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In the 1999 northern hemisphere season, a young and ambitious batsman wasn’t selected for the first few County Championship games of Northamptonshire’s season, with a more experienced player preferred.
For the corresponding time in 2015, a young and ambitious batsman wasn’t selected for Australia’s tour of the Caribbean – with a player far longer in the tooth getting the nod.
I’ve no idea how Joe Burns feels about his demotion to the reserves list, but I can assure you the Alec Swann of the first paragraph wasn’t particularly happy about his.
That the spot I wanted was occupied by Rob Bailey, a man with international appearances and close on 20,000 runs to his name at the time, wasn’t much of a consolation.
After all, if you want to play, you want to play – and that Adam Voges, he of 160 first-class games and nearly 11,000 runs, had the position wanted by Burns would no doubt have hardly made the latter feel better.
The oft-used justification of ‘he’s got more experience’ can fall into the easy cop-out category but every now and again it proves to be the correct call. What transpired in Dominica would, and should, have left the Australian selectors sporting very smug grins.
Voges’ debut century was that of someone who looked to the manor born, the performance of a multiple-Test veteran and not someone whose baggy green cap and individually numbered shirt were just out of the wrapper.
There were similarities to the debut century of Mark Waugh back at the start of the 1990s – a vastly experienced player, with a handful of one-day international appearances and numerous three-figure scores to his name – making such an easy adjustment to their elevation that the all-too-obvious question sprang to mind: why wasn’t it done earlier?
There is always a reason why things occur when they do and it doesn’t necessarily follow that what rings true in the present would’ve done in the past.
I don’t recall – and those with more in-depth knowledge of the Australian game may beg to differ – Voges being a name constantly linked with a Test berth. When it was mooted during the past season, regardless of the fact he was having a stellar domestic campaign, it seemed to be a case of putting two and two together and coming up with more than the answer.
Well, it did indeed equal four in this instance and good on Waugh and his fellow selectors for ignoring the numbers on the birth certificate and concentrating on those in the scorebook.
A good message is being delivered if first-class form counts for something, and with Voges it constituted as small a leap of faith as is probably possible in the decision to award a new cap.
Experience isn’t the be all and end all, but those dozen years and 160 matches hadn’t gone completely to waste with the way the 35-year-old carefully, then a touch more expansively as the batting partners ran out, stage managed the innings and turned a potentially slight advantage into a game-changing one.
If you’d never seen the Australians bat before and been given a guess as to which one was the new boy, you’d have been hard pushed to point the finger at the number five.
Very calm of temperament and visibly unflustered, Voges’ handling of Davendra Bishoo’s leg-spin was especially impressive, and on a surface where batting didn’t look the easiest of tasks – the scoring rate was pedestrian in modern-day terms – he looked to be playing a different game to his colleagues.
Quite how far Voges’ embryonic Test career will extend is a question with a small range of possible answers but he has been picked for a reason, and I don’t mean what has just gone, and that is to help ensure a first win in four attempts on English soil come August.
Going on how he performed last week, he will have a significant role to play.