Shane - Part whatever

... listening to Australia

A quick comment - more than it deserves - on Part 2 of the rather grandly named Warne Manifesto.

In Part 1, Warne told us that cricket is a simple game. In Part 2, he instead proves that even the best players are simple. Maybe that's what he meant. For instance:

• no one in Australia cricket (note the capital letters, on his website, for emphasis) is happy. Really? This is a blind, sweeping generalisation which allows Warne's ego to go into bat for all of us. I'm sorry Warnie but many of us are happy: happy with the team, happy with results, happy with progress since early 2011. There are bits we disagree with but we disagreed with bits before the mission statement too. Some of those bits were the reduced punishment you received for drug cheating and being on bookies payrolls; your treatment of your wife; your bullying of a couple of boys who took your picture ... well, there are other things but I just wanted to illustrate that CA made mistakes then too;
• the selection of Shaun Marsh as a starter in all three of Warne's Australian sides. Form might dictate his selection in shorter form cricket but he's a long way from mastering his own demons yet and at 29, is already too old to come back to Test cricket if we are building a future oriented side;
• the selection of 18 in his Test squad and yet 17 to India was too many? Why that many when the two shorter form teams only have 15? Does he intend to rotate them?;
• the selection of Marsh, Callum Ferguson, Nathan Couter-Nile and James Faulkner in his Test first XI and the omission of Phil Hughes, Usman Khawaja, Mitchell Starc and Jackson Bird. What the? This speaks loudly of the lack of thought bought to the table for this exercise. Most of us would like to see Ferguson playing but his form is inconsistent and doesn't match his ability. We may agree on Hughes, as Khawaja is the better No 3 but the spot is his until he fails ... such is the Baggy Green way. Starc and Bird are streets ahead of Couter-Nile and Faulkner;
• removing all fielding restrictions in one day cricket will have one immediate effect ... for the last 15 overs, there will be nine fieldsmen on the boundary. Attacking captaincy be damned. Where are the attacking captains in Test cricket when they have the opposition nine down with a capable batsman still at the crease?;
• the pitch must be a contest between bat and ball in all forms of cricket. That sounds great over a few schooners but see how many agree when T20 and ODI games finish half way when teams are bowled out or ODI team totals come back below the 200 mark because batsmen have to dig in. Crowds want to see big hitting and batsmen scoring runs in the shorter forms of the game, not bowlers taking pffeifers. Perhaps 4@40 and 8 an over for the Stars this season are behind this thinking.

"You're joking?"

It would be interesting if Shane Warne developed a mission statement. It would make for a laugh at least. Looking at the CA list, I wonder what SK Warne has done for the game since he didn't leave. Apart from hanging onto his youth and other outcomes designed solely to gratify himself, what has he put back into the game. Is he Australia's Lance Armstrong?

This little twitter outburst has grown beyond a joke. Warne's carping is doing more damage to Australian cricket than anything the Board or management team have done in the last two years. Its hard to believe that $10000 in BBL fines don't have something to do with it. If paybacks a bitch, we know its name. It maybe time for some of his high profile cricket mates to stop returning his calls/tweets/txts (note please MJ Clarke)

Warnie for PM.

Who's shout is it?