While few look like recalling this Edgbaston Test with much pleasure, four who might will be Australia’s selectors. For much of this tour, wise judges have deplored a squad containing as many specialist keepers as openers. Within two hours on the first day both strategies were, if not vindicated, at least proven defensible.
The presence of a second keeper on tour is today seen as analogous to wearing a belt and braces—a needless precaution. The reasoning goes that a replacement stumper is only ever an air ticket away. Until the matter transference beam of Star Trek becomes reality, however, injuries like Brad Haddin’s will require the presence of understudies like Graham Manou. One tick for the selectors—or what Cricket Australia, in these corporatist days, calls the NSP (National Selection Panel).
The other, more qualified tick was the replacement of Phillip Hughes at the top of the order by Shane Watson, who batted in some comfort through the two hours’ play to reach his second Test fifty. You’d have had good odds on that a week ago.
Watson’s name on the team sheet for the touring party a few months ago was asterisked ‘subject to fitness’. It hardly needed saying; his entire career has been shadowed by the same caveat. Had he been a player even twenty years ago, it’s doubtful he would have made it this far. There would not have been the medical resources and/or professional rewards available to maintain his involvement in the game. Even now, there’s a sense that he’s been persevered with as a pet project, that too much has been invested in him for it simply to be written off. Better players have had poorer deals.
The ratio of downtime to playing time has left its mark on him. His autograph is a rather painstaking imprint which dwells on the Ss in his Christian name and surname, suggesting something he has sweated over at length. Likewise his cricket. You sometimes sense when he is bowling that he has been given too much to remember, that as he returns to his mark he is ticking off a mental checklist. Nonetheless, he has always appeared a gifted and natural striker with a touch of Virender Sehwag’s ‘see ball, hit ball’ philosophy.
Which is not to say that Watson has ever looked the stuff of which opening batsmen are routinely made. In fact, the decision to leave Hughes out looks very much like one taken in Australia rather than at Edgbaston, reflecting a change in the process of Australian tour selection over the last decade or so.
When Mark Taylor led the Australians in 1997 he was one of the selectors, alongside vice-captain Steve Waugh and coach Geoff Marsh—a none-too-happy triangle given the tensions over Taylor’s form. Two years later in Antigua, with Australia unexpectedly trailing 1–2, it was Steve Waugh in the hot seat with Marsh and their then out-of-form vice-captain Shane Warne in the ejector seat—an arrangement even more tense, requiring the co-opting for Warne’s omission of selector Allan Border, who happened to be on the scene chaperoning a group of tourists.
By 2001 the coach, then John Buchanan, had lost his vote, and captain and vice-captain were liaising with the chairman of selectors, then Trevor Hohns, back in Australia, although that still left Waugh with the unpleasant task of effectively ending Michael Slater’s Test career. The system since has been for Australian teams abroad to be accompanied by a duty selector, who consults with captain and coach but reaches his own conclusions with colleagues in Australia.
That has some curious consequences, in that captain and coach are involved in selections on tour only in a consultative capacity, the members of the NSP being the only figures who vote. Thus, one suspects, the unintentionally misleading messages from Ponting and Nielsen this last week.
In his column for the Australian’s readers on 25 July, Ponting spoke glowingly of Hughes and his immediate prospects:
There is a big challenge ahead of him, but he is a young kid who is willing to learn and to try different things. In view of the talent he’s got, and the hunger he has for runs, I feel that he only needs half an hour in the middle and everything will click back into place.
Nielsen’s last tour blog post, dated 30 July, gives no hint of a change of policy; on the contrary, it advocates continuity:
I believe he [Hughes] must refrain from drastically changing his technique or the way he goes about playing, rather ensure he does [those] things that he knows he can do well for as long as required … I believe it’s important that he goes back to those things he’s had success with in the past, plays with a positive mindset and body language and displays a real hunger for the challenge being thrown at him in this series.
No sense from Ponting that he lacked confidence that Hughes could withstand that half an hour in the middle, or from Nielsen that Hughes would be practising his positive mindset and body language in the nets, presumably working on his front-foot aura. Jamie Cox’s view as duty selector, however, must have proven more persuasive, and Nielsen’s press comments after day one—‘He does need to go away and work at his game’—smacked of a subtle act of selectorial ventriloquism.
From the promotion of Watson and the non-selection of a reserve specialist opener for the tour, meanwhile, can be inferred a view among Andrew Hilditch and his colleagues that the game has changed. While we remain wedded to the stereotype of the opening batsman as a skilled player of fast bowling, physically brave and technically sound, the selectors may be suggesting that this view is obsolete: that because express pace is rare, and courage can be taken from a helmet and cuirass of padding, any half-decent batsman can do the job.
It’s not a view without some logic. Frank Woolley began opening for Kent in the late stages of his career and found it famously congenial, commenting on how many more loose balls he received. Australia has done pretty well out of pressing middle-order batsmen into service as openers, David Boon, Justin Langer and Simon Katich following the trail blazed by Bob Simpson. For all that, I have always thought that a prerequisite of any successful opening batsman is a relish for the job—a pleasure in the contest, a security in the role. To Hughes this seems to come naturally. Watson may acquire it, but he doesn’t have it yet; nor is it something in the selectors’ gift.