FOURTH TEST - DAY FOUR

Meters away - worlds apart. Brad Haddin slumps as England's victorious cricketers celebrate.

Today England retained the Ashes in emphatic style by dominating Australia in virtually every facet of the game.

There, I have said it.

It hurts, but it is the truth. This England team (I dare not call them "English") has been the best prepared, the most focused and collectively, the most in-form I have seen an England touring team in Australia in my life time.

From their opening batsmen to their revolving door seam bowling attack, they have been comfortably ahead of Australia...only Brad Haddin and Mike Hussey could make a case for being better performed than their direct counterparts Prior and Collingwood.

Johnson departed quickly this morning before Haddin and Siddle had a hit and giggle that piled on some low pressure, inconsequential runs that merely delayed the celebrations for a time, but it was all to no avail as England predictably ran out easy winners by an innings and 157 runs...a drubbing in anyone’s language.

To England go my sincere congratulations on a professional job that was clinical in it's execution. Well done, you thoroughly deserve it.

If I may, I wish to examine what has gone wrong with Australian cricket that has seen our national team not merely lose two tests, but the cause and effect of the heavy manner in which those tests were lost and with it any hope of reclaiming the Ashes.

If you are a delighted English cricket supporter, you may stop reading now, as our misery is not your problem. Enjoy yourself, for we Australians are about to enter a period of introspection that will see more casualties than a bloody gangland war.

If you are a despondent Aussie, read on.

If the English football team and the New Zealand All Blacks are the flag ships of their respective nations, then the Australian cricket team is the standard bearer for the Australian nation. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to suggest that there is alot of sadness and indeed anger at how they have performed this summer from across this expansive country.

Everywhere, Australians are asking; why?

My first broad side must go to Cricket Australia who in their previous guise promised that the en-mass retirements of Greg Chappell, Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh and the resultant collapse of our international fortunes in their vortex would never be allowed to happen again. In fact, as Warne, McGrath, Gilchrist etc were reaching the end of their glorious careers, the CA officials smugly informed us that Australian first class cricket was brimming with talent and that all would be OK. Sure, Shane Warne's aren't discovered everyday, but by and large, we would not fall into any kind of trough. We would remain number one, or somewhere close to it.

How embarrassingly wrong were they?

In all their smugness and money counting stupor, they completely misread where everything was inevitably heading. To paraphrase a friend...we aren't falling, we have fallen! The bottom hasn't fallen away, it has disappeared!

My next bake is reserved for the National Selection Panel headed by Andrew Hilditch and his band of merry incompetent buffoons. These slow witted dullards think that "succession planning" is organizing who goes second drop in the batting order.

Andrew Hilditch is delusional at the best of times, but he has proved himself to be a comedian too - "we selected Michael Beer because he has local knowledge of the WACA ground and conditions" when in fact he had just moved over from Victoria only a few months before and in reality had barely any idea of where to find the change rooms.

The criminal negligence displayed by the selection panel will be a topic of heated discussion across the length and breadth of this great country for many years to come. If I were any of messieurs Hilditch, Boon and Cox, I would consider going into some kind of fugitive protection program and go into hiding in the comparative anonymity of the USA living amongst 300 million American Citizens who do not give a hoot about cricket.

The selection panel must all resign post haste. Fall on your sword boys, because if you stay any longer, it will only get ugly. Just go.

The other member of the set up who has flown under the radar has been national coach Tim Nielsen. As respected cricket commentator and journalist Gideon Haigh noted this afternoon in an interview on SEN radio, "Nielsen was handed a three year extension to his contract before this current series! Given that his team's performance of the last few years has been less than satisfactory, this was an amazing decision by those at CA. If Nielsen were an AFL coach with his record over the last couple of years, he simply wouldn't have a job right now".

Or words to that effect.

The selectors must go.

The coach must go.

Many at Cricket Australia who have been dozing at their desks in recent years without noticing the initially imperceptible decline and more recently, the free fall, of Australian cricket must do the honourable thing and resign.

Australian cricket is rotten to the core right now and big changes are needed just to be competitive going forward let alone regaining number one status.

How one Sydney newspaper reported the fans anger.

OK, we have tackled the off field puppeteers who have been guilty of negligence, but what of the dearth of talented young cricketers? The Sheffield Shield was once described as a cricketing conveyor belt producing talent for the test team on demand.

Just place your order gents.

Now, there seems to be either journeymen who are in their early to mid thirties plying their trade, or young tyros with potential who are either in their teens or early twenties and are not yet ready for higher honours. In between there is a "donut". The critical age group where most test players are typically drawn from.

