What are the Australian selectors thinking of?

I must admit that I am baffled by the Australian squad announcement, not by the players that they’ve named but by the fact that they have felt it necessary to pick a squad that is bigger than that of the touring party. Is their thinking that they need to be putting pressure on the incumbents to perform? Or are they thinking that they need to publicly acknowledge that there are good young players coming through? Are they, indeed, thinking at all? Given that they are an essentially conservative group of selectors who almost certainly already know their side for Brisbane, it is difficult to see what message they are trying to send out, but the message that people are getting is that they don’t appear to know what they are doing. Oddly enough, ten years ago there might have been some mileage in doing this, if only to demonstrate the fearsome strength in depth that there was in Australian cricket at the time, but few of the reserve names will have the English team and management losing sleep. Xavier Doherty, for example, had a very impressive ODI debut against Sri Lanka the other day, but his first class bowling average is in the high forties and his prospects of playing test cricket anytime soon seem slim, so why bother naming him in a squad?

Some years ago, Gideon Haigh wrote a piece for cricinfo in which he said that the Australian selectors would only have to start earning their money once the great players had retired. The evidence is that they’re doing a fairly ham-fisted job of it.