Anatomy of an axing: Inside the ‘multimillion-dollar decisions’ that shape the Australian cricket team

Essendon Airport, late afternoon in February 1971. Bill Lawry, his wife Joy and their two daughters, Elizabeth and Susan, enter the arrivals hall to meet a phalanx of journalists and photographers.

They are there to question Lawry in the immediate aftermath of a signal moment in Australian cricket – the only time in the history of the Australian Test team that a captain has been sacked mid-series and dropped from the team altogether.

No single event has more firmly fixed the image of selectors in the public mind. Silent assassins, wielding power and deciding who to redeem or execute with all the secrecy of Mafia bosses.

Over the 55 years since, Australian Test selection has remained the source of endless debate, controversy and huge shifts in custom, communication and the balance of power between players and selectors.

Lawry learned of his axing from teammates, who found out from a journalist, setting the tone for the acrimony that has so often blown up over the selection of Australian cricket teams.

There was Simon Katich’s nuclear eruption after Andrew Hilditch’s panel cut him from the contract list in 2011. The fracturing of Shane Warne’s relationship with Steve Waugh when the captain dropped his deputy in the West Indies. The accusations of state bias when Brad Hodge was jettisoned after six Tests. Or the commotion, 17 years earlier, when Dean Jones was axed for the home summer after making 433 runs in his previous four Tests.

On the eve of the Ashes summer, during which a fresh wave of selections will be debated in pubs, on airwaves and on social media platforms, we spoke to past and present selectors and players to explore exactly how Australian teams are picked.

In 2025, the stakes have never been higher. “A lot of the decisions are effectively multimillion-dollar decisions, rather than going back to a certain time when it wasn’t necessarily that way,” chairman of selectors George Bailey tells this masthead.

Bailey leads a panel that also includes head coach Andrew McDonald and former Victorian paceman Tony Dodemaide. Their way of dealing with the hiring and firing of players could not be more different from when Lawry was brutally culled.

‘The bastards will never get me the way they got Bill’

Lawry had spent the final day of the previous Test match sitting alongside the selectors – chair Sir Donald Bradman, Neil Harvey and Sam Loxton, all members of the 1948 “Invincibles” team. But he was given no inkling of the change in the works. Loxton took an early flight home to Melbourne the next day before Lawry could find him for a customary debrief.

That morning, it fell to Keith Stackpole and Ian Redpath to tell Lawry what they had heard from the journalist Alan Shiell: Ian Chappell would replace him as captain, and fellow Victorian Ken Eastwood was the new opening batsman. Lawry was stoic, but admitted he thought there might have been something up when he could not find the selectors after the game.

Shiell also informed Chappell of his appointment as captain, after tracking him down to the Overway Hotel in Adelaide, where he was having lunch. After taking in the magnitude of the decision, Chappell would later declare to his wife: “The bastards will never get me the way they got Bill.”

‘I could sense it coming’

Earlier this year, the selection panel chaired by Bailey, the former Tasmanian captain and Test batter, came to the potentially tetchy decision to drop Nathan Lyon for a Test match in Jamaica.

When fit, Lyon had turned out for every Test for Australia dating back to 2013, so it was a significant decision.

Bailey, Dodemaide and McDonald, who communicate regularly over a WhatsApp group but also have regular calls wherever they may be in Australia or around the world, spent plenty of time mulling over the call with input from the captain, Pat Cummins.

But when they had concluded that Lyon would make way for Scott Boland – who subsequently plucked a hat-trick in a big Australian victory – the manner of the decision’s communication was as important as the selection change itself.

Together, McDonald, Cummins and Dodemaide all met Lyon in the captain’s hotel suite in Jamaica and conveyed the decision. Lyon, as all players do now, got ample opportunity to express his views on the decision, with the opportunity for further feedback later on. Lyon was particularly upset to be missing his longtime teammate Mitchell Starc’s 100th Test, but was grateful for the opportunity to talk it through.

“I went into Pat’s room and they all explained what they were doing, which I totally get and understand,” Lyon tells this masthead. “No one’s bigger than the team, doesn’t matter how many games you’ve played or what your record is.

“You know what it’s about. I could sense it coming from a fair way out, and that’s just an experienced old head I think.”

The underlying philosophy of Bailey’s panel is that, after decades of selectors keeping their cards close to their chest, this group prefers to err on the side of oversharing rather than undersharing.

“There won’t be anyone who can say they don’t know where they stand,” says vice captain Travis Head. “If they don’t know, then they probably don’t ask enough questions.”

Numerous figures have accused the current panel of becoming too close to the players, and surrendering autonomy over decisions as a result. Mitchell Johnson was one to make that point last summer, compelling Bailey to respond.

Asked now about that criticism, Bailey refers to his comment at the time. “If someone can show me how being distant and unaware of what the players are going through and what the plans are with the team and the coaching staff and how that’s more beneficial, I’d be all ears,” he said then.

At times, the public blowtorch has been fierce. Former selector Jamie Cox recalls the abuse hurled at then chairman Andrew Hilditch during the losing Ashes summer of 2010-11 as they walked around the back of the SCG with fellow panel member David Boon and ex-selector Merv Hughes.

“Just some ferocious shit that got thrown his way, really angry, emotional stuff,” recalls Cox.

“No one had anything bad to say for Boonie or Merv [both legendary former players], and no one recognised me, but ‘Digger’ copped the lot.”

Hilditch, who’d joined the panel in 1996 and helped guide Australia to world domination, was replaced by John Inverarity after that summer.

