In early November 2021, almost a full month before the first Ashes Test against England that summer, new selection chair George Bailey declared Marcus Harris would partner David Warner at the top of the order for Australia.
After years of last-moment selection calls, including an infamous internal trial game in Southampton before the 2019 Ashes series, Bailey was making a statement about providing certainty for players where possible, and explained why soon after.
A magic moment: Matt Renshaw salutes the crowd after making 100 in Sydney.Credit: AP
“It’s a five-match Test series,” he said. “Wherever possible you don’t need to make it a seven or eight-match Test series by leaving them in the dark.”
Yet at the MCG this week, Harris, Nathan McSweeney and a handful of other contenders were playing for Australia A in what amounted to a second Test of seven for the season: Two matches against India A have served as a virtual battle of the openers for that final spot in the top six.
By Saturday, it was clear that – through performing well enough over the two games – McSweeney and Harris had secured their places in a 13-man squad. There will be another week or two of speculation before captain Pat Cummins declares which of the two will accompany Usman Khawaja to the middle in Perth.
This is not the way Bailey nor fellow selectors Andrew McDonald and Tony Dodemaide have liked to operate. Fellow Test squad member Scott Boland admitted that the whole affair had proven “stressful” for Harris and company, adding mental weight to a part of the season where players are trying to find their groove.
In a few ways, it looks like a failure of planning by a selection panel that acquiesced to Steve Smith’s desire to try batting at the top of the order following Warner’s retirement in January, only to slip back to his pet middle-order spot when he found the going difficult against the West Indies and New Zealand.
But in the opinion of a range of figures close to the national set-up, the roots of the “battle of the openers” go back a lot further. They relate to a sequence of selection choices that have left the most capable long-term opening batter – Matt Renshaw – well outside the current conversation.
In November 2016, amid the uproar created by five consecutive Test match losses for Australia against Sri Lanka and South Africa, Renshaw was one of the new faces vaulted into the team. At 20, he was the newest: Not much younger than this summer’s wunderkind Sam Konstas, albeit with a full season’s worth of first-class experience behind him.
Picking Renshaw so early was a risk, but it paid off handsomely – at least to begin with. He peeled off 315 runs at 59 in four Tests at home, including a powerful 184 against Pakistan at the SCG, and then performed creditably in India during the hot-tempered 2017 series, making plenty of starts and averaging 29.
Renshaw struggled somewhat later that year in Bangladesh, although he was far from alone: Only Warner made centuries in a drawn series, with Peter Handscomb and Smith making the only other two scores of 50 or more.
Nevertheless, the selection panel then led by Trevor Hohns made the call to drop Renshaw and replace him with Cameron Bancroft. Ostensibly, this was because he had not made a score in Shield cricket before the squad was chosen, and an Ashes series was deemed the wrong place to find form.
But such views should have been secondary to a Test average of 36.64 from 10 matches in arguably the game’s toughest batting position. An alternative scenario had Renshaw being quietly assured of his place on return home from Bangladesh, and then joining the Australian run-fest that ensued in the 2017-18 Ashes.
Backed by Davey: Nathan McSweeney has the support of David Warner.Credit: Getty Images
There has long been a school of thought within Australian cricket that dropping a young player at that early stage would mean they learn lessons, harden their resolve, and come back better. Ricky Ponting, Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer are three such players commonly cited.
But there were also players like Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh and Ian Healy who were persisted with because the selectors took a longer view. After he struggled in his first two Tests against the West Indies and then made few runs to begin the 1989 Ashes tour, Taylor was a notable beneficiary of selection faith before he took flight.
In the case of Renshaw, he has played four Tests since 2017, one as a concussion substitute, and been dropped three more times, with a top score of just eight. He was also the reserve on the recent tour of New Zealand before dropping back again.
In between times, Bancroft, Joe Burns and Harris have all had longer stints. None of them matched the returns managed by Renshaw in those initial 10 Tests. Will Pucovski played one Test before a complex web of concussion and mental health issues overtook him.
On the 2019 Ashes tour, Bancroft was harshly dropped after absorbing a lot of deliveries in the first two Tests, and crucially offering a right-handed option when Stuart Broad and Jofra Archer were making a mess of left-handers at the top.
Likewise, Harris was unfortunate to lose his place after his best Test innings, 76 against England at the MCG in 2021, but only because Khawaja made back-to-back hundreds at the SCG. The harshest call, though, was undoubtedly on Renshaw.
It is now plausible that the man to open the batting with Khawaja against India in Perth will not be an opener at all, but rather the South Australian number three McSweeney. Khawaja has been blunt about the specialist nature of the job.
“Opening is not easy. I can tell you that because I’ve batted at one, two, three, four, five, six for Australia,” he said last summer. “Opening can be a very, very tough thing to do mentally more than physically.”
From an early age, Renshaw had started to condition himself for those mental challenges. But the way he was discarded in 2017 still has a ripple effect some seven years later.
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