Harriet Williamson in The Independent
Theresa May is visiting India this week cup in hand, to ask for a favourable post-Brexit trade deal. There’s arrogance in May’s return to Britain’s former colony, expectant that India will come up with the goods, but ultimately, the move shows how much the tables have turned.
Many people, particularly in my grandparents’ generation, still view British imperialism and empire with a dewy-eyed longing. The reality is, of course, that British rule in India caused the deaths of millions of people through administrative failure and imperialist cruelty. Numerous famines, outbreaks of cholera, the arbitrary and rushed drawing of the border between India and the newly-created Pakistan, mass-displacement, and the destruction of India’s cottage industries left the country impoverished and unstable.
Imperialism set India up as both Britain’s workhouse and convenient marketplace, and when India finally gained independence, it was reduced to one of the world’s poorest economies. For Britain to come begging now that we’ve made such a mess of things with our yet-undefined Brexit, opposed by 48.1 per cent of the electorate, is laughable.
Although a number of the more vehemently right-wing newspapers chose to focus on May’s ‘hardball’ stance on immigration during her visit, they didn’t pick up on the incongruity of the Prime Minister haggling over “Indians with no right to remain in the UK” whilst hankering after a lucrative trade deal.
At a tech summit in Delhi, May was pressured by business leaders including Sir James Dyson and Karan Bilimoria, founder of Cobra beer, to welcome more skilled Indian workers and students to Britain. The Government’s current position seems to involve the hope that India will still sign a cushy deal with us, while we crack down on Indians in Britain who’ve outstayed their frosty welcome.
The political conversation in Britain has, despite the influence of Corbyn, shifted perceptibly to the right. May knows that to keep the would-be-Ukippers and Brexit-devotees onside, she must act ‘tough on those foreign people’ despite surely recognising that she cannot turn back the clock on globalization.
The isolationist, shut-the-door sentiments that brought us Brexit are not going to serve Britain well when it comes to making international trade agreements, and to belief otherwise is a self-important indulgence that we can no longer afford. We live, for better or worse, in an interconnected world, and the issue of migration cannot be wiped off the table during trade discussions.
India wants access to the UK labour market for skilled workers, and the UK government wants to pander to the narrative that immigrants are an unnecessary scourge on our increasingly less green and pleasant land. On the basis of this impasse, a free trade agreement seems like a childish fantasy.
I wouldn’t blame India for putting up two fingers to Theresa May and Britain.
'People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right - especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.' Thomas Sowell
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Wednesday, 9 November 2016
European Parliament considers plan to let individual Brits opt-in to keep their EU citizenship
Jon Stone in The Independent
The European Parliament is to consider a plan that would allow British citizens to opt-in and keep their European Union citizenship – and its associated benefits – once the UK leaves the EU.
The proposal, which has been put before a parliamentary committee as an amendment, would grant the citizens of former member states the voluntary right to retain “associate citizenship” of the EU, such as after Brexit.
Associate citizens would be allowed to keep free movement across the EU as full citizens currently enjoy and would be allowed to vote in European Parliament elections, meaning they were still represented in Brussels.
The proposal could potentially give Brits who live and work across borders a workaround to the disruption caused by the Leave vote – and young people looking to flee an increasingly insular UK greater choice over where to move to.
Amendment 882 was proposed by Charles Goerens, a liberal MEP from Luxembourg. It will be considered by the European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee, which is drawing up a report with recommendations on “Possible evolutions of and adjustments to the current institutional set-up of the European Union”.
Brexit campaigners in Britain reacted with anger to the idea, arguing that it would discriminate against Leave voters and that it was “an outrage”.
The amendment suggests the provision of “European associate citizenship for those who feel and wish to be part of the European project but are nationals of a former Member State; offers these associate citizens the rights of freedom of movement and to reside on its territory as well as being represented in the Parliament through a vote in the European elections on the European lists”.
Though the British Government has been coy on what it wants Britain’s post-Brexit future to look like, it is likely that British citizens will lose the automatic right to live and work in the EU after Brexit.
This is because Prime Minister Theresa May has made clear that she would like to restrict freedom of movement from EU countries to the UK, a policy that would likely be reciprocated by the EU for British citizens.
