The Australian batsman Travis Head scored 163 last week as Australia won the World Test Championship Final against India and, a decade after a stint with Isle of Wight’s Ventnor Cricket Club, he could prove a thorn in England’s side during the Ashes which gets underway tomorrow (Friday).
Back in 2013, an 18-year-old Travis Head from Adelaide in South Australia was Ventnor Cricket Club’s overseas player and a recent article by The Cricket Monthly has explored the time he spent on the Island.
It was clear from this early age that he had considerable talent as he was the Southern Premier League’s top-scorer with 733 runs from just 14 innings. However, as poetically explained by The Cricket Monthly, these runs were scored at Newport’s Newclose Ground:
“Alas, besides a solitary T20 outing in which he scored a 50-ball 100, launching several balls into the exotic flora in the adjacent botanical gardens, these SPCL home games were not at Ventnor’s charmingly peculiar and hyperliterally named Steephill ground, whose short square boundaries and velodrome-shaped outfield (diminutive bowlers would come under the sightscreens) did not meet the league’s standards. 6 times in 8 years they won the 1st division and each time they were denied promotion, so in 2010 they moved 1st-team games to the brand new and well-appointed Newclose ground in the centre of the Island.
As well as his prodigious skill, his behaviour off the field and his humble persona drew admiration from his team-mates with Neil Westhorpe recounting the following anecdote to The Cricket Monthly from Festival weekend a decade ago:
“We all went along on the Friday night to see the Stone Roses but Travis stopped drinking quite early and got a taxi to my house. I didn’t know he’d gone. We stayed another 2 or 3 hours, and I found him later, asleep on my doorstep, readying himself for the game the next day, which was abandoned after 2 overs, so we all piled into the minibus and back to the festival.”
After a stuttering start to his international red-ball career, Head is now a key part of Australia’s batting order. As previously reported by Island Echo, Head set the tone for the last Ashes series Down Under with 152 from 148 balls before going on to notch another century later in the series and finishing up with an average of 59.50 at a strike rate of 86.02.
In the last Ashes series in England in 2019, Head averaged only a modest 27.28 with a top score of just 51 but having now registered his 1st overseas ton against India last week, Ventnor’s former star player could yet prove to be a major obstacle in England’s bid to reclaim the famous urn.
