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Nathan McSweeney didn’t perform as expected — but would dropping him solve Australia’s middle-order and instability issues?
Nathan McSweeney couldn’t score a fifty in six innings in 2024-25 BGT. (PC: X)
From India’s perspective, the Border-Gavaskar Trophy has been notorious for preponing the retirement of legendary players. Anil Kumble in 2008, MS Dhoni in 2014, and Ravichandran Ashwin might not be the last to hang his Test boots in the 2024 edition.
For Australia, a similar career-shaking pattern works out, but specifically for opening batters. Matt Renshaw, Will Pucovski, Joe Burns and Matthew Wade — all played their last Tests against India. The latest victim — at least for now — is Nathan McSweeney.
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McSweeney has been dropped after three Tests after scores of 10, 0, 39, 10*, 9 and 4. Australia have included 19-year-old New South Wales batter Sam Konstas, who scored a brilliant 107 runs against India in the warm-up game ahead of the Adelaide Test. Known for his dynamic batting style, it seems like he’d take the opening spot for the next two Tests.
Like with the previous opening snubs, there’s some clear, practical logic behind McSweeney’s dropping. But is it the right call? Below, we explain why it might not be:
Purely on stats, McSweeney perhaps deserved to be dropped. But if the management thinks that letting him go would solve their top-order issues, they might be wrong.
McSweeney’s series total of 72 runs is nine more than his senior opening partner Usman Khawaja, three more than white-ball captain Mitchell Marsh, and only 10 fewer than Marnus Labuschagne, who has been out-of-form for a few months now.
It’s easy to forget that McSweeney was a number three batter before his Test debut and was chosen for a role he hadn’t done before a lot, against an inexperienced but quality Indian attack. It’s also easy to ignore that four of his six dismissals came against the current best all-format bowler, Jasprit Bumrah, who has equally troubled the other Aussie batters.
If McSweeney was dropped on numbers, his senior teammates deserved the same treatment too. The 25-year-old even looked more technically adept than Khawaja, Marsh and occasionally, even Labuschagne, in dealing with the Indian attack.
McSweeney faced 212 deliveries in the series, significantly more than Marsh’s 141 and Khawaja’s 136. Even if Konstas does better than McSweeney (on traditionally much better batting wickets of Melbourne and Sydney, it needs to be noted), it would be more of a distraction from the records of the out-of-form seniors than a solution for the batting issues.
A day before his dropping was announced, former batter Mike Hussey said McSweeney was ‘set up for failure’ by the management who played him in the wrong spot against a difficult attack. He feared that it might end up ‘crushing him mentally’, which chief selector George Bailey and his team can now only hope won’t be the case.
While announcing the team, Bailey made a point to keep the door open for McSweeney in the future. But it isn’t a kind, honest assurance to a youngster that it initially looks like.
Renshaw, Pucovski, Burns and Wade are only a few recent openers whose careers halted after a handful of poor Test performances at the top of the order. Cameron Bancroft and Marcus Harris have also been tried, tested and dropped after a couple of failures.
Not to forget the Steven Smith experiment and Cameron Green and Travis Head being seen as contenders for the job. Openers have been dropped like flies, and the instability created by David Warner’s ban in 2018 is yet to be arrested.
Khawaja has been the only one to stand tall and now, at 38 years old, even he looks like a shadow of his old self who made the place his own. In such a scenario, dropping a 25-year-old and bringing an even younger batter would only add to the chaos.
What should hurt McSweeney further is the fact that he was clearly getting better. Despite batting in some of the most difficult phases in the series, his batting was improving, his confidence was palpable in how he was leaving and defending as the series progressed.
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If three difficult Tests continue to remain as the criteria for backing a young opener, even Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer would fail to keep their place in this Australian team.
Australia and Bailey have already touted Konstas’s attack-favoring game as some sort of solution to India.
“It has clearly been a challenge at the top of the order for batters throughout the series, and we want to provide the option of a different line-up for the next two matches… Sam gets a call-up to the Test squad for the first time. His style of batting offers a point of difference and we look forward to watching his game develop further,” Bailey told the press on Friday.
But Konstas, too, averages just 42.23 in First Class cricket, which isn’t much better than McSweeney’s 36.31 in fewer matches.
The 2005-born would probably be expected to replicate David Warner’s boundary hitting against the new ball, which complimented Khawaja well and allowed him to take some time. But his problems would be the same as McSweeney’s: he hasn’t faced a bowler of Bumrah’s quality either and there’s no guarantee that the Indian won’t romp over him too.
No matter how good an idea seems in theory, its practical application is reliant on a teenager, who’ll be coming to the series who’d have seen that the result of a few bad performances is a straight drop.
For a player whose game seemingly depends on the freedom of playing his shots, failures at the start of the career would be a huge possibility. If he can’t impress the selectors, too, Australia would find them in a lose-lose spot: if they drop him like McSweeney, that would make two young careers impacted within weeks; and if they don’t, the impact on McSweeney’s confidence would be insurmountable.
