There are stock phrases we get used to in Australian cricket. “Play his natural game” has been given a bit of a rest since the rank batting collapses early this decade. “Not crossing the line” is heard less often since the sandpaper fiasco of 2018. But “banging the door down” is alive and well.
Bang the door down. That is what you are supposed to do any time you get dropped or skipped over. Go a level down, haul in the runs and wickets that demand your next elevation. Great in theory, rarely reflected in practice.
Some players pick themselves, their achievements and ability obvious. But for the last few places in a team or a squad, Australian selectors tend to make picks for their own reasons – gut feel or personality, captain’s preference or public perception, getting along better with the existing order – then choose justifications after the fact.
There was a familiar whiff when Trevor Hohns announced the Ashes squad on Friday. In: Cameron Bancroft, who has not played for any Australian team since his ball‑tampering ban in 2018. Out: Joe Burns, who made 180 in Australia’s most recent Test match, and 133 a couple of weeks ago for Australia A in the warm-ups.
That is not banging the door down, that is camping in the front room for so long that you legally own the house by squatters’ rights. You can question the value of a hundred against an overmatched Sri Lanka, but the same Sri Lanka flew to South Africa a week later to smash them in two Tests. It is the same match where Marcus Harris and Marnus Labuschagne could not make a run between them. Burns dug the team out of a hole those players made at 28 for three, helping add 376. It was not easy at the time.
But selectors always wanted Bancroft back. In Australian cricket circles he is considered the unluckiest of the ball-tampering trio; a junior bystander dragged into the mess. He is also a personal favourite of the national coach, Justin Langer, who coached Bancroft’s entire pre-Test career at Western Australia and comforted him on returning home distraught from South Africa.
The national men’s team and the top level of management want to consign the tampering story to the past, even though plenty of questions are yet unanswered. Essential to that consignment is breaking the link between the episode and the players. The only method is to get them playing again, building them a more recent cricketing history than that day at Newlands.
A nightmare scenario would be if Warner and Smith made comebacks but Bancroft never performed well enough to be picked again. The ghost of his career would haunt theirs, a stub lopped off at eight Tests. So a Bancroft comeback as soon as possible was essential. Even if he is left out at a later date, he will have had his second chance, his subsequent chapter. Cape Town will not be the formal end of his Test career.
Picking Bancroft has its merits. He has been scoring in England, with two centuries among 726 runs for Durham this season, though if the quality of Burns’s runs is under question then second division county cricket is also liable. The main justification from Hohns was Bancroft’s unbeaten 93 in the intra-squad warm-up this week at Southampton, comfortably the highest score on a pitch doing plenty.
Hohns may not have meant to let slip that Bancroft was the first choice to partner opener David Warner. “We’re very comfortable with the form of Marcus Harris. He had a wonderful season back home – so he probably got the nod over Burns in that area.” The implication is that Burns and Harris vied for one place.
Burns has made four centuries in 16 Tests. Bancroft, Harris and fellow squad pick Labuschagne have never made one between them in 19 Tests.
Burns has been dropped five times, three of them shortly after big scores and twice after one-off appearances. Once again, after hammering away, he has been told to keep banging on that same old door.
If the roles were reversed and Burns’s record belonged to a player that selectors really wanted, then surely it would have been enough. Once again, the door is most useful for getting slammed shut on frankness about decisions.
