When Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer intimidated bowling attacks around the world and particularly in Australia, most Test pitches on which they played had a little in them early before flattening out into very good batting surfaces.
Innings like Hayden’s 197 at the Gabba in 2002 or Langer’s double hundred against England at the MCG, later in the same series, were sculpted on straw-coloured and true pitches that offered plenty to players capable of long concentration. The colloquial “ball with your name on it” was truly rare.
Even a decade ago, when Steve Smith had his first big summer for Australia, batting for long periods of time was rewarded because there was generally little in the pitches or the Kookaburra ball to challenge that concentration.
“The wickets were probably better then as well, the ball wasn’t as big a seam, so there were less good balls to get you out, if that makes sense,” Smith told this masthead. “A lot of it was batter error, and at that stage I felt like I wasn’t making many errors. I think I said to Hadds before that first Test, ‘They’re not going to get me out’, and it turned out to be the way. Maybe I need to say that more often and try to stick to it.
“Between the early 2000s and 2018, the wickets were pretty good. They were more batter than bowler friendly in Australia, and that’s flipped on its head now. With the grass on the wickets and the balls, it is definitely a lot more challenging for a batter. If you play well you can still score runs, not saying it’s impossible.
“But I felt it was harder for them to bowl a really great ball to get me out, whereas you feel now there’s one every now and again that’s going to have your name on it and you can’t do anything about it.”
After a global endemic culture of striving for reverse swing and becoming increasingly cavalier with the “management” of the ball blew up at Newlands in 2018, costing Smith and David Warner a year out of Test cricket, things started to change. Pitches became grassier at both domestic and international levels, a trend exacerbated in 2020 by the adoption of a hardier Kookaburra ball with a prouder seam and more protective lacquer.
In Sheffield Shield cricket since that time, 98 of 134 matches, per ABC Sport statistician Ric Finlay, have seen the toss-winning captain choose to bowl first. The calculation is always that batting on day one will be harder than on day four.
This summer, at the same time Nathan McSweeney has risen through the ranks to become Usman Khawaja’s opening partner in Perth, the stats have got even more slanted: in 15 first-class games so far this season, including the Australia A fixtures against India A, captains have chosen to bat first just three times.
All this makes opening a much more perilous exercise than it was in Hayden and Langer’s time, which in Perth at least was referred to by some domestic players as “the fielding years” because they spent so much time watching opposition players knock up huge scores.
The likes of Marcus Harris and Cameron Bancroft, the specialist openers who fell short of McSweeney in the top order race, are watched with a combination of admiration and awe by coaches and teammates. Their skill is admired, but the question is also asked, more than once, why do they put themselves through a seemingly thankless task?
For Victorian coach and former Test opener Chris Rogers, the challenge for the selectors is to identify the right players to absorb or attack the new ball while knowing that conditions have become very dicey for anyone batting earlier than about number four in the order – a little like the sorts of surfaces he can remember from club cricket, rather than higher levels.
“A lot!” he laughed when asked how often he had wished for a demotion from opening.
“Even in some of my club matches where pitches were very challenging and the seam was a little bit bigger because of the different ball, I found myself batting at four a few times. Sometimes you just feel like you want to get away from the new ball because it is tough. But that’s your role as an opener – you go through and you get tested regularly.
“Australia will still want to be in a position where they’re picking opening batters in domestic cricket to bat in the role.
“They probably just felt in this situation that it was the right way to go with a young player and we can develop him into an opener. Andrew McDonald has spoken about future-proofing the side and this is part of that process. Like with any skill, you get better through experience.”
For Khawaja, who can recall the earlier era and is now living through this one, the change in conditions demands consideration.
“Batting in Shield cricket has been as tough as it’s ever been in the last four years, ever since Kookaburra changed the ball,” he said.
“They raised the seam of the ball, made it more oval, we get more divoty wickets now than I ever had in the 10 years before that. We had green wickets before, but now that ball’s changed, that’s really changed things up.
“Bowlers aren’t even trying to swing it because with that new raised seam, it’s giving them another avenue to do it.
“The green wickets used to flatten out a bit quicker because the ball’s seam used to be not as pronounced. Now the ball seems to last a lot longer and creating more divots than it has before. So it has changed the game a little bit.”
In other words, McSweeney should brace himself for what’s to come against India.
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