2 Minutes Turkish said:
I'm aware of that, but during that period of dominance, why weren't we bringing at least a few young kids through to learn the ropes while we were dominating?
As 9th or 10th down the line or something? Granted I don't 'get' cricket much, I'm not a huge fan, but surely the AFL model would work in Cricket.
From 05-10, Collingwood was playing kids consistently despite playing in finals in all those years bar 05. This meant, that even once we lost Buckley, Burns, Clement etc, we had basically ready made players stepping in and taking over.
I don't see why during that era of utter dominance we couldn't have blooded 2-3 younger cricketers at various stages since during that time we were rarely if ever in danger of losing.
Definitely
You can't compare the two.
An AFL team has 22 players. You can play a few youngsters and it won't have a massive impact on the side. A cricket team has 11 players. And within that, there's generally only 6 batsman, a keeper, and four bowlers. So if you decide you want to blood a youngster for the sake of it (let's say a bowler) your bowling attacking is now 25% inexperienced.
On top of that, from 1995 to 2007 we probably had the second best bowling attack in the history of cricket (behind the West Indies of the 80s). McGrath, Warne, Gillespie and [insert Lee/Kaspa/Bichel/MacGill]. You can't drop them for the sake of blooding a youngster. You just have to hope the Shield competition is doing enough to get the next group up to standard.
People don't seem to realise it, but Australia was hit quite hard by injuries. If all went to plan, a fit 31 year old Jason Gillespie would have been leading our attack after McGrath retired. The problem is, Gillespie's body couldn't hold up and he was forced into an early retirement. Same with Brett Lee.
The thing is at the moment, it's not about playing young players for the sake of it. Steve Smith is better than Marcus North. It doesn't even matter that he's only 21, that's just a bonus. Same with Khawaja, O'Keefe and Hughes.
