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Handscomb working on back-foot game to master spin
- Updated: January 1, 2017
Peter Handscomb’s Test career is only three matches old, but he has already achieved a feat matched by few Australians. By scoring 54 on debut in Adelaide, 105 at the Gabba and 54 at the MCG, Handscomb became one of only five men to make a 50-plus score in each of his first three Tests for Australia. The only others to have done so are Bill Brown, Frank Iredale, Michael Bevan and Herbie Collins – Collins, in fact, did so in his fourth Test, too.
It is testament not only to Handscomb’s skill as a batsman – although he has shown plenty of that since being handed his baggy green less than six weeks ago – but also to his temperament. At the crease as a Test batsman, Handscomb has appeared as unflustered as if he was playing a club game for St Kilda, a sign of the mental strength that others have observed in Handscomb since his teenage years.
But beyond this home summer – and whether or not Handscomb matches Collins’ Australia record by making a 50-plus score in his fourth straight Test from debut – Australia hope that Handscomb can achieve another feat that few of his countrymen have managed. At least, few in recent years. That goal is to master the Indian conditions when Australia embark on a Test tour there next month, their first since being crushed 0-4 in 2013.
That trip is perhaps best remembered for the homework saga and the off-field unravelling of Australia’s fracturing squad, but the off-field chaos was born of on-field failures. On the first day of the series, in Chennai, Michael Clarke went to stumps on 103. It …
