We are in cricket's mixtape era

Scouting is the future. And selection, even if it is related to scouting, is kind of the past.

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Not that long ago, there was an Australian cricketer called Merv Hughes. He's mostly famous for having a moustache, but he also went on to be an Australian selector for a little while. And this was quite interesting, as he probably wasn't seen as a normal kind of selector, but I think they were trying to find different kinds of players with different kinds of backgrounds to see what they could find.

And so Merv Hughes was the Australian selector for a while, and then it turned out that Merv Hughes wasn't actually watching all that much cricket. Part of the reason was, he was still part of the amateur side of selection at that point. So he wasn't actually paid to do the job. When he was available and he would go down, or Cricket Australia would give him a per diem or whatever, he would be able to travel around and see some cricket.

The thing is that Merv Hughes couldn't watch as much cricket as other people because he didn't have a Foxtel subscription. That allowed you to watch all the overseas cricket at that time. And even now if you're an Australian cricket fan and you want to watch anything that's not at home, you pretty much have to have a subscription with it. And Merv did not.

So he was selecting the Australian team and unless he was there on a tour – which sometimes he was, because he would actually host tour groups – more often than not, he didn't actually see that much of Australian cricket. And he didn't have access to watching all the different domestic games, as a lot of them were also on Foxtel.

Basically, the Australian selector at that point wasn't actually watching much cricket. That was pretty normal. In fact, if you go back to county cricket, not that long ago, it would be the board who was deciding who was actually going to get the contract at the end of the next year, not the captain or the coach. Quite often, it was people who didn't even have any sort of cricket background, who just got themselves onto a board deciding if you were good enough to get a contract for the following year.

Of course, if you go back a little bit further again, you'll find that when Test cricket first started and for a very, very long time, quite often the home ground would decide on who played for the Test team. It was so random. In the West Indies, they would have a different captain all the time, and in England you would have very different XIs for different games based on who was popular in that area.

It was such a bizarre way of playing cricket. But the point is that selection in cricket has always been pretty haphazard and a little bit amateur, and we're finally getting to a more professional side of things.