For a moment in time today – 83 minutes, as the official match scorers confirmed – Australia’s national selection panel was breathing a little easier than had been possible over preceding weeks.

Scrutinised and scorned for the make-up of an erratically performing men’s Test team, and for the absence of public explanations regarding their selection rationale, chair Trevor Hohns and his fellow panelists Greg Chappell and Justin Langer witnessed green shoots of vindication.

Opener Marcus Harris, their first bold call of a most atypical home summer when he was handed his first Baggy Green Cap in the opening Test, was moving assuredly and at a good clip towards a maiden international century.

A milestone that has eluded this recast team throughout the Domain Series against India to date.

Providing able assistance to the left-hander was Marnus Labuschagne, a lightning rod for much of the debate that had engulfed the protocols of national selection and the existence of meritocracy since changes were made to the Test squad last week.

The pair who boasted five previous Test appearances between them were tackling the bowling complement of the world’s top-ranked team, who already had 622 first innings runs in the bank and the wicket of Australia’s most experienced batter, Usman Khawaja, in their keep.

Yet Harris and Labuschagne were there in the middle of the SCG on a day bearing Chennai-like heat and humidity, and fashioning Australia’s only 50-plus second-wicket stand of a sub-par batting campaign spanning three and a half matches.

Having emerged as one of the few shining lights in a gloomy Test summer for the home team, Harris then installed himself as Australia’s most prolific runs scorer of the series in his debut season, on the way to posting the highest individual tally of the campaign.

But just as the selection panel and an impatient nation dared to believe that something had gone right after so many recent wrong turns, the game took a familiar shift.

And the high spirits Australia had taken into lunch today were replaced by a sick feeling in the pit of their collective stomachs.

Harris fell in circumstances that would likely be deemed dead unlucky when fortune is riding with you, but becomes darkly predictable when in the sort of funk Australia cricket has been since Cape Town last March.

An inside edge that bounced behind the opener so that he was unaware of its location, only for the ball to announce its track with the tell-tale tumble of the leg bail.

Soon after, Shaun Marsh – a name that is forever embedded within polarised discussions about team selection – fell for his tenth single-figure score in 16 Test innings to increase the level of heartburn among the panel.

And then Labuschagne went for 38, victim of a neat catch to a close-in fielder.

Again, that kind of dismissal that seems to follow teams and players enduring a tough trot while those in the full flush of form invariably find the gaps a metre either side of waiting catchers.

Labuschagne’s contribution would hardly be considered a triumph in more traditional Australia cricket times, given the number three role has historically belonged to the best-credentialled batter in the line-up.

However, so lean have been the pickings through which selectors have sifted over recent years his 38 stands as the highest score by an Australia batter in his first attempt at the pivotal first-drop berth since the late Phillip Hughes’s 86 against Sri Lanka in Hobart six summer ago.

Bearing in mind that the nation’s most prolific scorers in that time – banned duo Steve Smith and David Warner – batted at number four and opener respectively for a bulk of their Test tenures.

It also represents a total that neither fits neatly into the assessment category of success or failure.

While the national selection panel took their lunch in some comfort, and the subsequent batting stumble remained a figment of the future, the discussion over the make-up of Australia teams current and past was being reheated on national airwaves.

Outgoing Cricket New South Wales Chief Executive Officer Andrew Jones, who leaves his post at summer’s end, admitted that team selection in Australia has been “haphazard for a number of years” and cited a case not dissimilar to Labuschagne’s as evidence.

In the SCG New Year Test against Pakistan two years ago, the then panel summoned Western Australia’s Hilton Cartwright for his debut amid a dramatic overhaul of the team that followed their earlier home series loss to South Africa.

In a game dominated by the home team, Cartwright scored an assured 37 in his sole innings that stretched beyond two hours, and finished wicketless having delivered just four overs with the ball

Yet the 24-year-old’s name was conspicuously absent from the touring party named for the Test tour to India later that month, replaced as seam-bowling all-rounder in that squad by Mitchell Marsh.

Cartwright’s only appearance in the Baggy Green Cap since his debut was a last-minute call-up to Bangladesh in September, 2017 where he scored 18 and again finished wicketless.

The symmetry of Jones’s critique gained greater relevance given Labuschagne’s batting contribution today, coupled with his bowling figures of 0-76 from 16 overs of energetically raw leg-spin.

Which proved sufficient for ex-Test captain Ricky Ponting to declare him a sure selection for this year’s Ashes in the UK.

Jones, who previously worked as an executive with Cricket Australia and was heavily involved in the preparation of the 2011 Argus Review that advocated sweeping changes to selection and team performance structures, acknowledged that past mistakes have been made.

And he outlined his preferred model, as implemented with the NSW Blues, for the senior coach to take on sole selection responsibility in consultation with talent managers and other informed observers.

“I think that we often don’t pick the players with the best records in batting,” Jones told radio station SEN during today’s lunch break.

“And I know that Test batting records are highly correlated with first-class records, and there’s a reason for that – the job is the same, and that’s making runs.

“We also chop and change, so the way we manage people and, in this case players, I think is unhelpful to those players.

“Hilton Cartwright, for example, was the hope for the Sydney Test two years ago, and there were lots of reasons why he was picked as the all-rounder, and his 37 on debut was deemed a success.

“But he wasn’t picked for the next series and you go ‘well, was his selection a success and was it a good idea or not?’.

“If it was a good idea, we didn’t act further on it and if it was a bad idea, we didn’t admit it.

“If I compare that to the way we hire executives, we put them through the wringer in the recruitment process to work out who the best candidate is.

“Then we put them through round after round of interviews, psychological testing, IQ testing, the works and as soon as we decide they’re the right person, we back them to the hilt.

“That, I think, would be a better philosophy for selection.

“We need to spend a lot of time working out who the best players are, and then we need to give them a lot of opportunity to be successful.

“The impact of poor selections on players, to their psyche and also to their lives financially and psychologically is quite profound, and I think the system works well when players have confidence that they’re going to get what they deserve.

“When that confidence is broken, bad things happen.”