They may be winning pretty handsomely in their top-end tour against Bangladesh, but Australia's cricketers aren't exactly quickening the pulse at the moment - which is a concern to Philip Derriman of the Sydney Morning Herald.

Star quality among cricketers - most easily defined as the ability to rise above the performance level of mere mortals - is fairly rare. Only a handful of Australian players has had it since cricket was first televised here.

People old enough to have seen him bat would say Norm O'Neill had it. Doug Walters certainly had it. You always felt when he arrived at the crease that he might do something out of the ordinary.

Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, in his heyday, had star quality too, and to some extent so did Mark Waugh. More recently, Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist both had it, but they're out of the picture.

Which leaves who? Nobody really.