My first reaction to what I sighted in the Cricinfo Facebook feed at five-thirty this morning was a definite suspicion that someone was taking the piss.
Five-thirty on a bin day morning when there’s cat herding to be done before you hit the hoof for the morning lap around town just after six doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for confirmation and investigation, but a quick squiz here suggested they weren’t kidding.
Oh well, Faulkner and Starc in for Khawaja and Bird would provide something to ponder on the lap around town, wouldn’t it?
As it turned out the pondering started as I stepped onto Kennedy Street and was pretty much done and dusted by the time I checked whether it was safe to cross Herbert Street. That’s a space of less than a hundred and fifty metres, folks, so it’s obvious the penny dropped fairly quickly.
In these cases you need to spot the principle the selection panel is working from. If you’re thinking this is what we’ve got and the question is which of them will be staying you’re going to be heading in with a side that’s largely unchanged from last time around. It becomes a question of which of the incumbents cement a place in the side and which of them play themselves out of it.
It’s a start with last time and figure deletions and inclusions approach.
The questions, in that mental environment, involve the possibility of reinstalling Cowan or Hughes in the top six, and which three quicks get the guernsey alongside Watson’s fourth seamer role and Lyon’s spin.
We don’t, however, seem to be working from that basis.
This time around we seem to have adopted what I’ve termed the old Primary Rep Side principle of this is what we’ve got, so how do we fill in the gaps.
Working on that basis, what we’ve got was Rogers and Warner to open, Clarke at Four/Five, Haddin to keep and Lyon to bowl offies. That’s sort of like your old known knowns.
Five names down, six to go in.
Three of those six are going to be your three specialist quicks, with Watson likely to cover the fourth seamer role. I’d reached that conclusion as I reached the half way point along Kennedy Street, which is where the penny dropped.
It all comes down to Harris.