Australia’s selectors took a punt on Sam Konstas as Test opener – and he is left with the debt | Geoff Lemon
Sam Konstas had given up.After his duck in Grenada, he looked devastated.After his duck in Jamaica, resigned.On body language, here was a player expecting to make nothing and expecting to be dropped.After his second shot at batting in the third Test proved futile, his second stint of fielding was one of absence: late to move, throwing one hand at the first dropped catch, snatching at the second, misfielding the run that let West Indies escape the lowest Test score.
On the tour that might have been his making, nothing had gone right.You had to feel sorry for him, still 19 years old in a team of ancient dads.He had walked into his Test career full of bravura and left it five matches later with an average of 16.In nine innings since his 60 on debut he has averaged 11.The cockiness must have curdled to embarrassment.
This is not to pile on to Konstas, a player attempting one of the hardest jobs in sport who still can’t buy a beer on transit home through Miami airport,Australia’s selectors, though, have done him a disservice, in what has turned out to be a crushing case of mismanagement,Undeniably, Boxing Day against India last year was a spectacle,Jasprit Bumrah had been monstering Australia with his new-ball spells across three Tests,Nathan McSweeney had been eaten alive.
Konstas was a teenager on debut, on the biggest day of the Australian sporting calendar, on the MCG against the best bowler in the world,He smashed that bowler out of the attack, not just with aggression but audacity, and the energy shift set Australia towards a win,Trying something different made sense,Defence hadn’t worked,The question that remains is how Konstas was the one picked for that job.
To that point he was a known talent with grade runs and under-19s hundreds, but before the 2024/25 season his New South Wales career consisted of four Sheffield Shield games, one half century and an average of 25.When he started his second season with twin centuries against South Australia, excitement went through the roof.His next few Shield scores were mid-range but then came a ton for the Prime Minster’s XI.This wasn’t first-class; it wasn’t even List A.It was a 50-over game where India strolled to a win.
It wasn’t serious cricket, but the talk escalated again,By this stage it was a kind of collective hallucination, amplified between media, fans and administrators, that this kid was the second coming of somebody or other,The sealer, weirdly enough, was a Big Bash game on 17 December, Konstas outshining former Test opener David Warner with a fast 56 in a symbolic handover,On screen for an interview, Konstas was so confident and impressive that a vision drawn in pencil was gone over in ink,The vibes were good.
A week later his national debut was confirmed.Essentially, Sam Konstas unknowingly talked his way into the Australian team.After Boxing Day, delirium reached its height.There was talk of Konstas revolutionising red-ball batting – never mind that England had batted that way for three years, and Rishabh Pant before them, and Adam Gilchrist before him, and Gilbert Jessop before the first world war.But reality is the hard ground at the end of every parabola, and it rushed up fast.
Second hit, Konstas managed one top edge to the fence before Bumrah blew up his stumps.In Sydney he kept hacking for 23 and 22.By the second innings Bumrah was absent injured, giving Konstas the chance to build something against lesser bowling.But he was Red Bull on tap.Unable to calm down, he played the worst shot of his career on 22 off 16 balls, trying to pick up short width from outside off and smear it over mid on.
Now you had a player confused about what was expected of him and how to do it,The plan to disrupt Bumrah had worked, but domestic cricket has dozens of players with middling records who can play scoops and laps and back-away cut shots,Any of them might have succeeded, and an experienced campaigner might have coped with being given a two-match assignment knowing they would subsequently go back to the ranks, rather than having their brief success carry the implication, as it did with Konstas, that he had to be the future,On the basis of one half century, selectors were now stuck,His first innings had shown his potential, his next three his limitations.
There would be public blowback if they discarded him, but they clearly didn’t trust him for the job, because their next Test engagements kept him in the squad but not in the team.Sign up to The SpinSubscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week’s actionafter newsletter promotionMistake compounded mistake.One was a fixation on Travis Head opening in Asia: having tried this too late to save the 2023 India tour, and with the next trip to India two years away, insisting on doing it in Sri Lanka was an esprit d’escalier selection.Two, if Head had to open, a management that believed in its choices would have sent Usman Khawaja to the bench, backing the player closest to the entrance rather than the exit.It was a wasted chance to give Konstas confidence, as well as running down selectors’ own confidence ahead of the World Test Championship final in London, where they went for Marnus Labuschagne.
Three Tests, two fill-in openers, and six months of waiting before Konstas next got to play in Barbados in June, the start of his three-match Caribbean misadventure returning 50 runs at 8, leaving Australia with a vacancy ahead of the Ashes.Most of cricket is failure, so streaks are statistically inevitable.Selectors can’t be criticised for the right candidate making low scores, but that’s if they pick the right candidate.In this case they stopped halfway.There was no firm basis for them to pick Konstas at the top level to begin with, but having done so, his only chance of success was to be backed as though there was.
He may not have made any runs in Sri Lanka or in London, but at least selectors would have known that sooner.A vote of confidence rather than reticence couldn’t have gone any worse.Making the wrong choice about a young player is a risk to their wellbeing.Early elevations can derail them for years to come.Even brief forays that go well can destabilise players who return to state or club.
Suddenly everyone is looking at them, either expecting them to play incredibly or gloating when they don’t.They’re left self-conscious, unsure of their ability, unsatisfied with the level they’re playing, so fixated on getting back up the ladder that their game falls into disrepair at the levels below.Success there feels like failure for not happening higher up.Failures are keener still.We’ve seen it all before.
Todd Murphy had his bowling go to pieces after early Test success in 2023,Kurtis Patterson is just now getting his game back to its best after being dropped six years ago,Matt Renshaw was celebrated as a 20-year-old opener but soon slid away to an unsatisfying career,You’d like to think that Konstas will be back, but it’s not entirely up to him,Things might just never come together in the right way.
Support can only do so much,There was a punt and Konstas is left with the debt,In their excitement about the idea that he was their future, this team might not have taken enough care with his own,
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