Oh Andrew Hilditch, you just give and give. If it weren’t for Bangladesh being allowed to play Test cricket, this would have been one of the worst series losses anywhere, ever, by any team. And yet you stand there (for once) in front of the media and proudly say the selectors did a good job.

Of course, when asked exactly how the selectors’ job recently could be defined as something approaching “good”, you actually didn’t have an answer. Which is about as surprising as Tony Greig spruiking a Limited Edition print of a shit photo, I suppose, so any disappointment I feel should be filed under “meh”.

The ODIs start soon and gee whiz, the chicken gizzards came out funny again: I like David Hussey but he’s thirty-three years old and hasn’t played a 50 over game for Australia since 2009. Of course, having treated Nathan Hauritz like a leper with bad breath and an ugly wife for the whole Test series, it stands to reason that Hilditch finds it appropriate to pick him for the first ODI; odds on Hauritz actually playing a game in the series though? Up there with me getting invited to Andrew Demetriou’s birthday party. As are the odds of Brad Hodge (remember him? The fucking selectors sure don’t) getting another cap.

The mistakes, the inconsistencies and the just plain “Who The Fuck Is That Guy” moments brought to us by the board of selectors in the past few years are legion and I’m only allowed a page and a bit for this column so I won’t bore you with every one. Just consider that we’ve tried out ten spinners in the four years since Warne retired and work from there.

The headlines today say “Hilditch: I won’t walk away”, again not surprising from a man blessed with denial-of-reality skills matched only by Queen Victoria, who refused to accept that lesbianism was possible and therefore would not sign a law prohibiting it. If Hilditch won’t walk away, perhaps he could be, I dunno, carried away by three heavily-armed men in black overalls and balaclavas. Or dragged away by Dionysus, the rogue bull elephant who hasn’t seen a female in six months and has been given a large dose of AndrewHilditchIsAFemaleElephantyoxin.

I’m hoping that maybe he could be chaperoned away by Pastor Danny Nalliah and baptised into Catch The Fire Ministries, where his talent for offending everyone with more than an eighth of an inch of brain could be put to better use. I’d like to see him towed away by a monster truck, or shot away in an unmanned rocket, to orbit the Earth henceforth in icy silence.

Any other suggestions for ways Hilditch and anything to do with cricket administration could be permanently and with extreme prejudice detached from one another will be greatly appreciated.

Why am I so annoyed about this? Because Hilditch is the public face of a classic case of administrators refusing to accept their own culpability and blaming the players. Cricket Australia, lured by the dollars in the IPL and the T20 game in general, have let our test side slip to an appalling level. What happens at an AFL or NRL club when things get this bad? The board, the coach, the football department fall on their swords, admitting that they’ve got it wrong by picking the wrong players and/or coach and not developing the ones they’ve got.

It’s rank cowardice and ineptitude that allows Cricket Australia and the Board of Selectors to sit there and tell us that they’ve been doing a bang-up job, it’s just these bastard incompetent players. Warne and McGrath retired over four years ago and what have they done with any consistency to find and nurture their successors? What did they do by way of a succession plan before their well-known departure dates? A fish rots from the head and CA have got to accept that they are the stinky bit.

But really, you want to know why I’m so angry about this, really and truly? Because I agree with fucking Dean Jones on something.

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Still with cricket and the cheerfully Kafkaesque world of the ICC: the hearing into spot-fixing against Butt, Asif and Aamer has been adjourned until Feb 5. Reasons given are that the tribunal has been asked to “reserve any decision on the charges until it has had sufficient time to give the issues careful consideration and until it is able, at the same time as handing down its decision, to provide written reasons. This would not be feasible in the timeframe agreed for this hearing in Doha.”

I have a number of questions about this statement, such as “if you hadn’t been asked, were you going to take some time to consider the issues? Or is the fix already in but there’s another interested party with another bag full of cash wanting to influence the outcome?” As for needing extra time to type up their decision, I’m sure one or two of the hundreds of worthless relatives that have been given jobs by the nabobs at the ICC has done a secretarial course at some time in their parasitic lives?

The most offensive thing about the quote reproduced above, though, is that the hearing is in Doha. Doha. Look it up on a map. It’s in Qatar, which is a small island off Saudi Arabia. They don’t fucking play cricket in fucking Doha but they obviously do a good deal on office space for nepotistic kleptoministrations like the ICC.

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Speaking of graft, good to see our fifty million bucks was well-spent sucking up to FIFA. We were never going to get the gig whether or not we produced the most loathsomely disgusting and stereotypically kitsch video ever made anywhere in history ever, which we did. Just like when Melbourne lost the Olympic Games to Atlanta, though, the shock at to whom we had lost was staggering.

Qatar aren’t just a minnow in football, they’re fucking plankton. It hits fifty degrees during the day. Homosexuality is illegal, dress standards apply in public and worst of all drinking is nearly impossible. None of this mattered to FIFA though, none of it. Because Qatar. Has. Money. Fuckloads of it.

Money is all that counts. Not the football, not the fans, just the money. So already they’re admitting that it will just be too damned hot to run the Cup during the Qatar Summer, despite the promises of air-conditioned stadia and talking about playing it in January, slap-bang in the middle of the European season. The turmoil this will cause to clubs and national teams and, oh yeah, the Olympics doesn’t matter, though, because Qatar has fuckloads of money.

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Brendon Fevola. That is all.

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