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the keyhole of six-inch-thick steel double doors separated by a moat from the Australian team's gated compound where the fences are topped with barbed wire.
    But therein may lie the problem. Australian cricket now wears such a banal, expressionless face that it leaves the journalists to make their own suppositions, while the choreographed denials invite the scepticism of Mandy Rice-Davies: 'Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?' The other factor is that, just for once, two teams are about to undertake a Test series with a reasonable period of preparation and premeditation. Such hiatuses demand interim narratives, preliminary judgements, questions to be answered, answers to be questioned. There actually used to be more of this. Nowadays the calendar is so congested that speculation is usually the stuff of a day or two at best. Is Ponting finished? Oh, now he's got some runs. Is Steve Smith a top-class leg-spinner? Errr, no. Nothing puts rumour and innuendo to flight like real runs and wickets – and it's not long to wait now.
17 NOVEMBER 2010
AUSTRALIA'S SQUAD
17 Again
    Bismarck commented famously that there were two things the public must never see made: sausages and laws. Had he known of the game, he would surely have added cricket teams. Albeit unintentionally, Cricket Australia has just demonstrated why.
    For some time, CA has been squirming about the encroachments of the football codes on summer. Although of limited actual significance, the Australian Football League's national draft has come close to eclipsing concurrent cricket news; the League's PR flaks boast of 'owning' November, and not idly.
    Thus the scheme, driven by CA's marketing department, of bringing forward the selection of the Australian team for the First Test, just ahead of the draft, and turning it into a public event, in the lunch hour at Sydney's bustling Circular Quay, in sight of the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and various other visual clichés. Ricky Ponting and some of his men could also be presented to the media, and even mingle with the public – a rare experience for them nowadays, when for much of the time the players might as well be holograms.
    Unfortunately, the days when the Australian cricket team chose itself are a thing of the past; likewise the era when Australian cricketers were physically susceptible only to kryptonite. The selectors, chaired by Andrew Hilditch, did not want to commit themselves. Three Sheffield Shield games loomed. New South Wales were hosting Tasmania at the SCG, Queensland entertaining South Australia at the Gabba, Victoria tackling Western Australia at the MCG. Likewise was Australia A due to throw the gauntlet down to England at Bellerive Oval in Hobart. It made as much sense to announce the Test team so ahead of time as it did to include whodunit in the programme for The Mousetrap.
    So it wasn't only the climate that made the event a damp squib. When the moment came that only a handful of spectators were waiting for, Hilditch temporised. He started to read. The list went on … and on. It stopped at last, almost arbitrarily, at seventeen names. Tension? You could barely have heard a piano drop. As a moment of buttock-clenching bathos, it ranked with the England and Wales Cricket Board preening themselves around Allen Stanford's box of bucks. Ricky Ponting doesn't faze easily, but even he was nonplussed: 'It's a different feel. Unfortunately, that's what we've got. For some reason, Cricket Australia wanted to name the squad as early as they have. We've just got to get on with it.'
    In fact, it was the selectors who needed to be getting on with things, winnowing this down to something more properly resembling a cricket team – as indeed they will. In one sense, it was quite an instructive exercise, like watching the rushes of a film or reading the first draft of a book. One was admitted to the selection process at a preliminary stage, with all compositional options still open, and before the