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ESPNcricinfo staff
January 9, 2012
Cricket Australia believes its rotation policy will strengthen the side by giving greater opportunities to young players. Pat Howard, CA's general manager of high performance, has outlined a plan to ensure the best players are available for major series, although he said it was important not to enter any series with a sub-standard side for the sake of resting players.
"We do look at different series differently and obviously we took the Indian series very much about trying to drive performance, so if a player was touch and go, we'd probably push him for this series knowing that if we had to rest him for part of the ODI series so be it," Howard told the Age. "For New Zealand we took more of a conservative approach, took the chance to get people right.
"There are risks associated with that and we have to keep that balance. Without question we want to win every series and we're never going to go in with a B-team against anybody, that's for sure. But we will take the opportunity to introduce players and with the downside of losing Hobart the upside is that we got to see David Warner at his best. At times we will take educated risks during a series to maintain overall opportunity to introduce players."
Warner, Mitchell Starc and James Pattinson all made their Test debuts during the recent series against New Zealand, with Pattinson and Warner both making strong contributions. However, Howard said had Australia not been willing to try the new men during the two-Test series, Pattinson might still be on the fringe.
"James Pattinson is a well-regarded player now but going into that series he wouldn't have been considered top of the tree," Howard said. "You've got to take the chance to introduce these players and find out. Some people say, 'is this the best player'? Well the selectors believe they have the potential to be, and in James Pattinson's case that has proven very right.
"For India, it was very much about trying to get the best players on the field. We knew Ryan Harris would be injected at some stage during the [India] series so we kept him and Mitchell Starc very close to the team, knowing the likelihood we would lose a player or two during the series."
Australia will be without Pattinson in the third Test against India in Perth due to his foot injury, but it has emerged that he was likely to be rested anyway, following his heavy workload over the past four Tests. Howard said there had even been consideration of resting Pattinson for the Sydney Test.
"We'd monitored his workload and knew that the time was coming for James and it was either going be the second or third Test that was going to be a pretty novel time for his workload," Howard said. "He's 21 years of age and we've got about three years of data on him, and we knew that would be around about the time.
"It was a really touch-and-go decision for Perth but even for Sydney. He was obviously in very good form and we thought we'd go ahead and give him the best chance. We'd been planning for James to miss that and coincide with Ryan's availability as well."
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