Craig O’Donoghue: If Marnus Labuschagne plays for Australia in second Test, it will expose double standards

There’s a huge double standard in Australian cricket selection and it surrounds the myth that players need to be banging down the door to justify replacing someone who is out of form in the Test team. It’s been said that Australia can’t drop Marnus Labuschagne despite recent scores of 10, 1*, 3, 5, 1, 2, 90, 6, 2 and 3 because nobody is scoring enough runs at the lower level to replace him. Well, there are 13 men who are averaging more than 40 in the Sheffield Shield this season after having at least five innings. Forty doesn’t sound like a great benchmark…that is until you realise that Labuschagne averaged 39.75 in the Shield during the season before he made his Test debut. He followed that with scores of 60, 37 and then a pair of ducks in the two four-day games between Australia A and India A just one month before his Test debut. He didn’t bang down the door for his original opportunity. A recent average of 39.75 was good enough to pick him but it’s not enough for someone else to replace him. Figure that out. Labuschagne was picked largely on potential when Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were suspended following sandpaper-gate, and then Matt Renshaw was struck in the head during the lead-up game. He wasn’t always at the forefront of the selection panel’s minds. Labuschange was more picked for depth and to get experience in an extended squad because he’d scored two Shield centuries after the mid-season break for the Big Bash. But he’d also been dismissed for less than 30 in more than half of his innings during the time. They were nice stats. But he wasn’t banging down the door. He was in the right place at the right time. As mentioned, Warner was banned for 12 months which meant he couldn’t be picked. But Warner’s Test debut was based on his amazing white-ball form. He wasn’t banging down the door in the Sheffield Shield because he barely played in that competition. Selectors loved what they saw in white-ball cricket, felt a small sample size of red-ball cricket was enough evidence he could play, so they threw him in and he seized his chance. What about some bowlers? Let’s try Nathan Lyon. He’d played four Shield games ever. He wasn’t banging down the door. Surely that’s an outlier though, right? No. Pat Cummins played three Shield games and took nine wickets at an average of 46.33 before making his Test debut. His best Shield figures were 3/118. Selectors saw something in Cummins and Lyon that made them look beyond stats. Lyon took 5/34 on Test debut. Cummins took 6/79 when he first donned the baggy green cap. Steve Smith is another great example of a player who earned his opportunity without doing a lot in the middle at a lower level. He spent more than two years in the Sheffield Shield after getting dropped from the Test team in 2011. Smith averaged 37 in the 2012/13 Shield season and didn’t score a single century but was picked for the tour of India because the selectors felt he’d be good on a spinning wicket. When given a chance midway through the tour of India after Australia lost the first two Tests and four players were punished for not doing their homework (remember that?), he scored 92 and it set him on his way. So sometimes selectors trust their eye and other times they expect mega form. But they’re also prepared to ignore horrible form if a player is established. That sort of inconsistent selection policy must drive players crazy. Then again, Australian Chairman of Selectors George Bailey wasn’t picked for Test cricket on the back of red ball form. He scored 19, 32, 20, 11 and 21 in the Shield games before his Test debut in November 2013 but was dominating one day cricket with scores of 82, 87, 85, 92 not out, 98 and 156 across September and October. Dropping Labuschange won’t be a declaration that his career is over. It will be recognition that he’s struggling and needs to play at a lower level to find form. It will send a message to every player throughout the country that nobody has a mortgage on their position in the team. Most good players will hit form at some point if you keep ignoring their failures. Warner averaged 20.6 during 2022 but the selectors kept playing him. Then he scored 200 in the Boxing Day test before following up by averaging just 22.8 for his next 16 innings. One big score doesn’t mean a return to form. But it does mean the selectors will use it as a reason to not make change for several more months. Selectors have already made it clear that they don’t care about batting positions because they’ve recently chosen Smith and Nathan McSweeney to open ahead of Shield players who do that job every match. History also tells us that there’s no consistent selection criteria to get into the team because sometimes they want Shield form, sometimes they rate white ball form, sometimes they’re looking for youth and sometimes they overlooking Shield form based on previous Test performances. If selectors keep Labuschagne in the team now after only one score above 10 from his last 10 Test innings, players throughout the country can justifiably ask how long they should be expected to accept inconsistency and double standards.