Travis Head: From selection snubs to superstardom, how South Australian star shone
It’s been a long, hard road to superstardom for Travis Head. Ben Horne and Robert Craddock detail Head’s rocky journey to the top.
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Before Travis Head could conquer the world, he was so far down the well he was bouncing off the bottom.
Having already been dropped twice from the Test team and brutally axed from Cricket Australia’s contract list, it was then, on an August day in 2021, he made himself a secret promise.
“If I get another opportunity to play for Australia. If I get another opportunity,” Head told a confidant. “I’m just going to f***ing whack it. I’m going to do it my way.”
The promise was made but there was no guarantee that chance would arrive.
Head looked done and dusted. He’d been cut loose by CA and, shattered by the snubbing, he failed miserably during a winter stint for Sussex in English county cricket.
But when he returned home in August, he picked himself up off the canvas with his pledge to “just f***ing whack it” and managed to find the form to get himself back into the selection conversation for the home Ashes.
It was then, after he narrowly pipped Usman Khawaja for a place in the first Test at the Gabba, that new captain Pat Cummins unlocked the country’s latest cricket hero with a powerful promise of his own.
Cummins put his arm around Head and said: “Trav, just go out there and do what you’ve got to do.”
It was all he needed to hear.
A show of faith, and a licence from the captain to unburden himself of the pressure of feeling he had to conform to how others wanted him to play, and just be Trav.
Head went out and blazed 152 off 148 balls in Brisbane and never looked back.
“After getting dropped a couple of times, his thinking was, ‘Well, I’ve tried it everybody else’s way. I’m just going to do it my way and if I fail, I’m not good enough,” Head’s father Simon told this masthead.
“At least in his own mind he was just going to give it a crack in his style, and he had the backing and support from JL (Justin Langer) at the time and Pat Cummins to go out and express himself.
“I think that was the first time that he probably felt as though he had the support and the confidence in him to go and do a job.
“Now, he’s got that sense of belonging I suppose.”
CAGING A BORN PREDATOR
Until then, Head had displayed moments of flashy brilliance for Australia, but clouded by mixed instructions of needing to build an innings and consolidate in the middle order, the left-hander was second guessing his instincts. The result was a lot of soft dismissals caught in the gully.
His father still rates his 234-ball 114 against New Zealand at the MCG on Boxing Day 2019 as one of his son’s finest achievements, because “that was done the conventional way not the Travis way. That was him trying to play to the system”.
Head, the see-ball, hit-ball type who only needed 20 minutes in the nets to feel prepared, was frustrated at being compared within the Australian camp to a master technician like Marnus Labuschagne, who meticulously hones his game for hours on end.
The magnificent 192-run partnership between Head and Labuschagne to win Australia Sunday’s World Cup final was validation of a shift in thinking to no longer compare apples with oranges, and to give every player the freedom and trust to blossom in their own way.
A NEW HERO
After dominating the past two home summers, producing magical Test match innings’ away in India and England and being crowned man-of-the-match in a World Cup semi-final and final, Australia is celebrating a new cult hero.
A down-to-earth, knockabout character to take us back to the good old mustachioed days of Boonie and Merv.
“I talk to family and friends. We never, ever anticipated he would reach the heights he has,” Simon Head says.
“When he was about 12, I told him if you ever play A-grade district cricket for Tea Tree Gully it’s a massive achievement.
“When you see some of the other players they’re just so professional. It’s almost robotic in the sense that everything is a routine, everything is a structure.
“Whereas Trav is a bit more flamboyant. He genuinely enjoys the game.
“Years ago I said to him the day he walks out on to the ground because he’s getting a pay cheque is the day you retire. You go out there and play because you love the game.”
Head has lit up social media with photos of his 72-hour bender after scoring one of the great hundreds in World Cup history in front of 100,000 people and a global TV audience of more than 500 million.
Trav Head looking about as well as you’d expect arriving for the T20 series ðŸ pic.twitter.com/X5so7fsArw
— Josh Conway (@BuzzConway_) November 22, 2023
His dedication to the party was even more impressive considering Ahmedabad, host of the final, is located in the dry state of Gujarat, where you can’t buy alcohol without a licence.
