Opinion
When Steve Smith walked out onto Lord’s on debut back in the winter of 2010 everyone hoped he would be our next Shane Warne.
Booming blonde hair, bowling leg spin and, much like our much-loved spinner, could swing a blade with some flare when required. Fast-forward ten years and no-one would’ve thought that Steve Smith would turn out to be the next Don Bradman.
It is a cricketing journey that has grown and grown every time he has made the walk from the dressing room to the popping crease, and as consumers of the game we are grateful to see him return to the national team in a home summer to strut his stuff.
But in the midst of what can only be described as another batting crisis in Australian cricket we enter another summer during which the composition of the Test team and in particular the top six is looking shakier than a tailender’s forward defence. While most tailenders are improving their batting as the evolution of the game continues, finding top-quality Test batsmen continues to be a struggle for the Australian selectors.
Forty-three baggy green caps have been handed out since Steve Smith made his Test debut. Twenty-two have been given to batsmen who have tried to make a dent at a long Test career. Behind Smith, David Warner boasts the best record, with 21 hundreds at an average of 45.47. Despite a lean return in the Ashes in England, Warner looks primed and ready to resume his Test career at the top of the order. While Marnus Labuschagne, Matthew Wade and captain Tim Paine remain as the locks for the early part of the summer, good luck picking the team that will be a regular and settled XI moving forward.
This is the perennial problem with Australian cricket: finding Test match-quality batsmen capable of consistently performing and churning out runs.
So as the Australian team faces up to Pakistan to commence another summer of cricket, the immediate future of the Test team lies within the playing XI and fingerful on the periphery. So while we should be celebrating our batsman getting selected to play Test cricket for Australia, we go into each series with at least four or five players on trial and with the weight of the world on their shoulders to perform. This series is no different.
(Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
Travis Head, Joe Burns and Marcus Harris. Two of the three are picked in the squad for the Test match and are starting the summer in the national team. But the reality is that Australian cricket needs all of these batsmen to push on and become the Test-quality batsmen we need them to be.
Travis Head was the leading run-scorer in Test matches for Australia last summer and trails Steve Smith only for this calendar year. Despite losing his spot for the fifth Ashes Test, the South Australian’s numbers at the start of his career read well. But he would know that his long-term job security rests on a solid summer at home.
Marnus Labuschagne, while in everyone’s good books at the moment, is in a very similar boat where he has to build on his starts and start converting his 50s into big hundreds.
Marcus Harris failed to solidify his long-term future at the top of the order in England and thus finds himself out of the side, but he has to realise that he needs to seize the next opportunity he gets, because from the little bit we have seen we still don’t know if he can make the jump.
Joe Burn’s simply needs to be given an extended, settled run at the top.
While the long-term future of our batsmen looks bright with the emerging talents of Will Pucovski, Jake Fraser-McGurk, Cameron Green, Daniel Solway, Jason Sangha and Josh Phillipe and plenty more, we can’t be relying upon these youngsters to make the jump as quickly as they can. While we are getting to know them through the Sheffield Shield, the One-day Cup and, to some extent, the Big Bash League, we know that rushing kids into the big time can be fraught with danger.
Both physically and mentally it has never been more critical to ensure players are brought into the fold only when they are ready. Australian cricket needs its depth now more than ever to ensure that the future talented batsmen in this country get integrated at the right time and not ahead of it.
So if last summer was considered a ‘hold the fort’ summer, its only fitting that this summer is dubbed a ‘steady the ship’ summer. It is a summer which beckons with plenty of answers as to what our best side looks like and who we might not see in the national team for a while.
It’s the summer of many cricketing questions, and it is on internally like never before.
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