From Gawler to the Test team, Travis Head could the future of Australian cricket
From SA’s oldest country town to the lofty heights of Lords, Travis Head is focused on one thing — keeping calm — amid claims he could be the future of Australian cricket.
Travis Head has a new mantra as he walks out to bat.
He tells himself to relax. To be calm. Of course, that might be easier said than done when you’re walking out against England in an Ashes Test match.
But, all things going as expected, that’s what Head hopes to be doing on Thursday at Edgbaston, where 25,000 pumped up, noisy fans, will be primed for action in the longest-running battle in world cricket.
He might struggle to hear himself think.
But he will also be considering what the wicket has been doing. What’s the state of the game. Is the team doing OK? Or are they three or four down for not many and need to consolidate?
“Then for me it’s about being really calm,” Head says.
In the back of his mind will be a few things he has been working on in the nets.
Perhaps it’s to keep a “hard, tight right side of my body”. Or about having “100 per cent detail” on each ball.
To be careful of the ball coming back towards his front pad. He will look for a solid early defensive shot, or even a leave, while remaining positive about taking any runs that come his way.
“I think there is a relaxation in my game which has given me great calmness and belief that I can go out in any situation in the game, which I could do this summer, whether it be 3/10 or 3/200.’’
Head is relatively new to the Test side, but he’s made his mark.
After only eight Tests he is averaging more than 50 runs a game, and topped off a consistent home summer with a sparkling maiden Test century when he crashed Sri Lanka for 161 runs. He came into the last Australian summer with only two Tests to his name, but left as one of his country’s vice-captains.
At only 25, Head is both a newcomer and a veteran.
He first played for South Australia just after he turned 18.
By 21, he was captain of his state. But Head had been playing senior cricket since he was 13 when he first turned out for the D-grade men’s district team at Tea Tree Gully.
Tea Tree Gully coach, and former Australian Test player, Peter Sleep had Head marked out as someone special from his earliest days. Sleep propelled him from D- grade to C-grade to B-grade.
Head made his A-grade debut when he was only 15.
“You could tell he was going to make the big time,” Sleep says. “He always wanted to get better. He worked hard at his game.”
Head grew up near Gawler and Sleep reckons his country upbringing also gave him and advantage over talented city kids.
“They get hit a bit harder and they take it a bit better if things get tough,” he says. And as the expectations and pressure grew as he progressed, this background also helped Head cope.
“A lot of kids along the way, they fall by the wayside when they are put under pressure and can’t cope with it,” Sleep says.
“Travis was one of those who could handle that and thrived on it.”
Head remembers the first time he saw cricket. He reckons he was six or seven. He was in the car with his mum, coming back from indoor soccer when he spotted a game at an oval near his house.
“I told mum to pull over. She pulled over and I fell in love with it,” he says.
The Heads moved around a bit. There was a house in Craigmore before a 4ha property near Gawler. Sport was always a big part of the mix. Cricket, footy, soccer, basketball, motorbikes. They built a minigolf course on their property, but cricket was always played too close to the house.
“It was good fun in Gawler,” he says. “You know everyone and went to school with everyone and played football with everyone, cricket with everyone.”
Perhaps too much fun in some ways. Head says he should have done better in school. He nearly left Trinity College at Gawler before Year 12 — “I didn’t want to waste mum and dad’s money” — but stuck it out. He says he picked up a couple of Bs and a couple of Es. “It was all or nothing for me. If I didn’t enjoy it, I didn’t do it.”
The upside of staying at school instead of heading out into the workforce was he spent more time playing cricket.
“I dropped a couple of subjects in Year 12 and took my cricket a lot more seriously. If I had ended up in a trade or a job I might not have done that as much.”
But he was no gilded youth in a cricket sense. He did it the hard way, playing against men rather than boys. He wasn’t picked in state under age teams until the under-17s. But he thinks it toughened him up. Even at school he tended to hang out with the older guys. He was playing first XVIII football at Trinity in Year 10, he was playing above his age level in cricket.
“I was a 14-year-old hanging out with all the older guys.
So I think I just developed quicker and matured pretty quick playing against those guys. They keep you pretty level. You are never better than them. In junior cricket you are always the best one and float through.”
But when it all happened for Head, it happened quickly. He had two outstanding national under-19 carnivals for South Australia, was picked in a second XI state team, then, two months after his 18th birthday, he was playing for his state.
The Redbacks were struggling at the time — not an unusual occurrence for a state team that last won the Sheffield Shield competition in 1996. Head was seen as a worthwhile gamble on the future.
It’s fair to say he was entering a new world. He hadn’t even paid that much attention to what the Redbacks had been up to before padding up for his first game. Living in Gawler, he hadn’t even been to the Adelaide Oval too often to watch matches.
“I didn’t really know what was going on,” Head admits. “I didn’t watch Shield cricket, didn’t look at the scores. I just did my own thing.”
His first game was against Victoria at the Adelaide Oval. He made 12 and 21. Not great, but not embarrassing for an 18-year-old playing his first game. His next match was against Victoria again, this time at the MCG. He made two in the first innings but a promising 57 in the second, against an attack featuring Test bowler Peter Siddle.
