We don't need another review - Sutherland

James Sutherland, the Cricket Australia chief executive, has denied the game down under is in need of another comprehensive review of its operations, structures and philosophies despite what he called a "very significant fall from grace" dating back to the start of the Sri Lanka tour in July.

On the day Rod Marsh resigned as selection chairman in the wake of the Test team's fifth consecutive heavy defeat and second in a row at home, Sutherland stated in the face of questions about his own future that "it's my responsibility to lead the people to turn this around".

He admitted that the team's preparation for the summer had to be re-examined, as did succession planning around the retirements that followed the 2015 Ashes. But Sutherland also stressed his belief that the game overall was in far better shape than it had been in 2011, and denied that he and CA had been too commercially focused at the expense of the national team's progress.

That year, the review of the game led by the former BHP chairman Don Argus brought in a raft of changes to Cricket Australia, and Sutherland maintained its principles and outcome had been sound in the face of criticism from the likes of the former captain Ian Chappell.

"I don't think there needs to be another review," Sutherland said. "I think [the Argus review] provides a pretty good blueprint or at least a strong reference point for us to have a look at where we've come from and where we are now.

"Some of the issues or challenges are short term in and around the existing team and others are perhaps more long term as we look through the cricketing challenges that we have both internationally but also domestically.

"I think that proper process in terms of management tells me that you need to look very closely at your strategy first and what you're trying to do. You then look at the structure to support that strategy and then you look at the people. This is clearly an opportunity for us to have a closer look.

"We're pretty clear on strategy - we want our teams to be No.1 in the world, men and women in all forms of the game. We need to need to have a look to make sure that we've got the right structures to support that and obviously people come after that."

During the Hobart Test, Sutherland had defended the team's preparation, but now changed tack. "Preparation is something that we'll definitely have a closer look at," he said. "The South Africans from memory had one [two-day] pink ball match and one short two-day red-ball match when they came into Australia.

"The discussions we had with team performance and the team itself as to what was the ideal preparation, given the circumstances of playing the one-day series in South Africa beforehand. What we arrived at was the Shield cricket that we played. We knew that was a difficult situation with the Test series starting as early as it did and I said in that [ABC Radio] interview there's nothing ideal and nothing perfect about preparation.

"Preparation is not just about the team, it's actually about the individual. We had that conversation with team management yesterday to try and understand which players we feel did not have the right preparation coming into the series. And the answer to that was very much around those players that were managing injuries were the ones that were most challenged by it."

Asked whether there was any scope for the Australian team and the coach Darren Lehmann to have more input regarding scheduling, Sutherland reflected that he was as much at the mercy of bilateral requirements as the team were. CA are leading a push to change the structure of international cricket to take on league structures and also reduce the overall volume of matches played.

"There are things about the schedule that I would like to change but they're very difficult to change," he said. "It's not just from a team performance perspective it's also about our obligations to deliver content, to our grounds, to our state associations, to media partners and others. On balance we work through that and make decisions on what we think is best.

"It may or may not be an issue in terms of the Australian team getting bowled out for [85] in the first innings of a Hobart Test match. No-one can tell me or guarantee that is actually the case because there are plenty of summers gone by where we've had a similar preparation to the season and done well. But we haven't this time and that gives cause for us to challenge ourselves on how we prepare our players."

Plenty of the spotlight has fallen on the Sheffield Shield competition, once the envy of the world but now increasingly marginalised by the growth of the Twenty20 Big Bash League at the heart of the summer. "It's hard to measure but clearly there is quite a lot of discussion around whether it still is or not," Sutherland said when asked whether it remained the game's pre-eminent domestic competition.

"I don't think it's a matter so much of comparison, it's a matter of whether Shield cricket is performing the role that Australian cricket needs it to right now. I think that's part of a discussion that we need to have internally, in regard to how Shield cricket is supported, where it fits in the schedule and the role that it plays in producing Australian Test cricketers in the future."