A little over three months ago, Steven Hogan was sitting in the Stuart Law Stand at Allan Border Field, ready to watch day one of a Sheffield Shield match, when he was approached by a member of Queensland’s coaching staff.
“He just said, ‘Mate, we need you to field’,” Hogan tells cricket.com.au. “I thought he was cracking a joke at first. I’d come that day as a spectator.”
Sitting beside Hogan for the Bulls’ clash with Western Australia was fellow 18-year-old Charles Lachmund and 19-year-old Victorian Ollie Peake – three of the country’s most highly regarded teen prospects.
The trio was feet up, eager to enjoy the action. Then an injury to Jack Wildermuth dramatically changed Hogan’s plans. He stood up, walked downstairs to the home dressing room, threw on a team kit, and entered the fray.
So it was that in Usman Khawaja’s final first-class match, Hogan – the youngster who some believe might become the finest born-and-bred Brisbane batter since the man whose grandstand he had been sitting in – made his quiet arrival on the scene.
The match itself was a fair reflection of just how that scene looks in 2026. Across three days – and aside from a century stand between WA’s openers – ball dominated bat. No side reached 230. Marnus Labuschagne took four wickets with his seamers. Queensland collapsed to 6-44 in the fourth innings, and were saved only by rain.
Ten days later, the Bulls’ Shield campaign was over, and for the seventh time in eight seasons, not a single one of their batters had scored 700 runs.
And it wasn’t only Queensland. As statistician Ric Finlay pointed out, Victorian Peter Handscomb’s haul of 688 runs was the lowest aggregate to top the Shield regular season run-scoring charts in 53 years. Across the board, the highest batting averages in the competition were down. The best bowling averages and strike-rates were lower.
The statistics are many. In the past three seasons, only two players – Beau Webster and Jake Weatherald – have hit 900 runs in a Shield campaign. Both men were subsequently handed Test debuts at the age of 31. The once thriving 1,000-run season is now in the critically endangered category; after 34 instances between 1990 and 2015, it has been sighted just twice since (Marcus Harris and Matt Wade in 2018-19), and not at all this decade.
The matter has for some time now been a talking point both within state bodies and at Cricket Australia. At a higher level, no less a talent than Steve Smith has spoken about the rising degree of difficulty for batters on Australian Test pitches. This winter, CA will hold a national meeting of coaches, where Shield pitches will be on the agenda.
“Batting (in the Shield) has been difficult,” said Australia head coach Andrew McDonald last month. “I think it’s too easy to sit there and go, ‘It’s the pitches’, or ‘It’s this’ – it’s probably a combination of everything.
“When the bowling averages are below 20 in some instances and when the batting averages dip below 40, it’s all relative … I think the best players still find themselves in that top echelon.
“I think the long-term question is: what does that mean for the development of your players? And what sort of style do you end up with in five or six years if you were to maintain the surfaces you’re playing on now?
“(There’s) an attitude that you’re probably not getting rewarded after 40 overs, there’s still a lot of seam (movement) that is happening (beyond that point), so it’s almost (a view of), ‘try to get them before they get me’ – I’ve heard some players talk about that.
“I think teams are working out how to play in those conditions. It’s whether they want to continue playing in those conditions. It’s a big question, and it’s a discussion that coaches are having.”
During the season gone, Hogan and Peake – interstate rivals but Australia U19 teammates – regularly spoke and swapped texts about batting, and how they can be best equipped to face the challenges of their profession.
“With him playing a fair bit in the Shield, he said it’s been pretty hard with the conditions not in (batters’) favour,” Hogan says. “And if you’re not scoring runs, it’s one of the toughest things in the world, mentally.”
In recent seasons, a number of Australia’s most promising youngsters have discovered that fact on the run. Most notably, it has been borne out in the fortunes of a couple of wunderkinds – Sam Konstas and Jake Fraser-McGurk – whose dizzying elevations were matched by their equally swift returns to mortality.
Hogan, the Sandgate-Redcliffe top-order batter who this month earned his first state contract with Queensland, is acutely aware that all of this – as well as the expectation, the fame, and the scrutiny – could be hurtling down the highway towards him very soon.
At 18, however, the kid whose parents owned an indoor sports centre throughout his childhood is optimistic about all of it.
“It’s pretty exciting,” he says, “going into that new world.”
* * *
More than anything else, Ollie Peake remembers the toil of his maiden first-class innings. Victoria were 3-20 on the first morning, playing away against three-time defending Sheffield Shield champs WA.
