An Australian Team to Rally Round

GH notes a subtle shift

Membership of the Australian cricket team is a little like the cast of a long-running soap opera - a Neighbours, or a Blue Hills, in which characters appear, achieve familiarity, behave to type, start to pall, then fade away. Like a lot Aussie soaps, too, it has tended to stereotypes and stock characters, to a preponderance of Shanes and Mitches with a suburban burnish. Captain Steve Smith, a cricketer as Australian as the Weetbix he used to flog, seems to incarnate this, while his vice-captain Travis Head might almost have been dreamed up by Kevin Bloody Wilson.

Baggy green Aussie

Don’t look now, however, but it’s worth noting the soap’s new direction. Australia looks likely to issue out two new caps tomorrow morning for the first time since the Gabba Test in January 2019, while Smith’s squad contains no fewer than four players born overseas: Usman Khawaja of Rawalpindi, Marnus Labuschagne from Klerksberg, Michael Neser from Pretoria, and Josh Inglis from Leeds. Maybe the West Australian should tone down those gags about ‘New Zealand-born Ben Stokes’….

The squad also includes the first Australian player born and bred in the Northern Territory, Jake Weatherald. Most importantly, perhaps, it features, for the first time in our history, two players of indigenous descent, Scott Boland, with his Gulidjan grandfather, and Brendan Doggett, with his Worimi ancestry.