Cricket’s changing times mean an end to the relaxed selector

SYDNEY - Being a cricket selector in Australia can be a thankless and difficult task, according to the Sydney Morning Herald report.

Take the last three months as an example. The Australian selector has had choose teams for the Test and one-day tour of India, team for the one-day series against Sri Lanka and now the Ashes Test and one-day international teams, besides months of watching Sheffield Shield games and Big Bash encounters and the ICC World Cup looming, the selectors can forget about a home life.

According to the SMH, cricketers are in the same boat, freighted around the globe and churned out on a production line of first class and 50-over and Twenty20 games so that they wake up and scarcely know what city they are in.

Selectors apart, is there one Australian cricket buff left alive who can, without reference to computer or record book, reel off the last Australian Test XI, the last Twenty20 side and the last day-night international team, even the last baggy green-capped team to win a Test match?

In times past, it was a luncheon adjournment snack to rattle off Test performances and Australian sides and Ashes results. Now try it.

The demand for Twenty20 has left the 50-50 format confronting a short-term future.

Little wonder Cricket Australia is groaning. Television ratings are plunging, crowd attendances are falling, money is tightening, sponsors are doubting the expense.

Even though the third game was dead, the Gabba crowd of less than 10,000 for Australia’s “triumph” over Sri Lanka was an ugly Brisbane record.

But the summer game’s revival series is at hand. That ticket sales are “booming” for the Ashes is a gratifying assurance. But will it be a long-term solution?

The specialisation and fragmentation of Australian teams, the dismemberment of the national squad in the past two years, has left cricket’s masses confused. Their love of cricket has been decimated, their passion and purses spent. (ANI)