"I Know What You Did Last Summer"

The Cricket Australia Board meets in Melbourne for two days from tomorrow and there is no doubting what is the biggest item on the agenda, for at the meeting Don Argus will present the accumulated opinions of all of Australia's leading cricketers, officials, former players and anyone with a vested interest. The general public appear to have been left out in the process with no formal procedures put in place to collect their opinions. Still, with Waugh, Border and Taylor on the committee and the forceful Malcom Speed, there can be no claim that CA haven't put their best men on the case.

What will it all reveal and more to the point, how much of the report will CA make public? If they are going to be "fair dinkum" in asking the public to support their teams in the next few years, it would be best to put it all out. Anything held back will not go down well with a public which wants answers and given the huge investment punters make every summer, they have earned the right to be informed.

There seems to be some obvious dead wood which will need to be cut from the branches to stop the whole CA Family Tree from going rotten. Selection is the top of everyone's list, in terms of the personnel playing pin the tail on the donkey at selection meetings, the manner of communicating with players and the policy. Clearly, CA must initiate a policy from which the selection panel is to operate and must put men into the job who agree with that policy. Hilditch must go and not just because of the revolving door through which spinners have made surprise arrivals and ungainly exits. He must go because he is autocratic. He must go because the policies and the decision making he has overseen has been flawed and destructive. He must go because he no longer has the confidence of the players or the public.

The Rod Marsh option is a good one. He has spent his time wisely and productively recognising and fostering Australia's best young players who became the legends of the 16 years of dominance and he's not long finished doing the same in England. Hey, aren't they now No 1?

But wait, there has to be more. Upgrade the status and power of the Australian Captain by putting him on the selection panel, even if not a voting member. Change the coach ... promote Steve Rixon from fielding coach to the main man. His pedigree is outstanding. Make Test cricket the main game in town. Make the Sheffield Shield the second most important game. Remove all domestic one-day cricket and limit the Big Bash. Fix schedules so Test players can and will play in Shield games instead of being "rested" or playing for sacred cash cows in India. Award contracts solely on the basis of performance and not a group picked by the selectors and do it by considering Test/Shield performances first ... select twenty; ODI's second ... select extra players to have twenty; Twenty20 Internationals and Big Bash last ... select enough players to have twenty of them. So first draft gets you twenty; second draft may add another ten; final draft another ten ... the actual number should vary from year to year, rather than having a quota which has to be selected.

The Katich fiasco should never have happened and what's more, the decision should have been countermanded by CA. As the 11 Tests of this summer play out, Australia will miss Katich!

Of course, things rarely happen in the real world they way I planned them. By Friday night, Andrew Hilditch will probably by CA Chairman. Might be time to start brushing up on an English accent then!
"Nobody Pulled Any Punches" SMH 18/8/11