With the World T20 looming, Australia are in the dangerous – and familiar – situation of not knowing their best Twenty20 combination
Daniel Brettig30-Jan-2016For the past eight weeks, Shane Watson was a part of the Sydney Thunder side that overcame four years of conspicuous underachievement to wrest the Big Bash League title from more fancied contenders in the Strikers, the Scorchers and the Stars.However low the Thunder sunk over the previous four seasons, there was always the hope that with continuity and sound decision-making, they could yet emerge as a force in Australian cricket. Like any club, they had the opportunities afforded by a good idea of their schedule and matches, the chance to recruit players and staff on long-term deals, and to address problems over time. Success, when it came, was not the result of an overnight shuffle.Watson, Australia’s stand-in Twenty20 captain, now finds himself on the far side of the team spectrum, for Australia’s T20 unit is about as ad hoc as they come. Some of this is presently the result of circumstances, such as a medical scare for the coach Darren Lehmann and a hamstring injury for the captain Aaron Finch. But the dismal loss of the current series to India a matter of weeks before the World T20 on the subcontinent is emblematic of a continuity problem Watson has experienced for a decade.”No doubt that’s the biggest challenge for the Australian Twenty20 team – and always has been, when I’ve been a part of it – is until the Twenty20 World Cup the priority for the best players playing all the time is not always there, because there’s so much cricket that is on,” Watson said. “You’ve just got to manage your best players as well as you can, which always means there’s no continuity with Twenty20 teams up until a game or two before the Twenty20 World Cup.”That’s happened in every Twenty20 World Cup I’ve been a part of, which does make it challenging, there’s no doubt.”When you play in a BBL team or IPL team you just about know your best team … everyone knows their specific roles, and are consistently doing them throughout a whole season. But when there’s only a few Twenty20s here and there, throughout a long summer, it provides a huge challenge to be able to get your best players playing in their best positions.”Initially, this issue was a product of no-one quite recognising what T20 was to become, as early internationals were marked by frivolity and in some cases indifference on the part of players and coaches alike. The decision to wire some players to the Channel Nine commentary box while fielding or batting was made at that time, and has remained despite international T20 now having a global tournament of some prestige – a tournament Australia have never won.They came closest to doing so while making the final in 2010, largely through the individual brilliance of Michael Hussey in a semi-final steal against Pakistan rather than any great sense of tactical cohesion. Since that time, the T20 side has bounced between distraction status and having a more substantial place in plans, invariably a few months out from the ICC event. In 2012 Watson helped drive a decent bid for the title until the semi-finals, but in 2014 the team and staff appeared burnt out from that summer’s Test match exertions and were eliminated with barely a whimper.There had actually been some sense of planning to the schedules that preceded those global events. The Australian side played nine evenly spaced matches in the 12 months prior to the 2012 tournment, and 10 in the same period leading into 2014. This time 2015 was almost entirely devoid of the format, to the extent that a single match in the 12-month voting period for the Allan Border Medal night meant the T20 trophy was not awarded.Australia did schedule six matches against India and South Africa for early 2016, packed into a couple of months before the World T20, ostensibly allowing for greater ability to get a team together. However the long wait followed by a rush of activity in the format has resulted in a startling lack of clarity among the selectors about their options.The choosing of a 17-man squad for three T20s against India was a warning sign, and now the inclusions of Usman Khawaja and Cameron Bancroft for the SCG on Sunday will stretch the number of players used to an eye-popping 19. That sort of a number raises unfavourable comparisons with the start of the disastrous 2010-11 Ashes series, never mind the questionable wisdom of choosing a part-time wicketkeeper to replace the less than sparkling glovework of Matthew Wade.Stability and knowledge of each player’s capability is nowhere to be seen. While commentating for ABC Grandstand, a noted T20 authority in David Hussey spelt it out: “I don’t think the selectors know which is the right T20 national team, and they don’t play enough to do so.” Speaking in Sydney upon the team’s arrival for the third match against India, the interim coach Michael Di Venuto did not appear confident things would settle down in a hurry either.”I’m not, hopefully the selectors are,” he said, when asked if he was sure what Australia’s best T20 side was. “I’m sure we’ll come up with a good combination, a good cricket team to take on that World Cup. We’ve had quite a few debutants so far throughout the series, we’ve got some players heading to New Zealand, preparing for that series over there, so the make-up of our side at the moment compared to the World Cup might be completely different. We’ll just have to see what the selectors come up with.”A key to Australia’s T20 struggles can be found within those words. Short-form assignments are always seen within the context of bigger tasks in the Test match and ODI arenas. Were Australia’s players and coaches to be asked whether they would prefer the World T20 title or the No. 1 Test match ranking, there would be few dissenters to the view that the latter is more significant, in terms of both reputations and finances.This takes the matter back to the Sydney Thunder, and the purpose of the BBL as devised by Cricket Australia. T20 is the vehicle through which to take the game to new audiences, not the format by which the national team’s story and aptitude is meant to be defined. There are plenty within CA who would be happy enough to see T20 be a club-only concern, with the muddled history of the national team in the third format consigned to the archives.That may all be well and good in terms of wider strategy and the growth of the game down under, a task at which few could fault CA in recent times. But the fact remains that Watson and the rest of Australia’s T20 players want to be part of a representative side that is cohesive, settled and successful like the Thunder have become, and they are running out of patience waiting for that day to arrive.