Jayne Adye, director of the Get Britain Out campaign described the proposal as divisive and said it was “totally unacceptable” for British people to retain the advantages of EU membership.
“This is an outrage. The EU is now attempting to divide the great British public at the exact moment we need unity. 17.4 million people voted to Leave the EU on 23 June and as a result the UK as a whole will get Brexit,” she said.
“Brexit means laws which impact the people of the UK will be created by accountable politicians in Westminster. It is totally unacceptable for certain citizens in the UK to subject themselves to laws which are created by politicians who are not accountable the British people as a whole. Discriminating against people based on their political views shows there are no depths the EU will not sink to.”
Britain voted to leave the EU at a referendum in June but has not yet begun the negotiation process. The Government is currently embroiled in a legal battle over whether it can trigger negotiations using Royal Prerogative, without consulting Parliament.
The European Parliament is to consider a plan that would allow British citizens to opt-in and keep their European Union citizenship – and its associated benefits – once the UK leaves the EU.
The proposal, which has been put before a parliamentary committee as an amendment, would grant the citizens of former member states the voluntary right to retain “associate citizenship” of the EU, such as after Brexit.
Associate citizens would be allowed to keep free movement across the EU as full citizens currently enjoy and would be allowed to vote in European Parliament elections, meaning they were still represented in Brussels.
The proposal could potentially give Brits who live and work across borders a workaround to the disruption caused by the Leave vote – and young people looking to flee an increasingly insular UK greater choice over where to move to.
Amendment 882 was proposed by Charles Goerens, a liberal MEP from Luxembourg. It will be considered by the European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee, which is drawing up a report with recommendations on “Possible evolutions of and adjustments to the current institutional set-up of the European Union”.
Brexit campaigners in Britain reacted with anger to the idea, arguing that it would discriminate against Leave voters and that it was “an outrage”.
The amendment suggests the provision of “European associate citizenship for those who feel and wish to be part of the European project but are nationals of a former Member State; offers these associate citizens the rights of freedom of movement and to reside on its territory as well as being represented in the Parliament through a vote in the European elections on the European lists”.
Though the British Government has been coy on what it wants Britain’s post-Brexit future to look like, it is likely that British citizens will lose the automatic right to live and work in the EU after Brexit.
This is because Prime Minister Theresa May has made clear that she would like to restrict freedom of movement from EU countries to the UK, a policy that would likely be reciprocated by the EU for British citizens.
Jayne Adye, director of the Get Britain Out campaign described the proposal as divisive and said it was “totally unacceptable” for British people to retain the advantages of EU membership.
“This is an outrage. The EU is now attempting to divide the great British public at the exact moment we need unity. 17.4 million people voted to Leave the EU on 23 June and as a result the UK as a whole will get Brexit,” she said.
“Brexit means laws which impact the people of the UK will be created by accountable politicians in Westminster. It is totally unacceptable for certain citizens in the UK to subject themselves to laws which are created by politicians who are not accountable the British people as a whole. Discriminating against people based on their political views shows there are no depths the EU will not sink to.”
Britain voted to leave the EU at a referendum in June but has not yet begun the negotiation process. The Government is currently embroiled in a legal battle over whether it can trigger negotiations using Royal Prerogative, without consulting Parliament.
Tuesday, 8 November 2016
In Brexit Britain there will be no benefit caps for the multinationals
Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
Take back control. Those three words now govern our politics. They sum up why Britain is leaving Europe, and they make up the yardstick by which Theresa May will be judged. Yet already, in the past few days, their hollowness has been exposed.
This story moves fast – and begins with a threat. Not a subtle moue of displeasure from behind an expensive pair of cufflinks, but a bluntly put, publicly issued ransom. At the end of September the boss of Nissan, Carlos Ghosn, goes to one of the car industry’s biggest annual events, the Paris Motor Show, and declares to reporters that Brexit means the UK now has to cut him “a deal”. If cars made in Britain are to face tariffs on export to Europe, he wants “some kind of compensation”.
Extraordinary: one of the biggest manufacturers in Britain effectively wants danger money to carry on investing here. Even more remarkably, Nissan has behind it the full might of the Japanese government, which sent 15 pages of demands on behalf of some of the country’s biggest businesses – along with the veiled threat to pull out of the UK.
