When you pick an Australian cricket team, it is a representative team. You don’t pick the 11 or 12 best mates around the country. You pick your 11 or 12 best cricketers, and you put them together to represent your country.

That’s how it is and how it should be. With that in mind, you’re not going to get 11 or 12 blokes who are absolutely best mates. And that can lead to the debate that has dominated the week leading up to the first Test of the summer.

I don’t know the relationship between Mitchell Johnson and David Warner. It’s obviously not great, but that doesn’t need to be taken into the media.

I think Mitchell Johnson is entitled, as we all are as commentators, to make his points on whether David Warner should play or not. And if they’re based on fact, and data, I don’t see a problem with that.

It’s when things get a little bit personal, that’s when it blows up into the sort of story that we’ve read over the last week. And that’s something that I’ve tried very hard to avoid over the last 20-odd years since moving from a player to a commentator and columnist.

Often these stories are nowhere near as big for the guys in the team than they are for those of us outside the dressing room. For those of us on the outside it’s the sort of story we enjoy because it gives us something to talk about, rather than a Prime Minister’s XI match against Pakistan which gets washed out, or whether Pakistan give Australia a decent run for their money.

Shh: Mitchell Johnson, George Bailey and David Warner in 2013.Credit: Getty

So in that regard this was a great story to have leading into the first Test. But for the Australians and Pakistanis, I’m sure they’re just thinking about what’s going to happen come first ball of the Test at Perth Stadium on Thursday. That’s the way you often go about it.

Obviously behind the scenes there’s probably a little bit of animosity there between David and Mitch, but at the end of the day, it’s a bigger story for those of us reading newspapers than it is the guys playing in the Test.