This is the Friends of History Debating Society.

I'm John Bachelor with my good friend and colleague Jeremy Zuckus.

Jeremy and I have known each other for almost 25 years.

We started in the war on terror and now we're just terrorized by creatures. However, Jeremy's teaching me cricket and this is the fun

part of the conversation because I've learned enough to follow Jeremy's argument that Australia is undergoing an odd

transformation after being world champions with test cricket. World

Champions that that is played one day. It's a T-50. It played in front of 50 or 60,000

screaming excited thrilled fans in this instance it was in India and winning with regular cricket you know

the spin bowling and defensive plays brilliant defensive plays d brilliant defensive plays, dashing, throwing their bodies around for five or six hours.

There's a, there's a suggestion that it's not good enough for them what's going on Jeremy well John what's going on with the Australian cricket is a good question because what's happened this week is and sorry let me put it in context too we're in a slow part of the year for cricket in Australia,

just because the northern and southern hemisphere schedules are kind of have a slow period, so what's happening now is here in Australia,

and the same in England and elsewhere in the world.

Basically all our teams are being reset. So a lot of contracts are being renewed for our

professional players but also a lot of new selections are being made for our cricket teams for the year ahead.

So the Australian international cricket team is being selected now.

Often what happens is that most players tend to get their contracts renewed unless they are actually retiring and some new players come in.

But in the Australian scene, the most interesting thing is that a number of fairly new players that were expected to have their contracts renewed did not.

And in fact what happened is players that play a slightly different style were brought in.

And I'll tell you what that style is.

It's basically the players that have not got a contract for this coming year are the ones that are

spin bowlers, other ones that play traditional cricket. They back conservatively, they play the long game,

and they play truly what cricket is all about over say five days series and they do it very well

...