Brendan Doggett has some mighty shoes to fill this week. Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Pat Cummins have been so good at Test cricket for so long that it has been hard for anyone to break into Australia’s pace attack and stay there, but injuries have now presented Doggett with a rare opportunity to become Starc’s new-ball partner.
In the past nine years, only three men other than the “big three” have opened the bowling for Australia in home Tests, and on the handful of occasions that Jhye Richardson, Jackson Bird and Scott Boland did so they made little impression.
Boland, who is set to play alongside Doggett this week, is chiefly known as a first-change bowler, and that is the role he is set to fill in the first Ashes Test starting in Perth on Friday.
If Doggett, left, and Boland start in Perth it will be the first time an Australia team has featured two indigenous players
MARK BRAKE/GETTY IMAGES
Doggett, 31, and Boland, 36, would also make history as the first cricketers of indigenous heritage to play alongside each other in Australia’s Test team. Of the country’s 471 male Test players, only Boland and Jason Gillespie — who played an important part in Doggett’s development as South Australia coach — are indigenous.
Doggett is a descendant through his mother of the Worimi people from around Newcastle, New South Wales. He and his brother Sam were part of an Australian indigenous squad that travelled to England seven years ago to commemorate 150 years since the first such team toured the UK in 1868. One of their matches was against a Sussex side coached by Gillespie.
Doggett has been described as a late developer in some quarters after being spotted for Toowoomba Souths when into his twenties, but he was nonetheless chosen for an Australia A tour to India in 2018, aged 24, on the back of only one season of Sheffield Shield cricket for Queensland.
Brendan Doggett, left, alongside his brother Sam in February
DARRIAN TRAYNOR/CA/GETTY IMAGES
After impressing in challenging conditions on the subcontinent, he was included in a Test squad to face Pakistan in the UAE when Hazlewood and Cummins were unavailable, as they are now. In the event, he did not play, injuries intervened and his form fell away.
A move to South Australia revived his fortunes and he was a key member of the team that delivered the state’s first shield title since 1996 earlier this year. He captured 33 wickets at 24.15, including 11 in the final against his former state Queensland. Recalled to the Australia A side, he took six for 15 against India A as well as four wickets against the England Lions in Sydney.
He has continued in the same vein this season, returning six for 48 against Western Australia at the Waca and five for 66 against Tasmania.
If a short stint at Durham early last summer did not produce quite the returns either he or the county were looking for — though he did take nine wickets in three championship matches at an average of 33 — this may have owed much to an unfamiliarity with the Dukes ball. No one could say that he doesn’t know how to bowl in Australian conditions.
He might have earned a first Test cap in the West Indies in June but an injury prevented him from making the tour.
“He’s one of the quicker bowlers in Australia,” Gillespie said. “He’s got a good motor, he’s a greyhound and is as fit as a fiddle. He’s ready to go. England will sniff an opportunity, but I’m confident the Australian seam attack is good enough to get the job done.
“His path to a potential baggy green [cap] is not a common one in the modern game. It just shows the value of our local competitions and working on your craft.”
Doggett led South Australia to their first Sheffield Shield title in 29 years
RICHARD WAINWRIGHT/EPA
Doggett believes he is ready. “It has been a journey,’’ he said. “I was working as a chippy [carpenter] in Toowoomba playing Saturday afternoon cricket and thought I was living the dream. I was grateful I got to start a career outside cricket. That’s allowed me to look at everything as a bonus.
“There have been plenty of ups and downs. I just roll with the punches. I’m as ready [for Test cricket] as I will ever be. I’ve the most confidence I’ve ever had in my body and my skill set.”
Speaking before Australia trained at the Optus Stadium on Monday, Boland welcomed the prospect of two new players — the opener Jake Weatherald and Doggett — making their debuts against England.
“It’s going to be an exciting time because a new guy or two will get a look in,” Boland said. “But they’re not inexperienced. Brendan is a 31-year-old who has played a lot of first-class cricket and knows his game. He knows what he will need to do to express his skills on the big stage.
“Hopefully he does get the nod, and if that happens it would be really special for him, his family and the Australian indigenous community. It gives [indigenous] kids a pathway.
“If you watch AFL [Australian rules] or the NRL [rugby league] you see numerous guys playing in the same team, or playing for Australia. Hopefully they will want to take that step into playing cricket, because cricket is not as big in the indigenous communities as AFL or rugby league. Hopefully we can shift that.”
If selected, Weatherald and Doggett may well thrive, but opening the batting with one debutant and the bowling with another would hardly be ideal from Australia’s point of view. The last time this happened? Brisbane in the 1982-83 Ashes, when Kepler Wessels opened the batting and Carl Rackemann took the new ball. Australia won.
First Ashes Test
England v Austraila
Optus Stadium, Perth
Starts Friday, 2.30am
TV TNT Sports