Andrew Hilditch, the head of Australian selectors, is in a festive mood.

It’s Christmas Eve and he has to decide what to give the Australian public for the Boxing Day Test.

So the former unhappy hooker descends into the vault underneath the MCG to the vintage cellars.

He carefully avoids the Cricket Hall of Shane, where the ghosts of Warnie’s clangers endlessly roam the night looking for love in all the wrong places.

Row upon row of vats, all as rotund as Boonie, lie gathering gold dust. Fermented in each is the finest qualities a cricketing nation could ever wish to savour.

He stops at a rather large, oil refinery-like vat, where everything exceptional about the Don is distilled.

Andrew has a taste before swallowing – you don’t spit out the Don – the Grange Hermitage of strikers.

“Ahhh … 99.96 out of 100, for sure … you forget how good it was. I’m glad Punter Ponting is slipping this into Mike Hussey’s Gatorade bottle during drinks.”

But what his country is crying out for is a corker of a spinner.

He moves down the vats past Tiger O’Reilly.

“One of our finest drops….but has a wicked kick worse than a mule.”

But he can’t help but stopping at the rather small, boutique Kerry O’Keefe keg.

“It definitely leaves a nutty taste in your mouth … not to mention the numb skull it gives you. Definitely the Porphyry Pearl of spinners.”

And so he stops at the Stuart MacGill cardboard cask, with the plastic bladder showing and leaking badly.

“This was once one of our finest vintages … best strike rate in the business until the Brisbane heat knocked it about. I’ve never been able to warm to it. It tends to be all over the shop … one minute it’s caressing your tongue like a nice Muscat, and the next it’s trying to knock your block off like an OP rum. I thinks it’s starting to really go off … some spinners just don’t improve with age … this one started off with the promise of Dom Perignon and ended up delivering Sparkling Star Wine.”

And so Andrew opens the tap and the $9.99 four litre MacGill Muscatel goes down the gurgler.