Heavy on bats

It's the time of year when we find out which players will be paid by Cricket Australia from 1 July onwards. There's nothing too surprising in the list, although there's always something to talk about. Jrod wonders why Lee gets more allowances for injuries than Bracken. Tony wonders about the magic number of contracts, pointing out the absence of T20 write-ins.

I'm not sure where the Jaques story fits in the injury picture, and I can see why a T20 position might not be considered that important, but 25 contracts does seem pretty arbitrary. It also seems to me at first glance that the squad, if we can call it that, is fairly balanced in terms of bat and ball. This is slightly surprising, given the effect of both injury rates and recent selection tendencies on the number of batsman and bowlers likely to be actually required for national duty.