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Handscomb: Australia’s ‘next big thing’

Handscomb has spent time in Australia's ODI set-up. Photo: Getty

Handscomb has spent time in Australia's ODI set-up. Photo: Getty

At the start of last summer, Peter Handscomb was a 23-year-old batsman-keeper who’d played 34 Sheffield Shield matches for Victoria for just one hundred.

His 14 fifties showcased his promise, but a batting average in the mid-30s needed improvement – and then Victorian coach Greg Shipperd told him so.

Since that heart-to-heart, he has hit five first-class hundreds and seven fifties, and on Saturday he begins a Sheffield Shield final – which Victoria play South Australia in – as one of his state’s key men.

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So what does he put his drastic improvement in his run output down to?

Handscomb has spent time in Australia's ODI set-up. Photo: Getty

Handscomb has spent time in Australia’s ODI set-up. Photo: Getty

Mostly “a mental change”, he tells The New Daily, crediting Shipperd for helping him make that adjustment in the winter of 2014.

Previously, Handscomb had suffered some technical issues stemming from a problem that all young Australian batsmen must now face: over-coaching. 

In his first three seasons of Shield cricket, he was seeing “five or six different coaches” per year, each of whom was telling him “different things”.

As a natural consequence, he had a “different technique every season”. 

By contrast, in the winter of 2014, he only worked with one batting coach — Shipperd — which meant that “I was only being told one thing, I could focus on that”. 

“We looked at my weaknesses in terms of how I was getting out and … came up with a strategy to combat that, and then let everything else take care of itself,” he said.

Crucially, they “focused on finding a technique that [he] felt comfortable [with]”, one which maximised his peculiar natural strengths (and thereby dragged his problem areas along in their wake), rather than obsessing over the natural weaknesses that all batsmen have.

That technique — which involves Handscomb holding his bat up above his shoulders like a baseballer as the bowler runs in to bowl and wiggling his bat down and up as the bowler releases the ball — is certainly a bit unusual for an Australian.

Ex-Test opener Michael Slater accurately described it as “very English” — but it works for Handscomb.

He is quick to acknowledge that there is still plenty of room for improvement in his game — for starters, he says, “I need to get that big hundred now” (his highest first-class score is 137) — and he is putting in the hard yakka to make those improvements. 

A recent run of failures has frustrated him, but he will still enter the Shield final buoyed by a stylish hundred against South Australia last month.

A good performance from Handscomb in the decider will only increase his chances of appearing on Australia’s tours of the West Indies and Sri Lanka later this year – and India in 2017.

Handscomb behind the stumps. Photo: Getty

Handscomb behind the stumps. Photo: Getty

Handscomb is renowned for his ability to play spin and is therefore a good chance to get picked – but he’s not resting on his laurels.

On Australia A’s 2015 winter tour of India, he realised that, on “Indian wickets that are a little bit unpredictable with their natural variation”, spinners “can bowl a lot faster so it’s a lot harder to get down the track”. 

Thus, he worked with Australia batting consultant, Sridharan Sriram – who he describes as “a legend” – on his sweep shot and playing spin off the back-foot like “the Indians [who] play spin very well going back, letting it spin and then working with it”.

His batting proficiency against spin, ability to keep — he kept all the way through juniors and wore the gloves for the Melbourne Stars for the entirety of this BBL season — and excellence in the field without the gloves — he is rated Victoria’s second-best slipper after Cameron White — make him a handy prospect for any tour of the sub-continent.

The renowned batting coach Trent Woodhill — Steve Smith’s junior mentor and David Warner’s personal batting coach — worked with Handscomb as an assistant coach of Victoria and is still working with him at the Stars. 

It leaves him well placed to judge Handscomb, who he says “can play 100 Tests”, and is one of “the best players (of spin) in the country.”

That’s some endorsement.

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