The instruction to every Sheffield Shield batsman and bowler this week is runs and wickets in spades will put them on the cusp of Test selection. But have Australia’s selectors been following that mantra?
Alex Malcolm15-Oct-2018Adam Voges’ return to Sheffield Shield ranks as Western Australia’s coach is timely.Not because he fills the enormous shoes of his predecessor Justin Langer, taking over the coaching role of a team that hasn’t won the Shield for 20 years. But because on the eve of the new season, his playing record serves as a reminder of why the Sheffield Shield is so valuable to the Australian Test team’s cause.Voges is the last man to score more than 1000 runs in a Sheffield Shield season. He scored 1358 runs at an average of 104.46 in the 2014-15 season, including six centuries in 20 innings. Only one player since has scored more than three centuries in a Shield season – Tasmania’s Ben Dunk scored four in 2015-16. Voges was subsequently selected to play for Australia, and peeled off five Test centuries, including two doubles, in 31 Test innings over the next 18 months.It is arguable that it has never been easier to get into Australia’s Test team. The instruction to every Sheffield Shield batsman and bowler this week is runs and wickets in spades will put them on the cusp of Test selection. But if the players need to walk the walk, so too do the national selectors. Because Shield form has had little bearing on national selection for some time and you could make a strong case that the players have reacted to that.The declining number of total centuries made in Shield cricket over the last ten years is alarming. But the individual tallies make for far more damning reading. Since 2008-09, only eight players have scored four centuries or more in a single Shield season. Four of those players, Voges, Steven Smith, Chris Rogers and Phillip Hughes, went on to make a minimum of three Test centuries each, with Smith accumulating 23.Michael Klinger, the only man to make 1000 runs and four centuries in two separate seasons in that span, like Dunk was never selected to play Test cricket.Selection is no perfect science, and 1000 runs or four centuries in a Shield season is no guarantor of Test-match success. But as far as performance indicators go, it’s as good as there is in Australian cricket. And in the burgeoning world of cricket data analytics, it’s as simplistic a measurement as you could find.Two of Australia’s three national selectors have reached the bar. Greg Chappell made four centuries in 15 Shield innings in 1969-70, and eight across his first four Shield seasons. The following season he scored a Test century on debut as a 22-year-old, the first of 24 among his 7110 Test runs.Justin Langer made 1137 Shield runs as a 23-year-old in 1993-94, and four Shield hundreds in the 1995-96 season before scoring the first of his 23 Test hundreds in 1998.Ricky Ponting never made 1000 runs or four hundreds in a Shield season, mainly through a lack of opportunity to play a full season. But he made three centuries in his first season in 1992-93, aged 18, and three in his last at 38, topping the Shield run-scoring charts with 911 at 75.91 in 2012-13, and 41 Test hundreds in between. Meanwhile, no member of Australia’s current Test squad has managed either feat.Cricket Australia’s high-performance structure is littered with current and former employees who have achieved one or both feats. Former national coach Darren Lehmann scored four hundreds or more in six different Shield seasons. Former national selector Mark Waugh also did it, along with state coaches, Voges and Jamie Siddons. New South Wales coach Phil Jaques made 1191 Shield runs and three centuries in 2004-05 before making three Test hundreds in just 19 innings.Jamie Cox (former national selector), Dene Hills (Cricket Australia Performance Analyst), David Fitzgerald (WACA Talent Development Manager) and David Hussey (Cricket Victoria board member) are among a host of players who achieved the mark but did not get selected to play Test cricket.The names of those who have done it and went on to international cricket in the last 30 years leap off the page. Matthew Hayden, Damien Martyn, Simon Katich, Shane Watson, Matthew Elliott, Murray Goodwin (Zimbabwe), Stuart Law, Michael Bevan, Brad Hodge, Greg Blewett, Andrew Symonds, Dean Jones and Geoff Marsh, all did it prior to enjoying varying degrees of success at international level.Yet the value of such prolific run-scoring as a platform for players to succeed at the next level has also been ignored further down the national talent pathway. Sixteen players have scored either 1000 runs or four centuries in a single season in the six Premier cricket competitions among the Shield-playing states over the last five years. Just four of the 16 have subsequently been selected to play Sheffield Shield cricket.Usman Khawaja looks to the heavens after making his first century in Asia•Getty ImagesOnly two will play this week. Nick Larkin has been selected for New South Wales after scoring five Premier cricket centuries and 1033 runs in just 11 innings for Sydney University last season. But he will line up alongside 18-year-old prodigy Jack Edwards, who scored 103 runs at 14.71 in eight innings for Manly-Warringah last