‘He’s off the charts’: Jake Fraser-McGurk is cricket’s teenage rock star
What happens when you mix a little bit of swagger with phenomenal talent? You get cricket’s next big thing, 17-year-old Jake Fraser-McGurk. Or as he is known to his mates, ‘Rooster’.
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If Jake Fraser-McGurk was in a band, he’d be the lead singer.
You can’t miss the little bit of swagger in the phenomenally talented 17-year-old, who will become the third youngest debutante in Victorian history at the MCG on Tuesday.
He’s been compared to Aaron Finch in batting style, with unflinching aggression, from ball one too.
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His nickname is “Rooster” and there’s a likeable confidence about him, one which makes him unafraid of failure.
Former Test opener Chris Rogers, now national Under 19s coach, has seen plenty of the kid from Mont Albert over the past year.
That included a 10-day stint at the national performance centre in Brisbane where Fraser- McGurk handled the likes of Test bowler Jackson Bird and Ashes tourist Michael Neser.
“On tough wickets, with new balls. He was brilliant,” Rogers said.
“In terms of talent, technically and physically, he’s off the charts. He’s as good as I have seen for a long time.”
The talent is exciting, and a youthful debutante for Victoria in recent years, other than fellow batting prodigy Will Pucovski, has been rare.
Amid the praise for Fraser-McGurk’s ability, the word “precocious” also comes up in conversations about him.
It’s a word with skewed connotations, and just means someone who has “developed certain abilities or skills an earlier age than is usual”.
McGurk fits that bill, having played his first game of senior cricket aged just 11.
There is that story about him getting in to a teeny bit of trouble once for throwing something off a balcony – very rock-star.
But it’s an outlier, and his elevation in to the professional outfits at Victoria and the Melbourne Renegades, where he almost played a game in last year’s Big Bash, have hastened a maturity which now matches his drive to get to the top.
“He has had to mature quickly,” his mum Charlotte said while sitting in the underground car park at the MCG, waiting for McGurk to finish training.
“But the amount of work he has put in to get where he is, it’s immense.
“If he’s not at training, he would be somewhere hitting balls or doing something.
“Not so much now he’s on a training schedule, but he’s got so much energy. He just wouldn’t stop.”
Fraser-McGurk played in every underage representative team on offer, state and national, plus indoor cricket too in winter after he gave up playing Aussie rules when he copped a knock to the head in Under 16s.
He was nearly always captain, so got used to doing a lot of talking.
“But don’t give him a microphone, for heaven’s sake,” Charlotte said.
“You won’t be able to get it off him.”
There’s that confidence again, one which certainly comes out in his batting.
“It’s pretty intimidating, knowing what he can do,” his new Victorian teammate Will Sutherland, only 20 himself and readying for his own Shield debut said on Monday.
It’s a different sort of intimidation to fellow young-gun Pucovski.
Both have stood-out in the Victorian pathways in recent years, by some way.
But while Pucovski, by his own admission, is “intrigued” by the mental and physical challenges of a long innings, Fraser-McGurk would have no trouble trying to hit his first ball, in any game, for six.
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“He is quite aggressive at it,” Charlotte said.
At one stage he’d gone through 30 bats. Now he’s down to just four favourites.
Rogers said Fraser-McGurk, who will slot in to the middle-order for possibly the next couple of Shield matches, didn’t worry too much about fitting any modern mould.
“And you don’t want everyone to be the same,” Rogers said.
“There are places for guys who just find ways to do different things when you need them.”
In other words, places for guys who can bat like rock-stars.