Crash: Can ‘expendable leader’ Travis Head find Test groove?
Part-rookie, part-leader, not a boy on the rise, nor a sage veteran. Will he become a future captain or be consigned to cricket’s scrapheap? Robert Craddock on the curious case of Travis Head.
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It’s that time of the festive season when we like making fearless predictions for the year ahead but my crystal ball goes foggy at the mention of one name … Travis Head.
Of all the players in Australia’s Test side Head’s future is the hardest to predict because the potential outcomes are so extreme.
He is current Test vice-captain so it is not a stretch at all to say his age (26 on Sunday) his Test batting average (40.82) and his leadership experience at South Australia make him a possible Test captain-in-waiting if he can put together a blistering 12 months.
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Yet right now he is fighting for his place in the Test team as he is the most vulnerable member of the top order.
So all at once Australia has declared him a leader, yet an expendable one.
Head is an interesting case study … part-rookie, part-leader, at 26 you can’t really call him a boy on the rise but nor is he a sage veteran.
Once a white ball dasher, he is now trying to plane the extravagance from his game to go the long Test match journey and spent months working on the most important, frequently used yet least appreciated shot in the book – the forward defence.
If he can find the groove – he’s not far away – the rewards will be endless and no-one faults his commitment. But he’s not there yet and his fight often seems as much with himself as the opposition.
The only thing that can be said with certainty is that where he sits at the moment is a harrowing place to be. Even the toughest players found that.
When Matthew Hayden sent his autobiography to the publishers they sent one chapter back with a request to tell us more about the insecure world of the fringe-dwelling batsmen with all of its crippling fears and anxieties.
So Hayden took off his suit of armour and spoke about the terrors that engulfed him in the nights before his first Test century against West Indies in Adelaide when he was playing for his spot.
How he walked the streets and wandered into a meditation class late at night because he thought it could help him before hurriedly leaving when it didn’t.
How he had crazy dreams of losing his protector and being timed out before he reached the middle.
How he would wake up in a cold sweat after those dreams was barely able to breathe when he reached the crease for his innings proper.
It’s stories like this that explain why, of the 458 players to have worn a baggy green cap in a Test, an astonishingly high 174 played five or less Tests. Lack of confidence, rather than ability, often proved overbearing.
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Head has done well to fight his way through the early challenges of Test cricket and his average of 40 after 15 Tests is better than Ricky Ponting, Steve Waugh and Hayden at the identical stage of their careers.
Head is a better player than he is given credit for.
But he also knows that over the past 50 years South Australia produced three other high-class left-handed batsmen in Darren Lehmann, Wayne Phillips and David Hookes who, despite some memorable innings, did not play 30 Tests, proving that in the jungle of Test cricket having the talent is just the start of it.
Nothing is guaranteed.
Originally published as Crash: Can ‘expendable leader’ Travis Head find Test groove?