Good for him.

Perhaps in ten years with then gaping puss ridden wounds of Australian cricket have healed, people will look back and say, “hey, that Hilditch was fun, why can’t we have fun people like that now”.

Of all the chairman of selectors I’ve grown up with, he was the one most likely to be found in a back alley in Adelaide, naked, stabbed, pissed on and generally defiled by some spinner who was done over.

Perhaps that will be Hilditch’s lasting legacy, showing us that via picking people who are just not ready for test cricket, and then fucking them over, you can send a Beau or Nathan into a spiraling shitfall of despair.

He’s less a selector and more a social activist, showing us what can go wrong with society through elaborate 5 year pranks.

It’s only fair to Hilditch that you pause to remember the good times.

Are you finished, good.

The entire mess that Australian Cricket finds itself in wasn’t Hilditch’s fault, no man has given his employers more reasons to fire him than Hilditch.

You could argue that Steve Smith playing as a number six was Hilditch’s attempt at Cricket Australia assisted seppuku. It was the loudest and saddest cry for help, tear and urine stained Hilditch publicly wept, and no one did a thing.

Waugh and Border are not known as sympathetic men, but rather than cover up for Hilditch’s many, many errors, they have done the kindly thing and gently pushed him out.

Sure it would have been more fun if Border broke into his house at 2AM and beat him to death with a Duncan Fearnely, but sadly those days of Australian cricket are over.

Hilditch’s demise is a weird moment for me; I spent so much time pointing out his various farcical selections and statements, that I almost feel sadness on his departure.

In many ways, Hilditch was my muse, he was one of the reasons I wanted to blog in the first place, and sometimes I felt as if he was saying things just for me.

It’s a personal relationship between asshole provocateur and the dude that pisses him off. I mean, without Hilditch, where would I be, who would I be, what world would we live in.

Hilditch has changed me, he made me become the bitter sarcastic shell of a man I’m proud to be. Without him I’d still be all those things, but he amped them up, and gave justification for feeling that way. I can never thank him enough for that.

As for me changing him, I’d like to think that hasn’t happened. I think of Hilditch as pure form of Hilditch, unaffected by any outside elements.

For better, and mostly worse, the world needs a Hilditch, even if Australian cricket never did.

Buy my version of the argus review, it’s funner.

Now he has been told he is not required or good enough to get into the list of best 25 cricketers in the country.

According to some media outlets, he’s angry.

I bet he is.

I imagine he has made a list, and those on that list will be dealt with in an ugly yet effective way.

Simon Katich’s death list may never be found, but in the next few weeks we may start hearing stories like this.

David – found naked in a bathtub having been force fed 52 cans of beer, still in the can. Boon’s body is a lumpy mess, and his moustache has been carved off his face with a knife.

Jamie Cox – a corpse is found in a local men’s hairdressers having been stabbed with tiny blunt scissors over 18614 times. It doesn’t make the national news.

Andrew – a transsexual prostitute corpse is found in a lawfirm office, it’s been strangled, or shot, no one is sure, and the story keeps changing.

Greg – the head of a man is found, near by is a wide bring hat with razors on the brim.

Michael – the body of a man is found at a trendy cafe on a sydney beach, it’s quite clear to officials that it’s been choked by an Australian flag.

Personally I think Katich should have been dropped, but if I ever meet him or have any contact with him at all I’ll tell him that his dropping was the biggest mistake I’ve seen by Australian selectors, then I’d buy him a beer and tell him how I used to troll some cricket blog who used to make fun of him.

The team, selectors, coach, marketers and administracrats were all completely out of form.

Had it not been for one man, I would have given up forever.

That man was Philip Pope.

Unless you are deep inside the cricket bowels, you may not know Philip (known as the popester).

While Cricket Australia say his job is in their media department, he is actually far more than that.

He lubes up Shane Watson for photo shoots, ghost writes Michael Clarke’s tweets, picks out which white shirt James Sutherland will wear, tells Tim Nielsen that Ricky respects him, ties Peter Young’s bow-ties, nods when ricky is yelling, proof reads Michael Hussey’s latest buddy cop thriller and programs the Andrew Hilditch atari brain for each day.

It’s clearly too much for any normal man, but the popester is no ordinary man.

He’s an official with a cape. If they put him out on the ground he would have ground out a plucky, yet ugly 30 odd at the G.

Leaving Australia I felt slightly better knowing the Australian Cricket team was being serviced by him. Australia was hurting, but in the soft and generous hands of the popester, it would heal, grow and come back.

Then Andrew Hilditch said excellent, and all my faith in Philip Pope came crashing down.

According to Cricket Australia, it was Pope who said Nathan Hauritz’s form in India was excellent, proving me right that Hilditch has an atari for a brain, and breaking my heart knowing that the popester had been broken trying to hold up all the other men around him.

