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Who are the players to watch as the second half of the Sheffield Shield season kicks off this week?
The likes of Ashton Agar, Fawad Ahmed and Marcus Stoinis will be pushing their cases for Australia’s Test tour of Sri Lanka in August.
For other domestic players, while imminent Test selection may be less likely, a dominant finish to the Shield season would certainly put them on the radar of the Australia selectors.
Here are my six Shield players to watch.
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Joe Mennie (South Australia, 27 years old)
Mennie must have been greatly encouraged by teammate Chadd Sayers’ selection in the Test squad for the tour of New Zealand. Like Sayers, Mennie is an unfashionable bowler who boasts neither unsettling pace nor sharp bounce, relying instead on accuracy and subtle skills. In other words, he is exactly the type of bowler the Australian selectors have largely ignored in recent years.
However, in picking Sayers and Bird for the Tests against the Kiwis the selectors may be acknowledging that they have been too pace-centric in the past. That would be a welcome change of tack as far as Mennie is concerned.
With 24 wickets at 19 in the first half of the Shield campaign he was the leading bowler in the land. Should be build on that and finish with a difficult-to-ignore 45 or 50-wicket season, Mennie could follow Sayers into the national setup.
Ashton Agar (Western Australia, 22 years old)
The three-Test tour of Sri Lanka shapes as a potential route back into Test cricket for Agar.
With Mitch Marsh’s grip loose on the batting all-rounder position in the Test team, a poor tour of New Zealand by Marsh could open the door for Agar.
While Agar began his professional career as a specialist spinner, his batting blossomed in the first half of this Shield season as he scored two tons amid a haul of 354 runs at 44. If the Australian selectors wanted to replace Marsh for the Sri Lanka Tests then they might be tempted by the all-round package offered by Agar who, crucially, spins the ball the opposite way to Nathan Lyon.
Andrew Fekete (Tasmania, 30 years old)
Fekete’s hopes of playing Test cricket are on the line in the next two months. With the recent retirements of Johnson and Ryan Harris, the steady decline of veteran Peter Siddle, and the regular injuries to Australia’s young pace stars, there are generous opportunities at present for domestic fast bowlers.
As we saw with Scott Boland’s unlikely rise into the Test squad this summer, all it can take is one or two startling displays to grab the attention of the selectors. For Fekete, though, he needs to make his move over the next two months or his chances of playing Test cricket probably will evaporate.
Turning 31 years old in just three months’ time, and with only 79 first-class wickets to his name, Fekete would be an unlikely Test debutant. But the selectors rated him highly enough to include him in the Test squad for the tour of Bangladesh, which Australia then abandoned due to security concerns.
Remarkably, Fekete in a matter of a few weeks went from being on the verge of a Test debut to being omitted from Tasmania’s Shield side. He managed to scrap his way back into their line-up and promptly snared 11 wickets from his next two matches.
Fekete can swing the ball at pace, which is just the kind of bowler Lehmann and the selectors favour. But it’s now or never for the late bloomer.
Marcus Stoinis (Victoria, 26 years old)
As mentioned above, Mitch Marsh’s Test spot is tenuous after averaging just 16 with the bat in his past 10 Tests. Along with Agar and Glenn Maxwell, Stoinis is one of the multi-skilled cricketers pressing for Marsh’s position.
Batting at first drop, Stoinis is a highly-dependable batsman, having made 1442 runs at 48 in his past 19 Shield games.
He also is an accurate medium pacer but, if he is to push his case for Test selection, he will need to play a bigger role with the ball for Victoria over the coming weeks, after being used sparingly in the first half of the Shield season.
Fawad Ahmed (Victoria, 33 years old)
After some nervous bowling displays in tour matches for Australia last year, Ahmed lost his spot as Lyon’s Test understudy to Steve O’Keefe. New South Welshman O’Keefe was typically tidy in his one Test for Australia this summer, taking 3-63 from 26 overs against the West Indies at the SCG.
But the Australian selectors are known to be skittish, particularly when it comes to spinners, so Ahmed is by no means out of the reckoning for the tour of Sri Lanka.
The leg spinner took 15 wickets at 25 before Christmas and a couple of big bags in his next five or six matches could vault him back into the national setup.
Joel Paris (Western Australia, 23 years old)
This lanky left armer has major hype surrounding him. With just 13 List A games to his name he was handed an international debut in the recent ODIs against India, indicating how highly he is rated.
The Australia selectors have often used the 50-over format to get a look at players they are considering for Test selection. Given Paris only made his first-class debut in late November it would be premature for him to be in Test reckoning at this stage.
That won’t step the selectors from being seduced by him though should be build impressively on the 14 wickets he took in his first two Shield games. Australia like the variety of having a left armer in their Test attack and with Mitchell Starc and Jason Behrendorff injured, and James Faulkner out of form, Paris’ stock is rising sharply.