If, If only

“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;” Rudyard Kipling, If, 1865

The British Nobel Laureate Rudyard Kipling would not have had cricket in mind when he penned his ode to Victorian stoicism, but the Australian Selectors could do worse than read his verse before they meet to discuss Australia’s disastrous defeat at the Adelaide Oval.

They should take note of another line from Kipling’s poem. “If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same;” Kipling wrote “then yours is the Earth, and everything that is in it.”

The Earth is not Australia’s right now, nor are the Ashes, and one could argue that part of the reason is that the Australian selectors have not treated the imposters of triumph and disaster just the same.

They did in 2009.

The triumph was an innings victory in Headingley to level the Ashes series 1-1. They “risked it all on a game of pitch and toss” by gambling with a fourth quick, Stuart Clark, and banking on a green seamer in Leeds. It worked. England won the toss and lost 20 wickets for 365 to book-end Australia’s only innings of 445.

Australia went unchanged to the grass-less, baron-dry, dusty Oval. The disaster came. With no specialist spinner, Australia removed 19 English wickets for scores of 332 and 373 declared. Hardly the run-gluts you may have expected given what was written in the post-script. But Australia managed a meagre 160 in their first innings, with pace-man Stuart Broad claiming five of Australia’s top seven, and off-spinner Graeme Swann bagging four of the rest.

The selectors met with disaster just the same. Ten of the eleven Australians present in both Leeds and London started in Brisbane a fortnight ago. The only change made was the introduction of Tasmanian left-arm orthodox spinner Xavier Doherty, with all of 35 First-Class fixtures of experience that had yielded just 84 wickets at 49.45. Meantime Clark was discarded to the scrapheap after the Oval debacle. His 94 test scalps at 23.86, including 30 English bats for a cost of 20.63 apiece, are currently leading New South Wales who sit atop the Sheffield Shield table.

But yet after a draw in Brisbane, where both teams claimed just 11 wickets each on one of the flattest wickets curator Kevin Mitchell Jr has ever concocted, the Australian Selectors dropped Mitchell Johnson and Ben Hilfenhaus for fear of a flatter surface in Adelaide, meaning that since Australia’s defeat to Pakistan at Headingley in July, nine different bowlers have been used in five different combinations, across five different tests against three opponents on three different continents.

Is it any surprise Australia has lost four of five tests, its worst losing slump since 1988.

The ex-members of Australia’s fast bowling cartel, as well as the tight knit spinning fraternity, are screaming blue-murder. Their kind are being made scapegoats for a batting unit that is consistently not carrying its weight.

This, to a certain extent is true. The Oval disaster was a batting failure not a bowling one. Likewise in Adelaide, despite a poor display by the bowlers, when you are defending a first innings total of just 245 you are asking to get beaten.

The problem is that the bowlers are dispensable. Aside from Mitchell Johnson, whose problems run deeper than a simple form slump, the next best test record of the nine bowlers used is Peter Siddle with 66 wickets and three five-wicket hauls. It is the equivalent of having a batting group whose most experienced player has only 1000 test runs and three centuries. For all those who felt Nathan Hauritz was hard done by, he took his first Sheffield Shield five-wicket haul only last week. Name the last Australian batsman to play 17 Tests having not made a Shield century?

Meantime, the batting woes are led by the captain and vice-captain who simply can’t be dropped. In the five winless test matches, Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke have combined for just six half centuries and no hundreds in 19 innings between them. Even the man in the gun, Marcus North, has posted a hundred in that time, if nothing else.

Even the opening combination, for all the praise they’ve received for being the bedrock of the side and the comparisons that have been drawn to the great combinations of yesteryear, are not as fruitful as they appear to be.

Andrew Strauss and Alistair Cook in just four innings of this Ashes campaign have scored three individual hundreds between them, including a double-century from Cook.

Simon Katich and Shane Watson have achieved just four centuries between them in 15 Tests as a combination.

Katich and Phillip Hughes managed three in one Durban Test match 21 months ago, ironically to seal the last significant Australian Test series victory.

As Cook and Strauss showed at the Gabba, and as the likes of Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer, Michael Slater and Mark Taylor, and Geoff Marsh and Taylor again have shown over a span of 21 years, double-century partnerships at the top of the order demoralise opponents to breaking point. There is a feeling of frustration, then panic, then helplessness, then defeat that seeps through the mind and soul of those trying to remove them. It’s been 21 months since Australia have achieved such dominance.

And it has exposed a soft underbelly. So what is the answer? Replacements? The bowlers would say it’s only fair. But who do you replace them with?

Herein lies the inherent, systemic problem that plagues Australian cricket right now. It is a problem that no number of selectors, commentators, writers, or pundits can solve. The cupboard is bare because the system is broken.