On a seaming wicket against a quality attack, it was tough going. Peake was joined by Handscomb and together the pair slowly worked their way into the contest. It took them 174 balls to cobble a 50-run stand.
Just before tea, Peake raised his bat for a hard-earned fifty. He had scrounged three fours, and was out early in the final session for 52 from 168 deliveries. Amid almost four hours at the crease, there were plenty of times when he wondered where his next run was coming from.
In averaging 24.95 in the competition across the following 12 months, it is a feeling Peake has become accustomed to, if not entirely comfortable with.
“I think that’s every Shield game I play,” he smiles. “You probably go through little phases of scoring really fast and then having to strip it back a bit. But that one (at the WACA Ground) stands out. I felt like I was pretty limited with what I could do … it was a good eye-opener into what you need to do, and if you can grit it out, it’s going to be pretty rewarding in the long run.”
Still a few months short of turning 20 but already with Australia’s ODI squad in Pakistan, Peake has been billed as the country’s great white cricketing hope. This despite the fact he has yet to score a hundred in any format from 26 matches (the closest he has come was with a fine 92 in a first-class match for Australia A in more batter-friendly conditions in Darwin), though that statistic likely speaks more to the challenges facing his generation of batters than his ability.
The left-hander’s elevation to the ODI squad for this Pakistan series is a case in point. Peake had played a total of six senior 50-over matches – three for Australia A and three for Victoria – scoring a couple of fifties. His most impressive performances in the one-day format came at this year’s U19 World Cup, when he scored two hundreds while batting from No.4. That tournament was in South Africa, a far cry from the surfaces the Australians are facing in Pakistan, where Peake batted at seven and eight (and scored 7, 31, 7) in the three matches.
All of which is to say that he is learning on the fly. Ricky Ponting, the man whose age record Peake broke in Rawalpindi last Saturday when he became Australia’s youngest-ever specialist ODI batter, played 52 times across first-class and one-day cricket before making his international bow as a 20-year-old. Before even turning 20, he had made eight Shield hundreds.
Times have changed.
Eight Shield hundreds as a teenager today? Forget it. Only two active players under the age of 30 (Henry Hunt and Cameron Green) have scored that many hundreds in Australia’s fabled Test cricket nursery. And while the legendary Ponting is an extreme example, the fact he can give away a decade underscores the sizeable shift.
Mike Hussey was there through the back half of the 1990s and has hardly left the game since. A Cricket Australia Hall of Famer who has claims to the title of this country’s greatest all-format batter, he is current batting coach with Chennai Super Kings and retains an intimate understanding of the contemporary game.
As he moved through the pathways system himself, Hussey, the man who once sweated through a six-hour net session after Allan Border suggested he ‘trained like he played’, also found other effective avenues through which to develop his red-ball game. One of those was the annual underage National Championships tournaments, which has for a decade now been a one-day competition.
“I was surprised when Cricket Australia looked to be prioritising white-ball cricket through the pathways,” Hussey tells cricket.com.au. “Part of the rationale was that you could get more hits – you might get to bat three times in a week, whereas if you’re playing red ball and you miss out, you might only get that one hit across a week.
“But I actually loved the pathway carnivals where we played two-day red-ball cricket – 100 overs a day – and you learned about batting long periods of time.
“When you learn to do those fundamentals well, you can always build on that, and expand your game from that foundation. But if you’ve got the expansive game with no foundation, it’s very hard to go back the other way – you’ve got nothing to fall back on.”
Elite young players involved in both the white-ball pathways and private school cricket in major cities can also find themselves missing out on Premier Cricket – an environment many past players insist was pivotal in their development. With school cricket played on weekends, much of the red-ball cricket these up-and-comers do play is within their age group, as opposed to coming up against strong men’s players at the higher levels of Premier Cricket. One unnamed state player was surprised to learn how little first grade cricket his new young squad mates had actually played; in some instances, fewer than a handful of games. It means a white-ball diet largely focused on shot making and fast run scoring, and market forces incentivising the development of those traits.
From Cricket Australia’s (CA) standpoint, a healthy combination of red ball and white, covering the three formats, remains a priority. Brian McFadyen, CA’s Senior Manager of National Development Programs, points out that National Championships make up a very small percentage of a developing players’ cricket across a calendar year. He adds another significant downside that was being experienced with two-day cricket in underage interstate competition: lopsided results between stronger and weaker states that led to many matches being concluded in barely more than a day anyway.