Faster than you can say Micra, Ghosn is invited to Downing Street. Within two weeks he has a face-to-face with the prime minister. The UK has just opted to sever four decades of relations with its biggest trading partner, the government has no fiscal policy and her own party is in turmoil – yet May still clears her diary for the Nissan boss.
Then, a few days back, Ghosn announces Sunderland will not only carry on working, but will now make the new-model Qashqai. The obvious question is: what did his company get from our government? Yet business secretary Greg Clark refuses to divulge any detail of how much or even what kind of taxpayer support has been offered to Nissan – after all, it’s only our money. Instead, he waves off the deal as just a slightly prickly chat in the senior common room.
“One can overcomplicate these things,” he airily tells MPs at the end of October. A mere month after Ghosn made his initial threat, what apparently changed his mind was the government’s “intention to find common ground and to pursue discussions in a rational and civilised way”.
To say this doesn’t add up is beside the point: it’s not meant to. Clark and May obviously don’t want a rival carmaker or any other multinational operating in Britain to know how far they will go to keep them onshore. But if the multimillionaire boss of a £33bn auto giant only wanted a “rational and civilised” discussion, , he could try a Melvyn Bragg podcast. The Qashqai has been a massive seller for Nissan; the company would not have opted to make the next model out of Sunderland merely on the basis of some comforting ministerial purrs.
A source tells Reuters that “the government gave Nissan a written commitment of extra support in the event Brexit reduces its competitiveness”. The carmaker itself acknowledges that its executive committee made its decision upon receiving the “support and assurances of the UK government”. And the former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, warns that such deals could cost the taxpayer “colossal amounts of money”. How much? Were the EU to slap on 10% extra on British-made cars, the tariff bill for Nissan UK alone would come to just shy of £300m a year. If May and Clark were to try to cover half of that, they would be extending an unprecedented level of subsidy to just one company. Now imagine those same terms replicated for the other big car exporters: Toyota (which before the referendum warned of cutbacks if Britain left the EU), Honda, Jaguar Land Rover …
What you’ve just seen, then, is a foretaste of the way big business will deal with the government in Brexit Britain. First the threat, then the bargain, and finally, with unministerial haste, an expensive handshake behind closed doors. Each time, the public will be none the wiser, even as their government commits them to perhaps costly support for some company or sector, each one claiming strategic importance. And don’t think it will stop at cars.
Within 48 hours of the Brexit vote, the National Farmers’ Union was preparing for an extraordinary meeting of its council to draw up demands for Downing Street. Top of the list was the £2.4bn in subsidies that farmers get each year from Brussels. Within weeks, the new chancellor Philip Hammond was promising to carry on the handouts until the end of this decade. He made similar offers to universities and businesses reliant on EU grants.
Almost inevitably, the British state becomes even more of a milch-cow for big businesses
Put these numbers in context. Starting this week, the government will cut the benefits it gives to 88,000 families. That is huge turmoil – and it will cut just £100m from the welfare bill. Yet at the same time, billions are being committed to keep sweet businesses from the pharmaceutical giants to the landowners of the south-west.
These are businesses that have already done very well out of taxpayers. Consider Nissan UK: Kevin Farnsworth, lecturer in social policy at the University of York and an expert on government subsidies, calculates that over the past two decades it has taken £782m in loans, grants and handouts from the British and European public. In upfront cash transfers alone that comes to £130m.
Farnsworth has calculated this figure by combing Nissan accounts as well as the grant documents from the British government and its various agencies. He has compiled a database for other major businesses, to be found at corporate-welfare-watch.org.uk.
Where this takes you is to the dirty secret of the British business model. From Margaret Thatcher onwards, successive governments have lured multinational investors by promising them access to the single market, a cheap, biddable workforce and a bunch of corporate sweeteners. It was the same offer Dublin made to the tax avoiders of Silicon Valley and – within its own narrow confines – it worked. As Farnsworth points out, Britain has reliably taken in proportionately more foreign direct investment than most of its competitors.
The problem is that now the UK can no longer guarantee access to 500 million European consumers, it will need to make its workers cheaper and even more flexible and offer more handouts.
