Australian cricket used to built as a pyramid. It was widest at its base, where we all started, playing at school, or in the juniors in a local park. A few hundred stepped past that on to the next tier, joining a Grade club. From there, at least in theory, you could scale to the very top of the pyramid – the Australian team – if you were good enough.
Today, the pyramid is looked on as a clumsy, inefficient and amateurish method of talent selection. Bright young kids are handed State contracts after bossing around a bunch of seventeen year-olds in age-group tournaments. People are picked on the basis of what they can become, rather than on what they’ve done. And maybe that’s better. Except that the pyramid worked. If you were good enough, you reached the top, having earned every promotion along the way. And if you weren’t – well, the pyramid delivered that message, too
