The Best Team That (Almost) Never Plays

GH on our women's Test team

Selections of an Australian men’s Test team are significant occasions, though not momentous. Other Test teams will follow; other choices will be made and remade. The choice of an Australian women’s Test team, meanwhile, is momentous without being significant: momentous, because women’s Tests are so few; somehow less significant, for similar reasons. World Cup squads; T20 World Cup squads: these ways big trophies lie. Women’s Tests are not the main game. The women have no Test championship; the Women’s Ashes trade at a big discount to the men’s. In 2023, the men played each other to an exhausting two-all standstill. In 2023, the women also deadlocked a stirring contest. But how many remember that, under the decade-old composite format, the scoreline was eight-all? This system has some recommendations, but that extra step in calculation and those arbitrary weightings do not aid its transparency. Now the custody of the trophy has been determined in barely 300 overs without a red ball being bowled, leaving the forthcoming Test match a dead rubber.