We know that if you want grown men to lift their game, you treat them like school kids. What ever you do, don't treat them like men. Men who are some of the best in the world, just not good enough to beat India, at home, on their specially developed wickets.

The fact that we never have been is no reason not to treat the current Oz cricket team like naughty children evidently.

When Alan Border found that our cricket tours were more of a booze cruise than a sport event, there were some choice words spoken, & some bums kicked. They were brought into line like men. That set the scene for Oz to rule the cricket world for years.

With the current management coaching & leadership, we might be able to play in the school boys championship. We'll probably have to, there'll be no men in the team.

Sending the naughty boys to their room to write 100 times, I must do better, must be a stroke of coaching genius, for the rest of the world that is.

God help us.

I agree Hazza. A stroke of coaching genius it wasn’t!

Hey, all players at the top level are supposed to give their all. They have surely worked out how to contribute their best right from the start. And the coach is supposed to make sure that they do.

So those who are contributing their best effort cannot possibly have anything else to offer, or suggest.

Perhaps the twelve players who did what the coach wanted should have been dismissed while the four that didn’t should have been held up as the genuinely best performers!

And perhaps the coach should be sacked for not making sure that the improvements that the twelve players suggested they could make, whatever they were, weren’t already implemented.

I don’t know. But I agree with Alan Border that this is not a good event for Australian cricket!

This had nothing to do with the performances of these four players. While Shane Watson was somewhat down on his form, James Pattinson had been doing very well indeed.

So for the next test the coach has taken out one very good performer, and at least two other players who were not underperforming. Not real bright, I must say!

Crikey, you’d want to develop a strong and united team spirit with a high level of respect for the coach, wouldn’t you? It seems that this silly coach, Mickey Arthur, hadn’t thought of that, and has had no qualms about implementing a very strongly divisive ‘strategy’!

Oh dear, its like watching paint dry:)

Planet.

Planet e what a boring thing to say!
Why if you find it that, why bother those who do not share your non view?
Yes Hasbeen, the world however is full of such mindless questions and requests to write thoughts that have zero impact on out comes.
Government departments, it may explain much, give two opposing teams paper, glue, and a project to build something.
Then judge on the out comes, little envelopes include instructions like *your task is to build a dragon*
I would have thought reviewing bowling actions/batting, watching videos of self and others would have been better than paper chases.
It is my view those promoting such non training lack the skill for the job they hold.
And while at it those who infiltrate such threads to show us what they think of sport are intellectually self amused.

There are some coaches going spare from that other ball playing mob, was it the "sharks"?
I am sure that they could run the Oz cricket team quite well. An injection of new blood, you might say.

It really is pointless for anyone who doesn't understand the game to comment on this, as the issues are quite complex and - yes - very boring for those who don't follow the game.

The root problem is, regrettably, money. Players can now make considerably more from seven weeks of IPL than from several seasons of Test cricket. Their attitude towards the senior game becomes markedly different over the years, which is the reason there is such an attitudinal gap between former players and today's.

Test cricket - the five-day variety that most natural cricketers aspire to - is light-years away from the pitch-and-slog of Twenty-Twenty. Ultimately, a player will have to decide whether to invest in the long game, in both senses of the word, or hire out his talents to the highest bidder on a boom-or-bust basis. The gang of four clearly - at least from the second-hand evidence we have been fed - determined they did not recognize the discipline that is needed to play five-day cricket.

That said, the manner in which the four players were disciplined is one of the worst examples of man-management that I have seen for a while, even in the sporting world.