Why can't we just pick the best players?

There has been a lot of debate, including from myself, about what NSW should do with their lineup for State of Origin 3 and for the coming years. Alot of talk about who is a future Origin player and who isn’t.
I gave my two cents on what team we should pick if we were looking towards the future, but it didn’t quite sit right with me to write that article. The main reason for that is that I have a long held belief that all representative teams should be picked wholly on the basis of who is the best suited person for the job.
By this, I mean that we shouldn’t be picking someone to play in a representative team because in 2 years time he is going to be a great player. They call it “blooding”, and I hate it.
The first time I personally remember encountering it was with the Australian Cricket team. I was always brought up to believe that wearing the Baggy Green was the biggest honour you could have as a cricketer. And the selectors went around the country watching players and picked the country’s 5 best batsmen, 5 best bowlers, and best wicketkeeper to wear the Baggy Green. You had to be the best and you had to earn the Baggy Green. That’s the way it had always been, that’s the way it was always going to be. That’s why it was such an honour.
Then at some point during Australia’s reign at the top of world cricket, things changed. The selectors and Cricket Australia realised (through some media propagation) that the players in the team, while still the best at their jobs, were getting old and were possibly going to retire around the same time and we would lose a generation of players in a short period of time and be left with an inexperienced squad of players that may or may not still be great cricketers.
So the selectors started bringing through players that may not have been the best batsmen at the time, but had the potential to be. The biggest example would probably be Michael Clarke. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great cricketer, and even had a great debut year with the bat, but when he got his first Baggy Green, he wasn’t one of the best 5 batsmen the country had to offer. He didn’t earn it.
The thing is that Cricket Australia went on such a media campaign with it that it almost because just accepted that we no longer picked the best 11 cricketers, we pick young players for the future too. If one of our best 5 batsmen was 33, he wasn’t going to be selected. And now nobody seems to remember the days when it was simply a matter of picking the best players.
Which brings me back to NSW Origin this year. The selectors and coach came out after selecting the team for game one and said they were going with a “Youth Policy”. The media said that some radical thinking was needed to beat this team of Queensland greats. Both were wrong. Is picking the best 17 players available now radical thinking? Is that what it has come to? Why do we need a youth policy? If the best available players are young, there is no need for a policy! We don’t need any policy other than PICK THE BEST AVAILABLE PLAYERS!!
This doesn’t mean that if someone had a brilliant game the weekend before, they get a spot, they have to prove that they are the best player in their position by producing performances over a period of time, and that they are still currently the best available candidate to play that spot. I really can’t stress this enough!
Don’t get me wrong, efforts should be made to help promising young players slot into a representative team comfortably once he is the best player for that position, but that doesn’t mean you simply give him the jersey now so that when he is the best available, he is not overawed! What is the point in weakening a current team to POSSIBLY make a future team better? Because let’s not forget how often the blooding of these you players goes wrong!
There are other ways to blood players to representative sports. The cricket has the Australia A teams for the one dayers, League has City v Country, or the Prime Ministers IX, or even tour matches back in the day where a Kangaroos team would actually tour. The Socceroos have friendlies, and Asian Cup qualifiers against weaker opposition. There are junior camps, senior camps, 40 man squads, Training squads. There are other ways to get these kids ready!
The sooner we remember that the better.