![\"Travis](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/342ad988b6c5fcaee7e16ac4f8646aaf45de2618.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nIn the shadow of the ghost of the old Doug Walters Stand, Travis Head was forging irresistible parallels.<\/p>\n
Folk heroes have been an important accessory to cricket in Australia, where followers like to see themselves, or some imagined aspect of themselves, reflected in a chosen wearer of the baggy green.<\/p>\n
They love purity and excellence too, but for every man in a high castle, every Greg Chappell or Steve Smith, there has to be a man in the street, a Walters or a Head.<\/p>\n
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Travis Head was in fine form at the SCG on Monday.Credit: Getty Images<\/p>\n
The stylistic likenesses were uncanny as Head launched into the England bowlers on a late and increasingly murky Monday afternoon. Head\u2019s opening boundaries, nonchalant pull shots to the Ladies Stand, were pure Dougie. England adjusted their lines but kept bowling half-trackers, which Head cut square, falling away to the leg, a left-handed mirror image of you know who.<\/p>\n
Which is not to say that Head didn\u2019t help himself to full balls when they came, but rather than step into his drives he walks into them from a front-on position, an unconventional stroke straight out of the uncoachable manual of that great ancestral innovator.<\/p>\n
Love lasts longer than admiration, and the way he\u2019s going, Head will be as beloved as Walters.<\/p>\n