Next stop was Vizag, again not necessarily up there with Vienna and Las Vegas as a party capital of the world, yet Head and the likes of Glenn Maxwell and Adam Zampa made the most of it and fittingly, were all rested from Australia’s first T20 on Friday morning.
This is the same good-time Head who missed a Sydney Ashes Test after contracting Covid at David Warner’s gin distillery, and who faithfully kept the Benaud-Qadir Trophy company in the hotel bar in Pakistan the morning after Australia’s historic Test series triumph, when many of his teammates had flown home.
There’s an affiliation between Head and the average punter, but Australia’s pre-eminent hairy-lipped hero believes there is even more to this loveable rascal than meets the eye.
“How much better does he play with a moustache,” Mervyn Hughes says.
“But I mean, let’s get fair dinkum about it. When he came in at an early age from South Australia – and was that next age group down from guys like (David) Warner and (Steve) Smith – he was thought of as a future captain. And I think he is.
“He reminds be a little bit of Ricky Ponting who had the BC and AC eras. BC was before captaincy when he was a bit of rogue and enjoyed life and AC when he took over the captaincy and probably changed a bit.
“That could happen to Travis. I think he likes to portray himself as a bit of a rogue but deep down he has good cricket smarts. Great players just find a way and he does.
“He does not need conditions in his favour to shine like that century against South Africa in Brisbane last year. In such a great batting order we have taken him for granted a bit.
“You would think in the next few years his chance will come as a captain and I sense he will be ready for it.’’
Allan Border agrees he is a future Test captain and would also admire the “AB” style toughness required to even get Head to the World Cup.
THE UNTOLD MEDICAL MIRACLE
Head broke his hand courtesy of South African speedster Gerald Coetzee three weeks out from the start of the tournament and was convinced he would miss his one shot at World Cup glory.
It wasn’t the initial blow that caused the break, but the next ball, when he attempted to soldier on only to shatter his hand from the impact of simply playing a shot.
If it wasn’t a World Cup, CA’s doctors would have ruled him out of the tour.
But because of what was at stake, a goal was set to get Head back batting inside six weeks when a normal recovery time would have been more like nine.
“I’m a quick healer,” Head pleaded to the specialist in Sydney who spared him from surgery which would have killed his dreams.
Still, the courage and faith of Australian selectors to hold a spot open in its 15-man squad for Head was extraordinary. They were still sweating on him getting through a final fitness test at a point when the team was already 0-2 and on the verge of being knocked out of the World Cup.
Head was passed fit to fly having not even faced a proper cricket ball, but his father had seen this movie before.
“He still had a bit of pain the next day (after facing mostly tennis balls at Adelaide Oval), but nothing he would tell anybody,” Simon Head says.
“Truth be known, even if he wasn’t (fit) he probably wouldn’t have told anyone.
“The cat’s out of the bag now so on his first under-19s tour to India (in 2011), he was on crutches leading up to that tour from a football injury, even though his old man said he might want to quit footy.
“He sprained his ankle badly and couldn’t walk on it for a few weeks but didn’t want to tell Cricket Australia.
“He literally took the ankle brace off the day before he got on the plane because he didn’t want to miss that tour.
“‘I think I’ll get right. I’ll get right.’ And he did.”
Australian selectors gambled everything in the belief Head was special enough to return and win it all in India.
While medically it was possible for Head to recover as he did in six and a half weeks to face New Zealand at the midway point of the Cup – CA high-performance staff are in awe at how he scored a stunning 59-ball century in his return having barely picked up a bat.
“He’s super courageous. Mentally knowing you’re coming back from something like this. That was just crazy that anyone could do that,” one source said.
KING YET MORTAL
Commercial interest in Head out of India is spiking ahead of a looming million dollar payday in the IPL auction next month. But the man who can move mountains knows that for those who play without fear, there inevitably will be a descent down the other side.
“I sit here now and I’m bracing for the day when maybe there’s a decline in his career. At some stage he’s going to be the most hated man in Australia, again, right? It’s a roller coaster ride for them,” Simon Head says.
“Three or four years ago, 50 per cent of the population didn’t want him anywhere near the Test side. Now they want to name streets after him and build statues.
“It’s hard to fathom even now that people are talking his name in the same light as those (great players).
“He’s certainly got some stories to sit in the pub and tell at the end of his career.”
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