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As he announced his retirement from professional cricket yesterday, Nathan Hauritz would have been justified in feeling upset with the way he was treated by the Australian selectors.
After Shane Warne retired in early 2006, the selectors were wildly unpredictable in their handling of spinners during a crazed scramble to find the next match-winning tweaker.
Despite the fact such dynamic slow bowlers had been extremely rare in the history of Australian cricket, the powers that be were determined to unearth a spinner who could rip apart sides. In the process, they ripped apart the careers of a succession of tweakers, Hauritz among them.
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Stuart MacGill, Brad Hogg, Dan Cullen, Beau Casson, Cameron White, Jason Krejza, Xavier Doherty, Michael Beer, Bryce McGain and even current skipper Steve Smith all were tasked with trying to plug the void left by Warne.
The ageing MacGill aside, none of them performed close to as well as Hauritz, who in 17 Tests took 63 wickets at 35 and was very handy with the blade, making 426 runs at 25.
The Queenslander was a sturdy member of the Test XI. But the selectors didn’t want sturdy, they wanted extraordinary.
Seemingly caught in a dream state manufactured by Warne and his magic, the selectors went chasing rainbows. At the end of each one was not a pot of spin-bowling gold, but rather another limited tweaker being asked to play the role of a champion.
Hauritz was limited too. He didn’t possess any befuddling variations or conjure startling turn. But he was accurate and bowled with an attacking arc – getting the ball to loop tantalisingly and drift significantly.
His captains could trust him – although it seemed Ricky Ponting didn’t – because he bowled few boundary balls and was adept at building pressure which could be capitalised on by the more potent members of the Australian attack.
In this way, he filled a similar role Nathan Lyon has occupied for most of his Test career. Hauritz’s Test figures are only a shade worse than Lyon’s, although admittedly from a much smaller sample size, and he was similarly frugal, with an almost identical economy rate of 3.14 runs per over.
Most importantly, Hauritz added some stability to the line-up for 22 months between late 2008 and late 2010.
In the 2009 Ashes he impressed many English observers as he took 10 wickets at 32 from three Tests, in a series during which star off-spinner Graeme Swann averaged 40 with the ball.
That series ended on a sour note for Hauritz, however, when he was not picked for the fifth and deciding Test on a turning deck at The Oval.
Rumours spread that Hauritz had made himself unavailable due to an injury niggle but more than a year later he denied that story.
He returned to the Australian line-up for their next series and bowled well against the West Indies and Pakistan at home. Yet Hauritz’s career ended abruptly the next summer when he was a shock omission from Australia’s Ashes squad.
The selectors at the time argued that left-armer Xavier Doherty would be more challenging to England’s many right-handed batsmen than Hauritz because he would spin the ball away from them.
The selectors stuck by this theory via no less than three spinners in that series – first Doherty (figures of 3-306), then Michael Beer (1-112) and lastly Steve Smith (0-138).
Combined they returned figures of 4-556 for the series. Yet even that wasn’t enough to convince the selectors to give the role back to Hauritz, who at just 29 years old was just entering what are typically a spinner’s prime years. He never played another Test.
Hauritz was just one of many cricketers – bowlers and batsmen alike – who were harshly treated by the selectors in the years after the country’s golden era ended.
The selectors were looking for the next Warne, the next Glenn McGrath, the next Matthew Hayden, when such beguiling talent just didn’t exist.
In the process, the likes of Hauritz were chewed up and spat out. Such is the nature of professional sport.