Brutal reality facing Xavier Bartlett after Australian debut heroics against West Indies at MCG

Xavier Bartlett achieved a lifelong dream when he debuted for Australia on the MCG on Friday. However, now the real battle begins as he fights to not join the long list of discarded Australian quicks.

Being an Australian male fast bowler not named Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc or Josh Hazlewood over the past seven years has been to live off the hope of scraps, at best.

And that’s across all three formats.

Hazlewood has been benched in subcontinental Tests when a second or even third spinner has been preferred.

Starc has been bypassed in a handful of Tests in England, where he was supposed to be no good but then ended up topping the wicket-tally in an Ashes series, and was dropped for Kane Richardson ahead of Australia’s final group game of the 2022 Twenty20 World Cup.

Otherwise though the openings have only come when the big three have been injured or rested.

That’s meant that quicks who might otherwise have played plenty of international cricket have been marginalised.

Scott Boland and Michael Neser, with Test bowling averages of 20.34 and 16.71 respectively are both desperately unlucky not to have played more Test cricket, but weirdly they might be the fortunate ones.

Australia's Xavier Bartlett poses for a selife with fans during the one-day international at the MCG. Picture: AFP

At least they’ve played Test cricket, more than can be said of Chris Tremain, who has 335 first-class wickets at 22.89 and is the leading wicket-taker in this season’s Sheffield Shield, but at 32 would realistically need something of a miracle to play a Test.

Tremain did however play four one-dayers for Australia on a tour of South Africa in October, 2016.

So he’s got one over Mark Steketee, who has taken more than 430 professional wickets over the last decade and was picked on what proved to be an abandoned Test tour of South Africa in early 2021.

At 30, he has fallen several rungs down the pecking order and faces an uphill battle to play even one match for his country.

On the white-ball front, any of Richardson, Sean Abbott, Nathan Ellis or Andrew Tye could have been mainstays in another era.

WHAT A PEACH! 🍑

Xavier Bartlett starts his international career with a ripper! #PlayOfTheDay | #AUSvWIpic.twitter.com/CyfNJyvjzS

— cricket.com.au (@cricketcomau) February 2, 2024

In this landscape though they have been resigned to fringe dwellers, keeping the seat warm when the top guns have needed a spell and almost always being shuffled to accommodate them, a strategy that has yielded Australia success across all three formats.

The upshot is that days like Friday at the MCG don’t come around all that often. To have two debutant quicks take the new ball in an ODI has happened just once for Australia in more than a quarter of a century.

One of those two quicks struck in his first over, ran through the West Indies’ top order and finished with 4-17 from nine overs, earning him player of the match honours.

The interesting bit is that it wasn’t Lance Morris, the much-hyped paceman who had been on the cusp of the Test side for more than a year and whose international debut had long appeared a matter of when not if.

Australia's Xavier Bartlett prepares to bowl during the first one-day international (ODI) cricket match between Australia and the West Indies at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Picture: AFP

In what was ostensibly the first day of Australia’s road to its World Cup defence in 2027, it was Xavier Bartlett - a player who wasn’t even in the Aussies’ initial squad for this series - who did the damage, even if he lacked the pace upside of the West Australian.

“He was very consistent at the top, not the quickest, but as we see we don’t need pace to be disruptive,” acknowledged Windies skipper Shai Hope, one of Bartlett’s victims.

Morris was well short of his top speed and sent down 10 wicketless overs that cost 59.

This series is nothing if not for some experimentation, and Morris’ modest debut hardly cost his side in any case given the Aussies coasted to an eight-wicket win on the back of half-centuries to Josh Inglis, Cameron Green and Steve Smith.

But in a landscape where regular opportunities remain hard to come by, underlings must take their chances. The tales of Nathan Coutler-Nile, Billy Stanlake and now Jhye Richardson show that being the next big thing doesn’t necessarily count for much if you can’t get on the park or flop when you do.

Player of the match is Xavier Bartlett, on debut! #AUSvWIpic.twitter.com/yVYYVtRj67

— cricket.com.au (@cricketcomau) February 2, 2024

Morris will get another chance across this series, and selectors will persist with him in any case, yet Bartlett’s performance is a reminder of how fickle the bowling pecking order can be.

Having missed the start of the domestic season through injury, the Queenslander would have been long odds a month ago to even play in this match, but an outstanding Big Bash League campaign for the Brisbane Heat catapulted him into the squad - over the top of Heat teammate Spencer Johnson - after Richardson went down with another injury.

Bartlett then pipped Will Sutherland - himself a late addition to the squad for Ellis - for an MCG debut, and comfortably outdid his long-anointed fellow debutant.

Bartlett still wasn’t optimistic about his prospects of regular international cricket moving forward.

“There’s definitely a long list of people in front of me,” Bartlett said, and he’s probably right.

Not nearly as many as there might have been a few weeks ago though.

Originally published as Brutal reality facing Xavier Bartlett after Australian debut heroics against West Indies at MCG