Everyone reckons they can select the Australian cricket team. Everyone, that is, except the selectors themselves.

Instead, the Australian team picks itself, as in, it literally picks itself. Marnus Labuschagne made this clear on the mike during his BBL game on Wednesday when he said Steve Smith had decided he would replace David Warner as opening batsman, and whatever anyone else thought, Smith had his way. Selectors usually choose teams and captains then decide the batting order. This time? Patrick Cummins hadn’t been sure about Smith as an opener. It didn’t matter. The idea started as Smith’s initiative. If he doesn’t succeed, it will end as his initiative too.

This has become normal. The freshly sainted Warner had been selecting himself for overseas Test tours, of which Australia has won one from six in the past five years. One from six. But success was no longer a criterion.

If the team picks itself, what is the point of the selectors? To wear a tracksuit, hang out with the boys and make them feel good about themselves? That might be popular, it might create a relaxed environment – of course it creates a relaxed environment – but whatever else it is, it’s not selecting.

So if it’s not doing anything beyond backing the senior players’ decisions, when is it time for the selection panel to be formally dissolved, consigned to the irrelevance it has so eagerly embraced?

Australian team lists used to be handed down by grey men in suits lurking alone at Sheffield Shield games and judging talent. Poor old Cameron Bancroft could have done with a strong-minded selector watching a Shield game or two instead of riding in the team bus guzzling Brand Warner or Brand Smith Kool-Aid. Now it operates more like a club team, where the senior players choose themselves, their mates, whoever doesn’t have to work on the day, and, when forced, an outsider whose form can’t be ignored. As with everything else, the Australian cricket team moves closer to a club model – imitating the football clubs they so admire and the T20 franchises they earn their big money from – which do without independent selection panels.

Steve Smith in the nets.Credit: Getty

Selecting itself was also what the Australian team did for its first few decades, when it was a little club owned by the senior players. Starting with Dave Gregory and Billy Murdoch, the captains and their cronies picked their travelling circuses for lucrative overseas trips from which they shared the profits and became rich men.

Interestingly, the selection model changed when the Australian team came to resemble a national symbol, and better governance was needed. Part of that independent oversight was a selection panel. Over the decades it sometimes got its job right, often got it wrong, frequently showed a perceived bias, took blame for poor results and little credit for good ones, but its purpose was unquestioned: to take the ultimate power away from the senior players and to govern the sport from a broader national base.