Based on the words of Australia’s head coach Andrew McDonald on Tuesday, Australia’s selectors have kept a couple of doors open for Usman Khawaja’s Ashes return, even as injury slammed all of them shut for Josh Hazlewood and Mark Wood.
A week removed from the noise about a possible forced retirement following his back trouble, Khawaja is set to be named in a squad for 15 for the third Test of the series, a red-ball affair at Adelaide Oval, and McDonald made it clear the left-hander may well celebrate his 39th birthday while playing his 86th match.
Usman Khawaja celebrates his second century in the SCG Test in 2022.Credit: AP
In electoral terms, Khawaja now has at least two pathways to the votes required for a Test recall before the end of this Ashes series.
The first is if McDonald and returning captain Pat Cummins reckon that, after three breakneck innings as an opener alongside Jake Weatherald, Travis Head should return to his customary middle-order spot.
When shielded from the perils of the new ball on his home ground, Head has a remarkably consistent record of destroying opposition attacks as they tire. In five Tests batting at No.5 in Adelaide, he has cuffed 497 runs at 99.40 and a strike rate of 86.13, with a trio of centuries.
At the same time, Adelaide is Khawaja’s second-strongest ground, after the SCG, for opening the batting. Like Head, he has profited from the short boundaries square of the wicket in South Australia, and has 328 runs at 65.60 in four games when walking out at the change of an innings.
McDonald was careful not to lock himself into the guarantee that Head would continue to open with Weatherald.
“It worked at this point in time. [With a] pink-ball Test at the Gabba, we felt like that combination was right for those conditions and the opposition,” he said. “We’ll always ask ourselves questions at the selection table, at our strategy meetings – what the best line-up is for that point in time?
“Each Test presents a new challenge. We’ve got the red ball in Adelaide – we haven’t done that too often recently. It’s great that Trav has put his hand up to do that in the past. We haven’t gone down that path a whole lot. We have in this instance, so will we continue to do that? We’ll have to wait and see.”
Travis Head at Adelaide Oval.Credit: Getty Images
The news that Wood has been ruled out of the rest of the series, having bowled just 10 overs in Perth before his knee flared up, may also factor in Australia’s choice of openers.
The other way in which Khawaja can return is if, with Head as an opener, room is made in the middle order. Playing Josh Inglis at No.7 indicated that he was not considered a straight swap for Head, and Khawaja would hardly knock back the opportunity to bat somewhere fresh after the new ball has been blunted by others.
“The assumption is that he can only open,” McDonald said of Khawaja. “So I think that he does have the flexibility. We like to think that all our batters have the flexibility to be able to perform anywhere in that order.
“We’re open to what the batting model would look like moving forward, should there be any moving parts. Whether Trav opens, whether he goes back to the middle, that will all play out. We’re taking it Test by Test.”
Back in 2019, when he was dropped from No.3 out of the side to make room for Marnus Labuschagne to keep his place alongside Steve Smith, Khawaja wondered why it was so often the case that players were left out entirely, rather than tried in different positions.
“There was no discussion of, ‘Maybe we can push Uzzy down to five or six’,” he said in 2023. “It was, ‘We’re just going to drop Uzzy and keep everyone else where they are’. That was their choice, and that’s fine.”
Khawaja made a strong case for his own adaptability three years later. When he made his return to the Test team in January 2022 in Sydney, Khawaja did not do so as an opener, but rather as No.5 in the order in place of Head, who had COVID-19.
The centuries Khawaja then peeled off in each innings of the match demanded he be retained for the following game when Head returned in Hobart – pushing out Marcus Harris. Khawaja became an opener through the flexibility of thought that McDonald and Cummins have grown increasingly vocal about when it comes to the batting order.
It would be ironic, if not poetic, should Khawaja’s final recall come in the same batting spot where his celebrated comeback began, but McDonald’s words on Tuesday certainly left room for the possibility.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
