Brad Haddin should be a worried man. If the incongruously named National Selection Panel can be as ruthless as it has with Ricky Ponting, what do they have in store for the iron-gloved keeper?
A man with 375 one day caps to his name, the best Australian batsman since Bradman and someone who despite failing in the CB Series is just coming off a double hundred in his last Test innings has been cast aside. Haddin would do well to nervously watch his back.
Rather ironically for a man for who the sound of quacking has frequently accompanied his return to the pavilion after another brief and fruitless visit to the crease in recent times, Haddin is being lined up as a dead duck by the NSP (which without pressing the point is a preposterous name for the selectors – one on a par with Andre Villas-Boas annoying misuse and overuse of the word ‘project’ in relation to his crumbling reign at Chelsea).
First, Haddin was being ‘rested’ for the T20 matches with India, then his ‘break’ was extended to the first three one dayers amidst talk of how the selectors were keen for him to go on until the back-to-back Ashes series next year.
Now though and partially hidden at the back-end of the announcement of Ponting’s culling, was sinister news for Haddin. Not only did the NSP nail their colours firmly to the mast of Matthew Wade as their first choice limited overs keeper, they also confirmed that Wade would be part of the Test squad for the forthcoming tour of the Caribbean.
Haddin, whose hold on his place was already tenuous thanks to some erratic performance behind the stumps and in front of them given his Test average of just 23 since the beginning of 2011, must know that the game is up if he is being honest with himself. Perhaps that accounts for his pair in New South Wales’s crushing defeat against Western Australia in the Sheffield Shield at the weekend.
He may have famously described India as fragile in the recent series but it is Haddin who has been dressed up in suspenders, had an orange plonked in his mouth and a belt tightened around his neck by the NSP. He is clearly a dead duck waddling, but will Inverarity pull the trigger before Haddin tastes peel?
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