Surveying this debacle, it strikes me that Lord Acton got it wrong. It’s not power that corrupts; it’s powerlessness. What do you bargain with, when three decades of deregulation and weakening of local and central government mean you have hardly any cards left in your hand? Almost inevitably, the British state becomes even more of a milch-cow for big businesses. Forget about foreigners coming over here and taking our benefits; now think about multinationals cherry-picking our benefits. That trade-off isn’t rhetorical: it’s real. That money will come from our social security, our hospitals, our schools. Brexit Britain: a soft touch for corporate welfare. Is this what was meant by control?
Take back control. Those three words now govern our politics. They sum up why Britain is leaving Europe, and they make up the yardstick by which Theresa May will be judged. Yet already, in the past few days, their hollowness has been exposed.
This story moves fast – and begins with a threat. Not a subtle moue of displeasure from behind an expensive pair of cufflinks, but a bluntly put, publicly issued ransom. At the end of September the boss of Nissan, Carlos Ghosn, goes to one of the car industry’s biggest annual events, the Paris Motor Show, and declares to reporters that Brexit means the UK now has to cut him “a deal”. If cars made in Britain are to face tariffs on export to Europe, he wants “some kind of compensation”.
Extraordinary: one of the biggest manufacturers in Britain effectively wants danger money to carry on investing here. Even more remarkably, Nissan has behind it the full might of the Japanese government, which sent 15 pages of demands on behalf of some of the country’s biggest businesses – along with the veiled threat to pull out of the UK.
Faster than you can say Micra, Ghosn is invited to Downing Street. Within two weeks he has a face-to-face with the prime minister. The UK has just opted to sever four decades of relations with its biggest trading partner, the government has no fiscal policy and her own party is in turmoil – yet May still clears her diary for the Nissan boss.
Then, a few days back, Ghosn announces Sunderland will not only carry on working, but will now make the new-model Qashqai. The obvious question is: what did his company get from our government? Yet business secretary Greg Clark refuses to divulge any detail of how much or even what kind of taxpayer support has been offered to Nissan – after all, it’s only our money. Instead, he waves off the deal as just a slightly prickly chat in the senior common room.
“One can overcomplicate these things,” he airily tells MPs at the end of October. A mere month after Ghosn made his initial threat, what apparently changed his mind was the government’s “intention to find common ground and to pursue discussions in a rational and civilised way”.
To say this doesn’t add up is beside the point: it’s not meant to. Clark and May obviously don’t want a rival carmaker or any other multinational operating in Britain to know how far they will go to keep them onshore. But if the multimillionaire boss of a £33bn auto giant only wanted a “rational and civilised” discussion, , he could try a Melvyn Bragg podcast. The Qashqai has been a massive seller for Nissan; the company would not have opted to make the next model out of Sunderland merely on the basis of some comforting ministerial purrs.
A source tells Reuters that “the government gave Nissan a written commitment of extra support in the event Brexit reduces its competitiveness”. The carmaker itself acknowledges that its executive committee made its decision upon receiving the “support and assurances of the UK government”. And the former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, warns that such deals could cost the taxpayer “colossal amounts of money”. How much? Were the EU to slap on 10% extra on British-made cars, the tariff bill for Nissan UK alone would come to just shy of £300m a year. If May and Clark were to try to cover half of that, they would be extending an unprecedented level of subsidy to just one company. Now imagine those same terms replicated for the other big car exporters: Toyota (which before the referendum warned of cutbacks if Britain left the EU), Honda, Jaguar Land Rover …
What you’ve just seen, then, is a foretaste of the way big business will deal with the government in Brexit Britain. First the threat, then the bargain, and finally, with unministerial haste, an expensive handshake behind closed doors. Each time, the public will be none the wiser, even as their government commits them to perhaps costly support for some company or sector, each one claiming strategic importance. And don’t think it will stop at cars.
Within 48 hours of the Brexit vote, the National Farmers’ Union was preparing for an extraordinary meeting of its council to draw up demands for Downing Street. Top of the list was the £2.4bn in subsidies that farmers get each year from Brussels. Within weeks, the new chancellor Philip Hammond was promising to carry on the handouts until the end of this decade. He made similar offers to universities and businesses reliant on EU grants.
