The chairman of the selection committee of the Australian cricket team, Rodney Marsh, has said that the Australian ODI and T20 squad is pretty young and the team would go from strength to strength in the upcoming 3 or 4 years. The recent performances of the Australian T20 and ODI team are quite poor. The Australian team lost the ODI series against England a couple of months back by 4-0. It was a 5 match series and one game got washed out by rain. It means that Australia was defeated in all the 4 official games. So, it was a kind of white wash. The Australian team used to dominate in ODI cricket in the era of Adam Gilchrist, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath. But, after the retirement of all these great players, the Australian team hasn’t been able to dominate the other teams at the international level.
After the retirement of Gilchrist, Brad Haddin was given the opportunity to fill in Gili’s shoes. But, he was pretty inconsistent in his performances and was dropped from the team last year. Haddin’s replacement, Matthew Wade, has batted well in a few matches, but, he hasn’t been able to match the dashing style of Gilchrist at the top of the order. However, Marsh seemed to be impressed with the performance of Wade so far. He said that Wade is an aggressive opening batsman, but, he would have to tighten his technique a bit against the spinners. Gili was very good against the spinners and he used to attack them by going down the track. Wade should also do the same against the spinners.
On being asked about the lack of a quality spinner in the Australian ODI side, Marsh said that Australia has got a good spinner in the form of Xavier Doherty. He has been doing quite well, but, he would have to take a few more wickets. He is one of the best spinners in Australia at the moment and the team has massive hopes with him in the future.