His is a great story, of late development, determination and recovery. He was highly rated as a youngster but never quite kicked on, although he was the first player to ever score a century in the final of the Big Bash, Australia\u2019s domestic Twenty20 competition, in 2018. He took a break from the game in 2020 for mental health reasons. He wasn\u2019t getting in his state side, Tasmania, in 2024 and was contemplating leaving entirely.<\/p>\n
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\n Jake Weatherald playing in the Big Bash in 2018 (Albert Perez\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
He was nevertheless determined to play for Australia one day. So that summer, he got married in Italy, and while his wife Rachel returned home to run her business, he flew to England to play for Great Witchingham.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never seen anyone train harder or have a mentality like that,\u201d Jimmy Hales, Great Witchingham\u2019s captain, tells The Athletic. \u201cHis mentality was, \u2018What am I doing today that gets me closer to playing cricket for Australia?\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019d hit 1,000 balls every day. He had this special spin mat that he\u2019d put on the practice wicket: I was a spinner and he was basically like, \u2018Bowl onto this mat and it\u2019ll spin more\u2019, so he could practice playing in really intense conditions. Everything about his game was so well organised and he was so sure in what he was doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n Weatherald playing for Tasmania last month (Albert Perez\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Great Witchingham play in the East Anglian Premier League, the highest level of amateur cricket in England. Most teams will have an overseas professional \u2014 New Zealand Test player Devon Conway and Australia white-ball specialist Jake Fraser-McGurk are among the names to appear in the league in recent years \u2014 and a smattering of other high-profile players.<\/p>\n
One of those is Monty Panesar, the former England Test spinner, who became friends with Weatherald in their relatively brief time together at Great Witchingham. \u201cWe used to go fishing quite a bit,\u201d Panesar tells The Athletic. \u201cHe loves it, it takes him away, calms his mind, and then he can get back into the cricket zone.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019d talk about cricket, and he would ask me about what it\u2019s like to play in the Ashes, because that\u2019s his dream.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was not Weatherald\u2019s first experience of English amateur cricket. He had spent two summers with Barnsley Woolley Miners, a small club in South Yorkshire, where he averaged almost 60.<\/p>\n
But, initially at least, he struggled at Great Witchingham. The club typically start the season with pink ball T20 games, before moving onto longer, red ball matches. \u201cAt the start, maybe the first four or five weeks, he didn\u2019t get above 20,\u201d says Hale. \u201cThere was a bit of chatter (about his performances), which was mainly because he just kept trying to hit every ball into the car park and he was getting caught every week.\u201d<\/p>\n
But then, when the red ball games came, Weatherald flourished. \u201cHe just locked into a different mode. He averaged over 50 and was the third-highest run scorer in the league, even though he left (to return to Australia) seven or eight weeks early.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was getting out on these soft, green wickets,\u201d says Panesar, \u201choling out into deep cover or whatever, but once the wickets got harder, he played some unbelievable innings.\u201d<\/p>\n
The general standard of play was beneath what Weatherald would be used to, but high enough that a player of his level couldn\u2019t just turn up and smash a hundred every week. He ended up averaging just under 40, with a highest score of 142.<\/p>\n
Weatherald took it very seriously, to the point where there was some minor friction with team-mates as he provided robust feedback.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s a big personality, and with that sometimes came a level of intensity where if someone wasn\u2019t pulling their weight, he would let them know,\u201d says Hale. \u201cIt created the odd challenge for me because you\u2019ve got blokes playing who are going back to work on Monday and he\u2019s getting stuck into them because they\u2019re not putting the effort in. But his mentality was, \u2018If we\u2019re here, we\u2019re here to win\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hale recalls one meeting in which they were discussing an opposition with a spin-heavy bowling attack, who he thought would attempt to tie the batters down and frustrate them with a low scoring rate. He discussed a few different approaches, then turned to Weatherald. \u201cHe said, \u2018Well, if I put him into the next field first ball, that\u2019s his problem now\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe would always walk out to bat with his chest out, as if he was trying to create a bit of aura. He would be more upset with himself if he blocked three balls and got out trying to hit the fourth for six, than if he had tried to do it first ball.\u201d<\/p>\n
Away from the game, he was a popular member of the squad. At one club social, he took charge of the music under the moniker \u2018DJ Teriyaki Tofu\u2019. He decided quite early on that Panesar\u2019s dress sense wasn\u2019t to his tastes, so he took him clothes shopping in London.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe ended up becoming my stylist,\u201d Panesar says. \u201cHe\u2019d always just say, \u2018I reckon this looks better on you\u2019, and he really enjoyed it. He liked quirky, funky, baggy clothing. I would just say, \u2018Yeah, just dress me up\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Jake-Weatherald-2-e1762366583882.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Jake Weatherald playing for Great Witchingham (Photo courtesy of Great Witchingham CC)<\/p>\n
From fashion stylist to potential opener. And Hale and Panesar think he could be a dangerous prospect for England\u2019s bowlers. \u201cIn a session, he could completely take down an attack,\u201d Panesar says.<\/p>\n
\u201cJake\u2019s going to score at 70, 80 per 100 balls,\u201d says Hale. \u201cHis best scores and moments in his career have come against high-speed bowling, and obviously they\u2019re expecting England to play Jofra Archer, Mark Wood and Brydon Carse.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s part of the reason that the player Weatherald is most readily compared to is David Warner: both are compact, aggressive, left-handed opening batters who are capable of taking the game away from the opposition.<\/p>\n
Weatherald returned to Australia after his stint with Great Witchingham and piled on the runs for Tasmania. With 906 in 18 innings at an average of 50.33, he was the top scorer in the Sheffield Shield. Given the uncertainty over who will partner Usman Khawaja at the top of the order, with Nathan McSweeney and Sam Konstas now seemingly discarded, it was difficult to ignore Weatherald\u2019s numbers.<\/p>\n
Was it all because of his stint at Great Witchingham?<\/p>\n
\u201cI told a few of the boys that prior to my captaincy, where was he?\u201d jokes Hale. \u201cI think his biggest challenge will be going from a state cricketer to an international cricketer in the biggest series. That\u2019s going to be pretty intense, and it feels like the one spot on the Australian side that everyone\u2019s got an eyeball on.\u201d<\/p>\n
At 31, Weatherald has taken longer than most to get to the top. And most also don\u2019t usually go via a tiny village in the east of England. But perhaps that will make him appreciate the opportunity even more.<\/p>\n
Remember the name. They certainly will in Great Witchingham.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Great Witchingham is not the sort of place you expect cricketers to prepare for an Ashes series. It\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265967,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,11880,85],"class_list":["post-265966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-global-sports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}