Will Pucovski proves the agonising wait was worth it
Will Pucovski made his Test debut on Wednesday, two years after he was first selected, and the initial reviews are good.
At 2.36pm at the Sydney Cricket Ground on Thursday, the television cameras homed in on two masked ground staff holding leaf blowers. One was operating; the other was standing by. Their source of concern was a damp strip of turf near the bowlers’ take-off point that worried the umpires.
The game had been suspended for rain and, as if to exaggerate the inertia of the moment, the activity was shown in slow motion. The workers could be seen shifting, like great giants, from one booted foot to the other. The grass bowed. Little clippings stirred. We were not, quite, watching grass grow, but we were watching it dry. Time passed. But only just.
That’s cricket. Ask Will Pucovski. On Thursday he made his Test debut, two years after he was first selected, thanks to unique vagaries of form, fitness and fortune.
For most of those arriving in the morning, the 22-year-old Victorian held the day’s chief interest. They studied him like a prime piece of horseflesh or an expensive new car — Australian cricket property, with the watermark of the high-performance system, now the embossment of the baggy green.
The initial reviews were good. The relaxed stance. The full face of the bat in defence, even if the eyes sometimes got outside the line as his trigger movement took Pucovski across the stumps. Occasionally, with the ball in transit, his mouth could be seen to gape, a la Betty Cuthbert, which makes a change from David Warner’s expression of wolfish glee and Marnus Labuschagne’s bubblegum. Otherwise, in an idiosyncratic XI, he looked perilously close to orthodox.
Then, after seven overs, rain arrived from the southeast. Then a bit more, and an inspection, or two, or three. Covers came on; then off; then on. Waiting for the umpires to determine a restart became like waiting for the COVID vaccine. Just a few more tests, need a bit more data, got to cross a few Ts, dot a few Is, maybe dot the Ts and cross the Is, then combine the letters and add a few flourishes, turning the doodle into a sort of heraldry etc.
More waiting. Replays rolled: Pucovski was shown accepting his cap before play at least half a dozen times, in slow motion for good measure. Commentators jawed: by the time Pucovski resumed with Marnus Labuschagne at 3pm, experts had picked him apart technically, temperamentally and psychoanalytically …. and he was just 14 not out from 29 balls.
Welcome, young man, to a whole new level of scrutiny. But, well, what was a bit more waiting, after so much?
The evidence got better on resumption. Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj strained for a breakthrough. He pushed them down the ground, worked them fluently to leg. Pucovski gave Bumrah a little nod when his outside edge was beaten, aborted a hook at Siraj at the last moment. Ashwin tested his defence against spin, menacing both edges. Twice the batsman got lucky, although luck was not all there was to it.
On 26, Pucovski offered a straightforward nick at the wicket, but Pant snatched at the ball too greedily. On 32, Pucovski gloved a bouncer from Siraj, but Pant was slow to turn as the ball looped over his head, and essentially lowered it to the ground. The soft signal was out, but the clear vision otherwise, leaving the selection open to question.
Two years ago at the SCG, the cherubic Pant pounded out an unbeaten 158 in 189 balls. He looked like a star in the making; in India, perhaps, he was made to feel a star already. He isn’t, not yet, and needs to be careful. In eight innings since that maiden hundred, Pant has not made more than 30, and continues keeping wicket to spin with harder hands than Roberto Duran.
Pucovski, then, might be thought a longer-term beneficiary of India’s calamitous second innings in Adelaide — Pant has been chosen ahead of the superior gloveman Wriddhiman Saha, on the assumption that he will accumulate more runs in front of the crease than he costs behind them. We shall see.
On 39, Pucovski got a further life, coming back for a third on a misfield as Bumrah slipped over at deep cover. He was close enough to Labuschagne almost to punch gloves, but Bumrah’s overhasty underarm allowed him to retrace his steps.
A few overs later, with tea approaching, Ajinkya Rahane threw the ball to Navdeep Saini, also given his first cap that morning — somewhat surprisingly, seeing the good notices for Thangarasu Natarajan. Pucovski stroked Saini’s first two nervous sighters to the boundary to notch a maiden half-century.
After tea, Pucovski gave Saini his first Test wicket, lbw to the first straight ball he did not attempt to play in the V — a tiny lapse in a debut innings that had been worth the wait.
This brought Steve Smith, for whom the series itself has been waiting, but with a determination to impress himself on proceedings. A choice off-drive from Bumrah, a succinct on-drive from Saini, a signature whip through mid-wicket from Ashwin: if Smith coaches himself, as his coach Justin Langer insists, then he should on Wednesday night have been shaking his own hand.
Ashwin, who has troubled him, no longer did. Having come down the wicket and driven in the air down the ground, Smith turned on his heel and walked back to his crease without a backward glance. No pause, no reflection, all business. By the close, Smith was 31 and, perhaps more importantly, had faced 64 balls, compared to 59 in the two previous Tests.
It was certain, it was crisp, it was concise, which is also the way of Test cricket — for all those phases of slow ooze, the game can shift double-quick.
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