Try as you might, there are some things you just can’t ignore.
I was all set to give the cricket discussion the big miss until the end of Day One, but a couple of headlines in the old browser had me recapping some previous thoughts on the morning lap around downtown Bowen.
The first of them was on the ABC News feed: Ashes: Brad Haddin calls Mickey Arthur 'very, very insecure', lauds impact of coach Darren Lehmann, which doesn’t come as any surprise apart from the fact that someone felt the point needed to be made.
The second appeared in The Guardian: Australia's Michael Clarke out to put Ashes misery in England behind him, which probably comes as no surprise to anyone who has read Clarke’s diary from the first part of the series. I haven’t, and don’t plan to, because I gather it’s a depressing read. The Guardian also had Glen McGrath opining: Australia's restored self-belief will help win them back the Ashes, which looked to be a fair assessment of where things are, devoid of predictions about whitewashes.
Most of the pre-Jimbo section of morning walk was spent folding those matters into previous ideas, and it’s obvious that we don’t want to be complicating things too much. When you do that, the plot tends to go out the window.
Without dwelling too much on the Arthur era it’s obvious that, for much of that time, we didn’t know what our best Test line up was. Uncertainty fuels insecurity, and it was a matter of plugging away until a couple of blokes stuck their hands up and looked to deliver. Pick and stick is an easy concept, but requires a bit of courage when it comes to the stick part. It’s easy to chop and change.
The side that goes out onto the paddock tomorrow is the strongest side we can assemble out of what’s available. McGrath makes the valid point that we’ll be in trouble if we lose Johnson, Harris or Siddle, but that’s not rocket surgery either.
You’d suspect Cutting is the next cab off the rank, and playing Faulkner if the track looks like it will help the quicks will share the work load, particularly since it looks like Watto will be right for a partial workload.
The cupboard might look relatively bare after that, but there are other quicks around, and if they’re needed it’ll be a case of waiting to see whether they measure up. Simple enough, that feller.