Once upon a time, when Australia was in its prime, selectors had the likes of Jamie Siddons, Stuart Law, Michael Bevan, Darren Lehmann, Jamie Cox, Michael Di Venuto, Martin Love, Brad Hodge, and Chris Rogers plundering tens of thousands of Sheffield Shield runs year in, year out, as merely back up to the incumbents in the Test squad.

Now the candidates range from two immeasurable, but hardly worldly, talents in Phillip Hughes and Usman Khawaja, and four others in Callum Ferguson, Shaun Marsh, Adam Voges, and Cameron White, all of who have played in excess of 50 Sheffield Shield matches, none of who average in excess of 40.

Perhaps some would argue that this is merely a less talented generation of Australian cricketers?

Then how must the rest of the world be going, if Australia are the current holders of the U19’s World Cup, and the last Australian side to achieve the feat featured White and Marsh?

If it isn’t the talent, it must be the system. Cricket Australia’s National Academy is no longer the breeding ground it was with staff, coaches, intakes, programs, and focus changing almost annually to the point that it’s unrecognisable from Rod Marsh’s Adelaide Institution that fostered arguably Australia’s greatest era of players.

The nation’s State Second XI competition, once the envy of the world for its strength and depth, has been reduced to an Under 23’s league, played under different rules to the Sheffield Shield, and thus has pillaged the foundations of Australian cricket as scores of players over the age of 23 leave grade cricket for work, travel, or family reasons because the chance of progression to State ranks has become virtually impossible. Runs and wickets against fellow 23 year olds do not a first-class cricketer make. There isn’t a cricketer alive who will tell you he was a better player before his 23rd birthday than he was after.

All the while, contracted cricketers over the age of 23, not in the Shield side can’t play in the Second XI competition.

The rise of T20 cricket has also led to a generation of Australian boys becoming more intent on the riches of the IPL, or the bright lights of the expanding Big Bash as opposed to winning a Shield cap.

Indeed CA ordered Doug Bollinger and Michael Hussey to stay with the Chennai Super Kings at the T20 Champions League rather than join the Test squad to prepare for a tour of India. The expectation that Hussey would go from thrashing as hard as he can as quickly as he can on one-day wickets in South Africa, to batting time and absorbing pressure from Harbhajan Singh and Pragyan Ojha on raging turners in India is akin to expecting Roger Federer to win the French Open after playing table tennis for a month. Likewise, to expect Bollinger to be fit for Tests in India after bowling four overs a day is laughable. That he broke down is anything but. Even worse, the rumour that he was fit to bowl through pain on the last day in Mohali only to be told to rest for the first Gabba test that he eventually wasn’t picked for, is something not even the England and Wales Cricket Board could have conjured its darkest days.

The ECB and their selectors “kept their heads when all about them were losing theirs” at the Oval in 2009. An innings defeat at Headingley heard calls for 40-year-old Mark Ramprakash to be recalled to sure up a fragile batting line-up such were the lack of options available. Instead they called upon the 28-year-old Jonathan Trott, with 8419 First-Class runs 131 matches, who delivered with a match-winning hundred. Now, 15-months and as many tests later, he is in the top ten players in the world and averaging 60 as England’s immovable number three.

England has learned from its mistakes. To paraphrase Kipling again, "they’ve watched the things they gave their life to broken and stooped and build 'em up with worn out tools."

They have done an Australia to Australia. They prepared thoroughly. Like Border’s heroes of 1989 they banned wives and partners until after the third test. They’ve played three first-class fixtures before the first test, two on test match venues. And they’ve picked an Australian-style team. Gone are the desperate days of trying to fit five bowlers in a Test XI. They’ve picked six specialist batsmen, a wicket-keeper, three quicks and a world-class spinner.

The Australian selectors don’t have the luxury of turning to a Trott as they did to Hussey or Hodge after 2005 to begin a 16-Test winning streak.

This clearly isn’t 2005. This is more 1988 as results and team experience suggest. The selectors and administrators are "watching the things they gave their life to broken, and now they must stoop and build 'em up with worn out tools."

The worn out tools are the Australian way. In 1988-9 during a one-sided summer against the West Indies, they picked Mark Taylor to make his debut in the fourth test after three successive defeats, and they stuck by the talented but inexperienced, and inconsistent, Steve Waugh at the expense of second test centurion Graeme Wood. They won in Adelaide, and six months later the pair made twin hundreds in the first Ashes test at Headingley. A dynasty of Australian cricket was born.

Otherwise, Australia can do an England and threaten to match the 31 players used in that 1989 series.

Australian selectors and Administrators take note of Kipling;

“ If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;”
...
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And – which is more – you'll be a Man my son!"