You can’t blame him, even a super official needs some help, and when trying to cover up the gaps in Australia’s sieve, he was bound to mess up something along the way. For all his victories he never got an opentop bus or a cooking show on cable TV, but his first mistake, ever, is plastered around the world as a sign of his incompetence.

It hurts me to see one of the greats go down, but I know he’ll come back, because that is what champions do.

According to Peter Young, Hilditch signed off (read; atari brain was programmed) on the comments before a 4am flight from Adelaide to Sydney.

There is no 4am flight from Adelaide to Sydney scheduled by any airline I know of.

So we can only assume the popester, as part of his CA duties, flies a Dash 8 when VIP CA people need it.

Maybe he does, because he is the popester, and even if he stuffed up once, I back him to bring this Australian team back to the glory times.

If anyone can, the popester can.

I’m now visualising the popester getting carried around the ground by Ricky and Clarke, as the crowd go wild for him, only to jump off their shoulders, straighten is CA approved tracksuit, and then get to bed early for some rest before taking Sutherland to Perth on a 3am flight.

This modified atari brain reads the papers, follows Warne’s twitter feed and writes a name that Greg Chappell types into him.

My opinion has many so called pieces of evidence, but my favourites are the spinners like Beau Casson, Nathan Hauritz, and Michael Beer.

Beau Casson was picked even though a look at him when riding your unicycle as he drove past in a car would tell you he didn’t have the mental stength to place test cricket.

Nathan Hauritz was picked when the New South Wales selectors didn’t believe he was good enough for them. He was then dropped when he finally believed he was good enough (before an Ashes losing test), brought back to suceed (for him) and then was dropped for a poor left arm version of himself, and has now been brought back because every other spinner in the country seems to have had their go.

Michael Beer was picked because Warne said he was good, Hilditch had no idea where he was from or anything about him at all. I could get six blokes from any cricket club and put them in a line up with Michael Beer and he’d need two chances to pick him out of the line up.

Hilditch could be a real functioning human being who occasionally says something that makes no sense to back up his latest mistake. He may not even make mistakes, perhaps there are no mistakes, and everything is just part of a larger interrelationship matrix that keeps the world hurtling to some sort of a disappointing conclusion. See how opinions open things up. What is a mistake, can you make them, is Hilditch made of them, etc.

Today Hilditch has picked Hauritz, again, and said this, “his one-day record in India is excellent”.

Excellent is Hilditch’s opinion. Nothing more. The man was asked a question and came up with an answer. Excellent isn’t concrete, it’s just an adjective used to explain why Nathan Hauritz has been brought back randomly again.

Just like Hilditch can rubbish my opinion on him having a modified atari making his decisions (mistakes), I can rubbish his opinion of using the word excellent when discussing Hauritz’s Indian one day form.

In seven one dayers in India Hauritz has taken four wickets at 70. He has an economy of 4.56.

It’s not terrible, saying this is excellent is better than saying Andrew Hilditch’s recent selections have been excellent, it just isn’t excellent. It could be described as ok, mediocre, not bad, far from exciting or meh. Excellent is a ways away from all of these.

Peter English‘s opinion is “To call Hauritz’s India record “excellent” shows how little knowledge the chairman has of his subjects.”

Surely if Andrew Hilditch was a human who was in charge of selection he would know the players records well enough that if when asked he wouldn’t call a decidedly average record excellent.

So he must have a modified atari for a brain. It’s only an opinion, but it makes more sense than anything Hilditch has done in a long time, in my opinion.

Mitchell Johnson said that Mitchell Johnson had been dropped.

Andrew Hilditch said Michael Beer would play and his knowledge of the WACA would be important.

Michael Beer didn’t play and Ponting has now said his knowledge of the conditions of Melbourne will help.

There are even rumours that the four man pace attack was not a plan but more an accident.  Like Michael Beer’s selection.

Australia won this test.

I mean really won.

Smashed by an innings and coming back to win by over 200 runs.

How is it possible that this team with this band of merry muppets who don’t even seem to know what is going on around them can win a test so easily.

Especially when they not only beat England, but also the momentum of the Adelaide win.

I like to think that Australia beat England and Greg Chappell beat the momentum. It is his windmill and he rode that donkey straight for it.

Unfortunately the donkey still might not play next game, it was always going to be rested.

Australia’s squad was just about as good as it could be, and for Hilditch, it was quite daring.  Going in with three strike bowlers who can all be quite wayward and a 20 year old untried leggie was a pretty bold move for someone once went trawling through the Sydney grade cricket bargain bins for a defensive spin option.

Hilditch must have realised that his previous T20 squads were pretty rubbish, so with this one he tried to get the best line up he could. Other than Harris coming in for Bollinger when Lee was injured there was no real problems in the squad that I had, other than one.

The captain.

