Justin Langer’s requirements: score a lot of runs and be a good bloke

The international schedule is making life hard for Test incumbents to shore up their places in the batting order.

Australia coach Justin Langer. Picture: Getty Images

I have one day to live. I’ve chosen to spend it at the cricket. There’s two fixtures to choose from. At the SCG, the Australian men’s side. At North Sydney Oval, the women. I know where I’m going. Where the Southern Stars are. Where MM Lanning, EA Perry and AJ Healy are. They’re the most watchable players in the country right now. Virtue. Flair.

And as they’re proving by their total and utter dominance of the one-day series against Pakistan, they know how to jag a win.

If the men could bat as well as Justin Langer speaks, perhaps it would be a different story. A joy of having Langer at the helm will be his surgical, beautifully nerd-like dissection of the state of play.

If you love a bloke who goes off on a tangent with a grin on his face and a sparkle in his eye, you’ll love Langer’s press conferences. He managed to work Lindsay Stephen, the golfer, into his post-match discussion at Abu Dhabi.

“I love batting,” Langer said after the team’s collapse in the second Test. “I’m telling you, I love batting. That’s why it’s killing me at the moment.”

His post-mortem of the stinging 373-run defeat has made it clear that positions are vacant for the Test series against India. He says there’s two criteria: You’ve gotta be a good bloke and you’ve gotta score runs. He says that’s a simple formula and yet, it’s actually rather complicated. Who’s to judge good blokeyness?

Some of Australia’s greatest players would never have entered a Test dressing room if personality tests had to be passed on the way in. From Bradman to Warne, not everyone has always been everyone else’s cup of tea.

GRAPHIC: The road to Adelaide

What if Australia’s biggest dickhead happened to score five hundreds in the first five rounds of the Sheffield Shield? Does Langer not want the challenge of welcoming him aboard and then turning him into a better human being?

Given the disaster in Abu Dhabi, forget about scouring the country for top fellas. None of us watching the second Test was thinking: oh well, skittled for 145 and 164, but jeez they’re good blokes! Just ask for runs. Or give the No 6 spot to Lanning — if she’s ruled to be a top chick.

It’s about to get complicated because of the scheduling. The selection shootout in the Sheffield Shield will not involve the blokes most likely to be shot.

There’s 45 days until the first Test against India. But for 35 of them, Australia’s multi-format players, most notably the under-siege Marsh brothers, will be playing nothing but white-ball cricket.

The first Test starts on December 6. If they play a full card of international one-dayers and T20s, they’ll be in their pyjamas until November 25, ruling them out of three full rounds of Sheffield Shield. They can sneak in one Shield game before the Test, but the squad might be picked before then. And they might need a rest … because they’ve played so many T20 and ODI tournaments.

“The schedule is what it is,” Langer said. “The great players are able to adapt their techniques and the skill of scoring runs.

“But we can’t sugarcoat it any longer. If I’m a young batsman in Australia, it’s a pretty exciting time. If you work really hard on your basic game and you learn how to make runs, then there will be huge opportunities in the Australian cricket team.”

Langer denied those with their Test positions hanging by the threads of their sleeveless vests, most notably the Marshes, should be omitted from the hit-and-giggle stuff to give them a month of red-ball cricket.

“You’ve got to pick your best T20 side,” Langer said. “You’ve got to pick your best one-day side. If you ask the players, they want to play for Australia. They want to play international cricket.”

Langer said he would prefer a batsman with an exemplary old-school technique — elbow up, head still, quick feet — and dubious mental strength to someone with a solid temperament but a more risque method of batting.

Comparing batting to golf — hence his recollection of a dinner with Stephen — he said a good technique would get a ball down the middle of the fairway, from where the possibilities were good.

If you kept slogging balls into the rough, no amount of mental strength would avoid the wrong sort of big scores being racked up, he said — and then agreed to run the rule over Australia’s misfiring top-six batsmen.

“We’re in a much different stage of Australian cricket history, aren’t we?” Langer grinned. “It’s usually harder to get out of the side than into the side. It used to be a beautiful thing.

“If you were a hunter, it used to be a shocking thing when you were playing. If you were the hunted, it was sort of good but the hunters were coming at you all the time. There was always pressure. In this instance, I thought Finchy (Aaron Finch) played pretty well. He did really well and he’ll learn a lot from this series. I was really impressed with Finchy.”

With Usman Khawaja set for knee surgery, only Finch was labelled a certainty for the first Test against India.

Langer said of the others: “I thought Marnus (Labuschagne) played particularly well in the second innings. He had a brain fade in the first innings.

“You’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, mate. I’ve seen some stuff on a cricket field but I’ve never seen that. Literally, and Marnus knows. I’m not burning him. It was the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in my life until I saw what happened yesterday (Azhar Ali’s run-out).

“Marnus’s legspin was a real revelation for us, wasn’t it? I thought he bowled beautifully and as a young legspinner, there’s a huge upside to that in all forms. Uzy (Khawaja) played really well and he’ll have his knee operated on sooner rather than later. Hopefully he’ll be right for the Test.”

Langer added: “The other guys, I thought Travis Head played well. He had a brilliant innings in the first Test. What I like about Travis Head is his development.

“He’s working hard on his game. Everyone used to say he couldn’t play spin, he’s worked hard on that. He played a late cut today for four that Sir Donald Bradman would have been happy about.

“Obviously Shaun and Mitch (Marsh) haven’t had their best series but we also know they’re good cricketers. They’re really good young men and they’re good cricketers who’ve had a tough time. There’s opportunities for guys in the team but there’s also opportunities for guys who are good blokes and make a lot of runs.”