Labuschagne is only the first question. McDonald's 'age profile' line is the real headline

Coaches have a special dialect for telling you a player is about to be dropped without saying it. Andrew McDonald has now delivered the definitive version. Marnus Labuschagne, he said, is still a very good cricketer, the selectors believed in him for this tour, and nobody is rushing into anything. He also hasn't taken his opportunity. Read that sequence back and only the last part matters.

Labuschagne made 0 and 4 at Newlands, dismissed twice in eight balls as Australia lost the decider by 176 runs and the series 2-1. ESPNcricinfo's assessment is that there "seems to be no world" in which he faces New Zealand in Perth on December 9. McDonald's own timetable is "the next week or so".

Forty-nine innings is the longest run without a hundred by any Australian top-four batter, and it has turned the argument from whether Labuschagne should go to whether keeping him this long was cruel. Simon Katich, on SEN, went for the second one, and he did not go gently.

The strength of Katich's case is that it isn't really about Labuschagne's technique. It's about a selection panel that watched a player sink and kept sending him out. The weakness is the timing: Steven Smith's neck ruled him out on the morning of the decider, so even a braver call on Labuschagne might have been reversed by breakfast.

McDonald declined to respond to Katich directly, then responded anyway. Any chance to play for Australia, he said, doesn't damage you. As a principle that's lovely. As a description of what 49 innings does to a batter's confidence, it's a harder sell. Jason Gillespie said on ABC during the Test that it felt "too far gone now".

His better point is the one about state cricket. Labuschagne was dropped for the Caribbean last year and came back with two hundreds in four Shield matches. The trouble is that this precedent cuts both ways: since that recall he averages 23.66, according to ESPNcricinfo. Domestic runs got him back in, and they didn't tell anyone he was fixed.

Then came the careful part. Having raised the age profile himself, McDonald ruled out the two most obvious places to start. He has seen nothing to suggest Smith is closer to retirement, and cricket.com.au reports Smith could even move up to No. 3 if Labuschagne goes. Lyon, who took six wickets at 43.66 against Simon Harmer's 14 at 29.35, isn't up for review either: "I don't think it's something to review now."

That is a coach naming the problem and postponing it in the same press conference. To be fair, there's a logic to it. Four home Tests against New Zealand are a sensible place to keep your experience together, and McDonald can point to real gains: Josh Inglis's second away Test hundred, Green's return, and Matt Renshaw as the series' leading run-scorer. But Australia tour India and England next year, and those are not the trips on which to discover who comes next.

Here's the part that should worry the selectors more than Katich does. A few hours after Newlands, the Shield offered them a look at the alternatives, and New South Wales lost to Tasmania by an innings and 81 runs. Sam Konstas was lbw for 2 in the second innings. Kurtis Patterson made 9. Nic Maddinson, fresh from 56 runs in four innings on the South Africa tour, made 2 and 1. NSW were 31 for 5.

NSW's two Shield games in Sydney later this month, with Smith a possible starter, are now effectively a trial. It's one match, and Shield form in early November has fooled people before. But the case against replacing Labuschagne was never that he was scoring runs. It was that nobody else was making it obvious.

Dropping Labuschagne is the easy decision, and it's now late enough that it no longer counts as a brave one. The harder decision is the one McDonald raised and parked. His side has legends in it, as he said, and it has also just been bowled out for 99 and 111 in consecutive Tests.

George Bailey announced on Monday that Cummins, Starc and Hazlewood are being rested from England's white-ball visit, with the Test group facing more than 100 days on the road once it assembles in Perth. That's workload management for an older team, and it's sensible. It also tells you what the age profile looks like in practice. McDonald says he's asking the same questions as everyone else. From now on, he's the one expected to answer them.