I feel that the Australian cricket team is in the same place the Socceroos were when Holger resigned. We were too reliant on older, complacent, underperforming players, and were playing without pride or mongrel. Postecoglou brought through the next generation of players before they were really ready - it was very painful at first, but in the medium term we ended up winning a huge piece of silverware. 

One policy that needs to die quickly is picking batsmen over the age of 32 to make their debut. If it works, we get maybe 3-4 useful years out of them. If they fail after one series, that's wasted time we could have spent giving a younger player an opportunity. 

We've tried this "pick an older batsman policy" for about 8 years, and so far the only success stories are Michael Hussey (who debuted at 30 and should have been picked earlier) and Chris Rogers (who was great but only for 25 tests). In the same time we've had Shaun Marsh, Callum Ferguson and Voges, all of whom have been failures to various degrees. We also hung on to Watson and Haddin for too long. We even had Joe Burns come in and score two hundreds, before he had two bad games in Sri Lanka and the selectors went back to Shaun Marsh. What the fuck?

We have paid the penalty for not picking young batsmen. If you look at the top batsmen in the world right now - Kohli, Williamson, Root and Smith, they all got picked in the test squad before the age of 25 - in some cases as young as 21. Clarke got picked really young, got dropped, then fixed up his game and came back the best batsman in the world. So did Smith. And Khawaja. Kane Williamson averaged under 35 for the first two years, but they stuck with him and now he's the finest batsman New Zealand have produced since Martin Crowe. 

How good would Bancroft, Burns, Handscombe, Jake Lehmann or countless others be now if they'd been given more of an opportunity earlier? If they fail, so be it. But at least they'll learn something from the experience of failing, and they'll still have time to go back to Shield cricket and fix it. As much as I ragged on Mitchell Marsh, at least the selectors gave him a chance to fail. 

When the Pakistan series comes around I'd like to see the selectors drop Voges, Ferguson, Nevill, Siddle, and maybe Mennie, and pick some really young guys to replace them.