In seeking a long-term solution to his technical travails of the past 12 months, Victoria's captain Peter Handscomb admits he may have hurt his short-term chances of earning a berth on Australia's tour of the UAE to face Pakistan.
Having spent much of the winter working on his balance and alignment with the former Test opener and now coach Chris Rogers at the National Cricket Centre in Brisbane, Handscomb found himself caught in transition while struggling for runs on the Australia A tour of India, and the resultant string of low scores contributed to his omission. The Queenslander Marnus Labuschagne, himself a late inclusion on the tour as injury cover for Matthew Renshaw, went to the UAE instead.
Rather than being part of Australia's current training camp at the ICC Global Academy in Dubai, Handscomb is leading Victoria, and a fluent 89 against New South Wales on Sunday was the first strong sign of progress after his off-season work. Reflecting on the sequence of events, Handscomb said that while he may have suffered in terms of his immediate prospects, he was building a stronger foundation for assignments to follow.
"All that work I was doing was in indoor nets and up in Brisbane which were far different conditions to what we had in India. Not that it's an excuse but I didn't adjust quickly enough to what I know how to play in India," Handscomb said ahead of Victoria's meeting with Western Australia at the Junction Oval on Wednesday. "I was still thinking too much about the ball swinging away and not so much the ball coming back into me and got lbw and bowled a couple of times which is disappointing.
"I've had this technique for four or five years now and it's worked really well for me. Naturally, that's where my movement patterns want to go. If you try and change something it's going to take time. It was nice to spend time in the middle feeling good and incorporating my own technique and everything I've been working on in the pre-season.
"It can be easy to go back to your old technique, something you're comfortable with. I believed in the work we were doing, I felt really good up there and was having some really good hits. I knew something would come, now it's about doing it again and making sure I'm putting up back to back scores."
Still fresh in Handscomb's mind were the runs he made against Pakistan at home in 2016-17, notably a sparkling century in his second Test, against the pink ball at the Gabba. "It was a disappointment," he said of being dropped. "I've done well before on subcontinent tours and I thought I could definitely do a job in the middle order for Australia against a side I have scored runs against before. The selectors and JL [Justin Langer] wanted runs in that Aussie A tour and I didn't put them on the board. I can understand the selection, now it's my job to score runs for Victoria and win games for Victoria.
"I didn't think I needed a lot of changes after last year. I batted under lights in Adelaide and got through both those times, albeit looked ugly. I managed to do my job, unfortunately I got out the next day. I was struggling a bit with the swinging and seaming ball, as most batters do, and wanted to find someone in Chris Rogers, who made a lot of runs in England and with a different technique as well. He was able to help me out, we've done some really good work and hopefully now that the season's kicking on all that work can start to pay off.
"Playing the ball later comes from the alignment. He noticed I was squaring up a bit, that probably came from a couple of tours on the subcontinent and in Australia as well where I mainly faced ball swinging into me so I spent a lot of time working on that. Then once the ball started to shift away I wasn't in a very good position to combat that. It got me straightening up, making sure my front elbow and shoulder lead the shot and everything else will follow."
As captain of his state, Handscomb also finds himself managing numerous other players at various stages of development, including Glenn Maxwell. He explained the reasoning for having Maxwell at No. 5 in the order, where he can pivot between the sort of steadying innings he was required to play when early wickets fell against Queensland, or detonate as he did briefly against NSW.
"He scored 80 in the first game and I think if you bat in the top five or top six you can still score hundreds, especially how the game is going, with guys going a bit harder up the top," Handscomb said. "It means that the middle order is moved from three and four to four and five, so if there is a collapse like we had in that first game then Maxy comes in and controls the innings.
"Or if we have a game like the NSW game where he comes in the last 10 overs, we know he can be striking at 200 or 250. That's the beauty of him, he's so versatile. He can play that really good innings where he builds his innings or he can come in and hit from ball one."
As for the strapping teenager Will Sutherland, son of Cricket Australia's soon-to-depart chief executive James Sutherland, Handscomb had entrusted him with the new ball at the start of the innings and been duly rewarded with intelligent seam bowling and bounce that hits the bat hard. "Will's been amazing," Handscomb said. "We saw glimpses of it last year when he came in. Unfortunately we couldn't keep playing him because of Year 12, but that's probably fair enough he had to go do his studies.
"This year he's been amazing, taking the new ball which is a new role for him, grabbed it with both hands, taking wickets up front which is what we want, and then he's got some good power hitting at the back end, which we haven't quite seen yet but we know he can do it. So hopefully he can for us.
"I know how hard he works, and I know how good a bowler he is. For him to come out, he's got the mental side of the game really well, he thinks about it, he's a very smart bowler, he understands what the batter's trying to do. He's just been going out there and executing his skill and it's been awesome to watch."