Category Archives: slanted reportage

Play Video

Sam Konstas ramp shot masterclass

Australian batter Sam Konstas tells Channel Seven how he used the innovative ramp shot against India’s Jasprit Bumrah, the world’s best fast bowler, in the Boxing Day Test.

It usually takes some time and a little effort to become an enigma because you have to establish a regular persona first. This generally takes a while in the public space, then you have to ripen those characteristics, i.e. become misunderstood or inconsistent with those expected traits.

Sam James Konstas jolted fans, coaches and mentors out of their festive season lounge chair lethargy with batting that is hard to forget. The flabbergast from coaches and mentors is not about how many Test runs he is making, but how he is making them. And then there was the non-playing theatrics.

His batting in his short Test career has been outrageous – sort of in a good way and sort of in an enigmatic way; mysterious and effective, yet hard to find a niche for it in the lengthy archives of Test cricket.

England’s Ben Duckett and Harry Brook, under the gaze of Brendon McCullum, have led a charge of sorts into this rampage and scoop era, so it can’t be said that Konstas has a patent on such unorthodoxy. Javed Miandad (who learnt it off Mushtaq Mohammad) and Mike Gatting were reverse sweeping in the early 1980s. Gatting famously got out while playing the stroke to Allan Border in the World Cup final in 1987, effectively handing the trophy to Australia. A single failure led to a generation of derision for “Gatt” – and the stroke.

Cricket’s pundits have been split in their acceptance of Konstas’ methods and his reluctance to show deference to his seniors in the opposition. Deference is a separate beast to respect. The intense media scrutiny that all international cricketers are subject to has magnified any eyebrow raise from the teenage debutant.

But he has revelled in the scrutiny and the competition, which is not surprising since he is a child of the social media-driven 21st century and has seen his picture on small screens since he was nine years old, when he started making hundreds.