Test Selectors Argue Lack Of Tasmanian Counteracted By Inclusion Of Territorian

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

In the long and profoundly neurotic tradition of Australian Test selection, there has always been an unspoken understanding that a cricket side is not simply a cricket side. It is a delicate national equation. A cross section of the Australian identity. A federation stitched together by temperament, talent and whatever the hell is in the Tamar River.

So when the starting XI for the first Ashes Test in Perth began circulating through the dressing room on Thursday morning, it did not take long for murmurs to gather around a single alarming absence. There would be no Tasmanian. No Ponting fuck-you spirit humming under the surface. No Boon-like centre of gravity. No faint scent of Tim Paine’s hair product quietly stabilising the whole social order. Beau Webster was hard-done-by.

For a moment, it looked as though Australia might march into an Ashes summer without that bedrock of dolerite resolve, the kind bred in cold air and long walks in the rain. The sort of resolve that has kept this country upright for decades, even as Victorians fussed about their backlifts, New South Welshmen lectured strangers on “silent quotas for Victorian players in the Test team,” Queenslanders daydreamed of causing rib damage, South Australians retreated into their odd, strange but dependable inner worlds and Western Australians strode into chaos assuming they could turn any catastrophe into a last-ball victory.

But selectors insist there is no need to panic. Australia, they say, has counteracted the Tasmanian void with an equally potent, though seldom-deployed, national resource. A Northern Territorian.

And, in a fortunate twist of fate, not just any Territorian. A Territorian who has since migrated south and been fortified by Tasmanian conditions. In Jake Weatherald, Australia has selected a rare and powerful hybrid. A mutant strain. A cricketer forged in the sweat-soaked pressure cooker of Darwin, then slow-aged like a Huon pine whisky in the cool gloom of Hobart in June.

In many ways, Weatherald's arrival solves two problems at once. You lose a Tasmanian, but you gain a Territorian Tasmanian. A dual-energy source. A man who carries the wild, chaotic voltage of the Top End layered over the granite temperament of someone who has lived long enough in Tasmania to genuinely consider wearing a heanie.

For most Australians, Territorians occupy an almost mythical category. We know remarkably few of them, and the handful who wander into public life tend to leave highly specific memories. The last great example was Damien Martyn, who timed a cricket ball better than anyone alive and carried himself with the languid menace of someone who might, without warning, smoke your entire packet of cigs, hurl a Lime bike onto active train tracks or drop his guts while doing the robot at The Met in Brisbane. I was there, Damien.

Yet Martyn remains beloved, not in spite of the chaos but because of it. He was a reminder that beneath the polite exterior of the Australian cricket team lies a national personality that is impulsive, part-feral and deeply unserious. In Weatherald, selectors seem to believe they have found that same distillation of Australian essence, a counterbalance to the dependable Tasmanian gravity missing from the lineup.

This is not merely a stylistic preference. It is a psychological strategy. If you reduce an Australian down to their base ingredients, skim off the self-doubt and tip out the anxiety, what remains is something startlingly close to a Territorian. They represent the unfiltered version of us. They are the final form.

And so, in their quiet way, selectors have bet the summer on the idea that one good Territorian can offset the absence of a Tasmanian. That the equilibrium of the dressing room will hold. That Doggett’s hard, swinging pace will mix cleanly with Weatherald’s fuck you I’m here till lunch panache. That the nation’s cricket identity, stretched across six states and two territories, can absorb a little more sunburnt chaos.

For now, we wait. Weatherald will stride out in Perth with the air thick and the stakes high. Australia will look to him not only for runs but for something stranger and harder to articulate. A reminder that the game is, at its core, an Australian pastime, played by Australians in all their various mutations. There’s footy and footy and rugby. We all play cricket.

A Territorian at the top of the order, wrapped in a Tasmanian shell. It may yet prove to be the balancing act the summer needs.

More to come.