Shield is back on Thursday (WA vs SA) then on Friday (Tas vs Vic) - I'm looking forward to seeing if players like Lyon and Harris make the SA team.
Harris, I reckon so, don't think Moffatt showed enough to keep him out. Lyon, maybe. O'Brien hasn't scored runs for some time so it's possible they'll accept a fairly awful tail and pick Lyon as a specialist bowler. Experience tells me, though, they'd keep O'Brien and Lyon would be fighting it out with one of the pace bowlers for a spot and none of them have done badly enough to drop them. A line-up of....
Harris
Cooper
Klinger
Ferguson
Blizzard
Manou
Christian
Cassel
Edmonson
Lyon
George
....looks quite attacking, even with the 3 specialist 11's. I note Jas Borgas has been smashing them too so he might even be in contention for a shock recall.
FC and OD cricket are indeed pretty different to T20, but still the energy and discipline on show from the Redbacks in the Big Bash for the last two seasons has been completly missing from the other formats.
Basically, the technical short-comings of local players don't get shown-up as much in short-form cricket.
With the kind of exciting talent they have had in their team over the years there just is no reason why it should have taken them 15 years to get their hands on some silverware.
Aside from the players who retired after the Shield win, for a long time the problem was that the selection and management of talented players was woeful and rooted in some fair backwards attitudes towards leading players and who's actually in charge of the team. Added to that innovative ideas stifled by the old farts, young players with some spark not selected for reasons other than cricketing ones, people put into leadership positions because they were the best old-tie cultural fit rather than the best man for the job, etc. Over-riding theme at SACA is that it's oooooooooold and toff.
But at least the grade system was generating the occasional top player. Now, it's not even doing that. SACA management needs an enema from top to, errr, bottom and there needs to be at least one less grade team (the ones in most trouble are least likely to get amalgamated, though). Talented juniors are still coming through, heaps of new faces around. The problem starts once they start playing regularly for seniors.