You go, Inver

Any day now I’ll assume that ESPNcricinfo is about to help finance my dream film project, which is Billy Elliot meets Harry Potter in the cricket nets at Lord’s. It’s a dream project with crossover appeal and a catchy elevator pitch.

The good news is that Cricket Australia is also helping me cast it. For a while I was never quite sure whom to cast as the wise, smooth, stately and distinguished head of the dancing cricket-wizard academy, but now I do. It’s clearly John Inverarity.

His performance as chairman of selectors has made every press conference from Cricket Australia in the last 20 years seem like a community meat raffle. And it wasn’t just the sensible clothes, reassuring white hair or even the glasses poised delicately on his nose. It was what he said, how he said it, and how he selected. Somehow in one press conference he gave Cricket Australia an intellectual panache that Andrew Hilditch couldn’t touch if Norman Mailer ghosted his press releases.

Inverarity didn’t even have the look of abject fear that his predecessors had when facing the media, and considering his last Test series ended with a draw against a team Australia thinks of as its special-needs cousin, he has plenty to fear. Instead, he was calmness personified, looking like he was about to go antique-ing after the presser to look for a new armoire. This is clearly not the usual sort of Australian cricket official. He probably even knows the differences between schizophrenia and multiple-personality disorder.

His selections were just as wise as he looked and sounded. Ed Cowan was brought in because he can play the moving ball, is in form, and knows his game. There was no panic selection of a pimply child who bats with a technique that wouldn’t survive the pressure of a desk fan. Cowan was the right man. Inverarity made sure by forcing Cricket Australia to play him against the Indians, and then he picked him for his struggling Test team. The coach, Mickey Arthur, wanted an allrounder, so Inverarity found the most in-form allrounder and put him in the squad.

It sounds like the job he was supposed to perform, but being the chairman of selectors of a team that has just thrown a series win away is not that easy. Especially when you are dropping the two project players of the last administration.

Everything about these decisions reeked of the new way Cricket Australia do things. A player of aboriginal heritage who isn’t really a specialist in either discipline being picked as an allrounder. And an opening batsman who is actually an opening batsman and an intellectual (no ghost writers needed), who blocks before breathing. Those things aren’t common for Australian players of recent times

This is the Inverarity touch. It’s smooth and well developed, more like a single malt from the highlands than some of the whisky-and-cola-in-a-cans of recent times.

There will be tougher decisions than picking these for Inverarity. Ponting, Hussey and Haddin are not going to go as quietly as Hughes and Khawaja have. And Inverarity has not yet been attacked for walking a dog, or not knowing what state a player comes from.

He still has time to make some great mistakes. Who knows, he may yet pick Simon Katich as vice-captain under Michael Clarke. Or encourage Nathan Hauritz to bowl leggies. Even when he does, he knows there is a role for him in my film, and if Shane Warne has taught us anything, it’s that everyone in cricket just wants to be a movie star.