looks to have potential but won't have too many opportunities to demonstrate it.

Among the opposition I'm rapidly cooling towards Dhoni, whose attitude with bat in hand seems to be a little too casual for mine, almost a case of I don't want to win this until the last over, so I'll take my time.

But we'll see, won't we? They're on again at the SCG this afternoon, with a squad that includes Clint McKay and Mitch Marsh who I conveniently left out of that clockwise fast bowling lineup a few paragraphs back.

Interesting times, indeed. Maybe that's why Hads and Watto are concerned about their long term prospects.

Of Incredible Hulks and Twelfth Men

I found it interesting that among all the speculation about the green tinge on the WACA wicket and the possible implications for team selection the only actual explanation of the phenomenon I could find was hidden away in the side bar of an article at Cricinfo with the headline Australia undecided on all-pace attack.

We knew that already, but it's always interesting to know the underlying factors, which is why you always need to talk to the groundsman or whoever's in charge of preparing the wicket square.

Cricket pitches are interesting exercises, and there's definitely more to these matters than meets the eye. It's not just a matter of a quick squiz that suggests it's a bit green, or an exploratory thumbprint that suggests it's a bit soft. You need to do a bit of the old Julius Sumner Miller and ask why is it so?

And you need to follow that explanation with an extrapolation, If that's why it's so, what does it all mean?

Cricket pitches need to be hard and flat, which is, along with the fact that your back yard probably wasn't big enough, the reason behind the failure of that cricket pitch you mowed in the back yard when you were a kid to host international matches.

There were other factors, of course, but regardless of those childhood dreams your back yard pitch probably hadn't been rolled to the required hardness and your common or garden lawnmower wouldn't have been able to shave the grass down to the required level.

Rolling is important because you need a hard flat surface to get something approaching the right degree of bounce, but that hardness doesn't sit well with certain other codes, which explains the use of drop in wicket squares at Australian grounds that also host AFL matches.

Having footballers jumping up and down on your wicket square probably doesn't do it a whole lot of good either, because it's not just what's on the top that counts. You need the right foundations, and repeated impacts over a long period (a la AFL players landing after taking a high mark) is going to cause compaction, to the point where wicket squares occasionally need to be dug up and completely relaid.

That also means there's a subtle difference between a track that has had lengthy and repeated attention from the heavy roller and then copped a bit of moisture on the top and one that has been sitting under the covers for three or four days, which is what happened in and around a certain Primary School State Carnival in 1992.

Coming off a proper preparation the deck will be lively early on and flatten out. An underprepared track, on the other hand, will give the early life and then die, giving you the slow and low that brought our opponents in that 1992 final unstuck after they won the toss and sent us in on a pitch that had much the same consistency as plasticene.

It had been under covers for four days, and only had half an hour's rolling on two mornings before we played on it.

So you don't just take a glance at the WACA wicket, notice the resemblance to The Incredible Hulk, select the four quicks and insert the opposition if you win the toss.

The grass is there to hold the track together, and given the likely weather conditions in Perth today and tomorrow you'd expect the track won't get its final shave until the last possible moment, which will, in turn, translate into an old style green-top, right?

Well, maybe, but not quite. You can click over to Cricinfo to get to that side bar, but the guts of it is they're using a new type of grass with a high fibre content in the finer than normal leaves so it holds its colour longer but won't seam as much as you'd expect, which is presumably why we're hanging off until the last shave of the surface to decide on the twelfth man.

The sun was drying out the track yesterday, so there was still a five o'clock shadow of grass on the wicket to protect it from a blistering sun overnight that'll presumably be getting close attention this morning. Grass on the pitch might help the quicks as far as sideways movement is concerned but if the track bakes and the grass dies off it may crack, with variable bounce entering the equation.

And Michael Clark's definitely not ruling the spinner out of the equation either, particularly with the Fremantle Doctor coming into play.

