3rd TEST AUST. v SAF.

Wait and see approach here for me. Got no idea what will be happening. Too many ????? all over the park.

 

Starting with

 

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(QUOTE) What happens if Hayden gets an UGLY 50+???

It's not often in cricket that it's good to make wholesale changes but if ever there was a time it is now in the third test of a lost series. Why is Hayden still in the side? If he fails in this test then a new opener will have to come in at the start of a new series. If he succeeds then he may hang around for another year or so and just as a new side is getting settled they will have to blood a new opener. All the selectors have done is ensure that the rebuilding will take longer than it should.

The other glaring problem that they will never have the guts to address is that Ponting is a great bat but a lousy captain. When he had McGrath, Warne, Gilchrist etc in his side his flaws weren't exposed but whenever Australia has been put under pressure in the last couple of years he has been shown to have poor man management skills, be bad-tempered, indecisive and lacking tactical nous.

Now he is having to cope with what most other current international captains have had to deal with over the years and he has paled by comparison with most of them. He still had some reasonable batting and bowling resources at his disposal in the first two tests and in India, Most of his contemporaries would have done a far better job of marshalling those resources. As long as he remains captain I predict that Australia will never regain the number one spot that they have lost in all but name and are likely to lose that by Wednesday.

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