Australia’s squad for the summer-ending Sydney is often anomalous. A turning wicket, a dead series or even a new year can lend an incongruity to the summer preceding it. Mitch Marsh and Peter Nevill batted at three and four respectively at the SCG last year. It’s where Colin Miller once opened the bowling and Stuart MacGill would always get a game. Of all home Tests, this is the one where the course, broadly speaking, truly appears to dictate the horse.
In that sense it’s a convenient setting for selectors to mask the abandonment of its short-lived “six specialist batsmen” policy, instead racing back into the arms of the all-rounder who can “do a bit of both”. Their fondness for the player who serves as insurance against fast bowling fatigue and injury is well understood, even if said player’s actual effectiveness isn’t. Australia’s recent series losses to England, Sri Lanka and South Africa were largely built on paltry batting returns; securing twenty wickets was rarely an issue. Hilton Cartwright might promise the fast bowling cadre an extra breather, but at what cost to Australian runs?
Glibly speaking, cricket teams have 11 players and the sixth spot is its mathematical middle. As such, the style of player selected there reveals much about the team’s approach. Amid the extensive praise for Asad Shafiq’s superb innings in Brisbane laid an uncomfortable question for Australia: when was the last time a number six influenced a match so heavily for the men in green and gold? Beneath it sits a deeper question at the heart of Australia’s approach to its number six role: what does the team need more help with? Batting or bowling?
Australian cricket – so often purveyor of confidence and simplicity – is unaccustomed to tying itself in philosophical knots, though something shifted about ten years ago. After a reasonably stable commitment to six batsmen, four bowlers and a keeper, selectors uncharacteristically uprooted policy.
Maybe it was Adam Gilchrist’s retirement, maybe it was Andrew Flintoff’s destruction, maybe they were scared of life post-Warne (some of us still are), but from late 2005, selectorial orthodoxy was abandoned in a desperate search for an Australian all-rounder to call its own; someone to win matches with profound contributions in both disciplines, who could compound that value by shouldering a load that would leave their specialists fresh. In other words, someone approaching the perfect cricketer. Throughout history, there hasn’t been many.
Of course, Australia never found its Freddie. It found Shane Watson, though to most he never seemed enough. As the search continues, history will be increasingly kind to him. The futility of Australia’s search revealed more about the rare brilliance of Flintoff than anything else. Unable to find an antipodean equivalent Australia lowered its bar a little. Instead of an intense, passionate, match-winning heartthrob with bat and ball, it’s since sought players who can “help out a bit” in both parts of the game; the real “chip in” Test cricketer.
After Watson, Mitchell Marsh was bequeathed the role. He proved able-enough foil with the ball, providing those so-treasured 10 to 15 overs to relieve the bowling cartel. But he didn’t score enough runs and people started to pine again for a Real Australian Number Six. And besides, what good was a potent attack if it had no runs to bowl to? Marsh, as bowling all-rounders are wont to do, bolstered the bowling but robbed the batting. The role has always had the feel of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
So selectors reverted to the pre-2005 convention. Six batsmen, four bowlers and a keeper. Callum Ferguson and Nic Maddinson – earmarked prodigies from successive generations – were brought in to once again uphold the lofty traditions of the position once held by proper run scorers: Walters, Waugh, Ponting and Martyn, to name a few. Both selections polarised opinion, but there was a deeper point beneath. Australia had shifted strategy. Once again, they would select the best players in each of cricket’s primary disciplines. The role-player was vanquished.
But the break-up always felt temporary. Unhelped by Maddinson’s quadruple failures, Australian bowling coach David Saker’s recent comments suggested the all-rounder – once it got its act together – would always be welcomed back in the house. Put forward by Cricket Australia to speak at a Test match press conference on behalf of the Australian Cricket team, in Australian cricket uniform, as one of its senior coaches, he claimed to be an outsider without influence as he unequivocally plumped for another bowler to help the quicks.
“We are desperately looking for that all-rounder who can bowl some overs for us,” Saker said.
The comments arrived after Pakistan had posted 450 in Brisbane followed by 443 on a comatose MCG wicket. Naturally, if you’re overworked and unsupported you appeal for help. Nurses, teachers and anyone who’s ever had a tough job will empathise. It’s uncertain whom Saker was referring to by “we”. Further, how Nic Maddinson was to interpret those comments ahead of his final, and failing, shot says much about how temporary he really was, and how wedded Australia is to the all-rounder number six.
So Australia returns to the role player. It’s a curious phenomenon in long form cricket. For a game requiring such exclusive expertise in two separate disciplines – where being proficient at even one is hard enough – how teams can contrive to find a place for someone not singularly expert in either appears counterintuitive.
And whereas Australia’s batting group waited years for a policy shift, two long innings’ was all it took for a reversal. This turnaround reveals much: how important Australia’s fast bowlers are to winning, how little it trusts its spinners, and how reliant it is on the triumvirate of Smith, Warner and Khawaja to post competitive totals.
