Jake FG v The Warner Effect

GH on Australian cricket's new sensation.

Gideon Haigh

If a batter is to be judged by his fan base, Jake Fraser-McGurk is doing everything right.  Ricky Ponting wants to see him in all three formats.  Michael Clarke wants to see him wearing his old number 23. The FG Train, as surely someone will christen him, was reported to have passed a brilliant international audition with a TikTok video debut innings of 10 off five balls a week ago.  Then with Australia chasing 80 a couple of nights later - pretty much an ideal scenario for such an uninhibited striker - he peeled off a highlights package 41 off 18 balls.  He’s young, he’s bold, he’s got a hyphen in his surname: what’s not to like?

Illustration by Fisher Classics www.fisherclassics.com

Twenty-one-year-old Fraser-McGurk has also become the latest beneficiary of The Warner Effect, which sounds like a combination of the Higgs Boson and Doppler Shift, but is one of world cricket’s most popular casual assumptions.  In January 2009, David Warner made his debut for Australia before representing NSW in the Sheffield Shield.  I already knew it was a big night because I’d seen James Sutherland without a tie; Warner’s 89 off 43 balls placed a ribbon round cricket’s T20 gift to the Australian public.

What was really important, however, was what happened next, which is that Warner complemented his white ball feats with a hugely successful and meritorious red ball career, thereby proving to cricket’s jeremiahs that the formats were compatible in gifted hands.  Away with all that boring first-class stuff.  Looked at through the rosy glow of the Warner Effect, anyone can do anything.  

Fraser-McGurk is not nearly so much an outlier as Warner was.  Fraser-McGurk has played first-class cricket , averaging 22.  This might not sound much, but it’s actually better than his T20 average of 20.  Leave out that 29-ball Marsh Cup hundred on a tiny ground last year, meanwhile, and his List A average shrinks to 26.  

But where people these days see sixes, they see dollar signs, and even evidence of whole new paradigms.  The cricket economy is calibrated to the heights a player can scale, not necessarily the regularity with which they do so, because T20 matches are won by high-impact twenty-first century performances rather than pedestrian twentieth century consistency.  If one of these raw talents does pay off, like a Warner, the dividends can be huge; if they don’t, what have you lost?  There'll be another prospect to hype soon enough.

Let’s play devil’s advocate here.  Warner demonstrated that the gaps between the formats could be bridged, not that it was straightforward to do so.  We’re often told that it was Virender Sehwag who when they were playing together at the Delhi Daredevils pronounced the benediction over Warner, telling him that T20 and Test careers were compatible.  The irony is that Sehwag himself demonstrated the opposite: he was an unremarkable T20 player with a good but not great ODI record, being neither especially fit nor swift between wickets.  Test cricket was his metier, so brilliantly did Viru work against its grain.

Even Warner found it hard from time to time.  Consider the long slow fade of his Test career, with two hundreds in his last twenty-eight Tests, in which he averaged 31.  The hankering to clear his front leg cost him his early compactness; he grew especially vulnerable from round the wicket.  And the main reason we still talk about Warner in the context of T20 and Tests? It's that there are bloody few other examples.  Is Fraser-McGurk as good a player as Aaron Finch, who floundered in Test cricket, and/or Usman Khawaja, a little languid for the white ball stuff?  Good heavens, so far Steve Smith has not shown a knack for T20.  Can we confidently predict that Fraser-McGurk will excel in all three formats when Smith cannot?

Magnifying the sway of the Warner Effect on the rise of Fraser-McGurk is Australian cricket’s on-going search for its next big thing.  Since the advent of Smith and Warner fifteen years ago, only Marnus Labuschagne and latterly Travis Head have been able to found the bases of solid batting careers: Henriques, Maddinson, Renshaw, Bancroft, Cartwright, Patterson, Harris, Pucovski and others have come and gone.  Thus the urgency around reinstating Cameron Green, who seems set to become a batter who bowls a little.  Like nature, Australian cricket abhors a vacuum.  It tends be filled with whomever is around.

None of which should be misread as disfavour for Fraser-McGurk, even though he seems to fail every time I watch him.  He does hit the ball with honey sweetness, and has the swag to go with his skill.  But his being seen through the heat haze of The Warner Effect causes us to underestimate the difficulty of the challenge facing him.  All the blandishments of Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke do not dispel it.  On the contrary, what could be more difficult than essentially fulfilling the prophecies of past masters?