Steve Waugh once said there are no fairytales in sport.
Aaron Finch must be pondering this notion as he battles a sore hamstring and sorry team run rate to keep the fast-fading dream of a Twenty20 World Cup title defence alive.
Aaron Finch may have played his last game for Australia.Credit:AP
Whether Finch proves his fitness for Friday’s game against Afghanistan in Adelaide, or Australia win by such an amount they scramble into the semi-finals, this nation’s most successful Twenty20 batsman and record-breaking captain has carved out a special career.
And if he has played his last game for Australia, Finch gave us one last look back with 63 from 44 balls against Ireland on Monday night in Brisbane.
If the thick-set Victorian with the square jaw had been born in any other era it’s doubtful there would have been a place for him in the game’s upper echelons.
Only once did he play anything like a full season of Sheffield Shield cricket for Victoria and three seasons in a row he averaged in the teens.
Aaron Finch struggled to make an impact in Sheffield Shield cricketCredit:AAP
Victorian coach at the time, Greg Shipperd, claimed there simply wasn’t room in the Victorian team after claiming back-to-back Shield titles.
“That’s probably the fault of how well the Victorian team was going at that time, that may have stalled his red ball development,” said Shipperd, now a successful red ball mentor with the Sixers.
“And then along came T20. It was the style of cricket that captured minds and was just perfectly suited for his game. His mind met the format rather than his technique.”
Finch made his T20 international debut in 2011, the year the club-based Big Bash started, but managed only six matches in two years.
John Inverarity was chairman of selectors when Finch was recalled for a white ball tour of the UK in 2013.
“We picked him more on intuition than performances,” Inverarity told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Finch hammered 156 in just 63 balls with 14 sixes against England at Southampton, at that stage the highest score in T20 internationals.
He broke his own record five years later, hitting 172 in 76 balls against Zimbabwe in Harare, which remains the highest T20 international score.
So perfectly has Finch been suited to the game’s shortest format that he is the only Australian to have played more than 100 T20 internationals (103) and the only Australian with 3000 T20I runs (3120).
Finch celebrates a century against Zimbabwe in 2018 on the way to a world record T20 score of 172Credit:AP
He is third on the international all-time list for sixes with 125, one more than Chris Gayle, and has captained more T20Is than any other player, 76. That included taking Australia to their inaugural T20 World Cup title in the UAE last year.
It was Finch’s captaincy that chairman of selectors George Bailey, Finch’s former T20I captain, talked up in Adelaide on Wednesday.
“His playing record speaks for itself, he’s got records in both [white ball] formats that are pretty enviable, and I think the captaincy aspect, it’s certainly something we’ve come to realise,” Bailey said.
“I think it’s been a real luxury that we’ve had a white ball captain that’s been so solid across formats for a number of years and that’s a credit to Finchy to be able to hold that together… he’s combined leading with playing and performing, he’s done that terrifically as well.”
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