Australian selectors optimistic at best in ignoring Jake Fraser-McGurk for Twenty20 World Cup

For the two months of the year when the Indian Premier League consumes world cricket – is world cricket – many will stick their fingers in their ears, shut their eyes and go ‘la la la la!’ until it’s over. This circus will pass.

Those fans will find solidarity in the Australian selection panel, who treat the IPL with the attitude they normally reserve for the Sheffield Shield. I’m not there, this isn’t happening.

Radiohead’s How To Disappear Completely has been the Australian selectors’ theme song for some time, and it was well demonstrated when Steve Smith selected himself as Test opener. It has been faithfully continued for the team they’ve selected for last year’s 50-over World Cup, and the team for the upcoming T20 World Cup. Experts at not-selecting, the panel has woken, signalled ‘Steady as she goes!’, and gone back to bed.

Twenty20 is a young form of cricket and this year’s IPL has undergone one of those quantum leaps every sport goes through in its early development. Hitting has reached a new audacity. Inventiveness for shot types and scoring areas has found new imaginative range. Bowling and fielding have responded with new craft, new athleticism. Even allowing for the middle-aged men risking their health in lung-busting TV commentary – this is one spectacle that doesn’t need over-egging – it’s been exhilarating to watch. I know it’s not cricket but whatever it is, it’s eye-poppingly good.

Where are the Australian selectors when this is happening? I don’t know either. In their Jason Demetriou-esque wisdom, their World Cup selection has retracted into the shell of known quantities. They have picked two veterans, David Warner and Glenn Maxwell, and a captain, Mitchell Marsh, who have not coped with the demands of an IPL season. They have picked Mitchell Starc, constantly beset by small niggles and a ricked neck from watching balls sail over his head. Only two selections, Travis Head and Pat Cummins, have shone consistently in this breakthrough IPL season. Another handful (Cameron Green, Marcus Stoinis, Tim David) have had intermittent impact. Most of the Australian squad can’t win places in IPL teams.

The focal point is Jake Fraser-McGurk. Like many emergent Indian talents, Fraser-McGurk is a native to short-form cricket. Since superseding Warner for the Delhi Capitals, Fraser-McGurk has played some innings that have to be seen to be believed. His strike rate of 233.33 is fourth in the IPL and everyone else in the top 10 is a lower-order slogger while Fraser-McGurk comes in at the top. He has treated Jasprit Bumrah and the best bowlers in the world as if their best balls are hung up a hitting sock from the garage ceiling. Even in his prime, let alone now, Warner has never matched this.

Chairman of selectors George Bailey said these performances had been ‘really eye catching’ and ‘really exciting’, but not enough for selection. Instead, the priority is ‘to structure the way we want’ and ‘the way we’re functioning at the top of the order with the three guys we’ve had there has been really strong as well’. In other words, the incumbents’ hypnotic hold on the panel continues. You are getting sleepy…

If the selectors looked to the next rank of Australian T20 batting, they might have looked at the last Big Bash League. The top-performing locals who scored more than 200 runs with a strike rate of more than 150 were Maxwell, Jake Weatherald, Chris Lynn, Fraser-McGurk and tournament top-scorer Matt Short (whose 542 runs at 60.11 with a strike rate of 153.25 were 180 runs more than the next highest scorer, making him the Cameron Bancroft of T20 cricket). Aaron Hardie scored 334 runs, at a strike rate of127.96, and also had a bowling economy rate among the best in the league. These players, Bailey said, ‘were all part of long conversations’ and surely also journeys, deep dives, hot takes and circle-backs, but where they ultimately landed did not move the needle. Somebody spare us.