Heat dials up with Sam Konstas to be thrown into MCG cauldron at Boxing Day Test

Heat dials up with Sam Konstas to be thrown into MCG cauldron at Boxing Day Test | Geoff Lemon

3 days ago

Before Christmas has even hit, there is more anticipation about Boxing Day than usual, in more ways than one.Australia and India sit at 1-1 with two Tests to play, the first at the MCG where India won on their last two tours.The ticketing forecast says it will be a full house, the weather forecast says it will hit 40C, and while the latter may suppress the former, it’s the first time that all tickets have been claimed since the Ashes match of 2013.Amidst all this stands a Test debut opening the batting for a 19-year-old, with Sam Konstas’ spot in the XI confirmed on Tuesday by Australia coach Andrew McDonald.Older generations will remember Doug Walters debuting at 19, and some would remember Neil Harvey doing the same.

There have been a few modern bolters at young ages, like Ashton Agar or Matthew Renshaw, and Konstas will have the benefit of a captain in Pat Cummins who debuted at 18.In terms of substantial modern batting careers, though, Konstas most brings to mind Phillip Hughes, who was playing Sheffield Shield cricket by 18, and Ricky Ponting who did the same at 17.Both were in the Test team by 20.Konstas has not had the years of building up his name, instead leaping to prominence this season with a few big innings in a domestic batting scene that currently underwhelms.But the prodigy talk about him in those last couple of months has echoes of the other two, an echo that Konstas started off with twin centuries against South Australia.

Ponting was the youngest to make twin Shield tons when he was 18, Hughes the youngest to do it in Tests,Ponting spoke about the similarities and differences in Melbourne on Sunday night at an event with The Final Word podcast, saying that his brief dealings with Konstas had shown a self-confidence and swagger that Ponting at the same age did not have,“The kid’s got some game and he’s got a bit about him, so let’s hope he does debut now,” Ponting said,“Before they picked the Test team, I got put on the spot and said go ahead and pick him in a radio interview,And I finished the interview and thought, ‘He hasn’t played a single game in Perth, hasn’t played a Shield game in Brisbane, hasn’t played a pink ball game yet, and here I am pushing him out in to open the batting in those venues against Bumrah.

’ So I retracted that about two weeks later and said ‘You’d better pick McSweeney, I reckon,’”Australia’s selectors did pick Nathan McSweeney at first, and he spared Konstas those three tough assignments and set him up to play in Melbourne and Sydney,If we can be frank in the week of Christmas dinner, the South Australian captain was handed a shit sandwich: asked to bat out of position, at the top of the order, against one of the best fast bowlers in history, who has been on a tear every time he’s taken the ball – in effectively five bowling innings this series, Jasprit Bumrah has 21 wickets at 10,Selection chair George Bailey defended the experiment by saying that it doesn’t matter where players bat in the order, a proposition that rather comes across as absurd after tens of thousands of first-class matches have involved the use of specialist openers,The job needs a particular set of skills, if a player like Bumrah is not to become a nightmare.

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 promotionNow in his third tour of Australia, Bumrah has taken 53 wickets on these shores at a cost of 17.15 runs apiece, with a wicket every 41 balls.In 148 years of Test cricket in this country, no visitor with as many wickets has taken them so cheaply or so frequently.To find anyone even in his vicinity you have to go back to the uncovered tracks of the 1880s: Billy Bates took 50 wickets at 16.42, Billy Barnes took 33 at 15.

42 and George Lohmann took 41 at 11,65,And still none had as low a strike rate,Incredibly, even if you remove all qualifying criteria to filter out anomalies, Bumrah is still 19th on the best visiting averages, mostly behind bowlers who played one or two matches, or part-timers who bowled as few as three overs,This is what the new kid will be up against, potentially taking strike on morning one in front of 90,000 people with the thermometers already pushing through the 30s.

