Posted by Is there a less showy attacking batter than Australia’s Travis Head?
Australia picked a new opener not so long ago – a couple of them actually. The second one was Sam Konstas, who quickly concluded that the best way to counter the world’s best fast bowler was by repeatedly attempting reverse scoops until he hit one.
After eventually doing so, he hit a few more. He made a few runs. Words like “audacious” were bandied about.
Australians marvelled at Konstas’ fearlessness, lauded his aggression and waxed lyrical about his fearless aggression. Pencil was renounced for ink. The nation had its new long-term opener.
Turning Head
Except a good while before this, Australia had concocted a plan for how they’d approach Test matches played on turning pitches. On their last tour of India, Travis Head had replaced David Warner at the top of the order halfway through the series with a view to him whacking the new ball. The new ball was duly whacked and the team concluded, “Okay, this is what we do in these conditions now.”
So it was that they arrived in Sri Lanka the other day armed with two conflicting plans. Dashing new opener who whacks, or subcontinental stand-in opener-whacker.
Given Konstas is flavour of the month, it feels quite brave that they ultimately went with Head. He hit 57 off 40 balls and as we type this sentence, Australia are exactly 600-5.
Is the pitch an ironed pancake thing on which they’d have made 600 regardless of who opened? Or did Head soften the ball at a time when the innings might have headed off down some other narrative path?
Who knows? Maybe Konstas’ previous struggles against Ravindra Jadeja would have come to be reclassified as overlooked warning sirens, or maybe he’d have made 200. Maybe, if he’s highly likely to play in the Ashes, a bit more Test experience would be beneficial. Or maybe some bad Test experiences would round off the very rough edges that could cut England to ribbons when the team returns to home conditions.
We don’t know about any of that. All we know is that you give Travis Head a job and he’ll just crack on with it in his own quietly dynamic way.
Turning heads
Some batters come across as attention-seeking. This might be down to words and deeds (Kevin Pietersen) or on-field behaviour and deeds (Virat Kohli), but it can also come about purely through deeds alone (Jos Buttler, say).
It’s hard to think of too many rapid scorers who aren’t magnets for public attention, even if they don’t otherwise exhibit too many look-at-me qualities. This makes us think that hitting boundaries and attempting to score quickly must unavoidably be a bit of a show-offy thing to do.
But then Travis Head clonks his way to another score and it feels like somehow this isn’t the case.
Because the clonking itself should really qualify as attention-seeking. Last year he hit the fourth-fastest hundred in the history of the IPL, off 39 balls, and finished the season as the fourth-highest scorer. He scored a century when Australia won the 2023 World Cup. A few months before that he’d scored 163 in the World Test Championship final.
Head sometimes looks shaky early on, but it never seems to bother him. Rather than overhauling his approach, he waits, and while he waits, he tries to hit some fours. For some reason this comes across less as ‘putting pressure back on the bowler’ and more as just passing the time. If he survives that period, he tends to progress to a phase where he’s no longer troubled. And then he just carries on playing much as he has been doing.
On the face of it, nothing’s changed. The bowlers are the same, Head is playing the same, but it just seems like that very old-fashioned thing of having his eye in.
This refusal to moderate his approach when he’s being challenged translates into habitually quick hundreds. His Test tons have mostly been scored at about five runs an over; his ODI hundreds at significantly more than a run a ball. His strike-rate in T20 internationals is 160.
Throw in his reliability and the fact his output spans the formats and on paper he’s one of the superstars of world cricket.
Superstardom hasn’t felt less superstarry since Superstars.
Pizzazzterzone
Trying to promote Travis Head as a superstar is like trying to bowl bouncers into plasticine. You’re simply not going to get a decent return on your efforts. There is an innate black hole quality to the man that sucks in all nearby pizzazz and simply does not let it out again.
It is, at least partly, down to the look.
Mitchell Johnson first grew a moustache for Movember, but it worked so well for him that the second time he grew one, it was essentially an aggressive act.
“Look at my terrifying moustache!” he seemed to say and batters crumbled.
