There are many aspects of the Ashes rivalry in which Australia can lay claim to fair supremacy.
They have won more series, 34 to 32, and, by a more emphatic margin of 140 to 108, more Tests as well. The greatest Australian teams, Don Bradman’s Invincibles and the early 2000s vintage, were better than any collective England have ever assembled in opposition. In Bradman, the country bred the game’s best-ever batter and, in Shane Warne, probably its best bowler, too. But all-rounders? Well, they have tended to be England’s thing.
Save the away series triumph of 2010-11, the figures of Ian Botham, Andrew Flintoff and Ben Stokes have between them been present in just about every positively iconic moment of the past 50 years, often as the defining character and providing England’s one prolonged Ashes edge. This summer, though, it may be diluted, and not merely by the unreliability of Stokes’s left knee.
Cameron Green is, by popular consensus, the best genuine all-rounder Australia have brought to these shores in generations, his predecessors largely either middling, jack-of-all-trades cricketers or else, in Warne’s case, so obviously a master of one that to tarnish him with an all-round brush would almost be a disservice (the spinner’s 249 runs in 2005 were a proper all-rounder’s contribution but barely seem worth mentioning against 40 wickets).
For many successful years, Australia have simply more than made do without one, but Green’s emergence has plugged a gap that hardly existed, though, conversely, it would have to have been rather large to accommodate his near two-metre frame.
Green’s record — batting average of 36, bowling average 34 — is hardly shabby, but does not yet do justice to a cricketer who turned 24 a fortnight ago and is only just leaving the phase of his development entitled ‘raw’. Growth, even within series, has been tangible, Green’s best display of a maiden Ashes in Australia 18 months ago coming in the finale at Hobart, where he took four wickets and made 74, and a first Test century arriving against India in Ahmedabad at the end of a four-match campaign he began sidelined by injury. As is almost as important a benchmark these days, a first IPL hundred has followed since.
“I think now he’s 20 Test matches in and you’re just seeing him mature a little bit,” Green’s captain, Pat Cummins, said yesterday. “He got his first Test hundred only a couple of Tests ago and I think you’re seeing him grow a little bit, get more confident in his own ability.”
Born in Perth, Green had never even played in England until a week ago, when two ludicrously good catches in the World Test Championship Final win over India at the Kia Oval served as a reminder that, much like Stokes, his capacity for influence extends to all three facets of the game.
“We all know he absolutely belongs at this level,” Cummins added. “He’s a superstar and I think now he’s starting to learn that himself.”
There are 15 players in the history of Test cricket to have achieved the gold standard of both 3,000 Test runs and 200 Test wickets. A fifth of them are English and, should Stokes take six wickets this summer, that figure would rise to a quarter; another 86 runs and five wickets for Moeen Ali and it could be five out of 17.
Of that collection, still only one, Warne, is Australian, but in Green they have, at last, a player with the scope to join the all-round elite.
