Star batsman Peter Handscomb reflects on his journey from Mount Waverley to the Australian side
JUST hours away from his first Boxing Day Test, Victorian batting sensation Peter Handscomb reflects on his journey to the top and how he plans to stay there.
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PETER Handscomb’s Australian-issued cream pants still have creases in them. Brand new, straight out of the packet.
He places his baggy green cap, still with that new car smell about it, in the palm of his flattened hand and gently slides it in to its baggy green coloured felt bag, embroidered with Test number 447.
Sitting beside the player race in an empty MCG days out from the Boxing Day Test, just down from the players viewing rooms where he’ll sit with his new teammates, the lad from Mount Waverley carefully places the bag inside his player backpack.
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“The backpack’s always with me, so is the baggy green cap,” he tells the Herald Sun, a “can you believe I’ve got one” grin across his freckled face.
He says “mate” a lot in 30 minutes, time spent talking about every club he’s played for, juniors through seniors, where he went to school, his first innings against men — he was 12 would you believe — and that ultimate eventuality of it all, a start in the Boxing Day Test.
That reward is just plain awesome, that’s what he says, just awesome, as he looks to that walkway he’ll stride down, maybe Monday, maybe Tuesday, and head out to bat for Australia.
But with such an epic reward still hours away, reflection on the journey brings just as many smiles.
Wind the clock back 20 years and there’s young Peter walking around the corner to the Mount Waverley Reserve in Charles Street, yapping to his dad, John, an Englishman who played a bit of lower level cricket in England.
He was a batsman too, not an off-spinner, a story which has got out of control as Handscomb has become a big part of the summer.
John was a bit older, closer to 60 than 40, and in to his second marriage when he had Peter and his brother Thomas, who has a PhD in maths and lives in London.
But John never missed a chance for a net session.
“He’d just stand there and throw the ball to me. He was more of a batter than an offie, I don’t know where that came from. He was a left hand bat who could pull and cut and that was about it. He was quite small,” Handscomb said.
“We’d do little drills to get my feet going. He’d stand on one side of the wicket and tell me to on drive, then stand on the other side and I’d have to off drive them. That was getting used to driving the ball.
“Then he’d just throw them at me and I had to find a way to deal with it, either hit it, kick it away, whatever, but I couldn’t get out. It was fun, I loved it. He was a fair bit older than me. He was retired from cricket. It was awesome though.”
John passed away last year, aged 80.
“He gave it a good crack,” Handscomb said.
John was around for plenty of good stuff from Peter too, who found early success in cricket when he captained the Victorian under 13 schoolboys team.
The coach of that side was Kelly Masters, who invited Handscomb to join Kew and play subdistrict cricket, against men.
“In the fourths,” he said, although that was just the starting point. Two years later he was playing firsts every week for Kew, and bigger things awaited.
Driven always by “supportive” parents, Handscomb at this stage was also playing soccer and tennis.
Aussie rules was never a factor because his mum and dad wouldn’t let him play.
“It was too rough they reckoned. And then when I got older and could make the call myself, it was all about cricket,” he said.
And it was. He was 17, and Handscomb decided to pull the pin on everything else and devote himself, year round to cricket, with a plan to join Premier Cricket club St Kilda.
“During the winter you would run around a track, keeping fit,” he said.
“Then I would be a training at St Kilda an hour before it started with one of my mates and we would throw balls at each other from half way down the pitch and try and knock each other out, hit the stumps, do stuff like that.
“Things like that have helped, volume of training.”
Maybe now, but initially all that training didn’t help his core business, making runs.
“I played one game in the twos at St Kilda, the last game of the season. Then the next season I started in the ones, I was 17, played four games with an average of one,” Handscomb said, the memory of that inglorious beginning still very fresh.
“I got dropped to the twos, stayed there for half the season, made some runs, got back in the ones, and my first game back I was dropped on zero, first ball, then made 70 and that got me the confidence to play.”
Cricket is funny that way. It’s a team game, wins can be great, but individual slumps are almost always present too.
There was little doubt Handscomb could play, that big things were in his future. But it wasn’t because he made massive amounts of runs all the time.
The right people were watching him and picking him in representative teams, Victorian Under 19s, Australian Under 19s. Only a select group of young talent makes those squads.
“But I didn’t do well in either of them,” Handscomb said.
“In the Vic carnival I averaged 10, and then for Australia my highest score was like 25. There was nothing there.”
Nothing, but something, surely. He wouldn’t have been picked otherwise.
Then came 600 runs when he went back to St Kilda, and a rookie contract with Victoria was his reward. There was something there.
At state training he faced guys like Darren and James Pattinson, Peter Siddle, Test bowlers all “steaming in”.
“I was like “this is scary as anything”. But it was awesome at the same time,” he said.
Runs came too, including a double-hundred for the Victorian second XI, which earned him a debut in the opening round of the 2011/12 season. He made 71 first up, and he was away.
Back at the MCG now, wearing those Aussie creams, Handscomb seems pretty comfortable.
But he doesn’t like that word, knowing, having just spoken about all those times when there weren’t runs, when there were doubts, that it’s never time to be comfortable.
Happy, yes, in part because he’s about to go bush, and move in with his girlfriend Sarah and her four horses on 20 acres just near Kinglake,
Content also, because he’s realised a dream, a dream every kid who goes down the nets with his old man or older brother has.
But he won’t ever be truly comfortable.
“There were moments there of positivity through all those times and I thought I could do it. But since then there have been moments where I think “what am I doing?”,” he said.
“I had two seasons where I couldn’t score a 100 for Victoria, so you are never in control.
“It is so hard, and everytime you go up to the next level it gets harder again.
“I feel confident now but there is every chance something could happen. It’s a fickle game, you can go down that slippery slope pretty quickly.”
But not today. Today’s a good day.
“Coming from the dressing room, down these stairs,” he said looking just over his right shoulder.
“I have thought about walking down and how cool that’s going to be.”
The crowd will be going nuts. He’s a Victorian.
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Handscomb has been to Boxing Day before, sat in the seats he’ll walk past, cheered on those other guys wearing those baggy green caps.
Now he’s one of them, and he’s got his own.
“It’s just awesome,” he said, because it really is.
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