Where has our great cricket team gone?

JOHN Inverarity is disappointed that his job is now much easier.

James Pattinson

IT may well be that former prime minister Malcolm Fraser had John Inverarity and his fellow selectors in mind when he observed that life wasn't meant to be easy.

And yet that's what life has become for Inverarity: easy, too easy for his comfort. It certainly wasn't meant to be this way. There is something of the ascetic about the 69-year-old former Test batsman turned chairman of selectors and it doesn't sit at all well with him how easily he and the selectors were able to arrive at the 16 names that make up the Ashes squad.

There was a time when any player wanting admission to the Australian cricket team needed to kick the selectors' door down. Now, it seems, the softest of knocks will see it opened. No longer is it a case of "Who can we possibly leave out?" but rather "Who can we put in?"

"What we want as selectors is an embarrassment of riches," Inverarity said recently.

"We want our job to be difficult because there are so many who are playing so well; because there are just so many guys making runs. But as you look through the Sheffield Shield performances, they ain't there."

In the season just completed only 11 batsmen scored more than 500 runs in Shield matches and of them only two, Ricky Ponting with 911 at 75.91 and Phil Hughes with 673 at 56.06, averaged better than 50. Only another two averaging above 40.

Just as disturbingly, only a dozen batsmen faced 1000 deliveries or more over the course of the season. Usman Khawaja was able to make his way into an Ashes touring party on the strength of a summer that yielded him just 438 runs at 39.81 off 752 balls spread over six Shield matches.

And to think that less than a decade ago Mike Hussey needed to amass more than 15,000 first-class runs before finally he was granted entry to the Test arena.

What has happened, one wonders, to the grit and the bloody-minded determination to dig in at the crease that once was the trademark of cricket in Australia?

The Shield, that great production line of Australian cricket, which once pumped out champion after champion, is starting to splutter and misfire.

Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Matt Hayden, Adam Gilchrist, Justin Langer and, more recently, Ponting and Hussey all have taken their leave of the Test team over the past half-dozen years and not one of them has adequately been replaced.

Realistically, it would have to be said every one of those players ranks among the greatest exponents of their respective crafts ever to have played the game and it borders on hubris to presume that replacing them would prove no more difficult than restocking the shelves of a vending machine.

And yet for so long, that is precisely what experience taught Australians to expect. Allan Border bade farewell in 1994, Ponting said hello in 1995. Ian Healy hung up his gloves in October 1999. Gilchrist took them down off the peg and tried them on for size in the very next Test.

Still, no great empire ever lasts forever. As the grizzled old sage reminds American lieutenant Nately in Catch-22: "Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed. Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours?"

Inverarity recalls that very same point being made to him by a former cricket correspondent for The Times newspaper.

"I often think back to Johnny Woodcock," he said. "Ten years ago when we were smashing everybody, I remember him delightfully saying, 'It's cyclical. It'll turn. You'll turn down, we'll turn up and have our period again'."

True enough, but it is not in the nature of Australians to meekly wait in the corner until the wheel of history slowly works its way through 360 degrees. Answers are being sought, hard shoulders applied to the wheel to speed it up. Why has Australian cricket fallen on to such barren times? Well, curiously, one explanation is that football is to blame, specifically AFL. It's gobbling up the best athletes in the country and not just the potential Test cricketers. Every Olympic sport is howling about the talent drain to the cashed-up and robustly evangelistic AFL.

"I've seen it happen in athletics too because I've had an interest in it," said Inverarity, whose daughter Alison was an Olympic high jumper. "But yes, I do see it in cricket, absolutely.

"Most of the youngsters at school who are just very good at sport, who have the body types to be fast bowlers, they play centre half-forward in the footy and they go to the footy.

"Most of them go to AFL. It's a talent drain there, yes it is."

Seemingly it's all part of the same instant-gratification syndrome that has young batsmen rudely trusting their spring-loaded bats to carry the ball over extra cover rather than steadily grafting away to build their technique. Why wait until the age of 24 or 25 to perform at the MCG in the Boxing Day Test when you can play at the "G" as an 18-year-old for Collingwood or Essendon? And be better paid to boot.

Tempting as it is to ascribe this aversion to commitment - in this case commitment to the crease - as a shared Gen X, Gen Y trait, the fact is that Michael Clarke found a way to keep his head down for 2418 deliveries in 2012 while amassing the most runs ever by an Australian batsman in a calendar year, 1595. If he could do it, if Hussey could put together 898 runs in the same period at a smidgen under 60, why could their younger teammates not summon up the same mental toughness?

Inverarity is somewhat at a loss to explain it. "I don't know why we don't have more 22, 23-year-old batters who just love batting all day and their game expands as the day goes on, but we're certainly in great need of them," he said.

He does concede, however, that Shield cricket is no longer a batsman-friendly environment. "I think the best cricket in all forms of the game is when there is a good contest between bat and ball. From what I've seen in Shield cricket lately, it's too much in favour of the ball."

Juiced-up wickets don't only disadvantage batsmen. They take their toll of spin bowlers too and there is the beginning of a solution to that great and, sadly, enduring mystery of Australian cricket: why did Warne not spawn a whole generation of spin wizards following in his footsteps?

But unhelpful wickets can only be part of the reason why Australia has gone through an entire cricket team of spin bowlers since Warne retired. Perhaps another explanation is that all the youngsters trying to emulate Warne may literally have followed too closely in his footsteps.

Warne ran only three paces to the bowling crease - unlike most leg-spinners, who build their momentum over five or six paces - and relied on powerful shoulders and strong hands to rip the ball. So, naturally, every one of his young Australian disciples assumed that was how it was done and mimicked his run-up, only to eventually discover they didn't have the physical attributes required to make his technique work for them.

Yet, for all the angst Australian cricket is experiencing, there have been way more ups than downs for the Land Down Under over its 136 years in the Test arena and that proud history has given rise to a profound and deep-seated confidence that the bad times will never last for long.

Inverarity, as you would expect, is a true believer and immediately goes on to the front foot when asked if he thinks Australia can turn it all around.

"Yes I do. I feel very excited about the Ashes and optimistic and we only need on that first day to do really well and a couple of guys make a hundred and confidence goes up," he said. "Those things can happen and can happen very easily."

Oh dear, did he say "easily"?