Shane Watson, is he unlucky or what?

[four_or_six]

They haven't gone it at all, they've always been poor (as have all selectors really). It's just that those who pointed-out their poor ways were often shouted down by the "WELL AUSTRALIA HAVE WON SO CLEARLY THE DECISION WAS RIGHT!!!!" bull****.

I don't think they've been particularly poor, more just average. In this case, sometimes I think selectors pick players for certain conditions and so on, but to come out and basically say selection policy is to chop and change the team just seems a bit bonkers.

 

[Richard]

I've said many times how many abysmal selections the Australian lot have made the last 10-15 years. Mostly the replies have been "well Australia won so they weren't bad".

Others have made many howlers as well, I should add again.

 

[four_or_six]

Others have made many howlers as well, I should add again.

That's why I say 'average'

 

[Richard]

Just because the "average" selection committee can be well described as "poor" wasn't quite what I was thinking of.

By average I was thinking you were meaning "not good but not bad", rather than "conforming to the norm".

As a rule, most selection committees are poor. It's pretty rare to see the selectors of any team go through a sustained period of 4 or 5 years without making a fair few mistakes.

 

[four_or_six]

Just because the "average" selection committee can be well described as "poor" wasn't quite what I was thinking of.

By average I was thinking you were meaning "not good but not bad", rather than "conforming to the norm".

As a rule, most selection committees are poor. It's pretty rare to see the selectors of any team go through a sustained period of 4 or 5 years without making a fair few mistakes.

No no... to me, average = conforming to the norm

 

[Top_Cat]

Just because the "average" selection committee can be well described as "poor" wasn't quite what I was thinking of.

By average I was thinking you were meaning "not good but not bad", rather than "conforming to the norm".

As a rule, most selection committees are poor. It's pretty rare to see the selectors of any team go through a sustained period of 4 or 5 years without making a fair few mistakes.

Just because they make mistakes, doesn't make them poor surely. So much of selection is about luck too and seeing stuff which the stats might not bear out. Otherwise you'd just let a computer pick the top 6 run-scorers and top 4 wicket-takers in your domestic comp and play them. It's far from an easy job and sometimes gambles don't come off because of the x-factor of playing for one's country vs one's state/club.

You could probably come up with a litany of poor selections by Aus over the years but I could also come up with a similarly long list of players selected where the faith in them paid-off. Whether it was only for a short time or whether it took a while for it to bear fruit, those are good selections in the end.

 

[Richard]

Nah, they're not. A good selection is one which has something going for it. The outcome is immaterial. Not all good selections pay dividends, and not all bad selections backfire.

The reason you can't have a computer pick cricket teams is it requires a human to do things like make phonecalls and let players down gently and the like. And also that no computer can really properly analyse cricket statistics, because they're a many-layered thing.

However, at the end of the day, actual performance is what counts. Stats sum-up performance. But these are stats only a human can properly interpret.

Problems start when humans wrongly interpret stats or worse, partially or completely disregard them thinking their judge of skill is better than the game itself's judgement. It's not a selector's job to go with what he thinks is a talented player; it's a selector's job to go with players who've shown their talent. A computer can't work-out the latter, but a faulty human interpretation of the former is all too common and this is what makes so many selection committees so poor, and causes so many mistakes in selection.