Almost inevitably, the British state becomes even more of a milch-cow for big businesses
Put these numbers in context. Starting this week, the government will cut the benefits it gives to 88,000 families. That is huge turmoil – and it will cut just £100m from the welfare bill. Yet at the same time, billions are being committed to keep sweet businesses from the pharmaceutical giants to the landowners of the south-west.
These are businesses that have already done very well out of taxpayers. Consider Nissan UK: Kevin Farnsworth, lecturer in social policy at the University of York and an expert on government subsidies, calculates that over the past two decades it has taken £782m in loans, grants and handouts from the British and European public. In upfront cash transfers alone that comes to £130m.
Farnsworth has calculated this figure by combing Nissan accounts as well as the grant documents from the British government and its various agencies. He has compiled a database for other major businesses, to be found at corporate-welfare-watch.org.uk.
Where this takes you is to the dirty secret of the British business model. From Margaret Thatcher onwards, successive governments have lured multinational investors by promising them access to the single market, a cheap, biddable workforce and a bunch of corporate sweeteners. It was the same offer Dublin made to the tax avoiders of Silicon Valley and – within its own narrow confines – it worked. As Farnsworth points out, Britain has reliably taken in proportionately more foreign direct investment than most of its competitors.
The problem is that now the UK can no longer guarantee access to 500 million European consumers, it will need to make its workers cheaper and even more flexible and offer more handouts.
Surveying this debacle, it strikes me that Lord Acton got it wrong. It’s not power that corrupts; it’s powerlessness. What do you bargain with, when three decades of deregulation and weakening of local and central government mean you have hardly any cards left in your hand? Almost inevitably, the British state becomes even more of a milch-cow for big businesses. Forget about foreigners coming over here and taking our benefits; now think about multinationals cherry-picking our benefits. That trade-off isn’t rhetorical: it’s real. That money will come from our social security, our hospitals, our schools. Brexit Britain: a soft touch for corporate welfare. Is this what was meant by control?
On Cricket Selection at the lower levels: it's complicated
Michael Jeh in Cricinfo
In a recent piece in the Australian, the peerless Gideon Haigh described the life of a fringe first-class cricketer, Steve Cazzulino. The beauty of the story is that the most powerful words come from Cazzulino himself and not the wordsmith.
It is that time of year in Australian cricket when representative careers are made or broken, sometimes forever. For Cazzulino, a damn fine cricketer who played 13 first-class games, it sounds like he harbours lingering regrets that his career did not kick on. In some senses, when you get close enough to being selected for Australia, the equation becomes simple. If you're in the frame, it mostly boils down to runs and wickets, allowing for incumbency rights. Shaun Marsh v Joe Burns v Usman Khawaja v Cameron Bancroft. Jackson Bird v Peter Siddle v Joe Mennie.
Auditioning for the first-class stage, though, is not quite as straightforward as comparing apples with apples. For many talented youngsters, like Cazzulino when he was an elite junior, making it into the representative ranks and being selected in Under-17, U-19 and development squads can be make or break. If your card is not marked, if you're not identified in the talent ID pathway, if you're not looked at by the selectors, it is not as simple as just scoring big runs or taking wickets.
Unlike, say, athletics or swimming, where your chances are determined by the clock or the tape measure, cricket selectors have more of a juggling act to perform. And at that crucial juncture in a player's life, somewhere between 17 and 20 years of age, when they have to juggle choices like university, job prospects, or giving cricket a red-hot go, if they miss out on selection, it may be the last we see of that person.
That could have been Matthew Hayden's story. Overlooked at underage levels but burning with disappointment, he just piled on so many 1st Grade runs and then Shield runs that it became impossible not to pick him for the next level up. Not every cricketer can tell that story. For many (most?), trying to get noticed by the pathway selectors is often the fork-in-the-road moment. I witnessed the Hayden story first-hand (we were team-mates during that period) but I've also seen the kind of heartbreak, doubt and sadness that Cazzulino so courageously opens up about.
As the father of a young 13-year-old who has dreams of making more rep teams, I'm forever torn between encouraging him to chase that dream with a single-minded determination and being fearful that he might take my advice and still fall short. Have I set him up for an almost inevitable fail or fall? I keep telling him that it's all about putting numbers on the board, but I know my words are hollow - it's not as simple as that. It's also about team balance, opportunity, luck, umpiring decisions and selectorial vision (or blindness). Yes, when it comes to Sheffield Shield cricket and you're in a straight shootout, it might come down to the pure numbers, but to get to that stage, how much of it is in the lap of the gods - the selectors?