Apart from that, we've got the predictable stuff about sledging (by players and spectators). One notes the comment therein that While Pup generally steers well clear of anything that might be interpreted as "sledging", he's quite happy for his 'keeper to indulge in a bit of byplay.

Sort of like my remarks about Mr Tendulkar in yesterday's blog. He doesn't either, but he was very quick to jump to the Turbanator's aid when Monkeygate broke…

Of swallows and summers

Pause for a moment among the celebratory tumult and consider what may have happened had things gone differently at the toss of the coin.

With a track that was going to offer early life on Day One, flatten out on Days Two, Three and Four and offer some assistance to the spinners on Day Five you'd have to think a captain would give at least momentary consideration to winning the toss and inserting.

That, by the way, was the groundsman's assessment of the SCG pitch, presumably available to both camps, You should always, as I've mentioned elsewhere, talk to the groundsman.

Dhoni could very easily have sent us in, and, given the fact that we slumped to 3-37 later in the day when the early juice in the pitch was draining away you'd have to guess Australia's top order batting could have been in equally deep water if we'd been called on to bat in the morning.

While you ponder yesterday's batting heroics, pause for a moment and consider what may have ensued had our three quicks and a spinner attack been called on to spend Day Two bowling to some subset of Sehwag, Dravid, Tendulkar and Laxman.

Under those circumstances one may well have been demanding what the selctors thought they were doing by going into the game with only four specialist bowlers and demanding Daniel Christian's recall to the squad to bat at Six and do his share of the bowling...

As things turned out, by stumps the Indian attack were, to use the vernacular, pretty much stuffed. Remarkably, given the amount of commentary about slow over rates, they managed to get the full ninety overs bowled without going into overtime. Maybe they just wanted to get off the paddock.

That's not to take anything away from a masterful innings by the captain and a useful century from his predecessor which presumably has a fair chunk of the cricketing commentariat suggesting there's life in the old boy yet.

Similar comments will presumably follow the Hussey century that looks about as inevitable as a score around the same level as India's seven for seven hundred plus at the same ground eight years ago.

If Hussey doesn't reach the magical three-figure score there's every possibility that Haddin, faced with a tiring attack and with significant question marks over his own career, will.

It's only a couple of years since a remarkable result in the equivalent Test against Pakistan had the Australian brains trust thinking everything was fine. That, you may recall, was just before we headed over to England to hand back The Ashes.

There'll be plenty of learned opinion along the lines that Ponting and Hussey are now safe for the foreseeable future. Well, maybe they are. Depends on what the selection panel is thinking.

One element in the case for a dual retention is the lack of talent on the horizon and the continuing question marks over the top order batting. Fair enough, and we're not going to be able to assess the possible alternatives while they're playing Big Bash either, so the only opportunities to evaluate the alternatives will be in the post-Bash Sheffield Shield and the tour to the West Indies.

With Australia's international summer running into early March and the West Indian tour kicking off with the first ODI in St Vincent on 16 March, and the Test Series running through April, there'll be a fair chance to assess Shield form between the resumption on 2 February and the Final, which coincides with that first ODI.

You'd guess the two limited overs touring parties would be named towards the end of the ODI series here, followed by the announcement of the Test party towards the end of the Shield season.

The IPL, in case you're wondering, kicks off on 4 April 2012, and runs until 27 May, so you can rule any West Indian players with IPL contracts out of the Test series. They're probably going to be missing for the T20 games wedged between the ODIs and the Tests as well, so you're probably looking at playing a weakened Windies side.

They're currently ranked considerably below Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and they're not that far ahead of New Zealand.

Under those circumstances you'd suspect that an Australian bat who wasn't able to hold his form through that series would have to be in serious doubt for the Test series against a full strength South Africa, wouldn't you?

On that basis, regardless of any other considerations you could possibly sell the idea of a winter off to the two elder statesmen because here's a chance for some of their potential rivals to rule themselves out of contention. It's also feasible that a loss of form on tour could rule either Ponting or Hussey out for the South African series.