How the hell did this happen?

Leaving aside the negligence of those in charge that I have already touched upon, there is a simpler reason why the above has occurred. Back in the late 1990's the Australian test players threatened strike action in order to obtain a better deal for the ordinary Australian first class cricketer who was a poor relation compared to his fully professional English County Cricket cousin.

After the new deal was struck, Australian first class players were placed on annual contracts and guaranteed minimum annual salaries. I think the minimum salary was about $80,000 AUSD per annum, thus making first class cricket a professional occupation compared to it's pauper past.

The effects of this were far reaching, but not all the outcomes were positive as we are about to see. On the one hand, first class cricketers could concentrate on their cricket without having to worry about how they were going to pay the rent or concerning themselves with getting a mundane disposable job in the off season. That was the positive and the hoped for outcome by the idealistic test cricketers who fought for their comrades in arms.

But there was a side effect that no one anticipated from this landmark change in Australian domestic cricket. The unforeseen result was a kind of upsetting of the equilibrium of the Australian First Class scene on a few fronts.

1/ Because playing first class cricket had become an occupation, players were not abandoning mediocre careers in their mid twenties to "get a real job" as their cricketing ancestors had done before them in Australia. Instead they became journeymen and continued plying their trade for their state teams well into their thirties and even into their mid to late thirties in extreme cases.

2/As a result of the above situation, the tradition of the teenaged first class cricketer had started to almost disappear. State selectors and administrators obsessed with winning the Sheffield Shield were more inclined to stick with late twenties or thirty something journeymen rather than punting on extreme youth and waiting for a pay off. In recent times NSW has been the exception to this rule, but other states have barely registered that they have contributed to the killing of Australian test cricket.

3/ The net result of the above two points has lead to the fact that the Australian test team which had started to reach it's use by date by 2008 at the latest was not able to be effectively topped up with exciting young talent, simply because there was very little young talent in the Sheffield Shield that was of the quality required to take the next step.

To illustrate my point, the all conquering Victorian bowling line up of Dirk Nannes (35), Shane Harwood (37), Bryce McGain (39) and Peter Siddle (26) which swept all before them in spearheading Victoria's assault on the Sheffield Shield, One Day titles etc. were decidedly lopsided in one critical area.

The numbers in brackets are their ages.

Unsurprisingly, Peter Siddle is the only one of that quartet who is in the correct age to become a regular test performer, even though it could be argued that Nannes was and still is the better bowler. Dirk Nannes did not make his first class debut until he was twenty nine - what future is there in selecting rookies at such an advanced age?

Sure, Nannes was a pro skier in his twenties traversing the slopes of the world, so he may be an exception to the rule, but Harwood was twenty eight when he made his first class debut and McGain was thirty - what was holding them back from being selected earlier?

Throw in Clint McKay who made his debut at the "youthful" age of twenty four and you have a bowling group that have largely missed the bus. Only Siddle was blooded young and only Siddle has gone onto a remotely sustainable test career.

Australian cricket fans have long envied the ability of Pakistan and India to pluck a teenaged pace bowling prodigy from obscurity who looks at home playing test cricket immediately. In recent summers, names such as Ishant Sharma and Mohammad Amir have dazzled the Australian cricket watching public with their precocious talents.

If these lads were Australian, they would not have played for their respective states yet much less have sparkled in the test arena.

Dale Steyn, arguably the best fast bowler in the world at present is a twenty seven year old who made his test debut at twenty one and his first class debut at twenty. If Steyn were an Australian, would he have been given such opportunities so early? It is doubtful.

Therein lies the problem.

Australian first class cricket has gone from being the yard stick to something approaching an over thirties league.

My simple solution to re-establish the delicate ecology of young promising cricketers pressuring the more established players for a place in first class and test line ups is to introduce a compulsory minimum component of youth in each state team. This would be in the form of five of the eleven must be twenty three or under.

Radical? Maybe.

Necessary? Absolutely.

It is not the only way of ensuring that Australia climbs back up the rankings, but it will certainly go a long way towards restoring some kind of parity in talent identification. With the compulsory component of youth, state administrators will be forced to locate, nurture and develop promising young players instead of hoping to cherry pick from other states or find a mature workhorse capable of "doing a job".

This all should have been started a decade ago, or at the very latest in the wake of the 2005 Ashes defeat which was the first sign of Australian Cricketing mortality. However, nothing was done and now we are paying the heavy price of complacency.

We must start right now as this is year zero.