Rod Marsh slams Australia's batting display during the Ashes

Rod Marsh slams Australia’s batting display during the Ashes: Australia’s chairman of selectors, Rod Marsh has launched a scathing attack on the country’s batsmen and advised them to be more ”selfish”. Marsh, head of the four-man selection panel that also includes coach Darren Lehmann accepted his share of the blame but also identified Australia’s middle-order batting as a prominent weakness.

England took an unbeatable 3-1 lead in the five-match series with an innings and 78-run victory in the fourth Test at Trent Bridge on Saturday. Marsh urged the batsmen to practice batting for longer periods as they move into the post-Michael Clarke era. Three of Australia’s next four overseas series are in the subcontinent and the men from down under have testing times ahead of them.

”Being selfish as a batsman seems to me to be not wanting to get out and wanting to occupy the crease longer than anyone else in your team, and those things count in Test match cricket., They’ve got to say, ‘Righto, no one’s getting me out and I don’t care if it takes me all day to make a hundred’. You’re allowed to bat all day. I think our longest partnership in that [Trent Bridge] game was something like 18 overs. That’s appalling in a Test match, I don’t care what [pitch] you’re playing on” said the former Aussie ahead of Australia’s tour match in Northampton starting tomorrow.

Marsh, 67, was appointed in May last year on a 3-year contract to head the selection panel but finds himself under scrutiny after the decision to select an experienced Ashes squad which was labelled ‘Dad’s Army’ on their arrival in the UK.

Not shying away from responsibility he said, “You’ve got to be held accountable – fine, I agree with that, but I’m just racking my brain to try and think of who else we could have picked. If I had my time again, to sit down and choose the batsmen to come to England it would have been exactly the same. I just couldn’t think of anyone else who could have done the job.”

“We picked blokes with experience in these conditions, we picked blokes that we thought would get runs. Our blokes scored more runs than their (England’s) top-order, but our middle-order scored no runs and that was the big differential – we just didn’t score any runs in the middle. If you have a look at our first innings batting it’s been deplorable, it’s all you can say. How the hell do you (foresee) that, how do you see some of the best batsmen in the world make no runs in the first innings of four Test matches basically. It just staggered me.” he added.

Talking about the difficulty in selecting the team for Trent Bridge he said, “That’s probably the hardest selection I’ve been involved in, that last Test match, because I thought there were three or four options, every one of which could have been fantastic and every one of which could have been poor. That was just the way it was. Had we won the toss we might not be even talking about it right now.” This was Australia’s 4^th successive Ashes series loss in England.