Australia v South Africa: How former Test opener Marcus Harris fell into selection mire
Marcus Harris, the spare batter in Australia‘s Test squad this summer, has been leapfrogged by Matthew Renshaw. DANIEL CHERNY unpacks the opener’s slide down the pecking order and hopes of a recall.
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Marcus Harris and Andrew McDonald sat together and chatted at the back of the SCG Members’ Stand on Tuesday. It was match eve, there were runs to be had; opportunities ahead.
Not for Harris though, and it’s hard to quite know when, if ever, the next chance will come.
He’s the Australian Test cricketer hiding in plain sight.
It feels like an eternity ago, but Harris was in Australia’s Test XI this time last year.
There are umpteen sliding-doors moments in sports but few in recent times have had as long-lasting consequences as Travis Head testing positive for Covid-19 in the aftermath of the 2021 Boxing Day Test.
Head had only shaded Usman Khawaja to bat in Australia’s middle order at the start of that series. Harris, in relative terms, was secure in his spot.
The left-hander started the series poorly with scores of 3, 9*, 3 and 23. But a fighting knock of 76, the highest total of a low-scoring Test, could have earned player-of-the-match honours at the MCG if not for Scott Boland’s second-innings heroics.
Had Harris turned his third half-century at the level into a maiden Test ton, he would have been almost impossible to drop for the remainder of the season.
Alas for Harris he edged Jimmy Anderson to Joe Root at slip. A sucker was given an even break. The sucker was Khawaja, given an opening by Head’s illness.
Khawaja duly posted twin tons at the SCG, Harris made middling scores of 38 and 27. It was the latter who made way for the returning Head, and Harris hasn’t appeared in Test cricket since.
Well actually, that’s not strictly true. He’s appeared plenty, generally in fluoro vest running drinks and gloves, sometimes as a sub fielder. Australia has played 11 Tests since the opener’s omission, and Harris has been in the squad for nine of them. In Sri Lanka, where he wasn’t in the Test squad, he was shadowing the main group with Australia A.
In theory, he should still be right where he was a year ago: the last batter out and the next one in. He was the sole spare batter in the Test squad all summer. Until Cameron Green went down, and instead of opting for an all-rounder, the selectors decided to bolster the middle order with Matthew Renshaw.
Harris has barely had a chance to put a foot wrong since the Test squad for the series against the West Indies was named on November 8, albeit he failed thrice for Victoria in the following week.
He made 73 and 5 for the Prime Minister’s XI against the West Indies, a match in which he opened with Renshaw - who scored 81 and 101*. And that is Harris’ most recent bat in professional cricket.
Renshaw has batted in the middle order for Queensland, which helped nudge him ahead of Harris in the pecking order.
It does pose the question, what would have happened had Head or Steve Smith needed last-minute replacing earlier in the season?
“We feel with Matt in particular that he’s got the flexibility to bat anywhere in the order from the top through the middle as well,” McDonald said on the weekend.
“We feel Marcus Harris, he’s an opening batter or top three. We’ve seen him bat at three at times across his career.
“Usman Khawaja, I don‘t want to give too much away, but he could bat middle. But we do like the combination of him and Davey [Warner] up the top and that’s probably where we’ll head in the future as well, unless things shifted significantly.”
Warner and Khawaja are both 36, and despite Warner’s stunning Melbourne 200, both men are nearing the end. However while Harris - who averages 25.29 from 14 Tests - will remain in selectors’ thoughts, it is now Renshaw who has been given the chance to make himself undroppable, just as Khawaja did a year ago.
Both Renshaw and Peter Handscomb are firming to head to India next month, leaving Harris, 30, increasingly marginalised.
From incumbency to touching distance, his fingertips are slipping further from the Australian XI.
Originally published as Australia v South Africa: How former Test opener Marcus Harris fell into selection mire
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