The perils of bits-and-pieces selection

Bits-and-pieces was for many years unofficial English selection policy. For Australians, all through the late-1980s and 90s, it provided an annual source of guaranteed hilarity. Year in, year out, such rare and exotic creatures as David Gower or Jack Russell or Phil Tufnell would be guillotined in favour of, say, Dermot Reeve or Richard Blakey or Robert Croft. Sure, none of Bob, Dick or Dermie could actually bat, bowl or keep with any remote sort of flair. But blimey, the reasoning went, did you know they can turn cartwheels and juggle jam doughnuts - rather too many jam doughnuts, in Croft's case - in their spare time? Let's pick 'em.

As with most British inventions, especially the daft ones, bits-and-pieces selection policy appears belatedly to have caught on in Australia. Yesterday's announcement of the team for Zimbabwe next month - the tour nobody wants to go on but only Stuart MacGill had the balls/morals/mischief to say so - was remarkable for two reasons: the inclusion of someone who has accumulated seven first-class fifties and one five-for but is actually a legspinner (Cameron White), and the exclusion of an explosive, once-a-generation kind of batsman on the grounds that his offbreaks aren't up to scratch (Andrew Symonds). How long till the laugh's on us?

Of course, bits-and-pieces is no overnight flight of madness. It has been seeping in gradually, invisibly almost, for years. MacGill, who boasts the best strike-rate in domestic limited-overs history, has played only three one-day internationals in his life because he bats like a rabbit and doesn't field like a hare. Meanwhile a string of lesser operators - Gavin Robertson, Brad Young, Nathan Hauritz, Brad Hogg - have arrived with a bang and disappeared with a thud.

Darren Lehmann and Simon Katich, two of the happier recent selections, are slyer examples of the ever-creeping bits-and-pieces obsession. Lehmann, despite being picked roughly three years too late, has since reinvented himself as a dextrous and sure-footed, if slightly galumphing, Neil Harvey. Katich has displayed the polish and innovation that was blinkingly obvious to anyone who had seen him make mincemeat of domestic trundlers.

Both, though, were eventually selected not for their bladesmanship but for their two-for-the-price-of-one left-arm dobbers, which deviate half a centimetre this way or that. Their success was down to good luck more than planning. And lest we forget Katich, after his gorgeous maiden hundred against India in Sydney, was promptly shafted for the next two games because Symonds not only bowls a bit of slow stuff but a dollop of medium-pace too.

The emergence of Michael Clarke, whose name was missing for approximately the 217th time from yesterday's team sheet, has thrown the selectors into something of a tailspin. Clarke is the most eyecatchingly gifted young Australian batsman since Greg Chappell. Once upon a time that would have been enough.

Instead the selectors have talked up his left-arm spinners, which are marginal to fair at best, and picked him exclusively in one-dayers. The upshot is that he's played only 37 first-class matches (none of them Tests) across five seasons. That's fewer than 14 hits a year. Logic would normally dictate that when you've unearthed the next Greg Chappell you look after him, not try to turn him into the next Garry Sobers.

Yesterday's biggest loser, however, was not Clarke but Symonds. Nine years ago he thwacked a world-record 16 sixes for Glamorgan, hurtled to 254 in 206 balls, then turned his back on England because he wanted to wear the baggy green. By the time he did, it was for two Tests on Sri Lankan minefields - as unGabbalike surroundings as you could possibly imagine - and his batting was almost an afterthought. He was picked in the cross-your-fingers fantasy that he'd prove a lively medium quick (which he hasn't been in years) and a canny offspinner (which he's never been). He failed. And so we bid farewell to a beautiful waste, a dazzling old-fashioned six-hitter who, like Colin Milburn and David Hookes before him, could have been anything but instead made selectors jumpy.

The winner is Cameron White. According to all reports he's a good kid with a wise head, which he's gonna need, because those same reports describe his legbreaks as strictly unthreatening works in progress. He is a bowler who has been picked for his batting: the quintessential bits-and-pieces option. Still, he has something about him and you'd be silly to rule out a bright future for him. But as with Lehmann and Katich, you suspect the selectors have backed the right man for the wrong reasons.

All this represents an alarming departure from the Australian way. The nuts and bolts of the Border-Taylor-Waugh dynasties, for all their buccaneering strokeplay and bucking of convention, were built of strictly traditional ingredients. Two exceptional openers (invariably a dasher and a grafter), a kick-arse first drop, three freewheeling middle-order bats, one sturdy keeper-batsman or batsman-keeper, three outstanding quicks and a spinner who gives the ball an almighty tweak. It is a surefire winning formula. Australia ignore it at their peril.

Not that bouts of bits-and-pieces lunacy are unheard of round these parts. The late-1970s witnessed the selection of Richie Robinson, Trevor Laughlin and Phil Carlson. The mid-80s gave rise to Roger Woolley, Peter Sleep and, blink and you missed him, Glenn Trimble.

But desperate times demanded drastic steps. Better for today's selectors to remember what happened to England in the late-1980s and 90s. Bits plus pieces equalled loads of rubbish.