Three weeks ago, Tasmanian fast bowler Riley Meredith shaped the Sheffield Shield season when, in a moment of amnesia, he forgot he was not playing T20.
Tasmania needed four runs off the last ball to beat South Australia. The striker, Lawrence Neil-Smith, didn’t score the boundary. A single was run, game over, match drawn… except Meredith, in a mental mash-up, decided to run again, as if it was the pointless last ball of a BBL game.
He ran himself out. South Australia won an extra five Shield points and went atop the table.
Tasmania went bottom. All because the BBL mentality had struck early.
On Boxing Day, Sam Konstas also mashed up long- and short-form cricket, with different effect. Cricket went giddy with Sam-mania. A new Messiah had arrived, admittedly one day late, but Sam moved fast enough to make up time.
Boxing Day 2024 happened so long ago, yet it feels like yesterday. They were dizzy, end-of- the-world times. As with any millenarian moment, it set off wild speculations and outlandish theories about stars in the sky. It attracted wise men and shepherds and their opposite, heavies dispatched from the centre of power to end young hopes. Whether disciples or nay-sayers, they all sounded a bit unhinged.
Sam is going to change the future of Test cricket.
Sam won’t get away with this against the Duke ball on English decks.
Sam won’t get away with it in the second innings.
Sam has formed a perfect synthesis of cricket’s five-day and three-hour versions.
Sam can’t sustain this beyond an hour and a half, which will blow his potential for big scores. He only made 60.
Sam can’t do it on the subcontinent.
Sam will do it on the subcontinent, for multi-millions, in the IPL.
Sam’s teenaged confidence is a thing of beauty.
Sam’s teenaged confidence is a travesty.
Sam’s debut is the most exciting thing to hit in cricket since David Hookes. Since Adam Gilchrist. Since Ashton Agar.
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Illustration: Simon LetchCredit: Simon Letch
Poor Sam, with so many people crafting his narrative while he was still in his crib? No. Sam was giving TV interviews at the first drinks break, geeing up the crowd, mugging for the cameras and shooting selfies before stumps. In between, King Herod sent his hitman. Virat Kohli made forceful contact without using his arms or hands, which in this part of the world gives him 10 minutes in the bin and a judiciary appearance on Monday. In the cricket world, the official sanction is… India. What mattered was that the contact left Kohli, metaphorically, lying in pieces like a dropped crystal vase.
Sam seemed to be doing just fine.
The urge to over-predict is a human instinct. It’s getting worse as it gets more commodified, and it’s also why sports’ immune systems are so compromised by the gambling virus. We want to know what happens next, so we overstate the future impact of a singular event, such as Konstas’s debut. Amid so much forecasting, the real challenge is to grasp, preserve and cherish what we have seen.
So, to run entirely against the grain, let’s limit ourselves to the thing in itself.
Boxing Day was otherwise a meat-and-potatoes day of good competitive Test cricket: six wickets, 311 runs. But Konstas’s innings made this a day like no other, one that should stick in the memory (if we can remember to remember).
His first and main contribution was to get Australia talking and arguing about Test cricket.
This is no small thing. The AFL has devoured one Melbourne cricket venue already. The NRL is looking for Las Vegas headlines. Compared with the Leviathan football codes, Test cricket is not yet a second-rank sport in Australia, but it’s not quite first-rank either.
Sam Konstas plays a ramp shot against Jasprit Bumrah.Credit: Chris Hopkins
In the duration of one football game, Konstas restored Test cricket as Australia’s sport, magnetic to watch and worth arguing over.
Secondly, it stressed the importance of context. Before the sun set on Boxing Day, Ben Duckett hit 68 runs off 29 balls in Sydney. One of the best exponents of the English version of Samball (the version Australians don’t think is any good under pressure), Duckett hit more sixes, fours, ramps, flips, dinks, chips and reverse sweeps, and a few more runs than Konstas, in half the time. It didn’t even stick in the memory by the end of the game. If Duckett can forget he’s playing Test cricket next Boxing Day, then he’ll be remembered.
Thirdly, Konstas led. Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne and Steve Smith followed.
Within the context of the fourth Test match, this is probably Konstas’s most important impact. The instant he began ramping Jasprit Bumrah over the cordon, he set his older teammates free.
Fourthly, it was an emperor’s new clothes moment. The ball was seaming and swinging on Boxing Day morning, but Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj were not bowling at the stumps.
Virat Kohli and Sam Konstas clash.Credit: Seven
Either intentionally or because they lacked control, they bowled a fifth-stump line and the metre-too-short length that sucks in teams visiting Australia. If batsmen are prodding and poking, it will eventually pick up wickets.
But Konstas outsmarted them with an attack that was better than any previously-tried defence. The Indian bowlers did not adapt in the way that Patrick Cummins or Mitchell Starc might have done. No bouncer barrage, no redirection at the stumps, no straying beyond the percentage-cricket program that works against batsmen also playing a percentage game.
And fifthly, the Kohli collision hurt India. Kohli went low, Konstas sailed high. The intimidatory bump is a bad look for cricket, and usually counter-productive (see how it worked when Australia tried it on Brian Lara). On Boxing Day, it gave graphic illustration to the change of the generations. Kohli is too big a name to receive an appropriate sanction, but he’d made an old fool of himself on the field and we all saw it.
All the forecasts about what Konstas can, can’t, might, will or won’t do? Leave them for the future. What he’s already done is what matters now. He mashed up different genres of cricket, and it went horribly right in all the ways that Riley Meredith’s mash-up went horribly wrong. That’s what happens during times of transition.
Cricket can be a backward-looking game, but sometimes looking back is the best defence against the consuming, corrupting fever of what’s-next. And even when it’s only days ago, that doesn’t mean you can’t make the effort to store and enjoy the memory. By the weekend, we’ll have a new story. You only get to be born once, and new events will have taken over. Who knows? But also – quite honestly – who cares?
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