WA prodigy Cameron Green is set to become the next star of Australian cricket but a career in the AFL was once a real chance
Cameron Green grew up like so many youngsters — wanting to be a football and cricket star. Then came a turning point which delivered Aussie cricket a future Test player.
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It was the sliding doors moment that might have cost the AFL a future star but could yet repay Australian cricket with the Test all-rounder it has craved for decades.
It was mid-2015 and Cameron Green — the rising star who Greg Chappell recently called the best young cricket talent he had seen since Ricky Ponting — was delicately balancing his two favourite sports.
Cricket had always been a prominent force in his life, but his size, agility and footy nous meant Australian rules football was also a strong consideration.
Green was 16 and still adding centimetres to his rising frame as he mulled over which sport would become his launching pad into professional ranks.
With the benefit of hindsight, the decision might have come to a head when he took the field for Western Australia’s under-16s national carnival side against Vic Country in their first game at Metricon Stadium.
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In the first quarter of his first game of the carnival on the Gold Coast, the normally cool Green was being annoyed by a Vic Country defender.
His WA under-16s coach, John Hancock, could sense the best young forward he had in his team was getting frustrated by the nagging attention.
“I can still picture the end of the ground he (Green) was playing at,” Hancock told the Sunday Herald Sun this week.
“It was the first quarter of our first game.
“The bloke (Green’s opponent) was getting into him a bit … stepping on his toes, backing into him and giving him a bit of an elbow jab.
“He’d (Green) had enough and thought, ‘Stuff this pal’ and he turned around and cracked him one.”
Uncharacteristically, the usually composed Green had thrown his hand out to fend off his opponent and paid the price — he broke his valuable bowling hand!
Hancock can see the humorous side to it now, the moment that effectively ended Green’s football representative career not long after it had started.
But he certainly wasn’t laughing at the time.
No one realised the seriousness of Green’s injury at the time. He had the resilience to play the game out and was one of WA’s best players in the game, even if the ball didn’t go inside 50m on many occasions as Vic Country stormed away to victory.
A subsequent scan revealed — as Hancock recalled — several bones broken in Green’s hand which brought an end to his carnival.
“He has got to learn to clench his fist properly,” Hancock laughed. “He’s a good western suburbs private school boy …
“That was his bowling hand, too. I remember getting the (injury) report back and thinking, ‘Does this mean he won’t play (for the rest of the carnival)?’ I already knew the answer (because) you don’t want to risk the bowling hand … you could stuff up your winter and then stuff up the summer as well.”
CRICKETER CAMERON
Fast forward five-and-a-half years, and with a few extra centimetres added to his now near 200cm height, Green is one of the most exciting young cricketers in the country.
The WA wunderkind and young Victorian Will Pucovski are edging tantalisingly close to securing their first baggy green caps, despite both suffering concussions in very different circumstances this week.
Green was cleared of any serious injury after having the ball smashed back at him from Jasprit Bumrah, striking him above his eye and forcing him out of the tour match against India at the SCG.
It remains to be seen whether that “mild concussion” will keep him out of contention for the first Test in Adelaide next week.
Regardless of whether the 21-year-old plays or not, it seems certain he will make his Test debut at some stage soon following a stunning start to the summer, with Chappell saying Green could be the key to Australia’s chances of winning the 2021-22 Ashes series.
Green, who first shone as a cricketer as a 10-year-old in an under-13s team and who played for the Subiaco-Floreat Cricket Club – the same grade club as his dad once did – played his first one-day international for his country recently.
He has impressed with his exceptional batting and his fast-medium bowling in 20 first-class matches so far, with the excitement rising ever since he took 5-24 on Sheffield Shield debut as a 17-year-old against Tasmania in 2017.
It’s a far cry from what might have been for the gangly kid who had AFL talent scouts looking at him five years ago as a likely key-forward.
Hancock said of the young footballer Green: “Cameron was naturally gifted and saw the game well. He read the ball in the air very well and was strong overhead with a good goal sense. He was agile and athletic. He was probably close to the most-talented (forward in the system) at that age.
“A lot of water would have had to pass under the bridge in the next two years, but he was good enough.”
YOUNG TALENT TIME
AFL talent ambassador Kevin Sheehan said Green was like so many elite young sportsmen he had encountered who excelled at different sports.