Head admits to some nerves at the step up but says he never felt intimidated by his new playing companions.
“You have got Peter Siddle … bowling absolute thunderbolts,” Head recalls with a smile. “I thought he was going to kill me. Bowling as fast as he could, just sledging me and I was loving it. I was like, ‘how cool is this?’”
And as he was battling Siddle, veteran Victorian players Chris Rogers and Andrew McDonald were giving the new boy a bit of grief. Questioning his skills and technique. Just to test his mettle.
“I thought, ‘shit, am I doing it the right way? Am I not doing it the right way? What am I doing?’ It was a new kettle of fish.”
Head decided the best way to progress was to listen and learn. To watch guys like Victoria’s Rob Quiney, who always seemed to make runs against South Australia; or Mitchell Johnson, the Australian fast bowler who, for a time, was the quickest, scariest bowler in world cricket; or the legendary Ricky Ponting.
South Australia had good players but could never seem to string it all together. In three of Head’s first four seasons, the Redbacks propped up the rest of the table.
The lack of success on a team front was probably beneficial for Head in some respects. It allowed selectors to give him a little more time to settle into first class cricket. A little more leeway to fail. He played three seasons before he was dropped for the first time and that was only for one game.
“I think I was very fortunate in a way,” he says. “We weren’t going great but they gave me an opportunity.”
The quest for his first Shield century was frustrating. Five times he passed 90 without making it to 100. He knew he had to improve. “It was pretty obvious I needed to get better,” he says. “You are not going to forge a career doing what I was doing.”
There are a few words that crop up a lot when talking with Head. Improvement is one. Consistency is another. Not long after Head made his SA debut, a batsman from New South Wales called Phil Hughes moved to Adelaide.
Hughes was a phenomenon.
Like Head, he was a left-hander, like Head he had been playing first class cricket since his teens. He had also played for Australia when he was only 20 and had Test centuries to his name.
Hughes had some ups and downs in the Test sphere but it was widely assumed he would have a long and successful career for the national team.
Head calls him a “freak” and says what he learned from Hughes was the value of “consistency”.
“He was someone I learned all my batting off really,” Head says. “About what is expected of you. You have to get runs and you have to keep getting runs. It doesn’t matter how many runs you get, you have to keep getting runs. Always trying to pile them on.”
Hughes, of course, died in tragic circumstances when struck by a bouncer while batting for South Australia against New South Wales in 2014. There was an almost unprecedented outpouring of national grief when the 25-year-old passed away. The #putoutyourbats campaign went around the world.
When Head scored his first Test century this year against Sri Lanka he dedicated it to Hughes. “(It was dedicated) to a few and Hughesy as well. It was a little bit emotional, to be honest,” Head said after play.
Head played one-day cricket for Australia before he played a Test. A few times his name had been mentioned as a possible call-up to the Test team, but it never quite materialised. He would have a dry run when runs were needed or he would make a 100 the week after the team was picked.
Head thinks the carrot of potential selection infiltrated his mindset a little bit.
“I probably over thought about it then,” he says. So he relaxed a little. Put it to the back of his mind.
“If Test cricket doesn’t happen, it’s not the end of the world. I will have this winter off, chill out for a bit, have a break, go for a holiday,” he remembers.
Instead, after the Cape Town scandal where captain Steven Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were suspended for ball tampering, half a new batting order was needed.
Head performed strongly on an Australia A tour before finding himself selected in the Test team to play Pakistan in Dubai.
He did well enough in those two Tests against Pakistan to earn selection in the Australian summer. Coincidentally, the first Test was in Adelaide against India. Head was grateful he had the two Tests in the bank before facing up to a full Adelaide Oval.
“If I had played my first Test in Adelaide it would have been an absolute shambles,” he says. “Because 40,000 people would be there, half of them out the back sucking tins all day. To have already played two Test matches then come here in front of a big crowd I was really relaxed and calm about things.”
All of which will, in turn, be a good preparation for the highest profile games Australia plays — the Ashes against the eternal enemy England.
He understands the demands on an Australian cricketer. “I understand you always have to perform, that’s a given. You have to perform or you are out of the team,” he says. “You have to win.”
Australia holds the Ashes, but England will be favourite to win them back on home soil. Smith and Warner are back in the baggy green, but England has a formidable bowling attack — although one that is under a cloud with strains to several of the quicks, including Jimmy Anderson, Mark Wood and Jofra Archer.
Head is looking forward to the return of Smith and Warner. “I went from being a very junior player, an inexperienced player to a young player to a senior player pretty quickly,” he says of his start in Test cricket.
“I want to experience being one of the young guys, being with guys who have played 80 Test matches. When you are playing your first few games you want to be playing with guys like that.”
Head thinks given the strengths of both bowling attacks, the Ashes will be decided by the batsmen.
“I think England’s bowling line-up is unbelievable. I think Australia’s is unbelievable as well,” he says.
“I’m looking forward to two bowling line- ups going at it. I think that is where the game is going to lie — it will be with the batters. Who can bat the best.”
And in the middle of it all will be Travis Head of Gawler.