Ed Cowan - In the Firing Line: Diary of a Season

Diary of a season

Monday, 4 October 2010

There is still snow on the top of Mount Wellington, and icy winds have been sniping about the nets at Bellerive Oval, from which goalposts have only just been removed cricket season must be around the corner. In fact, it's virtually in the house next door. While grade cricket will not start in Hobart for a couple more weeks (having already been well and truly underway in other states), the PKF Tasmanian Tigers' first game of 201011 is only two days away.

Today was essentially the first time the entire squad had been together all pre-season. It was the first time, for example, we had been joined by our new import, Mark Cosgrove from South Australia, who returned yesterday from another successful season with Glamorgan. Cossie is at a crossroad, having been strangely axed by his own state. Privately, we can't believe our luck. He is a player of enormous skill someone who has benefited from playing cricket all year round and in doing so, learning to play the game his way cramming 90 first-class games into his 26 years. He's tough. I've crossed swords with him on the field many times over. Everything's different, though, when you share dressing rooms; in fact, having made the hard decision to come to Tasmania last season, I feel a kinship with him. I hope, like me, he can reinvent himself away from the hometown preconceptions.

Not that he is the only one in our group for whom this season holds greater significance. My friend and captain, George Bailey, could well be in contention for a spot in the World Cup squad come February if he continues from where he left off in last year's limited-over competition. His appointment as leader last year went a long way to making my decision to move to Tasmania all the more clear. He was someone I thought I wanted to play under and for. I saw him first as an opponent, and admired his natural gifts and obvious cricket savvy. I got to know him when we represented our respective state playing groups as delegates on the Australian Cricketers' Association, a serious environment in which he also showed his silly side: at an ACA karaoke night, he performed The Archies' Sugar Sugar with several kilograms of CSR's finest granulated product trapped in his undies.

George has grown into his role as captain, as an on-field strategist and off-field motivator. What he needs now is a knockout season with the bat 1000 runs instead of 700, the kind that lifts him into Test contention. His 160 not out for Australia A in the winter may also be the catalyst for the huge first-class season that his talent deserves.

In a country that has been reportedly bare of a spinner of any substance in the post-Warne era, we are in the sometimes awkward position of having both the next best spinners not playing international cricket in our team, Xavier Doherty and Jason Krejza. Unfortunately, Bellerive Oval has historically given little encouragement to slow bowlers: Stuart MacGill described it once as though he was bowling on glass. But perhaps though if the wicket is grassy this year, the old adage, if it seams, it spins, will ring true.

They are brilliant in their own ways: Xavier has the skill to mix up his pace and rarely bowls a bad ball; Jason turns it big, perhaps as much as anyone in the world.

The real complexity of our situation as a team though is how we are meant to fit both of these guys into our four-day team. It is simply not possible, except perhaps in Sydney on a turning wicket. Either could play Test cricket this year, and yet only one will ever be playing regular four-day cricket.