Spare a thought for Bird, possibly the first No. 11 batsman to be judged on his batting ability! One can only hope he gets another shot at redemption.
Selecting Test teams must be hard but picking underage rep teams must be a nightmare. Every parent and district coach thinks their child has a powerful case and can quote statistics to prove their point. Selectors on the other hand have to weigh up whether 25 runs opening the batting in 1st Grade is worth more than a century batting in the middle order in 3rd Grade. What allowances do you make for a kid who nicks off to a peach of an outswinger, or gets a poor lbw decision in contrast to someone else who gets dropped early and can murder mediocre bowling? How do you allow for someone who plays on green seamers, which is reflected in their numbers, as distinct from a spinner who never really gets the chance to bowl on a wearing pitch because most junior rep cricket doesn't go for long enough to bring that skill into play?
If you've got the luxury of time, years in some cases, you will eventually sort the wheat from the chaff. But when you have to balance that long-term view with a commitment to rewarding form and "runs on the board", how do you walk the tightrope? I know of recent cases where someone who has opened the batting in 1st Grade and faced first-class bowlers (men) for an hour has been overlooked for a 3rd grade batsman who peeled off 80 against boys his own age. The numbers tell one story but anyone who has eked out a tough 20 on a green pitch in Brisbane in the first session will tell you that you sometimes need to be in good form to nick one.
As a medium-fast bowler myself, when I was in form I almost preferred to bowl to better batsmen because there were more chances of them nicking the late outswinger. So often a marginally slower bowler will find that elusive edge because the batsman has that extra fraction of a second to catch up with the ball. When that same bowler gets selected to play at the next level up, a superior batsman will make him look ordinary. Which selector would have the guts and the vision to look past the numbers and pick the cricketer who is more likely to succeed higher up? When that does occasionally happen, they run the risk of getting pilloried for picking someone who hasn't performed well on paper. For every "gut-feeling" selection, there's an aggrieved cricketer (like Cazzulino) who wonders why the benchmark was not a tangible, measurable, justifiable number. As a parent with experience of all this now, I must force myself to look beyond the obvious when my kids miss out. I must confess that it is an easy statement to make in a hypothetical situation.
Cazzulino's tale, brought to life so eloquently by Haigh, is going to be compulsory reading for my sons. Having gone through that same process myself 25 years ago, daring to dream but knowing in my heart that I wasn't good enough to crack it full-time, I yearned to reach out and claim every word of the piece as my own. In my case, I was never quite good enough but I was lucky enough to win a scholarship to Oxford, which satisfied some of that hunger while opening another door. If my sons have inherited anything from me, I hope it won't be my talent but rather the ability to have dreams that can be pursued in a non-mutually exclusive way. As Cazzulino opines when asked if it was difficult to be a rounded person at cricket: "Absolutely. I think you either need to be incredibly smart or incredibly thick-skinned." Or in the case of Bird, you just need to score more runs at No. 11.
In a recent piece in the Australian, the peerless Gideon Haigh described the life of a fringe first-class cricketer, Steve Cazzulino. The beauty of the story is that the most powerful words come from Cazzulino himself and not the wordsmith.
It is that time of year in Australian cricket when representative careers are made or broken, sometimes forever. For Cazzulino, a damn fine cricketer who played 13 first-class games, it sounds like he harbours lingering regrets that his career did not kick on. In some senses, when you get close enough to being selected for Australia, the equation becomes simple. If you're in the frame, it mostly boils down to runs and wickets, allowing for incumbency rights. Shaun Marsh v Joe Burns v Usman Khawaja v Cameron Bancroft. Jackson Bird v Peter Siddle v Joe Mennie.
Auditioning for the first-class stage, though, is not quite as straightforward as comparing apples with apples. For many talented youngsters, like Cazzulino when he was an elite junior, making it into the representative ranks and being selected in Under-17, U-19 and development squads can be make or break. If your card is not marked, if you're not identified in the talent ID pathway, if you're not looked at by the selectors, it is not as simple as just scoring big runs or taking wickets.
