Boland a bridge between two traditions

The second Indigenous Australian to play Test cricket produced a spell to remember at the MCG.

Scott Boland with the Mullagh Medal for his man of the match performance in the Boxing Day Test Picture: AFP

The Boxing Day Test is Australian cricket’s shop window. You can’t hide failure: it was Australia’s humiliation in 2010 that precipitated the epic navel gaze of the Argus Review. You can, though, advertise success: not all the elaborate plans, pathways programs and public lectures about Indigenous cricket will match for impact Scott Boland’s winning the Johnny Mullagh Medal in this Test.

Boxing Day 2021 marked 155 years since Mullagh topscored for the Aboriginal XI of the Western District against the Melbourne Cricket Club on this ground, then unenclosed and almost rustic. A collection was taken up in his honour, and the game preluded the team’s storied full-scale tour of England 18 months later.

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In 2018, on the sesquicentenary of that tour, Scott Boland and his brother Nick, having just learned of their Western District Indigenous ancestry via a Gulidjan grandfather, joined an Aboriginal XI tracing that pioneering team’s footsteps. Now here we are, the paths of Mullagh and Boland having converged over an arc of history even longer than the Ashes.

Figures of six for 7 are an outlier. When a bowler with a first-class average of 26 is taking the fastest five-for in 140 years of Anglo-Australian competition, then it conveys something of the inequality of this contest, the demoralised state of England’s XI and the enfeebled state of English cricket. Even Pat Cummins could not keep the surprise from his voice. “We were really confident Scotty would do a great job,” he said. “Maybe not 6 for 7!”

But Boland himself is an outlier, only the second player of Indigenous descent to represent Australia – a dispiriting dearth. And what to do? One can only deal with the circumstances as one finds them, and Boland did so peremptorily. He uprooted Haseeb Hamid with a fine ball and Jack Leach with a smart ball on Monday night, and Joe Root’s flying edge to slip on Tuesday was a consequence of the white-knuckled grip on England’s captain that Australia have exerted all summer.

Scott Boland is mobbed after claiming the wicket of Ollie Robinson Picture: AFP

As he claimed his sixth wicket, whiteclad figures converged from everywhere to pile on in celebration. Boland is one of those figures identifiable to teammates as a cricketer’s cricketer. He is 32, has risen from grassroots at Frankston and run in with Victoria for a decade, unheralded, unflagging and unyielding. He is a fast bowling tradie, handy and reliable. If he turned up on your door, you’d instinctively trust him with any sticky household maintenance.

Seven weeks ago, Boland represented Victoria against New South Wales. It was one of those relatively rare occasions when Victoria play at their traditional home, the MCG, rather than their adopted base, the Junction Oval.

These occasions can be a little soulless, a bit sterile. The crowds are usually meagre, their stray shouts echoing round the empty stands. The skies were overcast, and with Melbourne having barely shaken off its sixth lockdown the mood subdued.

Yet the occasion was auspicious also. The pitch, torpid for many years, bounced, and batters looked uneasy. And Boland bowled fast, snaffling eight wickets, making a resounding whack as he hit the keeper’s gloves, and losing nothing by comparison with his Test-playing teammate James Pattinson.

Into the bargain, Pattinson had just announced his retirement from international cricket, despite being a year Boland’s junior. Boland is not quite the sight Pattinson was at his peak. He is not one of those spring-heeled, gym-toned athletes cricket seems to be cloning as if in a laboratory; he is in a more traditional mode, broad-shouldered and heavy-booted.

But if he had but known it, Boland had advanced effectively two steps in Australia’s long fast-bowling queue, where you can wait longer for a baggy green than even a Covid test in Sydney.

It took a further arbitrary shortening of that queue for Boland to learn on Christmas Eve that he was to make his Test debut as, effectively, the reserve of a reserve of a reserve, Josh Hazlewood, Jhye Richardson and Michael Neser all failing to come up for selection.

There was a sense of homecoming all the same, reinforced by Aunty Joy Wandin Murphy in her welcome to country on the first day, when she acknowledged the presence in the Australian XI of Boland as a Gulidjan man from round Colac.

Scott Boland, third right, during the Welcome to Country ceremony by senior Wurundjeri elder of the Kulin Nation, Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin, before the third Test at the MCG Picture: Getty Images

Two-and-a-half days on, and Boland was accepting the Mullagh Medal from Belinda Duarte, a descendant of Mullagh’s colleague Yanggendyinanyuk (Dick-a-Dick), who also testified to the inspirational qualities of the bowler’s feat. “You cannot be what you cannot see,” she said succinctly.

It needed something to rescue this day from a sense of disappointment that a Boxing Day Test against England, in a way the definitive version of cricket’s long form, had concluded in 1084 deliveries – the shortest match hosted by Australia in 70 years. Only two teams in Test cricket have won by an innings with a first-innings lead of fewer than 82 runs. Such statistics are gruesome, but perhaps it can be allowed that, on this occasion, the history eclipses them.