Australian cricket turns to The Inbetweeners to take first steps into unknown
Related Story: Uncapped duo named in Australian squad for India Tests
After eight of the strangest months Australian cricket has faced, the arrival of this year's annual Test Squad Selection Day will have come to many as a familiar and welcome relief.
Most people involved in the game in this country — be they in the inner sanctum or just cheering and chirping from the sidelines — have spent most of their post-Cape Town life in the pursuit of some normality, falling back on old habits in the hope business as usual will provide some balance to what has been constant controversy and crisis.
For fans, that's generally been translated to firmly attaching hopes to the latest batch of teenage wonderkids and screaming nasty things about the Marsh brothers on the internet. For Cricket Australia, it's meant high-ranking officials digging themselves into holes and eventually having to resign their way out of them.
And for Test selectors, it has again seen the start of the Sheffield Shield season turned into something like a month-long under-17s carnival, as a small handful of matches are relied upon to foster and reveal cricket's second-most-popular F-word — form.
This year, it's been Victorian opener Marcus Harris who has timed his run to perfection. A marathon 250 not out against New South Wales and a series of eye-catching 60-odds have seen his season average inflate to an unignorable 87.40 — a figure that makes it rather easy to overlook a first class career average of a little over 35.
Peter Handscomb, a batsman summoned after Australia's last great crisis in Hobart in 2016 (simpler times when merely batting poorly was as bad as things as could get), has been recalled off the back of a century against South Australia. Handscomb performed well against India on the away tour in 2017, and will take solace from the fact Jimmy Anderson will be on the other side of the world this summer.
Chris Tremain joins Peter Siddle as the back-up quicks in the squad, only to be broken out in case of significant emergency in the shape of injury to one of the Big Four. Aaron Finch and Travis Head get to continue their Test adventures after steady but unspectacular starts in the UAE.
The rest picked itself — Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon with the ball, Usman Khawaja back from injury, Tim Paine thrust into leadership, and Shaun and Mitchell Marsh, whose spots were never in doubt despite your uncle's vehement Facebook protests.
When you toss it all in together, the squad pretty neatly breaks into two halves: those whose life in the team predates Sandpapergate and who will be walk-up starts for the Ashes next August, and The Inbetweeners.
For the former, the scars of South Africa and a firm eye on the future will make for an uncomfortable summer. For the latter, careers are very much on the line.
While the Australian Cricketers' Association's push to have the suspensions on Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft lifted was misguided and counter-productive, there can be no doubt at least two of those players will be catapulted back into the Australian XI at the soonest possible juncture.
Spots which have been thrust open will snap back shut just as quickly, meaning the players who briefly filled them run a serious risk of becoming little more than answers to trivia questions. On the other hand — the one holding the half-full glass — this presents an exceedingly rare opportunity for a few fortunate men to make themselves mainstays in Australian cricket's brave new world.
At 32 years old and fitting just a little too snugly into the gap left behind by Warner — fortunately in stature and batting style, rather than temperament — Finch perhaps runs the risk of wearing the Inbetweener tag most.
While Harris, Head and Handscomb all likely still have their best days ahead of them, this summer looms as Finch's one shot. Lurking behind both he and Harris is Matthew Renshaw, who scored first class runs with an ease beyond his years in 2018 only to trip up come the November auditions, and if Finch was to fall out of the side between now and February his path back looks far murkier than his younger opening partner.
But while so much of this situation feels comfortably familiar — the Shield showcase, the selection punts, the rationales that don't quite add up — what has been refreshingly absent has been the aggressive angst that has traditionally accompanied the naming of our Test squads.
The most common complaint Twitter has offered up this afternoon has predictably centred on those two pesky brothers from WA, which serves only to prove there's nothing really to complain about.
Maybe, for the first time ever, everyone is truly happy with the work of Trevor Hohns and his merry men. Maybe everyone is simply all outraged out.
Or maybe — hopefully — people have cottoned on to the fact that this is to be a summer like nothing we are used to, and that our instinctive methods of judging players and this team won't really be applicable for the next few months, given everything that has gone before.
Half the team will be trying to rebuild a culture that the country can be proud of, while the other half will be fighting for their professional lives. As a result, this summer can be the start of something new and exciting or a footnote, a small piece of sticky tape that plugs a leaky pipe before the plumbers finally arrive.
So much remains unknown, but the fortunes of this bright-eyed bunch of Inbetweeners will go most of the way to enlightening us.
[contf]
[contfnew]
ABC .net
[contfnewc]
[contfnewc]
