Yeah Finch needs a rest alright rest from the WC
http://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/26131998/aaron-finch-needs-break-not-sack
Aaron Finch needs a break, not the sack
Little trumpeted a few days ago was the news out of Tasmania that the Australian Test captain
Tim Paine was to be rested from this week's Sheffield Shield match against Victoria. More so than any specific injury, the move was designed to refresh Paine at a time when he is low on energy and looking ahead to the Ashes later this year.
In the words of the state coach Adam Griffith: "The workload he's had - he's a bit sore, he had that virus at the end of the Test series. It's an opportunity for him to stay home and rest up and get right for the back-end. If it was the final Ashes Test and he needed to win it to win the Ashes, he could play. But we've got to think about the big picture and make sure we don't push all our players too far and they break."
All part, then, of the big picture for Paine, who for all the pressures of the Test captaincy has been carefully managed to get the most out of his body and mind. Pointedly, this management included a change in tack after his initial involvement in the ODI team in England last year. After a series that by his own admission Paine found difficult to negotiate, he was omitted from the limited-overs set up as the captaincy passed on to
Aaron Finch.
A little more than six months on, and it is readily apparent that the careful management applied to Paine to ensure he was not "cooked" at the back end of this summer and ahead of the trip to England has been nowhere near as precise for Finch.
On the surface, it appears that both Paine and Finch have had similar workloads in this time. From the start of the October tour of UAE, Paine has played in 13 matches, all of them in first-class or Test cricket, entailing 60 days of scheduled playing time with regular breaks for rest in between. Finch, meanwhile, has played 33 days of first-class or Test cricket in that time and 25 of limited-overs cricket, all of the latter as captain either of Australia or Melbourne Renegades.
However, on closer inspection, the plight of Finch becomes clearer. He has jumped from one format to another no fewer than eight times, whereas Paine has been able to prepare and play with only one kind of cricket on his mind. Equally, the playing of one-day and T20 matches does not entail the semi-regular extra days of rest invited by early finishes to long-form games: Paine's total playing days drops down to 56 when accounting for early finishes in the Abu Dhabi, Brisbane and Canberra Tests, whereas Finch only benefited from the first of these.
Equally, the mental toll of captaining in the fast-paced white-ball environment is such that it can scramble even the most organised of minds. As Greg Chappell once put it: "It was hard enough from the playing point of view but exceedingly demanding from a captaincy point of view. Two one-day games in a row were physically and mentally more demanding than a Test match."
This is all without mentioning the extra burden of leadership in Australian cricket this summer in the wake of the Newlands scandal and at the start of a new broadcast deal. Alongside Paine, Finch has been responsible for ensuring a cleaner on-field image for the national team, and a more consistent connection to the public, most often through the increasingly invasive demands of the broadcast rights holders. Add that to the usual selection conundrums, and the fact that Finch, for all his laid back, "larrikin from Colac" image, is as tightly wound as any professional batsman, and you have the recipe for some serious fatigue.
Then, of course, there has been the as yet unquantified mental toll taken on Finch by thrusting a career white-ball player for Australia into Test cricket as a stopgap for the banned Steven Smith and David Warner. At the time he was chosen, the coach Justin Langer made a lot of Finch's standing as a "senior player", meaning he was expected to add more to the team than merely the making of runs or the taking of catches.
As was to be seen during the Test series against India, Finch's longstanding technical weakness against the ball moving back into him created enormous trouble, compounded further when a paceman as skillful and persistent as Jasprit Bumrah was also to take the occasional ball away towards the slips. These challenges provided Finch with a dilemma he had experienced in the past for Victoria, but never before under the scrutiny of Test matches.
This, then, is where Australia's selectors and team management might have taken another path. Though he performed serviceably against Pakistan in the UAE, on pitches not providing too great a problem for Finch in terms of the bounce and sideways movement, Finch might easily have been jettisoned as a "horses for courses" selection at home, not least after he had this to say about his initial struggles during the home ODIs and T20s against South Africa.