You’d have to ask Dennis Lillee how his came about, but it carried the same air. Then, in the late-80s, the top lips of Allan Border, David Boon and Merv Hughes seemed designed to send a strong message about the nature of the wearers and indeed about the nation of Australia in general.
Head’s moustache?
“I’m pretty lazy, so I don’t like looking after myself,” he told ABC in 2023.
It is almost as if there is a directly inverse relationship between how Head goes about his cricket and his personal vibe. For every barrage of fours and sixes in a match, he brings a corresponding and proportional deadbat energy to absolutely everything else.
Controversy!
You’d think it would be easy to pin a random concocted controversy on a World Cup winner. Comes with the territory, no? But attempting to do so with Head is a thankless task.
We saw a headline the other day, suggesting Head had ‘taken a a swipe at critics’ after the series victory over India.
The offending quote read: “The series could have gone in any direction for the last few Test matches and it’s been a crazy five. The media has hyped it up in different directions and different narratives. I don’t agree with some and I do agree with some others.”
Why didn’t they go with “EXCLUSIVE: Head reveals he agrees with some things, but not other things”?
Then there was the ‘finger on ice’ celebration earlier in the series after he’d dismissed Rishabh Pant.
“Travis head’s obnoxious behaviour during the course of the Melbourne test doesn’t auger well for the gentleman’s game,” wrote former India opener, Navjot Singh Sidhu. “Sets the worst possible example when there are kids, women, young & old watching the game… this caustic conduct did not insult an individual but a nation of 1.5 billion Indians… stringent punishment that would serve a deterrent for the future generations needs to be slapped on him so that no one dares follow suit !!!”
That’s Navjot Singh Sidhu, the guy who was sentenced to “one year rigorous imprisonment” for a road rage incident that resulted in a man’s death. (We’d like to word our description of the incident less generously, but it’s hard to know where you stand on India’s shifting legal sands – Sidhu’s case has taken in various charges, acquittals, convictions and reversals over the years.)
Head later explained that he’d been, “mainly taking the piss out of Gaz [Nathan Lyon] really,” by suggesting that his own part-time bowling was so valuable that after delivering just a handful of overs his spinning finger should be put on ice until it was needed again.
Maybe the gentleman’s game’s not so gravely threatened by Head’s behaviour, Navjot. Your limited view might even suggest you aren’t on the highest moral ground.
Don’t let it go to your Head
We’ve established that Head isn’t attention-seeking, but at the same time he isn’t really attention-oblivious either. He doesn’t come across as a Jonathan Trott, lost in his bubble, inured from the wider world, subject only to the pressure that is applied from within.
We wouldn’t even say he’s attention-ambivalent because it suggests mixed feelings. He’s more attention-indifferent. Head plays how he plays, does what he does, without any obvious regard for how his actions might be received.
You could call it a philosophy – and we’re sure in some ways it is – but it mostly just looks like he hasn’t really thought about it much. That’s probably to some extent an illusion, but therein lies some of the brilliance of the man.
Keeping things simple is an art and Head’s particular artistry only becomes more challenging within the increasingly professional cricket world. If nothing else, you need to have a certain conviction about your approach to resist the alternatives.
At the IPL, for example, with every resource available to him, Head resists the temptation to “deep dive” about upcoming opponents. He told Cricinfo he’ll instead have a few words with team-mates to, “try and tap into conversational stuff. I don’t like to sit around and watch a heap of footage or anything.”
He says he strives for a “balance” where the emphasis is on freshness. “Just try and stay pretty relaxed about things.”
Back in the day, some of the UK cricket press had a habit of referring to Matthew Hoggard as a yeoman. It’s a funny word that hasn’t often been used about other cricketers. The implication was that he was an unspectacular cricketer – a bit of a toiler.
Despite his spectacular all-format performances, Travis Head has a little of that quality about him too. While the ‘super’ part of ‘superstar’ fits well enough, the ‘star’ part sits less comfortably.
As paradoxical as it sounds, perhaps he’s a superyeoman.
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