How did this Newcastle fan end up opening the batting for Australia?
North East-born Matt Renshaw will face his pal Joe Root
AS HIS old man will tell you, Matthew Renshaw’s journey to Test cricket was ‘never planned... it just happened’.
This goes some way to explain how, having begun 10,000 miles away in Middlesbrough, his first anniversary as an international batsman later this month will come against the country of his birth as David Warner’s opening partner.
The opening Test of the Ashes at his home ground of the Gabba will be 21-year-old Renshaw’s 11th for Australia. Dad Ian will be in customary mode, pacing up and down one of the hospitality boxes, mum Alison sitting motionless somewhere nearby. Two English parents willing on their fair dinkum lad.
Dr Ian Renshaw, is a senior lecturer at Queensland University of Technology, whose career teaching and researching sports coaching, skill acquisition and sports psychology, landed his family in Brisbane via Teesside, Sheffield and Auckland in 2007.
He reveals: ‘I saw Greg Chappell in Sydney recently and he said: “You must be finding it hard watching him in a baggy green?” But no, not at all, actually. I guess it wasn’t a decision we ever made. It just happened.
‘Until Matthew started playing for Australia, I always wanted England to win. But up to that point we never knew whether he was even going to get close to being good enough, so it was irrelevant when people asked which one he would play for.
‘Then, when things happened, they happened very quickly.’
Renshaw, a Newcastle United fan courtesy of his Geordie mother, is like Australia captain Steve Smith, whose mother is English, or Peter Handscomb, whose British parents met Down Under — they could have opted for either side of cricket’s greatest rivalry.
‘We chose to come and live here, we arrived when he was 10 and he never actually played a game in England. He played junior cricket for a couple of years in New Zealand, but the vast majority of his development has been in Queensland, so he’s a product of the Australian system. He talks like an Aussie, and he is an Aussie.’
However, the links between the Renshaws and top-level English cricket are entrenched.
First, there is the friendship with Joe Root’s family. Their fathers ‘enjoyed sneaking singles’ at the turn of the millennium as openers for Sheffield Collegiate.
Billy Root, Joe’s younger brother, lodged with the Renshaws just a couple of winters ago while playing grade cricket in Queensland.
Back in the North East, mum Alison taught maths to a young Liam Plunkett, whose seambowling father Alan is said to have had the better of on-field skirmishes in local matches between Middlesbrough and Marske. Once in Auckland father and son would play cricket in the yard. Backyard cricket has shaped generations of Australian players, with signature strokes often a result of childhood environments. The driveway where the Waugh brothers played as kids sloped towards the leg-stump, so naturally Mark Waugh was a genius off his pads. Renshaw is no different. ‘ The last shot to appear for him was the square cut because there was a pillar in the way in the front yard,’ his dad recalls. In Brisbane his first match on turf was a district trial for Met North. He sailed through, and into the Queensland age- group Eye on the ball: Matthew Renshaw teams. Straight out of Brisbane Grammar School, he was offered a Queensland rookie contract. But Renshaw has continued those paternal practice sessions.
Even now, 26 matches into a firstclass career, the pair can be found a short walk from their Albany Creek home, on the artificial strip at the Brendale sports complex with a bucket of balls.
No one knows Renshaw’s game better than his Sutton-in-Ashfieldraised dad, and so it proved after a debut against Pakistan in which Ian says he kept ‘playing and missing for the world’.
‘We managed to go back, look at some replays, and work out what was going on. We did a little session between that Test and the next one. We solved it. Chris Rogers was the only one who appeared to have spotted what we had done, which was interesting.’
Caught up in the emotion of an Australia debut at 20, Renshaw had forgotten the little things — like adjusting his stance when bowlers went round the wicket.
Of course, this all took place just a little over 18 months after his Sheffield Shield debut, and immediately after he returned from a knee injury to hit a hundred and a 50 off South Australia.
The Australians believed they had found the perfect foil for the dashing David Warner; a player with, dare it be said, ‘English characteristics’.
Renshaw senior explains: ‘He’s stubborn, I guess, and because he played men’s cricket early, he copped a lot of stick overer the years — they couldn’t get him out, but he couldn’t necessarily score — so that stood him in good stead.’
In his second Shield game he spent 48 balls on nought, and batted the majority of f the day against Tasmania for 37 runs, as they hung g the ball outside off-stump p to a seven-two field.
Ian says: ‘ He had two o heroes: Alastair Cook and d Mike Hussey. He’s almost a mini Cook, although h obviously not as good yet.
‘ They are very similar, r, waiting for the bowlers’ s’ patience to snap first.’
When the Pakistanis is snapped in Sydney at the he start of the year, they were re taken for 184.
‘There are always ups and nd downs,’ adds Ian. ‘People le work you out, and so you have ve to do something better. If you ou don’t, you disappear. He knows he’s nowhere near the he finished article, so he’s always ays looking at the next challenge.’ ge.’
And that will be trying to help his adopted nation wrest est the famous urn out of the land and of his fathers.