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Remember when: Agar's day out

Aussie teenager makes Trent Bridge his own

As England's fatigued fielders trudged to the dressing room last night having seen another day of opportunities dribble through their fingers, they were accompanied by the ghost of Trent Bridge Tests recently past which took the form of a gangling Australian teenager.

It's been a year since Ashton Agar, a 19-year-old spin bowler who was both uncapped and largely unknown when added belatedly to Australia's touring party for its 2013 Ashes tour of England, ensured his name will forever remain a byword for kids with a cricket dream.

Sri Lankan heritage (his grandfather was a renowned cricketer at Dharmarajah College in Muthiah Muralidaran's home city of Kandy) aside, the circumstances in which Agar etched his name into cricket history bore remarkable similarity to what India achieved at the same venue overnight.

Having seen their team lose four wickets for as many runs midway through the second day in Nottingham, India's last pair Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Mohammad Shami infuriated England's flagging bowlers by surviving a further two and half hours and racking up 111 runs along the way.

But Agar's meteoric rise to Ashes folklore was even more unexpected, and significantly more inspiring.

Just the third Australian teenager to be presented with a Baggy Green since Doug Walters when the Beatles were in their pomp, Agar bounded through the players' gate at Trent Bridge before lunch that day with his lithe limbs and sunny smile betraying no hint of the dire strife facing his team.

Still bearing the scars of a disastrous tour of India months earlier and the recent sacking of their coach still back page news, any faint hope of regaining the Ashes after two failed campaigns had seemingly vapourised in a calamitous batting collapse that saw five wickets fall for eight runs.

The sight of 19-year-old Agar joining Phillip Hughes to try and somehow reduce the 98-run deficit Australia still faced saw England's bowlers falling over themselves for a crack at the remaining wicket so ripe to fall, and their openers pondering how best to survive the short session to lunch.

But despite having made more appearances for his adopted state of Western Australia than he had played senior grade games in Perth, the Melbourne-born left-hander - whose all-round talents had been championed by learned judges including selection chair John Inverarity, talent manager Greg Chappell and WA coach Justin Langer - soon showed he was not intimidated.

Indeed, as Agar's career-defining day wore on the enduring watermark of his maiden Test innings was the adolescent indifference he happily brought to such a supposedly sombre scenario, and the unadulterated sense of fun he radiated as he held at least two nations transfixed.

It could all have so easily ended before it properly began.

He had scored six when England were convinced they had him stumped off rival spinner Graeme Swann, but video technology deemed a verdict too close to call and the sense of theatre escalated from there.

The lad who six weeks earlier had been rolling his arm over for Henley in England's Home Counties Premier League played with a freedom and freshness that not only enthralled those lapping up the Midlands sunshine but gave timely hope to Australians cricket fans in need of something – someone – to believe in.

As England's guileless bowlers sought to ruffle him with short stuff that any teenage cricketer familiar with Perth pitches can handle in their sleep, Agar simply played his own game en route to assembling some impressive milestones.

Upon reaching 27 he notched the highest score by an Australian number 11 batsman on debut.

Twenty runs later he held the record for all number 11 batsmen in their first Test innings.

He then set about the firsts – first last-man to make a Test 50 on debut, surpassed his previous highest first-class score of 71 (for WA against Tasmania five months earlier), and the biggest 10th-wicket partnership in Test history when it climbed past 150 and highest-ever score by a Test number 11.

At that stage, when Agar expunged from history West Indian Tino Best's 95 also set against a hapless England a year earlier, the nonsensical notion of a teenager playing his first Test match doing what nobody in 136 years had managed and score a century from the end of the order was just a shot away.

When that shot came – an attempted pull off Stuart Broad bowling around the wicket and finally achieving his aim by cramping the free-swinging Australian for room – and was plucked barely above the turf by Swann lurching in from the boundary rope, most folks watching were lost for words.

The feel-good movie they had lived for the past 134 minutes ended with the hero being cut down with the credits due to roll.

But any suggestion of disappointment was erased when Agar, with 98 against his name and the chance of a debut hundred gone forever, removed his batting helmet, gave an endearing 'oh well' shrug of his shoulders and flashed the sort of grin that a kid who just dented dad's car might try on.

"I'm super happy," Agar told reporters at his end-of-day media appearance, his pristine Australian cap perched proudly on his unruly mat of rock-star hair.

"(New coach) Darren Lehmann just told the whole team to bat in their natural style and that's the way I like to bat, so that's what I did.

"I like to keep myself fairly relaxed and I didn't get too nervous.

"I was hitting the ball fairly well and I just tried to keep doing that."

For all the brash flamboyance, nerveless self-belief and undeniable skill that had carried him so far from anonymity over the preceding couple of hours, it was that mature-yet-almost-childlike response to unforeseen success that made Agar an instant national treasure.

No matter how fleetingly.

And regardless of whether or not he has the chance to resume his Test career, which was forestalled following his next match at Lord's when he went wicketless and failed to reach 20 in either innings, July 11 was unquestionably, and will long remain, Ashton Agar's day.