Whatever swagger he might have will surely be tested out.Still, if you think he’s going to sweat, bring your mind back to Ponting and consider this: a Konstas debut would be the first time an Australian side has fielded a player born after losing the 2005 Ashes.Digest that with your leftovers.In a world that always moves on, and an Australian team soon to move with it, this is a seismic roll of the wheel.

technologySee all

ChatGPT search tool vulnerable to manipulation and deception, tests show

OpenAI’s ChatGPT search tool may be open to manipulation using hidden content, and can return malicious code from websites it searches, a Guardian investigation has found.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.OpenAI has made the search product available to paying customers and is encouraging users to make it their default search tool

3 days ago

Musk’s conflicts of interest as Trump adviser could benefit him, experts warn

Elon Musk’s position as Donald Trump’s co-chair of an advisory panel tasked with proposing huge cuts in spending and regulations has sparked criticism from legal experts and watchdogs who warn of conflicts of interest that could benefit the tech billionaire and other Trump backers.The fledgling panel has a sweeping mandate that Musk, the world’s richest man, proposed to Trump during the campaign as the tech mogul was pumping about $250m into a Pac to help Trump win the presidency.Soon after he won, Trump announced the panel’s creation, and Musk revealed it has an eye-popping goal of slashing $2tn in federal spending, or about 30% of the annual budget, which watchdogs and analysts say is unlikely without axing popular programs that benefit the public.The panel, dubbed the “department of government efficiency” (or Doge), is co-chaired by billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy and is just getting going, but critics are raising alarms about potential conflicts of interest posed by Musk businesses including SpaceX, Tesla and X.Musk’s enterprises have billions of dollars in federal contracts with agencies such as the defense department and include some, like X and Tesla, that have been investigated and fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission

3 days ago

How far do Elon Musk and Reform UK share a political vision?

The get-together last week of Elon Musk, Nigel Farage and Reform UK’s treasurer, Nick Candy, was not just a gathering of Donald Trump fans. It was a meeting of minds.Immigration, culture wars and shrinking the public sector all feature highly on their political agendas, developed under the umbrella of Trump’s Maga vision.“We only have one more chance left to save the west and we can do great things together,” said Farage afterwards.It also revived speculation that Musk could donate as much as $100m (£80m) to Reform, even if there are signs that such a move may actually be opposed by voters

4 days ago

‘We’re figuring out cool ways of storytelling’: how TikTok is changing the way we watch musicals

When Jorge Rivera-Herrans released part of Epic: the Musical last Christmas, he managed to push Taylor Swift off the top of the US iTunes album charts. So there is a lot at stake when the final instalment of his musical retelling of the Odyssey is released on Christmas Day.Rivera-Herrans’s project has already been an extraordinary success, with more monthly listeners on Spotify (1.6m) than veterans such as Morrissey, Liam Gallagher, or the Sex Pistols, and 119m plays on the platform in the past 28 days alone.“I wanted to have sword fights and the ocean, and I wanted to have gods and monsters, and spells and love and lust and revenge,” he told the Observer

5 days ago

The god illusion: why the pope is so popular as a deepfake image

For the pope, it was the wrong kind of madonna.The pop legend, she of the 80’s anthem Like a Prayer, has stirred controversy in recent weeks by posting deepfake images on social media which show the pontiff embracing her. It has fanned the flames of a debate which is already raging over the creation of AI art in which Pope Francis plays a symbolic, and unwilling, role.The head of the Catholic church is used to being the subject of AI-generated fakery. One of the defining images of the AI boom was Francis in a Balenciaga puffer jacket

6 days ago

Can I survive for 24 hours without GPS navigation?

Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than other workers to die of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a Harvard study published in the British Medical Journal.On the one hand, it makes total sense, navigation and spatial memory belonging in the hippocampus, which is the first region of the brain the disease atrophies. On the other hand, life expectancy is significantly lower than average in both jobs – 68 and 64 respectively – and Alzheimer’s typically afflicts those over 65.Nevertheless, there is a good argument to ditch the GPS simply because memory, particularly spatial, is use-it-or-lose-it, as a study in Scientific Reports demonstrated in 2020. We have become more and more reliant on Google Maps, even using it for journeys we know well

6 days ago

businessSee all

;