Ok. So Australia’s national cricket team is currently on a tour of India, nominally to play cricket.

Is the tour going well?

Not in a cricketing sense.

As a tour to make Indians feel superior to Australia as a cricketing nation, it is world’s best practice.

Australian Cricket has been in a bad state for some time. It’s been so bad Shane Warne has written a two-part ‘manifesto’ on how to fix Australian Cricket.

Part one was written on an etch-a-sketch and part two is mainly just a crayon picture of a house and a sun in the sky wearing sunglasses.

Cricket fans still see the manifesto as a massive upgrade on the current Cricket Australia strategy.

This week, news broke that four players Shane Watson, James Pattinson, Usman Khawaja and Mitchell Johnson, were sent home for not filling out a questionnaire on how to turn around the less than ideal results in the first two tests.

Australian coach Mickey Arthur said “Although this incident might seem very small in isolation this is a line-in-the-sand moment for us as a unit in our quest to become the best in the world.”

Now, anyone can see that sending four professional sportspeople home from a tour just because they didn’t do some minor homework is bizarre overkill.

I mean, I never did homework at school and now I’m manager of F shift at the thirteenth biggest abattoir in Australia.

It was obvious, though, that this latest incident was the tip of the iceberg but the coach and cricket hierarchy didn’t want to say, ‘We’ve mismanaged this for a while and now we picked the most bizarre incident to take action over.’

That would make them sound like the management of the Australian Swimming team.

Instead they tried to act tough and make out these four players were being petty.

Then reality walked in with a giant stick.

The media, social media and rational people everywhere pointed out this scenario was ‘Rihanna getting back with Chris Brown’ crazy.

Even the British press stopped listening in on other people’s phone calls to write with glee about the total stupidity of the situation.

What to do for Cricket Australia?

When you don’t have a plan B, you improvise.

Except sports administrators are terrible at improvising.

It’s what happens to people whose fragile masculinity prevented them ever truly embracing theater sports at high school.

Instead they let Mickey Arthur says it was also that “back-chat” and “giving attitude” had become part of the team culture.

Apart from sounding like a teacher in a John Hughes’ movie, this sounded like it wasn’t the homework alone. Weird huh?

Oh well. Things couldn’t get any worse.

Then Australian team performance manager Pat Howard decided to help out by commenting on Shane Watson, the most high profile player sent home.

He said, ‘I know Shane reasonably well – I think he acts in the best interests of the team – sometimes.’

Helpful.

Pat of course is manager of team performance. But hang on you say, at the start of this article you intimated in stunning prose that the performance of the Australian Cricket team is of a nature that is less than ideal.

I know.

Pat was an ok rugby union player before becoming Australian Rugby Union’s high performance unit.

How did the Wallabies go with Pat there? Not well.

Cricket Australia must have picked up on this when they hired him. They dropped the ‘high’ from his title.

This showed enormous foresight. Pat is just a manager of performance, at no point does it say at what level this performance has to be.

Pat seems to have decided that ‘average, veering towards awful’ is the level of performance he feels comfortable with.

Upon Shane Watson’s return from India, he spent quite a bit of time holding an informal press conference where he shared his views on the whole saga. Surprisingly, he took a very pro-Shane position.

He has since followed this up with a PR coup of organising for Watson’s wife to have a baby, making it hard to attack him.

This development shows Shane is obviously playing a long game because my sources tell me it takes months to prepare a baby.

So where does this all leave us?

I have no idea. In my view, Australian Cricket was much better when we won everything.

Shane Warne has chimed in to suggest everything could be fixed by getting all the players together behind closed doors with some music and a few drinks.

Personally, I think this is just Shane’s fallback solution to any problem.

My solution is elegant in its simplicity.

What Australian Cricket needs is a bunch of people who are really, really good at cricket.