After an unusually quiet few weeks on the Test selection front with a settled XI unchanged while beating Pakistan, David Warner’s retirement suddenly has one of the favourite national arguments boiling over.
People love to talk about selection injustice, and the latest occupant of that unwanted role is Cameron Bancroft, overlooked for Warner’s vacancy so that Steve Smith can give it a shot despite never having opened the batting in 105 Tests.
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Plenty of onlookers claim to see an agenda, shaped as follows: Australia’s premier four bowlers – Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood, Nathan Lyon, and the captain Pat Cummins – were also the bowlers in 2018 when Bancroft sandpapered the match ball in South Africa. They maintain they did not know what he was doing. In 2021 during an interview with this publication, Bancroft haltingly and vaguely addressed that question with: “yeah, look, I think, yeah, I think it’s pretty probably self-explanatory.”
So, has Bancroft been excluded out of personal resentment? Tendered as proof is his recent Sheffield Shield form, with Bancroft leading the runs handsomely last year and again at the halfway break of the current season. Adding spice to the mix is a little state versus state, mate versus mate energy: Bancroft is from Western Australia, the four bowlers are from New South Wales.
As with most generalisations, the large majority of people from Western Australia are fair-minded and even-tempered contributors to the Australian national project, compatriots that the rest of us are lucky to have. Alongside them lives an extremely vocal minority, including a few elected officials, with an astounding ratio of chip to shoulder when it comes to their relationship with everywhere on the other side of that long straight cross-continental line.
These are the people who complained it was unfair to miss out on Test matches during the pandemic, when their border was locked down like Andy Dufresne. When Tests did return and a paltry crowd showed up, they said that obviously nobody could go outside school holidays. When this season’s match moved to the school holidays, they said nobody could go because it was a work week. On the Saturday? People couldn’t go because club cricket was on. And the Sunday, when only 9000 showed up to see Lyon become the third and probably last Australian bowler to reach 500 Test wickets, they said it was too close to Christmas and everyone was tired.
In that context, there is a hitherto unreached level of comedy to claiming state discrimination against Cameron Bancroft, a Western Australian who has made his case with runs in the Sheffield Shield, in favour of Cameron Green, a … Western Australian who made his case with runs in the Sheffield Shield. Bancroft isn’t being left out to accommodate Smith, who is already in the side. Bancroft is missing out, and Smith is moving from his spot as one of Australia’s most successful number fours, to accommodate Green.
Green’s mid-range returns in three years of Test cricket mask the fact that he was chosen as a batting prodigy. His 29 matches in the domestic comp have yielded seven centuries and seven 50s, including monsters like a 251 and a 197, at an average of 54.
This from a 24-year-old who has played once in the past two seasons, when he thumped 96 against Queensland. He may not yet have carried over these returns to Test cricket, but the national team management thinks he will. And his big runs in Shield cricket have come batting at four.
Throw in the fact that Green is six-foot-eleventy, catches racing pigeons in the gully, and can bowl over 140 kilometres an hour, and it stands to reason that he has been given a lot of rope. Number four better suits his style of long and patient batting than the traditional counterattacking all-rounder role that Mitchell Marsh does so well at six.
Green may not become the Test cricket wonder that is predicted, but he should be given the chance. Perhaps he could have waited longer while a career opener did the job up top. But the chance to bat him where he is most comfortable has arisen, so it’s not a surprise to see it taken.
Nor is Bancroft the only other logical option for a new opener. Marcus Harris has trailed the Test squad around with scant inclusion since 2019, in between making plenty in the Shield, and piling up runs in English county cricket with eight centuries in the past three seasons. Matthew Renshaw, who made a century in Pakistan’s recent tour match and played Tests in India less than a year ago, is still the reserve in the squad because he is versatile and can bat middle order.
Hopefully, Bancroft gets another chance. He has put in the work and it would be a personal salve. The more pressing question is what happens if Smith’s move fails, as cute solutions often do. Four good matches against West Indies and in New Zealand will not teach anyone much, nor will four poor matches see the experiment abandoned. He will then play no Test cricket in 2024 until India arrive this November.
If those in the middle order make their appointments a winner, and Smith’s move doesn’t work, it will leave more awkward reshuffling to do. In any case, injury and chance create movement. Keep scoring, and surely Bancroft’s time will come.
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