Phil Jaques wants to play for Australia

Phil Jaques scored a double hundred in his last game and he scored one yesterday too: 202 off 294 balls. Having been immediately dropped after making Australia's highest one-day international innings on debut, Jaques knows he has to keep making an impact. So he is doing.

'Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen,' is the motto of Australia's selectors when dealing with up-and-coming batsmen. If we were an Australian selector we'd make a list of all the batsmen eligible for the side and then work our way down it until we finally got to someone who wasn't Test standard. It would take a while. We'd carry on working our way down the list even after we'd reached batsmen who weren't up to standard. It would be an unwise decision to employ us as an Australian selector.

Phil Jaques was averaging 89.87 in the County Championship before this game, so now he's topped 100. Bizarrely, that's less than Darren Gough who is currently averaging 114 after three innings (two not outs). Remember when Darren Gough was the next Ian Botham? That was a LONG time ago.