Alex Carey’s drop of Tom Latham in the final 15 minutes of play ended a day that placed the wicketkeeper in sharp focus.
As the Hagley Oval pitch became steadily more friendly for batting and the deeper New Zealand dug in, the dimensions of another Australian missed opportunity to kill off a Test match became apparent. A total of 256 in reply to 162 was not, it turned out, going to be enough to put the tourists beyond reach.
Marnus Labuschagne’s 90 was excellent, but not quite a matchwinner, cancelled out more or less by local boy Matt Henry’s 7-67. And the rapid exits of Travis Head, Mitchell Marsh and Alex Carey were made to look more vital than incidental. By stumps, an appreciative crowd was hailing Tom Latham for an unbeaten 65, his best score against Australia, with New Zealand now 40 runs ahead. The last three days of this series, their final Test cricket for nine months, now look like becoming hard work for Australia. It would have been harder still if not for captain Pat Cummins’ incisive spell in the last hour, finding a way through Kane Williamson and breaking a sequence of eight consecutive innings where the former Black Caps captain had converted a 50 into a century. But Carey’s drop of Latham off Josh Hazlewood in the final 15 minutes of play, diving in front of first slip Usman Khawaja, ended a day that placed the wicketkeeper in particularly sharp focus so far as the future is concerned.Based on the sample size of the past 12 months, dating back to the start of the India tour last year, it is Carey’s batting returns that should generate conjecture. Across formats for Australia, he is averaging 22.65 from 36 innings in that time, and has already been dropped from the ODI team for Josh Inglis. In the company of Labuschagne, all Carey needed to do was get established at the crease, which he did, and play in the slipstream of his fluent partner.Instead, the appearance of Glenn Phillips’ spin drew a reflexive paddle sweep, premeditated out of all proportion to the ball’s length, and an unsightly miscue to mid-wicket. Phillips, having just been called upon by Tim Southee, could barely believe his luck. Labuschagne defended the shot choice. “I’m happy with Alex’s option there, get that 45 guy in and make it very tough for the bowlers to bowl,” Labuschagne said. “Spin at that stage of the game was where we needed to score our runs, but that’s how the game goes.“We’ve got the six best batters in the country out on the field and that’s what’s important. It’s not gelling perfectly yet, the sample size is getting bigger and we’re getting more information, but we’re liking where Greeny’s at at four, he’s batting really well. And Steve averages 58, so he’ll find a way, I’m 100 per cent sure of that.” But these sorts of dismissals have become a depressingly familiar pattern for Carey. In Wellington, he was twice caught at cover, a mode of dismissal he also fell to at the Oval last year. Then there was the bevy of ill-judged sweeps and reverses in India. It is an area that Cummins highlighted after the Basin Reserve game, which might well have been closer due to Australia’s batting blind spots if not for the extravagant turn Nathan Lyon was able to extract from a dry surface. “Playing your own way is taking the information that you need to take in, assessing the conditions and then building your game plan around that,” Cummins had said. “It’s not ‘this is how I’m going to play in all conditions’. We can just manage those tempos a little bit better.”These words seemed to be crafted very much for Carey in particular, so his Christchurch exit to Phillips will give the selectors pause ahead of India’s visit next summer. That said, assessing his contribution must be multifaceted. In wicketkeeping terms, Carey’s value to Australia’s Test side is rich indeed. In Test history, only four glovemen with more than 100 victims have a better rate of dismissals per innings than his figure of 2.15: predecessor Tim Paine , South Africa’s Quinton de Kock , Adam Gilchrist and West Indian Josh Da Silva . At the same time, his work to Lyon has been silken, and there is clearly a great degree of trust between spinner and keeper. Carey has improved greatly in this area since taking the Test gloves. His work was rather more lumpen against spin circa the 2019 World Cup, ironically at a time when his batting skill was just about the talk of the tournament. But on the batting front, the selectors must also assess how Australia’s top seven are functioning collectively. That the two most substantial scores of the series so far have come from Cameron Green and Labuschagne is a good pointer to the future, but the misfires from the middle order have thrice allowed the Black Caps back into the contest. If Head and Marsh are to play as freely and aggressively as they can, it would help to have some solidity behind them as well as in front. And with the younger Inglis cracking an unbeaten century in his first Sheffield Shield game for sometime last week, Carey’s value with the gloves can only keep him at the head of the queue for so long. As the Latham drop underlined, wicketkeeping chances will be more desperately snatched for if there are not enough runs on the board to help complement them.
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