The rot starts at the top!

Incompetent selectors and hey presto a side thoroughly thrashed by minnows! Experience? Yes and the sort we create by not holding back emerging talent, on the patently puerile grounds of lack of experience!

Our best cricketers were included in adult teams when still callow youths! Bradman Ponting etc!

And so arrived at test standard level suitably experienced, yet still trending towarding toward their physiological peak, with their best years and performances ahead of them, rather than well past it as is the case for most so called professional selections?

We were short of a couple of quicks, and they were a fully fit and ready to trundle Cummings and Paterson! neither of whom are mugs with the bat!

Speed and swing without having to resort to ball tampering! Which FINALLY ought to see, a new nil by mouth applied to all levels of cricket!

And the player's union ought not be allowed to function as a de facto selection board!

Players need to be chosen on current meritorious form; not yesterday's reputation or family member/former friend influence deep inside the system!?

And injured players too often rushed back far too soon only to see them succumb to the same injury, only more so, and often with whole of career, tragic outcomes!

I would allow sheffield shield averages to act as a selection panel, then an A and B team trial test game or games to self select for positions; some in the final team and others as ready made, slot right in understudies!

Simply put, you can't polish a turd, nor can you teach talent! But with the best system in place you can hone and bring it forward, before age wearies it!

Finally the shield comp ought to go back on air (Aunty?) so we can use footage in a far more clinical diagnosis of CURRENT SHIELD FORM or easily remedied, flawed technique! Give me the job, I'd be hard placed to do worse?
Alan B.

Who gives a rats about cricket as a sport? Its the biggest waste of time ever. At least 22 players and only 4 or 5 players if that, moving at anyone time.

Its only use is for the ABC to fill the airwaves with hour after hour of drivel so that their presenters can take some leave.