English cricket laughed aloud when David Warner was found guilty of punching Joe Root in a Birmingham bar and suspended until the first Ashes Test, without remembering that he who laughs longest laughs loudest.
As a result of his suspension, Warner cannot conceivably open Australia’s batting at Trent Bridge on Jul 10, because he would be too short of match-practice for this key position. But the man in the Australian squad who is most qualified to open a Test innings in England can now do so.
Chris Rogers is an old school Australian, like Darren lehmann, the coach who has replaced Mickey Arthur. No more of Cricket Australia’s well-intentioned folly of trying to produce New Age, reconstructed men who drink decaffeinated latte; they are going back to their tradition of picking tough cricketers, no matter how larrikin.
Not that Rogers is a larrikin: he is Australian, but too well-travelled to be very Aussie. He is a tough cricketer though, one of the dying breed who has played around the world and averaged more than 50 in first-class cricket, and who knows how to switch on and, with a beer, switch off. Andrew Strauss, who knew him at Middlesex, sums him up - not without admiration — as ‘a typical Australian cricketer.’
But while Rogers has some great numbers to his name - he is about to clock 20,000 first-class runs and has 60 centuries — he does not have a great presence, or aura, on the cricket field. ‘He may look quiet and studious but he is pretty extrovert, and he has been a tremendous influence,’ says Angus Fraser, Middlesex’s director of cricket, who signed Rogers from Derbyshire to be an exemplary senior player and captain, fronting Middlesex’s revival.
‘As a batsman he is hard-nosed, nothing flamboyant, not pretty on the eye,’ Fraser adds. ‘He is all about finding a way to score runs.’ And now that Rogers is 35, and Australian batting is in a parlous state, their national selectors have finally noticed and reached the same conclusion.
He has represented Australia once before, in highly unusual circumstances. It was in the aftermath of Monkeygate, when Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan Singh fell out during the Sydney Test of 2008, and the Australian and Indian players were at each other’s throats (although their administrators had far too much in common to fall out).
Rogers was brought in for the next Test at Perth, when he found it strange that there was not even a team meeting to discuss tactics. It was all politics instead. Under-prepared, Australia lost and Rogers scored 4 (a rather unlucky lbw) and 15. That, he thought, was it. ‘Facing every ball was like a match in itself, due to the pressure that comes with that level of cricket,’ Rogers wrote later for Cricinfo about his sole Test.
He lost his contract with Cricket Australia, then with Western Australia — rumours of a rift with Justin langer, a like pole in that he too had averaged 50 and led Middlesex — and he washed up at Victoria, grateful for a game.
But all the while, during Australian off-seasons, he had been expanding his portfolio in England, with Derbyshire, Northamptonshire and leicestershire, before Fraser signed him for Middlesex for 2011. He wears the county’s No 1 shirt, not because of ego but because, he says, he likes to lead from the front.
Rogers always wears a chest-pad for batting, because of a most unpleasant accident: he was hit by Shaun Tait, the South Australian slinger timed at 100 mph. He wears lenses too: while preferring spectacles for batting and fielding, he usually bats with lenses because sweat would drip on his glasses. He is also colour-blind and found it difficult, when playing in Abu Dhabi under lights, to see a pink ball.
So profound is his knowledge of English conditions — he has already played at Trent Bridge this season, when he led Middlesex to a ten-wicket win — that Rogers, having waited for so long, has seen his moment finally arrive.