Inside Ashton Agar’s road back to international cricket from ‘disaster’ on eve of T20 World Cup

Ashton Agar has had to be resilient throughout his 11-year international career, but maybe never more so than in 2023. He shares how ‘disaster’ ended up being the ultimate silver lining.

The famous Rudyard Kipling poem “If” speaks of meeting triumph and disaster in the same manner.

For Ashton Agar, triumph and disaster came on the same night in Bloemfontein early last September.

In the series of lower-order heists pulled off by Australia over the past year, the three-wicket win over South Africa in the sides’ first one-dayer is easy to overlook. It came via an unbeaten 112-run eighth-wicket stand between Agar and Marnus Labuschagne - the latter of whom was subbed into the game after Cameron Green was felled by a bouncer.

It also remains Agar’s most recent international appearance. Having recovered from a calf injury in the lead-up to that tour, a collection of flops from Australia’s recognised batters meant he was forced to bat for way longer than would have been ideal in his first match back from such an ailment.

“I bowled 10 overs, I fielded at point and then at deep midwicket for 50 overs and then batted and got 48 not out, and ran a lot between the wickets. I think I did 15K in total for the game, and heaps of high-speed accelerations, which is basically a disaster for a first game back after a calf,” Agar told this masthead.

“It was a real shame because I could feel it going as I was batting. I was like ‘this doesn’t feel too good.’ But you’re trying to win for your country. And nothing’s gonna stop you doing that. So you keep going and unfortunately I had a little re-strain and then after that, it was always going to be a push to try and get to the World Cup.

Ashton Agar suffered a calf strain in this match. Picture: AFP

“Which was hard because particularly after playing a really nice game and feeling good about your skills, then you’re back into the rehab.”

That injury came a month before Australia’s first World Cup match, and three weeks before the 15-man squad, of which Agar was tentatively a member, was finalised.

The tweaker lost his race to make the cut, his position taken by Labuschagne. Even then there was hope a fit-again Agar could yet be called up should an injury arise to another player in India.

But the flame was quickly extinguished.

“You have to push the rehab along to try and get to match fitness again, which is quite a high intensity and so I re-strained it, trying to push to get to the World Cup and unfortunately it just didn’t work out.”

Agar had every right to be bitter. It capped a cricketing annus horribilis for the lefty, who had started the year with a Test recall against South Africa in Sydney but ended up confusingly departing the Test tour in India having been leapfrogged by younger finger-spinners Todd Murphy and Matt Kuhnemann.

Todd Murphy leapfrogged Agar in India. Picture: Getty Images

But September 2023 was actually a red-letter month for Agar. It was the month - September 20 to be precise - that his wife Madeleine gave birth to son Charles, the couple’s first child.

From the disappointment of the calf setbacks came the most silver of linings.

“There’s a couple of ways of looking at it. I missed the World Cup, but I got the first eight weeks, nine weeks with my son that I would have missed. I probably would have had eight days with him, or 10 days with him and then would have had to have gone to the World Cup,” Agar said.

“Looking back on that now, that was such a crucial period where I could actually learn what it means to be a dad to a tiny little baby boy which is pretty special. And I could actually help my wife a hell of a lot in that time. Waking up a lot during the night changing nappies, just doing little things. So it was a beautiful time. Albeit, I was injured.

“I was up a lot of the time so I watched heaps of the World Cup. And I really love watching cricket in India. It’s always really exciting. And yeah, so it wasn’t it wasn’t a tough watch at all. I love those boys. Most of my best mates are in that team. And seeing them win, I was pumped for them and I was in contact with them most of the time.”

This is Agar’s disposition. When you make 98 on Test debut batting at No. 11 as a teenager it is impossible to expect a career of linear progress.

Even then, Agar’s road has had more twists than most, perennially on the fringes across all three formats.

Ashton Agar made an incredible 98 on debut. Picture: AP Photo/Jon Super

But the advice of former Cricket Australia psychologist Michael Lloyd has served him well.

“He said something very simple but that was quite profound I thought. He said when you think ‘why me?’ the best thing to do is always just flip the script and think ‘well why not me?’ It could always be someone else. You know, it would be someone else. There’s plenty of other people in far worse situations than I’m in so I guess little things like that help,” Agar said.

“I think the key is to just keep coming back. Not just settling and feeling sorry for yourself. I think to keep coming back shows good resilience and I like doing that.

“Things don’t always go your way, or they don’t always work out how you’d like them to and it can be quite comforting to dwell on that. But it really gets you nowhere. And the more time you have to think about it and the more you do start trying to comfort yourself and thinking ‘why me?,’ it’s a really dangerous place to be I reckon.”

That resilience has led Agar back to another World Cup squad, this time of the Twenty20 variety. And while there are no guarantees, spin-friendly conditions mean he could easily be paired with Adam Zampa in the same XI.

He will head to the Caribbean as a soon-to-be freelancer. Having lost his central contract, Agar turned down a spot on Western Australia’s list, choosing the greater flexibility of the white-ball circuit while not completely ruling out adding to his five Tests.

“I’d probably been thinking about it for a little while, to be honest. Having been away so much and travelling with the Australian white-ball team. It meant that I had, you know, really played in red-ball cricket for a long time,” Agar said.

Ashton Agar is all in on white ball cricket. Picture: Getty Images

“I found myself in this position of seeing a lot more white-ball than I did red-ball. But also over that period, the games have grown apart so quickly.

“I spoke to Stoin (Marcus Stoinis) quite a bit about it. I think he has a really good sort of strategic brain, he sees things quite clearly and projects well, quite healthily into the future, if that makes sense. So I spoke to him about it.”

For Agar, it had become increasingly difficult to be ready for the occasional Test opening. After more than five years on the outer, he went wicketless from 22 overs against the Proteas in Sydney in what is his sole home Test to date.

“Bowling with a really old ball feels very different to bowling with a harder white ball,” he said.

“But also just bowling the same ball six balls in a row and having to hit that one spot to be honest having to do that all the time isn’t probably as exciting for me. I’ve always been a bowler that tries to mix it up. I don’t have a lot of fun bowling six of the same balls. I quite like bowling arm balls or cross-seam or you know, just playing with different variations. So that was definitely a challenge.

“And I guess that’s what makes Test cricket so hard is that you have to be so good at something for such a long time. And you certainly need to practice that a lot. And in white-ball cricket, particularly Twenty20s as a spinner, the key is being unpredictable. So batters can’t line you up. They’re worlds apart, those two skills. I think if I was playing red-ball cricket in between those tours, you’d probably be in a better place to step into a Test match like that or just bowl with the red ball, but when you’re not exposed to it for a substantial amount of time definitely it poses challenges.”

Originally published as Inside Ashton Agar’s road back to international cricket from ‘disaster’ on eve of T20 World Cup