You never heard Daryl Foster or NSW coaches moaning when they lost half their team to higher duties, why is the BBL so bloody precious? This is just further proof to me that something is seriously out of whack with cricket in this country.
Fun fact: I used to be a transcriber for a living so I put my transcriber hat back on and pulled out the Hohns quote about the BBL in full:
Question: (inaudible)
Hohns: The CA XI? Yeah, look, you’ve probably seen the squad for that and what we’ve done there is include some of our new inclusions in the test squad in that so they can at least get some red-ball cricket.
As we know, the Big Bash is currently being played and nobody has had the chance to play any red-ball cricket. We can’t do anything about that so we are seriously using this game particularly for those purposes.
We’re also very mindful of the Big Bash that is going on and not disrupting the franchises too much by taking too many of their players. But currently we’ve had no pull-back from the Big Bash franchises and I thank them for their cooperation there.
So when you look at the CA XI side, you'll see that it contains the new players to the test team: Burns, Renshaw and Pucovski, plus Labuschagne. None of them have had much red-ball cricket, as per Hohns's comments.
Of the others:
Patterson - no BBL games this year
Boland - is playing BBL for Stars
Doran - no BBL games
Holland - no BBL games
Neser - is playing BBL for Strikers
Sangha - is playing BBL for Thunder
Tremain - no BBL games
So they've filled the side with no more than one player per franchise. Strikers don't play when the CA XI is playing, so Neser might not even miss a game - the others will miss one at the most.
Most of the players selected would be close to a genuine Australia A team, and considering this isn't one, it's just a team thrown together as a warm-up for the opposition, I don't know why there is any angst over this at all.