Australia vs. India test match: Sam Konstas’s knock a celebration of youth

Ah, the audacity of youth. The precocity, the arrogance, the extraordinary self-belief.

All of it was on display from Sam Konstas, the young man who debuted for the Australian men’s Test XI yesterday and baffled India’s best bowlers.

Batting with Usman Khawaja, a man old enough to be his father, Konstas lapped and missed Jasprit Bumrah, then lapped and reverse-lapped the great man’s new ball offerings to the boundary twice and over it once.

Bumrah, a cool character, broke into bemused smiles while captain Rohit Sharma was pointing and yelling at stunned fielders, dispatching them from the cordon to outposts on the boundary. Konstas swatted Siraj to the mid-wicket boundary. The sheer impertinence of the shot sent the fast bowler into such a rage, he looked like he might spontaneously combust in the Melbourne heat right there and then.

Meanwhile, Virat Kohli mistook the game for the standard argy-bargy of AFL. Had he tried to menace the young man on the field where the Sherrin bounces unpredictably, Konstas’s teammates would have come from all points of the compass to remonstrate and throw the odd jumper punch. But this was cricket and the serene Khawaja intervened and urged calm.

The cricket media seem fixated on how a limp ICC might punish the former Indian captain but that is missing the point. The most important thing to remember is that when the angry old man of Indian cricket tried to bully the 19-year-old, attempting to snap his concentration, Konstas stared him down. In a pre-match social media interview shot on Christmas Eve, Konstas had declared Virat Kohli the most famous person he had met in his almost two decades on the planet. In the heat of the contest, Konstas regarded Kohli’s celebrity as mere bagatelle, stood his ground and one hopes, fended Kohli off with one of Australia’s more specific geographical instructions.

India, a team largely of old men in cricketing terms, were left rattled. Morally shot. Momentum, that most perplexing and difficult to engineer of all sporting forces, had been snatched from them and sat comfortably in the Australian column for all 90 minutes of Konstas’s innings. The debutant’s knock calmed the nerves and sharpened the technique of Khawaja and helped usher Stephen Smith to the crease with the score at an agreeable 154 rather than the dismal two wicket down two digit tallies of the WACA, the Gabba and Adelaide Oval.

The term prodigy is problematic. It assumes greatness as some freak of nature rather than of hard work and clarity of mind. It presupposes that talent alone is enough. It might be useful in understanding how Mozart wrote Piano Concerto No. 1 in F major when he was 11 years old but as the story goes, Sam Konstas had balls fed through a bowling machine which came at him at 150kph in the nets when he was just eight.

India has one in Yashasvi Jaiswal, a greybeard by comparison with Konstas at 23, but a young man who has made hundreds for fun at all levels of junior cricket before dominating the Indian domestic competition, then the IPL and now Tests. And less than two weeks ago, 21-year-old Georgia Voll from Toowoomba backed up an impressive debut to score 101 off just 87 balls in the second ODI against India at the Allan Border Field.

Too often we see our young people through the prism of stereotype, as gormless automatons, doom scrolling social media, surly and uncommunicative at a personal level, just like we were by the way absent of smartphones. Perceived as insouciant, indifferent and apathetic, they are often unfairly characterised as weak in mind, if not body.

Born in 2005, Konstas straddles the demographer’s markers of Gen Z and the Alpha Generation. Australians born in this century are digital natives, almost handed iPad screens in the moments after emerging from the womb. We fret, worry and ask what will become of them? Why, we even had to legislate to protect them from the ugliness of social media, as if our young people are not strong enough to determine their own pathways.

Konstas has been mentored by Australian all-rounder Shane Watson at NSW District club, Sutherland. He has taken the best advice offered to him by his seniors but decided his own course of action when his time has come.

Konstas had played and missed at Bumrah four times in the first over of the Test. I have little doubt that had a 30-year-old batsman opened with Khawaja yesterday, he would have stuck with the traditions of the game, been constrained by its orthodoxies and eventually been nicked off or had his pads smashed in front of the stumps. For just two overs, Konstas was headed along that same orbit of attrition and failure until he determined there was another way. A plan emerged in his mind and while the Australian cricket team in the dressing rooms may have had no inkling of it, it worked in a way that seems barely believable for its sheer audacity.

It was a celebration of youth and more so, a statement to the nation that our greatest resource is not found at the bottom of quarries but in the minds and the intent of our young people. If Sam Konstas’s innings on Boxing Day at the MCG is anything to go by, this country’s future is in very good, very fast hands.