Australia A tour of India,

[lemmon]

Re: Australia A tour of India,

All players we've mentioned but a bit of an overview here with some footage for those wanting to put some techniques to the names:

http://www.cricket.com.au/news/australian-batting-contenders-for-tour-of-bangladesh/2015-08-09

[GVGjr]

Re: Australia A tour of India,

Just listening to Gideon Haigh who talked about how our selectors fell for the trap of trying to get one more Ashes series out if an aging and declining group. Said it was the same mistake England fell for when they toured Australia.

He also didn't paint a very good picture for our test future indicating that the likes of Burns, Bancroft and others are good players but unlikely to be great ones. He seems to be of the view that the days of having an abundance of test quality players in Australia might never return given the demands and distractions of the other forms of cricket.

Tend to agree with his assessment of the future although I do believe we have genuine depth in our quick bowlers.

We need players with some grit, we need tests to go into the 5th day more and while this might not be a high priority right at this moment we need to rebuild a slips cordon which is vitally important given our pace bowling strength.

It's going to be an interesting summer.

[Yankee Hotel Foxtrot]

Re: Australia A tour of India,

One of my friends who has two young boys playing junior cricket has a sense that many young kids these days are less inclined to enjoy longer forms of cricket. He also reckons that many talented kids get disillusioned with the administration of junior cricket; that there is a lot of nepotism involved in junior rep selection leading many to walk away from the game in their early teens.

I myself wonder whether young kids today are more inclined to want to play sports that provide a quicker gratification than long form cricket and that are more exciting.
I hope I'm wrong because I dearly love the unique virtues of test cricket and hope that it can hold a special place in our sporting culture for generations to come. I hate with a passion the meaningless of 20/20 cricket, but i sense this is the form today's kids prefer. If this is true then I'm not sure test cricket has a viable future in Australia in the long term.

[lemmon]

Re: Australia A tour of India,

Im a Gideon Haigh disciple and a lot of what you say YHF, rings true with what he wrote in his 2007 Ashes tour diary. Basically that kids in Australian schools now talk about premier league soccer stats with the same fervour they once did about batting averages. Having recently come through a western suburbs all boys high school, you'd be kidding if you thought cricket was still ahead of soccer in terms of interest and participation.

The sad reality is that the thought of a 5 day game with the chance of a winner at the end is archaic to most kids. The standards will never be what they were when the competitive pool is lessened. The same rings true all around the world. The real killer of cricket in the west indies was the growth and money in basketball. If T20 gets kids playing the game where they previous wouldn't, its better than nothing