Additionally, McFadyen points out that the transition to playing long-format cricket – even for the best players – will occur in their late teens at the earliest.
“If you look at that 15-21 age bracket – where most development occurs – there’s still plenty of access to a range of formats in the pathway,” McFadyen tells cricket.com.au. “There’s probably 60-70 days of cricket through a year when you factor in club, rep, school, state trial matches – and that makes up a high proportion of a players’ development over time.
“As well as Premier Cricket, for the older players in that bracket there’s the Toyota 2nd XI competition, which has stood the test of time for transitioning young players from pathway and Premier Cricket to the physical and mental challenges of four-day cricket.
“Most states play between four and six Second XI matches. And at the same time, the majority of a players’ development is being done in their home state program, and the competitions that sit within that state.
“For the very best players, we have extensive International U19 and Australia A programs, which provide development in foreign destinations.”
A look at the calendar shows both Australia U19s and Australia A will tour India this September, where they will play multiple four-day and 50-over games. Next year, each squad will face England for similar schedules (Aus U19s hosting in January, Aus A touring in June to align with the Ashes).
Why then the tumbling numbers for batters in the Shield? Hussey has seen the conditions into which young batters are being thrust, and the versatility that is expected of them across the formats, and isn’t surprised by the outcomes.
“Shield pitches – and Test pitches for that matter – have been a lot more favourable toward the seam bowlers in the last five-plus years, and I feel like the ball has been doing a lot as well,” Hussey says. “That makes it difficult to learn how to bat long periods of time, and to learn how to make big, big scores.
“That then changes the approach of a lot of batters. Suddenly they’re thinking: Well, there’s going to be a ball with my name on it, so I better get as many runs as I can before it gets me.
“And from a technical perspective, maybe techniques aren’t as tight for four-day cricket as they used to be. It’s that adjustment from the short form. In T20 cricket, you’re looking to get your front leg out of the way, and you’re standing more leg side of the ball so you can swing your arms freely.
“Then you come to four-day cricket and ideally you’re trying to get your head in line with the ball, you’re trying to play straighter, play the ball in front of your body, et cetera.
“Maybe players aren’t making that adjustment as much anymore. Look at someone like Travis Head. Now he’s obviously a great Test player as well, but he likes his arms free so he can swing the bat more in T20 mode.
“If you ask a lot of the modern players how they go changing between formats, they tend to say, ‘Nah, nah, it’s easy’. But I don’t necessarily buy that. I don’t think it’s as easy as what they say it is. There’s definitely an adjustment in technique, and certainly an adjustment in approach. That can have an effect on your play.”
Peake learned about those adjustments at the beginning of the new year. In the space of six weeks, he traversed three formats across two countries, moving from Big Bash to the U19 World Cup and back into the Shield. It is the type of schedule that will become his norm. And throughout, the expectation of quality contributions was ever-present.
In three Shield matches after his return from the World Cup, Peake made 94 runs at 23.50. He began with a duck – out caught behind after aiming an ambitious drive well away from his body– and peaked with a four-hour 59 against South Australia, an innings that echoed his maiden first-class performance.
In the final, he made 28 and 4, out in both innings to high-quality seaming deliveries from South Australia’s quicks. Earlier in the contest, SA skipper Nathan McSweeney – the only top-four batter in the match to pass 35 – engaged in a compelling duel with Victoria’s Test paceman Scott Boland, and said afterward it “felt very like I was playing Test cricket … So that definitely sets up the batters for hopefully a smooth transition into Test cricket.”
Peake will be hoping the same applies to him. He understands it is historically tough going for batters at the moment but is viewing things a little differently. For him, it is less about volume of runs and more about performing well relative to both his peers, and circumstance. A big part of that, he has learned, is acquiring the mental strength to handle failure.
“I know when Pete (Handscomb) was getting into the Test team, it felt like to him he probably had to make a hundred every game to get picked for Australia,” he says. “There were a lot of high scores going around, so you couldn’t really let up.
“And from what I’ve heard, the seaming conditions are as extreme as they have been in the last little while, but maybe 10-15 years ago they had to deal with reverse swing and spinning conditions. So I guess across all generations, there’s been challenges – they’re just different at the moment.
“But it is quite tough dealing with a lot of disappointments – of missing out quite a bit, because that’s just the way the game is going – and still being mentally strong enough to front up each game and try to get the best out of yourself for your team.”