But that's n the future. Turning the gaze back to the SCG we're looking at batting long, with the key question involving the timing of the declaration.

This one could, of course, be simplified by a rapid termination of the Australian innings but on yesterday's revealed form and today's likely conditions that would seem about as likely as a double century from former Victorian and Australian leggie Jim Higgs.

You may not remember Mr Higgs. He was the guy who made Chris Martin look like Don Bradman, was bowled by the only ball he faced on the 1975 tour of England and received a standing ovation when he hit a ball in an MCG Test against the West Indies.

No, you'd have to assume we'll still be batting at the tea break, and the key decision will be whether to have an hour at them before stumps today or bat into tomorrow and wear them down further.

There is, after all, every possibility that one of their bowlers will break down, so even if India were to escape with the draw, they'll be weakened going into Perth next Friday…

Gazing into the crystal ball, one suspects that much of that will depend on the Indian over rate. Assuming we're looking to bowl close to the scheduled hundred and eighty over the last two days, if they've been slowing things down through the first two sessions I'd be inclined to bat on, and on, and on…

But we'll see.One swallow does not make a summer. Nor do two, three or even four, even if one of them is a substantial record-breaking triple swallow.

And one should also be perpetually aware that around the next corner Fate may, even as we speak, be slipping the lead into the boxing glove.

A thorny question

I don't know which of the whoever bats second will probably score a squillion runs scenarios I find more depressing.

Given a Cricinfo report suggesting that this year's drop in pitch will offer early life and is unlikely to break up once that early life departs, you'd expect a side with a strong batting order to be inclined to insert the opposition, bat for about two days and then see if they can be winkled out on Days Four and Five to win without needing to bat again.

Which will, of course, make the toss and subsequent decisions rather interesting.

You'd hope that whoever bats first would last well into the second day, and preferably lasts until some time through the middle session, giving the bowlers a short spell with the new rock before Tea and two and (probably) a half hours in the final session before a bib bowl on Days Three and Four.

You definitely wouldn't be looking to a repeat of last year's opening day even if it is India batting first, because rocketed out on Day One would reduce opportunities to enjoy Sehwag, Gambhir, Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman and Dhoni at the crease.

I could watch those guys bat all day, and there's every chance I probably will.

Repeatedly.

Having them at the crease all day, and given there's a fifty-fifty chance India will be batting second it could well stretch to two - not that I'm objecting to the prospect provided we've managed something over three hundred batting first - means there's going to be an awful lot of work for the bowlers.

Having had the series in Sri Lanka and South Africa to cement his place in the side it'll be interesting to see how Lyon goes against a batting order that has been known to destroy spin bowlers.

And given the lengthy spell at the crease you'd have to assume there'll be something go amiss with one of the bowlers. Ten days of Test cricket over the next fortnight and all that…

Murphy's Law would suggest that we'll lose one of the quicks and/or have something go amiss with Lyon, and given the whatever can go wrong will go wrong and when it does it'll go wrong at the worst possible time factor means that if we lose a quick it'll probably be Pattinson.

That would make two potential spearheads of an emerging attack gone in the space of three Tests.…

So there's my reason for not looking forward to two days of Sachin and Company at the crease.

I am looking forward to it, actually, but in a way I'm not.

We could, on the other hand, find ourselves batting second against an attack where you'd have to place question marks over the fitness of Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma, and surely, I hear you ask, Hughesy's looking forward to watching Australia amass something in the vicinity of six hundred.

This is where the I don't know the worse scenario bit really kicks in, since a score around the six hundred mark is probably going to mean a big hundred or two, and there's every possibility that or two might mean both of Ponting and Hussey, and a belief that both can stick around into the indefinite future.

Under those circumstances, given the fact that we went for Hussey over Christian at Six, where does Watson slot in, given the assumption he's an automatic selection if fit?

And with that, I rest my case for the moment. Reflections on Day One to follow tomorrow morning.