Unlike, say, athletics or swimming, where your chances are determined by the clock or the tape measure, cricket selectors have more of a juggling act to perform. And at that crucial juncture in a player's life, somewhere between 17 and 20 years of age, when they have to juggle choices like university, job prospects, or giving cricket a red-hot go, if they miss out on selection, it may be the last we see of that person.
That could have been Matthew Hayden's story. Overlooked at underage levels but burning with disappointment, he just piled on so many 1st Grade runs and then Shield runs that it became impossible not to pick him for the next level up. Not every cricketer can tell that story. For many (most?), trying to get noticed by the pathway selectors is often the fork-in-the-road moment. I witnessed the Hayden story first-hand (we were team-mates during that period) but I've also seen the kind of heartbreak, doubt and sadness that Cazzulino so courageously opens up about.
As the father of a young 13-year-old who has dreams of making more rep teams, I'm forever torn between encouraging him to chase that dream with a single-minded determination and being fearful that he might take my advice and still fall short. Have I set him up for an almost inevitable fail or fall? I keep telling him that it's all about putting numbers on the board, but I know my words are hollow - it's not as simple as that. It's also about team balance, opportunity, luck, umpiring decisions and selectorial vision (or blindness). Yes, when it comes to Sheffield Shield cricket and you're in a straight shootout, it might come down to the pure numbers, but to get to that stage, how much of it is in the lap of the gods - the selectors?
Spare a thought for Bird, possibly the first No. 11 batsman to be judged on his batting ability! One can only hope he gets another shot at redemption.
Selecting Test teams must be hard but picking underage rep teams must be a nightmare. Every parent and district coach thinks their child has a powerful case and can quote statistics to prove their point. Selectors on the other hand have to weigh up whether 25 runs opening the batting in 1st Grade is worth more than a century batting in the middle order in 3rd Grade. What allowances do you make for a kid who nicks off to a peach of an outswinger, or gets a poor lbw decision in contrast to someone else who gets dropped early and can murder mediocre bowling? How do you allow for someone who plays on green seamers, which is reflected in their numbers, as distinct from a spinner who never really gets the chance to bowl on a wearing pitch because most junior rep cricket doesn't go for long enough to bring that skill into play?
If you've got the luxury of time, years in some cases, you will eventually sort the wheat from the chaff. But when you have to balance that long-term view with a commitment to rewarding form and "runs on the board", how do you walk the tightrope? I know of recent cases where someone who has opened the batting in 1st Grade and faced first-class bowlers (men) for an hour has been overlooked for a 3rd grade batsman who peeled off 80 against boys his own age. The numbers tell one story but anyone who has eked out a tough 20 on a green pitch in Brisbane in the first session will tell you that you sometimes need to be in good form to nick one.
As a medium-fast bowler myself, when I was in form I almost preferred to bowl to better batsmen because there were more chances of them nicking the late outswinger. So often a marginally slower bowler will find that elusive edge because the batsman has that extra fraction of a second to catch up with the ball. When that same bowler gets selected to play at the next level up, a superior batsman will make him look ordinary. Which selector would have the guts and the vision to look past the numbers and pick the cricketer who is more likely to succeed higher up? When that does occasionally happen, they run the risk of getting pilloried for picking someone who hasn't performed well on paper. For every "gut-feeling" selection, there's an aggrieved cricketer (like Cazzulino) who wonders why the benchmark was not a tangible, measurable, justifiable number. As a parent with experience of all this now, I must force myself to look beyond the obvious when my kids miss out. I must confess that it is an easy statement to make in a hypothetical situation.
Cazzulino's tale, brought to life so eloquently by Haigh, is going to be compulsory reading for my sons. Having gone through that same process myself 25 years ago, daring to dream but knowing in my heart that I wasn't good enough to crack it full-time, I yearned to reach out and claim every word of the piece as my own. In my case, I was never quite good enough but I was lucky enough to win a scholarship to Oxford, which satisfied some of that hunger while opening another door. If my sons have inherited anything from me, I hope it won't be my talent but rather the ability to have dreams that can be pursued in a non-mutually exclusive way. As Cazzulino opines when asked if it was difficult to be a rounded person at cricket: "Absolutely. I think you either need to be incredibly smart or incredibly thick-skinned." Or in the case of Bird, you just need to score more runs at No. 11.
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