season, 64 of which were made in one innings.Josh Inglis made 1137 runs and four centuries, including a mammoth 246 in Western Australia’s Premier cricket Grand Final, back in 2014-15 and has recently become WA’s regular wicketkeeper since Sam Whiteman suffered a serious finger injury. The last man to score four hundreds in a WA premier cricket season was Stewart Walters in 2016-17. Walters’ task this week will be to throw balls to the prodigiously gifted Josh Philippe as WA’s batting coach. Philippe’s talent is absolutely undeniable, as was seen during the JLT Cup. But it’s worth noting that WA’s young opening batsman has never faced more than 120 balls in an innings in either premier cricket, Futures League cricket or the JLT Cup.As Usman Khawaja showed in Dubai, 120 balls should be an entrée for an opener, before gorging on a main course and dessert. Had Khawaja failed to progress past 120 balls in either innings, Australia would have lost handsomely.The non-selection of prolific run-scorers at premier level is undoubtedly justifiable on a case-by-case basis just as it was for the likes of Siddons, Cox, Klinger and co. at Shield level. Age is a significant factor and Walters is a prime example. He was 33, having already played for a decade of professional cricket in England on a UK passport. It should be noted though that Walters’ third century of the 2016-17 WA premier cricket season was a flawless 153 against an attack featuring Jason Behrendorff and another Shield bowler in Andrew Holder. Just three weeks later, Behrendorff took a record-breaking 14 for 89 against Victoria in a Shield game at the WACA.The point is not to lament the misfortune of the specific individuals but rather lament the message it sends to the rest of the players around the country. Cricketers are acutely aware of what their peers are doing and hyper-sensitive to the selection of teams.Picking players who smash down the door with prolific performances sends a powerful and transparent message to all players. Perform and progress. Picking on potential alone causes frustration and indifference.There is no doubt the likes of Philippe and Edwards have the tools to be outstanding players for Australia and will be two of the young guns to watch this season. But if they are unable to dominate the Sheffield Shield over the early portion of their careers like Chappell, Langer and Ponting did before them as prodigies, some might measure it in talent-identification terms as a failure to live up to potential. Yet a mathematician might simply term the same data phenomenon as regression to the mean.The same applies to the bowlers. The last three bowlers to take 50 wickets in a Shield season are Chris Tremain, Chadd Sayers, and Jon Holland. Curiously, only one was in the squad for the UAE Test series, despite Sayers having played the last Test in South Africa and Tremain having performed well from a statistical perspective on the India A tour.Workload management will now make it more difficult for fast bowlers, in particular, to pile up 50-plus wickets, as wells as multiple five-wicket and ten-wicket hauls in a Shield season.Josh Hazlewood and Pat Cummins are injury-free and have played Premier cricket and, in Cummins’ case, the JLT Cup on return from their respective back injuries. But neither will play in the Sheffield Shield this week. Their workloads will instead be managed in the more malleable Futures League, where 12 men can bowl in order to ensure they’re not forced to bowl excessively beyond their management protocols.Chadd Sayers is mobbed by his team-mates after picking up his first Test wicket•AFPForgotten quick James Pattinson is also making his return from back surgery via Premier cricket and the Futures League. He has only bowled a total of 12 overs for Dandenong and Victoria’s second XI but he did score a century in the Futures League against South Australia.Behrendorff will not play any Sheffield Shield or Futures League cricket for WA prior to the Big Bash despite returning from a back injury and playing in the JLT Cup. But in order to try and keep him injury-free for an entire summer, he has been ruled out of the first half of the Shield season, and will more than likely not be made available for the second half, barring exceptional circumstances post the BBL. Nathan Coulter-Nile was set for exactly the same management schedule with the WA squad until he was called up to Australia’s T20I squad for the three-match series in the UAE. Even still, he won’t play any red-ball cricket upon his return.The Shield final could also be decided by a bonus-points structure this season for the first time in the case an outright result is not achieved. It is deliciously ironic that a drawn final has been roundly lambasted as an inadequate conclusion to the Shield competition, yet Australia’s remarkable fight for a draw against Pakistan in Dubai was widely lauded as a landmark result in the resurrection of the Australian Test team.What we know is there are words and actions. The Australian Test team matched its actions with its words in Dubai. At the start of a new Shield season, the Australian selectors must match their actions with their words. If players perform, the rewards should come. Otherwise, what value is the Sheffield Shield?