* * *
Late on a Monday evening in the Hobart suburb of Lindisfarne, Teague Wyllie found himself hastily assembling the bed he would be sleeping in that night.
Wyllie’s move from Perth to Tasmania had unfolded quickly, and he really needed his sleep. He had loaded up his car, shipped it across Bass Strait, then gone on a shopping spree in his new hometown. The following day, he would be facing local media, meeting teammates, and venturing out on a tour of Hobart.
Life had moved fast for the 22-year-old since he had held off on a three-year contract offer from the WACA last December, citing limited game time and a lack of clarity over the identity of the head coach moving forward. It was a bold call, but Wyllie is his own man, with courage in his convictions. At nine, he was playing cricket against men in Mandurah. At 16, he quit school to get an apprenticeship in turf management. And at 18, he was scoring a first-class hundred against a Blues attack featuring Nathan Lyon and Chris Tremain.
Since that century, scored a little over four years ago, there has not been another. Wyllie averaged 43.25 after three first-class matches but in 21 games since, that has steadily dropped away to 20.79. Unlike Peake, he was identified almost exclusively as a red-ball batter, and while Test cricket remains his primary ambition, that is a perception he plans to change. Having been inside the system for four seasons now, part of him fears kids with more power and better strike-rates are being picked ahead of those who might traditionally have been preferred.
“I think there’d be plenty of young cricketers around Australia right now who might not have developed the 360 (degree) scoring, but they can bat time, and they can lock in against good spells of bowling,” Wyllie tells cricket.com.au. “But because their strike rate’s not as high as what some other kids are, they probably don’t get the same opportunity.
“(Just) because their white-ball game is not as developed, that doesn’t mean they’re not as good a cricketer. They’re probably better in long-form cricket than a lot of the guys who are getting picked, but that’s just the way the pathways are, and the way the game’s trending.”
McFadyen sees it differently.
“Teams are made up of a range of player types,” he says. “We’ve had three formats for a couple of decades now and many players – Mike Hussey, Shane Watson and Marnus Labuschagne spring to mind – started off as suited to red-ball cricket, and part of their development was becoming more adaptable to a range of situations and formats.
“But every young player who starts off with a conventional red-ball defensive game has a great foundation to grow into players like those I mentioned.”
Wyllie echoes Hussey’s view on the pathways system and concedes that with stringent fast-bowling workloads for youngsters nowadays, arranging meaningful longer form cricket is challenging. His involvement in men’s cricket from such a young age exposed him regularly to the red ball and allowed him to prioritise a solid defensive base. Yet while there was the fleeting early glory of a century in his third first-class match, nothing could prepare him for life in contemporary Shield cricket, where pitches are prepared to all-but ensure results and teams even view the points system to be skewed in favour of wickets over runs.
“I had a little bit of success early on, and it all kind of happened really fast,” Wyllie says. “But when I first started playing Shield cricket, I was naïve to how hard the game was … you start playing against guys like Nathan Lyon, Scott Boland, and with the footage and the analytics now, you just get found out.
“I feel lucky that that’s happened to me between the ages of 17 to 21, where a lot of people get that from the ages of 21 to 25, and then all of a sudden they’re a few years back.”
Through three-and-a-bit seasons of lean returns, Wyllie stopped at nothing to rediscover his Midas touch. In between, he set about expanding his game for white-ball cricket, working hard through Big Bash breaks with the Perth Scorchers Academy. For a period, he knew the technical changes were impacting his red-ball game, but he adopted a short-term pain, long-term gain philosophy.
“It was a really tough period,” he says of those years. “Probably more mentally than anything. When I say I tried everything, I mean I tried absolutely everything: I went from a double-foot trigger to a one-foot trigger; I went from a one-foot trigger to standing still with my bat toe to the floor; and then I (realised) no matter how I bat, I can make runs – I’ve just got to do what’s comfortable for me.
“So I went back to what allowed me to get to that level, and what was natural to me. I feel like that has helped me so much more in the last couple years, and now, with the way the game’s trending and the way some of the pitches are playing, averaging 35 is like averaging 50 was 30 years ago.”
Wyllie is now hopeful of getting an opportunity for Tasmania, who have lost Test opener Jake Weatherald and opted not to re-sign Mac Wright and Charlie Wakim, though the returning Ben McDermott and the now-contracted Nikhil Chaudhary will also have claims on first XI places.
Experience has taught him that whichever venue is home, and wherever he fits into the order, batting will be tough work in a competition that for the past three seasons has seen more than 74 per cent of captains opt to bowl first.
