Fruit pickers,
Noted that the Chairman and the Three Wise Men put their thinking hats on today to pick a team for the Veldt.
Fuehrer Hilditch, no doubt, would have got out a blank team sheet and a pencil and scratched MJ CLARKE (NSW) at the top of the page.
First picked.
Big Merv, Boonie, and the Mystery Man would’ve looked on and nodded; then he wrote down the name RT PONTING (TAS).
Never mind allocating the (c) and (v-c) assignations, that’s up to The Board anyway.
At that moment the CA Tea Lady knocked on the door and wheeled in her trolley set with a delicious Devonshire Tea, so while the selectors were helping themselves, they asked her to cut a few names out of the papers and drop them into a Baggy Green that just happened to be lying around the room.
Out came the names one by one, and phrases like “too young”, “too old”, “too crippled”, “too boozed and mentally unstable” were bandied about, but occasionally The Chairman would mutter “he’ll do”, and voila!, there you have it, a 14 man squad to be led like so many lambs to the slaughter.
And yet, as at 10PM Wednesday, there appears to be no announcement chattering to life on the old bush telegraph in the corner of the loungeroom.
You could only think there might be a touch of tooing and froing over ports about whether to break their own too old/too young policy and pick McGain at 36 and Hughes at 20 as potential debutants.
Or perhaps they are arguing over brandy and cigars about the fact that there hasn’t been a half-way decent Australian all-rounder since Keith Miller.
It’s been a particularly busy couple of weeks for Pup.
First he injures his Social Finger in a late night mishap and has to miss a couple of one-day games because the batting hand’s buggered, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise as there were a few wedding arrangements that had to be signed off with the agents, then he has to come back earlier than expected on account of how woefully the team is traveling, then has to take over the Captaincy after Punter was ruled out on account of the hitherto unusual injury of “too tired”.
Then, unbeknown to him, CA had to send out an SOS call to the jewelers to get a second Alan Border Medal minted so they didn’t have to cut the one they had in half.
It appears that Pup and Punter now have two AB gongs each in the Trophy Cabinet.
The bookmakers ruled a line through the book and stopped taking bets on Test Player of Year a long, long time ago.
All the while he’s been mulling over whether or not he should put himself on the chopping block at the Indian Premier League meat market in Goa at the reserve price of $US1,000,000.
Not that he needs the cash - the wedding photo’s will be worth that much in No Idea.
Probably a bit peeved that he is rated by the auctioneers as being worth $US350,000 less than K.Pietersen.
But, if the truth be known, it’s most likely that he wants to save himself from the embarrassment of not attracting any bids at that price, in these troubled times, given that he has always hoisted his petard as a test match player, who happens to also have a pretty handy 40 odd average in the one-day caper, but has generally been rubbish in the handful of Twenty20 games that he’s played.
Plus the IPL promoters are reported to be getting cold feet about the Australians who are likely to go on the Ashes tour, given that they won’t be available for the whole comp and will have their minds elsewhere.
Give it a wide berth, son.
It’s beneath you, and, let’s face it, there’s no future in it.
