Matt Renshaw's 14 Tests have been spread across seven years. Now, by his own admission, a different person to when he started out in international cricket, he deserves a second run at making the opening spot his own.
“I hope he’s lying on the table in there half dead.”
A scathing remark, and one you hope comes with no small degree of exaggeration. That was Allan Border on Matthew Renshaw, after the batter left the field for a bathroom break in Pune in 2017.
One can only assume Border would rather the opener had soiled himself in public view of thousands at the venue, and potentially millions watching the game on television and online. A sub-section of Indian fans still remembers Renshaw almost solely for that incident.
The thing with sport is, no one can resist a comeback story.
Eight years on, Border has more positive words to say, backing him for an Ashes spot this Australian summer on the SENQ Breakfast radio show: “I’d be going Renshaw [to partner Khawaja]. He’s back in the one-day team and he’s been scoring runs pretty consistently over the last couple of years – red ball and white ball – and he’s been there, done that.”
The same day, Greg Chappell said Renshaw would be a “synergistic” fit as Khawaja’s opening partner.
As things stand, between the support for Renshaw and Marnus Labuschagne’s recent renaissance, Australia could well end up with an all-Queensland top three come the first ball of the Ashes in Perth.
On the same radio show, Border, just before launching into a scathing review of Sam Konstas’ ramp shot, did make quite a pertinent point about, as he saw it, the changing face of the Australian men’s Test team.
“Maybe the player(s) now, the careers are sort of 25 to 35 [years old] type-thing, rather than 20 to 30. I think there’s been a shift, you know, that players are maturing later.
“So therefore we won’t see too many of the young blokes like [Sam] Konstas getting a run because they’re just not quite ready at that age.”
Konstas, Australia’s incumbent opening partner to Khawaja, is 20 now, and was 19 when he debuted for Australia. The previous opener to do so aged 20 or younger was Renshaw himself, in 2016 against South Africa.
He made 10 and 34 not out in a day-night Test, the latter knock coming off 137 balls and prompting Mark Nicholas to gush about how this young batter, brought up on a diet of white-ball cricket, revelled in letting the ball go.
After 10 Tests, he averaged 36.64, with one hundred and three fifties to his name. Renshaw was dropped after that, and then re-appeared briefly for the final Test of the infamous sandpaper tour.
Under Australia’s new management, that was the last Test he would play for nearly five years. When he did get another go, it was in the middle-order on a tour of India; he returned scores of zero, two and two – and his Test average dipped below 30.
As far as domestic first-class cricket is concerned, the years since his last Test have been a slight mixed bag.
In 2023, he averaged nearly 55 from 16 innings for Australia A and Queensland – a run of form that was enough for him to earn a squad spot for the tour of New Zealand in early February 2024. Renshaw warmed the bench.
Read more: Konstas, Labuschagne and beyond: Eleven batters in the race to open for Australia in the Ashes
When he went back to domestic cricket after that, he struggled. Fifteen first-class matches that year saw a meagre return of 747 runs, at an average of under 30. There’s every chance that cost him a place in Australia’s squad for the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, allowing Nathan McSweeney and Konstas to jump the queue, as it were.
Off the field, Renshaw had his own pre-occupations. With a one-year old child at home and a second on the way for much of 2024, it’s not outlandish to think that life itself played a part in that downturn in form.
“It feels like every summer there is a circus about something and it is usually about the openers because Australian cricket wants another opener,” he told reporters in November 2024. “I think [the decision] last week (to promote Test debutant Nathan McSweeney to open) might have hurt a lot of us.”
In the same breath, Renshaw spoke about actively trying to stay away from the hype around Australia’s opening options, something he repeated 11 months later on Wednesday, ahead of the second ODI against India.
“A lot of the time you try and force a few things, you see someone else gets runs, and you go: 'I need to score runs because then I'm going to be picked for Australia, then I'm going to become a good person',” he said.
“That whole mentality when you're young is that's how you view yourself as a person. Whereas now I go home and I've got to change nappies, I've got to put kids to bed, I've got to try and calm screaming babies down.
“When you're young, you go home [and] you have got nothing to do, so you're just sitting on your phone scrolling. I hide. I don't have the Cricket Australia app, I don't try to look at any news, I hide all the cricket stuff on my Instagram so I don't see it.”
Also read: Beyond Boland: How does Australia's pace depth stack up ahead of the Ashes?
This is not an uncommon refrain in cricket, or in sport. Players have often spoken about how ‘letting go’ can have a freeing effect on their game. Cricket revels in talk about the mental aspect of the game, and its intangibles – often veering into psychobabble – but at least on a surface level, mental state and athletic performance are not entirely divorced from one another.
There is an intriguing bit of research that may be pertinent to Renshaw’s career. Amol Desai, data analyst with Zelus Analytics and Cricviz, concluded in 2023 that the average Test batter peaks in their early 20s, and improves in first-class cricket, peaking in their late 20s or early 30s.
Renshaw is now 29, and a healthy 2025 across formats makes one think that 2024 was the blip, not the expectation. He did not play Test cricket for much of his early 20s and the early signs were promising, so it does provide hope that he is peaking in the domestic game at roughly the same time a genuine Test-quality batter would.
In 2017, a youthful, clean-shaven Renshaw joked about how Virat Kohli had given him a tough time about his toilet incident while he was batting in the following Test; all in good spirit, but there was also a twinkle in his eyes that almost betrayed the amazement that a genuine star of world cricket was in such close proximity to him.
When he spoke on Wednesday, a thin moustache did little to hide his still-boyish appearance, but there was decidedly more calm and steel behind his eyes, than wonder and excitement. There was a line about Kohli again, but with more zen about it: “Virat Kohli made a duck [in the first ODI] and he is the best player in this format. So I thought 'it's okay to fail'. A lot of the time, you always chase perfection in this game. But no one has ever perfected it. I don't think there is any point trying too hard.”
There is a thin line between resignation and acceptance; the former implies a residual level of discontent. Renshaw seems to have accepted, rather than resigned himself to, where he stands vis-a-vis the Australian team. He still may not be who you pick to take on Kuldeep and Jadeja in the subcontinent, but he has been batting at the top in Australia for years, and that is what they need for the Ashes.
When he made his ODI debut on Sunday, the eight years and 329 days after his Test debut made it the longest gap for anyone who has debuted in the longest format since 1971.
Renshaw knows how to wait, and the chance should come this year. But even if it doesn’t, you sense he won’t be too put off.
Image credit: YouTube / Cricket Australia
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