Don’t read a word more. Pull out the highlights of Travis Head’s sensational hundred and zoom in to the four he hits to move from 22 to 26. Adjectives feel trite and inadequate to describe that jaw-dropper.
It’s a length ball barely outside off stump from Brydon Carse, who delivers it from round the stumps. Head is crouching at the crease, and bents his front knee a bit when the ball is rushing towards him. His back-leg’s pad is flapping outside off at this point. From that angle of release, the ball is homing in on his off stump. Or the pad. Definitely at disaster as Head seems hellbent on an attacking shot. A freeze frame at this point reveals no possible jail break for his aggressive urge. Head could easily have defended that, of course. But Head doesn’t do easy.
He wants to belt that ball through cover point. And not with a Kumar Sangakkara like on-the-up crisp punch. Nor with a Brian Lara-ish whiplash. Head does what Head does. He wants to butcher it up and over the off side without moving towards the ball or covering the line of stumps.
Travis Head hits a boundary through cover point against England’s Brydon Carse in the 1st Ashes Test in Perth. (PHOTO: Screengrab via cricket.com.au YouTube)
Let’s rewind to when he was 10 years old before we come back to the here and now to understand that urge. The former Australian offspinner Peter Sleep had just joined the Tea Tree Gully cricket club, north of Adelaide where he met the 10-year old Head.
“He was this very confident kid. And he had that cut shot that the Indians know more than most these days, cutting it from the stumps! Not as powerful but the basics were there,” Sleep had told this newspaper late last year after Head had bashed the living daylights out of the Indians in the Test series. “He always had that cut.”
So, the urge to cut that Carse delivery isn’t from an egoistic instinct of an adult. It comes from a kid’s swagger and delight. By now it’s firmly tattooed in his muscle memory. Still, this shot against Carse on a crazy Saturday at Perth where he hit the second-fastest hundred by an Australian in the Ashes Tests to leave England’s captain Ben Stokes “shell-shocked” was something else. The knock was replete with several audacious cut shots where he repeatedly shuffled outside leg to create room for his mayhem.
But he hadn’t predetermined this shot, and hence hadn’t done any shuffles. He just reacted. What transpired from the moment he decided to go for the shot and to its execution is goosebump-y.
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With barely a second to react after the ball has landed, he collapses his arms, folds down his elbows for he desires the power of the bat-speed and create the illusion of room where none exists. The toe-end of the bat pops up to its zenith now, and he brings it crashing down in a fury. The ball is at him now. All this is transpiring like a blur. Incredibly, he pulls it off in time and crash-lands the ball up and over cover point.
It’s the four that deflates England, and there is no stopping Head after that. He shuffles to the leg, he moves to the off, he bends back, he whips to the leg – and one of the great Ashes hundreds is done. Darren Lehmann, former Australian batsman, gushed: “That was just an amazing innings, I’ve not seen anything like it.”
And it was him who volunteered to open at the end of England’s second innings. “We came off at the tea break (on day two) and we were umming and ahhing who to put up top and Heady was like, ‘I’ll do it. I should do it’,” Steve Smith told reporters. ”I was like, ‘Go for it’. And he went for it.