What advice then for those white-ball bred youngsters arriving fresh on the scene?
“I think for players coming into the system, having played white-ball cricket on glassy wickets, it’s about trying to find a method for scoring runs and adapting to the long format on wickets that do a bit,” he says.
“To get opportunities now, young batsmen have got to be able to score 360 (degrees). So you see guys coming to the system now and their white-ball game is so developed, but I just think now it’s taking guys longer to adapt and get better at playing four-day cricket, just because the first time a lot of these guys start playing longer-form cricket is in second grade or first grade adult’s cricket.
“One of my good coaches growing up always said it takes four or five years of playing at a level, or playing in a format, to get good at it. So for these guys, it’s different to what it was 30, 40 years ago.
“But I think your basic fundamentals are still what make you as a cricketer. It’s very hard for some young cricketers now, because they want to play what’s in front of them – so if they’ve got an Under-17 tournament coming up and that’s a white-ball tournament, you’re going to prepare for that (accordingly). But everyone’s long-term goal is to play Test cricket for Australia, so there’s a bit of a contradiction there. And I can empathise – I’ve been through that situation.
“For every young person reading this, keep trying to nail your fundamentals. Red-ball cricket, the way it’s trending now, yes, there’s times where you have to play a reverse sweep or a lap, and you have to hit them over the top. It’s getting a lot faster paced, but I still think you want to have a good front-foot defence, a good back-foot defence, and pounce when they miss.
“That’s what the game’s always been about.”
* * *
Peake and Hogan have already been praised for their attitudes, specifically for a willingness to learn. The teenagers are leaning on more experienced teammates – for Peake, it’s been Handscomb and Harris, for Hogan, his Sandgate-Redcliffe teammate Mitch Swepson, and Marnus Labuschagne – and asking questions relating to matters both on the field and off.
The world of professional sport can be a strange and intimidating one to walk into. There are expectations around training and high-performance, media commitments and standards of behaviour. Player agents will come knocking, opportunities will present themselves, finances will need to be managed.
Wyllie, who turned 22 in April, has been through all of it. Again he is thankful for his path, which allowed him to gain some life experience before entering the oft-described ‘bubble’ of elite cricket.
“A lot of these kids are straight out of school, they’re 17-18 and jumping into the system,” he says. “They still live at home, a lot of things are done for them, and they haven’t had much experience with the outside world. They come in and they’re so raw … and when you’re fresh out of home, and lot of guys are moving states, so they’ve got no social network around them … it can be quite a daunting place.”
For Hogan, this is the world that awaits. The Brisbane boy has, with parents Christine and Frank, been treading carefully so far, refusing to rush into securing a player agent as Steven finds his feet in the Queensland Cricket setup. Frank was an important coach during his son’s junior development, through which he, like Wyllie, dreamed of a Baggy Green and found ways to prioritise batting long.
To say Hogan has been dragged kicking and screaming into the T20 world is perhaps overstating it, but only a little. Certainly, he sees himself more in the Nathan McSweeney mould than the Tim David one.
“That was the tough thing for me,” he says. “I probably would’ve preferred that (being a red-ball specialist) – it took a bit of convincing from those top-level coaches … (but) the reality is you’ve got to be good at multiple formats now. I’m happy with that now and I’m working on my game to be a lot better across all formats.”
For Hogan, who made a century for Australia U19s at this year’s World Cup (where he and Peake spent time getting technical on power hitting, and bat-face angle in T20 versus red-ball cricket) it isn’t a zero-sum game. In fact, he believes that through developing his white-ball batting, his red-ball game will improve as well.
“They’re expecting higher strike-rates in red-ball cricket now,” he says. “That doesn’t mean you have to play the exact same way, but I think there are T20 skills you can use in red-ball cricket. Look at someone like Alex Carey, you’ll see him come in and reverse from ball one (in red-ball cricket), and he’s been fairly successful over the last two years. So I think they (the formats) can help each other.”
That theory will likely face its sternest test when the summer begins. Hogan will be hoping for an opportunity in Queensland’s Shield side – this time as a batter, rather than as a substitute fielder. He will be freshly 19 by then and is cheekily hoping that, when it comes to the pitches he bats on, the wheel might have turned.
“A few people have said that, because things happen in cycles and it’s been so hard for batters, they (Cricket Australia) have probably realised that, and they might try to make it a bit easier for the next two years or so. Maybe I’m coming in at a very good time.”
