David Hussey is better than any international batsman England have produced in the last 10 years. He averages (correction averages 50) at state level and 40s at one day domestic level. He has been a victim of a lack of foresight and lottery selections from the selectors who have not given him a chance at test level and not an extended run in ODIs.
At the same time even North was given a decent chance to prove himself even though he averages only 40 in at first class level and exhibited absolutely no confidence or technique when he played. Yes, you can't just pick players based on numbers but if these numbers mean absolutely zero then why even keep scores, just let them go out there and swing the bat and if they look good enter them into the random number generator and do a lottery pick. We had one of the best first class systems in the world arguably and that served us so well through the 90s and early 00s and could produced 2 or 3 World XIs and squandered all of that talent, work, time and investment with the wrong guy picking players. A bunch of "part time selectors" getting paid 40 grand a year to pick players worth ten times more than that. Ridiculous
If the Australian selectors were actually competent they could have remained number 1 in the world for the past 6-7 years with a batting lineup containing:
Ponting, Clarke, Hodge, Katich, Hussey, Hussey, Watson (batting lower down), Jaques (who was cut short by injury), Hughes (who still has a lot of potential for the future although needs to work on his play against spin), Rogers
Instead they ****ed it up trying to find the next superstar picking players based "feeling". These are players with proven records who all would have played 100 tests if they played for other countries. The saddest part of all of this is that this is not even 20/20 hindsight, this was all known about 4-5 years ago when they could have changed things and righted wrongs, but they kept banging their head against a brick wall with dumb selections and picking players based solely on age.