“He was in their (cricket) pathway program (in WA) and they were keen to keep him out of the WAFL, but we did manage to get him into the state under-16s,” Sheehan said.
“He only played one game but played well. He had the injury (broken hand) and maybe that affected what happened next.”
Raff Guadagnino, who was WA’s football state academy manager at the time, said it wasn’t hard to be excited about Green’s football potential, even if he and Hancock were always concerned he might choose cricket over football.
“There was a fair bit of excitement about him at the time,” Guadagnino said. “I had seen Jack Darling, I had seen Jesse Hogan, I had seen Cam McCarthy, and I think (Green) was the best of them at the same age.”
“He was just a natural athlete who could still keep up with the best of them in the midfield.”
Green, who attended Scotch College in Perth, had been zoned to Claremont’s highly-successful junior development programs that is renowned Australia-wide.
Some of the players who have graduated to AFL ranks after being nurtured at times Claremont include Nat Fyfe, Tom Mitchell, Jeremy McGovern, Jesse Hogan, Tom Barrass, Joel Hamling, Jack Martin and Sam Petrevski-Seton.
Warren Parker, who was Claremont’s talent manager at the time and who is now football manager with East Perth, said of a young Cameron Green: “He had a really good football career through until he was 16 or 17 … and then he started concentrating more on his cricket.
“He was a key-position player and those guys don’t grow on trees. We were very keen to keep him, but as a private school kid, we didn’t get a lot of access to him,” Parker said.
“He was well-skilled and he had all the attributes to get drafted, but his cricket started to blossom and he decided to go down that pathway.”
One of those who took a particular interest in Green at the time was then West Australian Cricket Association general manager of high performance Ben Oliver, who is now Cricket Australia’s executive general manager of national teams.
“His early years were nurtured by Scotch College and Subiaco-Floreat Cricket Club, and then he had the benefit of coming through the WACA programs which were led by some great coaches, mentors and a dedicated team of support staff — Justin Langer, Geoff Marsh, Adam Griffith and David Fitzgerald among others,” Oliver said.
“We were aware Cam was playing footy and supported him in that. In his first year as a WA-contracted player, he played footy with Scotch College during the pre-season. We valued multi-sport development and wanted him to have that experience in his final year of school.”
MULTI-SPORT STARS
Sheehan said Australian football had been successful in securing a number of talented youngsters who had also had great career opportunities in other sports, including Scott Pendlebury (basketball), Callum Mills (rugby union), Andrew McGrath (athletics) and Jordan Clark (who once took a hat-trick in an Australian under 16s cricket game), to name a few.
Others have slipped through the net, including Patty Mills, who took over Pendlebury’s basketball spot at the Australian Institute of Sport. Mills went on to win an NBA Championship ring with San Antonio Spurs.
He says some have even come back to football after starting with other sports including Alex Keath (cricket) and Hugh Greenwood (basketball).
“You can’t win them all, but we win more than our fair share,” Sheehan said.
“So many of them are talented at two or three sports, and they have to make a decision on which one to choose.
“It is a competition for talent. We are not hell bent on getting them to make a decision too early. We let them wait until the last minute and run through until their draft year. If they enjoy both sports for a period, then you end up with a more well-rounded athlete who has a few more tricks to his game.”
There are certainly plenty of tricks to Green’s cricketing arsenal.
Some of the best cricketing judges believe he can play a massive role in all levels of the game for years to come.
“We always had a long-term view with Cam however there were a couple of moments early on that stood out to me,” Oliver said.
“The first was in a under-19 national championships game. He took four wickets and made 50 in the final to lead WA to the title. He was fearless in the run chase and stood up for the team when the game was on the line.
“He made a good half-century in a Premier Cricket T20 final for Subiaco-Floreat almost three years ago at a time when he wasn’t bowling. He was a young man in a pressure environment against senior players and he seemed to revel in those big moments. That was a very positive sign.”
While those who saw him play football in his junior days are convinced he would have developed into a leading forward at an AFL club if he had progressed through to his draft year, the trajectory of Green’s cricket career shows he made the right decision.
Hancock, for one, wasn’t thinking about what might have been when he watched the giant all-rounder playing for Australia on TV recently.
“If you had to have a dollar on it even back then, I would have put in on him choosing cricket,” Hancock said.
“Hopefully we’ll be watching him (at that level) for a long time.”
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