Picking Michael Clarke as captain was a political appointment rather than a selection on merit.  Obviously on merit the better T20 cricketer whose team wins T20 tournaments for fun, Cam White, would have been the captain.

Instead Clarke was appointed as captain because one day he will be test captain, and while I understand the logic (even if the thought of all this sickens me), what is the point of making someone captain of a form of cricket they suck at? How can Clarke, newly separated from a glamour python, be expected to take over his first Australian team in the one form of cricket he has never been any good at?

Had he taken over the one day side, given Ponting even more time to prepare for the short balls he will face in test matches, it would make sense.  Clarke is class in One Day cricket. He would have taken over a side that he has been a successful part of for hyears and wouldn’t have had to worry about improving his form just to get picked.

In T20 cricket Clarke is an albatross made of excrement.  His batting is pathetically bad, his strike rate is worse than that and his only redeeming feature is that his arms don’t look bad in those stupid green arm stockings they are forced to wear.

Now that Clarke has proved his bad form to the world with the bat (and his captaincy wasn’t exactly Mike Brearly like either) in the T20, the easy, and probably correct decision would be to give White the role.  It seems the main reason not to give White the role at this stage is that he might be good at it. That will make Clarke’s promotion harder to justify.

It is clear that Hilditch is still not prepared to take pick the best T20 side and this is why he has given the role to someone who all but claimed he shouldn’t be picked.

Clarke’s continued selection means that T20 cricket is not being taken seriously by Australia, and is actually being seen as a development format.  Which is fine, if they take it seriously as a development format.

I don’t really care that much about T20, if Australia got bundled out of every tournament early, and won every test series I’d be more than happy.  But don’t do it fucken half assed.  Don’t pick a good T20 squad a lumber it without a project captain.

Drop anyone over 28 other than Clarke.  Bring in Starc, Wade, Marsh, Keath, Pattinson, Hazelwood and Cutting.  Make sure all these guys are used to International cricket so that one day they may flourish in the test arena.

Either develop or take it seriously, Hilditch, don’t do both badly.

Shane Watson has gone out LBW 6 out of his last 7 test innings, and has also gone out after a break 4 times during that period.

Who has the weakness?

Watson has a vastly superior looking technique than Hughes’ technique of looking like he is a glass doll being dropped from the second floor.

But Watson’s test average can’t even look up at Hughes’ average.

Watson has no test century, since coming in as opener he is yet to take a wicket in three tests, and keeps going out the same way.

Phil Hughes must be beside himself, and beside himself there must be Chris Rogers and Phil Jacques who are beside him who is… you know.

The Australian batting line up makes no sense. A middle order batsman and a number three open the batting, and an opening batsman at number four.

The one resource that Australia seems to have in reserve is opening batsmen, yet both their openers are manufactured. It just doesn’t make sense.

Hilditch may like to think of himself as some wacky experimental scientist mixing up random potions and hoping for a good outcome.

There are simple ways around this, swap Hussey for Watson, and see how that goes.

Or drop Hussey, bring back in a proper opener, move Clarke to 4 and Watson to 5. Watson doesn’t have to change the way he plays then.

Or drop Watson until there is a spot in the middle order where his bowling can actually be used, and bring in an opening batsman, there is a pile of them at the door.

What I expect Hilditch to do is bring in a second keeper in the place of North, open the batting with Mitchell Johnson, move Hussey to number 8 and wait for the magic to happen.

I just want to know what Phil Hughes thinks of all this, oh for the glory days when he was tweeting the inner workings of his mind.

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“Cricket Australia has reappointed Andrew Hilditch as the chairman of the national selection panel until the end of the 2011 World Cup.

Hilditch was retained despite Australia’s 2-1 series loss to England in this year’s Ashes series.

Hilditch has been chairman of selectors since 2006 and a selector since 2000.”

The bastards slipped this in.

I thought he was supposed to be fired, not reinstated for years.

Then:

“I have not really thought too much about (Nannes’ move to Holland), to be honest”.

“Nannes’ performances have been good at domestic level but we are fortunate enough at this time to have some very good international bowlers available, as we had hoped. We feel we have the right flexibility in our squad with the players we have.”

Now:

“We are keen to look at different players as specialist T20 players in these two matches and in this instance we have selected Dirk Nannes following his strong domestic performances in recent seasons to have a look at him in the Australian set up.”

This is a terrible situation, but Andrew Hilditch and I have been working on a plan.

The raelians are experimenting in cloning, so Andrew and I flew over to nevada, and gave them the coccyx of Tiger Bill O’Reilly.

Being that this is still an experiment, there have been problems.

The First Tiger Bill clone could only bowl long hops with a ridiculous slingy side on action, the second one bowled shit, but did spend hours explaining why he should be picked, and the third bowled ok but stole Andrew’s wallet.

At this stage we are expecting them to have perfected Tiger Bill in time for the 2nd test.