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Blind search for another Warne continues |
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Dec 16, 2009 at 12:00 AM |
Shane Warne was a talent so rare that it may be generations before another of his ilk is found.
Yet Australia's blind hope that the national selectors will blithely stumble upon another Warne to carry the torch for spin bowling has never been more evident than in the selection of Steven Smith.
By choosing the cherubic, 20-year-old as back-up to a sore Nathan Hauritz ahead of the third Test against the West Indies at the WACA ground, Andrew Hilditch and his panel were being either exceptionally bold or wilfully reckless, depending on one's perspective.
As a legspinner, Smith is not so much a baby as an embryo, something attested to by his first-class bowling return of 11 wickets at 75.18 from nine matches.
For the selectors to consider Smith ready to play a Test match, which he would have done had Hauritz not made a rapid recovery from his tender right spinning finger, was asking far too much.
As the nation's slow bowling elder statesman Terry Jenner put it: "In my view he's just not ready for this level of cricket, he's just not ready.
"He's a really good talent, but he's got a first-class average of 75.
"It doesn't seem logical for me (to have him around the Australian team yet).
"It is just a bewildering decision, but I guess it puts an end to that speculation about 'Spin Idol', I guess it lays that to rest, because they've shown their hand.
"When he gets everything right, he has a magnificent leg break, and he's still working through that.
"He can't be consistent yet because he's only a kid."
As worrying as the assumption that a player with Smith's modest background could hold his own at cricket's highest level is the fact that his selection made him the eighth slow bowler to hover around the Test team since Warne's retirement.
Apart from the conscientious but limited Hauritz, none were given an extended run of opportunities - certainly nothing like the one afforded to Warne in his earliest days.
It took Warne until his fifth Test, 11 months after his first, to signal his arrival by spinning out 7-52 against the West Indies to win the 1992 Boxing Day match.
Warne's early appearances against India in Sydney and Adelaide were only vaguely promising, and it is possible to speculate that the current selection panel might have missed him.
On the evidence of those matches it is hard to imagine them choosing him for the subsequent tour of Sri Lanka, where Warne developed further.
Instead he might have languished in state cricket with Victoria, where his record was never as stellar as it became at international level.
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