Cox, Hughes and Greg Chappell have always defended Hilditch’s diligence and deep passion for Australian cricket, but he has seldom been seen at cricket matches since.

Pick and stick

While captain Cummins is not formally a selector, even on tour, he has an extensive consulting role with Bailey, McDonald and Dodemaide. He has also helped to shape the philosophy for selection and the hard conversations with players.

“Transparency is important. You want to know the reasons why,” Cummins says. “Even if you don’t necessarily agree, you want them to be there so it’s not just a gut feel or something. And I think you want consistency. So if you go, ‘We’re sticking with this guy’, and maybe you might argue we’re sticking with him too long, you just know that maybe one day you’ll get the chance, and we’ll promise that we’ll stick with you.”

Cummins says players who are dropped want to know how they can make it back.

“It might be conditions-based and, ‘Get ready for next week because you’re going to play a part’, and you actually mean those words.

“Or we think you’re not at your best, here’s your path forward, here’s what we want you to work on, here’s how we’re going to help you as a coaching and selection group to help you get back in this side.”

Cummins noted the numerous occasions that Mitchell Starc has found himself out of the team across each format. Among the most high-profile cases was when he missed out on a critical game at the 2022 Twenty20 World Cup in Australia. A decade earlier, as the panel chaired by Inverarity started leaning on sports science to manage bowling loads, Starc was “rested” for a Boxing Day Test. He wasn’t happy.

“Every player sees themselves in the best light,” Cummins says.

“You think you should play everything and that you can do better than anyone else. But you do need to accept sometimes that there is improvement to be made.

“Starcy has shown that a few times when he’s been dropped or managed, he’s always come back a better player.”

The most dropped player in the Australian team

No one in the contemporary team has been dropped more often than Usman Khawaja. By his tally, there were seven occasions between 2011 and 2019 where he was left out of the Australian side, either at home or on tour.

“The communication is way better,” he says. “Before it was such an old school mentality, especially for a batsman. If you got dropped, you went right back down the pecking order, and I don’t think that should always be the case.

“If you’re playing for Australia and you’ve done well and you do get dropped, it doesn’t mean you’re now the worst batsman in the country… There’s no reason why after six months you can’t come back up, if the selectors are seeing what they want to see. I think that’s changed.

“The selectors are more mindful of where people are in their career, what’s going on, what’s best for the team. There’s a lot more context to picking teams and dropping players.”

Khawaja believes Australia’s overseas results have improved because of greater mindfulness of how to handle a player who misses out away from home, yet still has to stay with the squad.

“When you get dropped overseas, that’s by far the worst,” Khawaja says. “You have to kind of fake it a little bit, be amongst the boys and do what you can to help the team out, and that’s the hardest.

“Because say you get fired from work, you’re fired, you leave the office, you’re gone. But if you get dropped on tour you have to hang around for another three weeks, so the environment’s even worse and it just rubs your face in the dirt.

“It’s psychologically very different.”

Head, who also had his share of time in and out of the team between 2018 and 2023, said there was no great way to tell a player they were surplus to the Test XI – as he was at the start of the 2023 tour of India in Nagpur. But the art is in how selectors and coaches follow up with a way forward.

“I didn’t agree with it at the time and we had a good conversation about it,” Head says. “But then there’s two ways to go about it, you either kick the bucket or you get on with it, and for me, it was about supporting my teammates and getting on with it and preparing to potentially play at some point.

“Now more than ever, there is more to it than just getting dropped. How do you get back in, how do you deal with it, mentally, physically, and what you need to do to get back. The follow-ups are better than they’ve been.

“It’s laying out a plan for what you need to do or the reasons why you’re not in the side. Communication has got bigger and bigger, and that’s for the good.”

Since Bailey was appointed selection chair in 2021, the panel has never needed to revert to a formal vote. They work on reaching consensus, even if it takes hours of conversations to get there.

This had not been the case with Lawry.

It should never happen again

None of the selectors was enamoured with Lawry’s captaincy or batting, but few expected them to turf out the captain when Chappell was the most likely alternative. So what happened?

Years passed, including Chappell’s entire tenure as skipper, before he was any wiser as to how he had seemingly been handpicked as captain by Bradman.

Eventually, retired from playing and living in Sydney, Chappell was having a beer at Pennant Hills Golf Club and struck up a conversation with Harvey, who had also retired as a selector. At such moments secrets are often revealed, and here was Chappell’s chance to find out what happened.

Chappell got a typically forthright response from Harvey. “It was me, it was bloody me, I got you the captaincy.”

How?

Harvey had, during the summer of 1970-71, convinced Loxton that the pair needed to make the case for change to Bradman, including the push for Chappell as Lawry’s replacement. For while Harvey, Loxton and Bradman were close, the former pair had closer links through playing together in Victoria. It was quite something for Harvey and Loxton to outvote Bradman, but that is essentially what they did.

It’s no coincidence that Lawry’s sacking was both the first and the last of its kind. Numerous members of that young Australian team would become selectors themselves: Greg Chappell and Rod Marsh among them. And the story of Lawry’s execution has remained a vital one for Australian cricket. Just because he took the fall with grace did not mean it should happen again.

Rather than stew on losing the captaincy, Lawry’s sense that Eastwood felt poorly equipped for the task has remained his primary regret, and another lasting theme of selection debate. When is the right time for new blood?

“Kenny Eastwood was a brilliant player and he should have played Test cricket before,” Lawry told journalist Adam White earlier this year.

“He came up to me once and it was the saddest moment of my cricket career … he said to me, ‘If you’d have played in Sydney we might have won that Test match’. That really hurt me.”