‘The first catch, we erupted in here’: Snug Tavern toasts Webster’s Test debut

Snug, Tasmania. Population 1440, according to the 2021 census, with an IGA, butcher’s, post office and, as of Friday, a Test cricketer.

That last feature, in the form of two-metre tall, blinged-up allrounder Beau Webster, is good for business at the Snug Tavern.

The tiny town’s local watering hole, ringed by a carpark and still hunting a kitchen hand for the summer, played host to a small but committed crew of 50 friends and ex-teammates of Australia’s newest Test debutant on Friday.

Roughly three per cent of Snug’s population was sat in the same pub Webster drank his first beer some time ago.

“He’s put Snug on the map,” Webster’s father Rod beamed from up on high in the SCG’s Sir Donald Bradman stand. It was later pointed out that Snug’s alumni also include Nobel Prize-winning scientist Elizabeth Blackburn.

“Plenty of people wouldn’t have ever heard of it. It’s only a little town 20 kilometres out of Hobart, but it’s a great little town.”

Beau Webster takes a ripping catch to dismiss Virat Kohli.Credit: Fox Cricket

As his son rolled through multiple tidy spells that kept India’s batting order honest, the Snug Tavern crowd kept a close watch.

Their man, glinting earring and all, had already featured in the day’s early highlight after all. Scott Boland banged one in on an angle, Yashasvi Jaiswal edged it on another and Webster whipped out those “buckets for hands”. Never in doubt.

“The first catch, we erupted in here,” Calvin Aean, curator of the nearby Kingston Twin Ovals, where Webster played his junior cricket, reported from the Snug Tavern bar.

“But the second one getting rid of Virat [Kohli], that had a great reaction given no one seems to like him over the past few weeks. So that was pretty special.

Beau Webster celebrates his first Test catch against India.Credit: AP

“There’s a lot of the old boys in here, his old teammates and mates of his old man, and we’ve been keeping the bar busy from the first ball. It’s a pretty special time.”

Webster was feeling the love from home and abroad. His phone has been blowing up in the 24 hours preceding his baggy green presentation from Mark Waugh.

“To come from a small place in Tasmania and represent the country, there hasn’t been too many [Tasmanians] over the journey,” Webster said.

“So to be one of to be one of those few, I’m really proud. I’m Tasmanian through and through, [so] to be able to put on a show for them, put them on the map and do what I can for the state, makes me really proud.”

While the people of Snug keep the home fires burning, Rod and Tina Webster take a breath after a mad 24-hour scramble to take in their youngest’s Test debut. Not for nothing, it was Mitch Marsh who told Webster he would be replacing the Western Australian, delivering the news of his own downfall with “a big nod, big grin and ‘you’re in’.”

After a Facebook call-out for a dog sitter went viral, hounds Eddie and Frank were left in the care of relatives. Flights from Hobart to Sydney were found; accommodation too.

Older brother Jordan, currently based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, tried to make his own haphazard dash across the Pacific once news of his sibling’s debut arrived at 10am AEDT on Thursday.

But at last check, Jordan was settling for a dodgy online stream in the cosmopolitan South American centre. In one ear, surely, was one half of Australian cricket’s new favourite set of earrings.

The call-out for a dog sitter after Beau Webster’s Test debut is confirmed.Credit: Facebook

The other is shining brightly in the SCG centre. Conjuring memories of Shane Warne, Colin ‘Funky’ Miller and a youthful Michael Clarke, a heady slew of loud, occasionally lewd, local favourites to sport earrings in the gentleman’s game.

Webster strikes as anything but. Even if the theory at the Snug Tavern, according to Aean, is that “the earring might have come in after his last few overseas T20 contracts.

“The bigger the contract, the bigger the diamond maybe?”

The truth is far more wholesome, and better for it.

An unassuming journeyman of Australian cricket, Webster has plied his trade for more than a decade in the state arena. Now 31, he’s found consistency with his batting and added seamers to his off-spin in a reversal of Miller’s own late-blooming Test career.

A berth on the next subcontinent tour to Sri Lanka at the end of the month looms given the added strings Beau now offers. Especially after an eye-catching first day as an Australian Test cricketer, bling and all.

“His mother bought a set of earrings probably about a year ago,” Rod Webster explains. “And she gave one to Beau and one to his older brother. They both wear them, I think just out of respect for their mother. I wouldn’t say Beau’s all that out there, that might be his one thing.”