The bush bash that saw Murphy rediscover his fizz

"Nice ball, Todd."

Those knowing words from Steve Smith after an overspun off-break fizzed off the SCG practice pitch and into the splice of his bat did more than he could have known to validate the journey Todd Murphy has been on.

A call-up for the country’s most credentialled Test spinner outside Nathan Lyon might have seemed like a fait accompli when the 567-wicket star went down midway through this Ashes campaign.

Yet, only months ago, Murphy might not have been so confident his stock ball would trouble one of the world’s leading players of spin quite like the one he bowled to Smith on Thursday.

Outside of the considerable strength work he has completed to repair a right shoulder that buckled under the workload of his first year as an international cricketer, the most important moment leading to this Ashes recall came on a cold winter's morning in country Victoria.

In August, Murphy met his long-time mentor Craig Howard in country Victoria, at the Sandhurst Cricket Club's synthetic nets as the oval's dewy grass dried in Bendigo’s morning sun.

The seven-Test spinner had returned from a maiden county stint with Gloucestershire, his first matches in England since admirably standing in for Lyon in two Tests there in 2023. He was less pleased with his performances this time around, with his 11 wickets from four first-class games costing 56 runs apiece.

"There were just a couple of things that were creeping in," Murphy told cricket.com.au's Unplayable Podcast. "I wasn't loving how I was bowling and it just felt that I lacked a little bit of energy on the ball.

"I didn't know why, because I felt like my energy within myself was really good, but it just felt like the end product wasn't exactly where I wanted it.

"That's probably the biggest thing that I get from Craig – he's known me from when I started to where I am now, so he can see those small things that have changed that maybe I don't even feel."

Howard, a renowned spin coach who first stumbled across a teenaged Murphy at a junior representative trial in country Victoria, had noted a technical flaw had emerged as he pored over YouTube streams of Murphy’s games. He compared his bowling in the UK with the footage he had kept from the off-spinner’s early days as a country prodigy and through his rapid elevation to Sheffield Shield and international level, all before he turned 23.

Like Murphy, Howard uses that term 'energy on the ball' – in essence, the fizz that had made the ball jump at Smith in Sydney this week – and noted how it was lacking as he bowled to an empty net on that quiet Sunday morning.

"I think because he lacked a bit of energy behind the ball, he probably defaulted to a slightly squarer seam," Howard told cricket.com.au. "But because of the way his arm was working, it didn't quite have the same curve. When he gets it right, he gets the drop and the curve."

The fix was for Murphy to bring his right arm, which was not only going past the perpendicular at his point of release but also beyond where 11 would be on a clock face, back to pointing straight up.

"We just needed to try a few things to get it back there," said Howard. "One of the things was he sort of had to feel like he was bowling a bit round-arm even though when we stopped to look at the footage, it was right where we wanted it to be."

Murphy suspected the problem had its origins in the shoulder tendon issues he had faced in the preceding years. His 51 first-class wickets since returning from the 2023 Ashes through to the end of his county stint last year (including his comeback Test in Sri Lanka in February last year) had come at an average of 45.

While he had more recently stabilised the joint through extensive time in the gym, the bad habits that crept in from playing while gritting his teeth through pain had lingered.

"It felt like I was maybe just overcompensating for the lack of power at a time where I was trying to create it in different ways, but that got me into bad positions," said Murphy.

"Now that I've done a lot of the work to get myself back to feeling like I'm physically strong and can do all the stuff with my shoulders, it was (asking himself), 'What have you gone away from and how can you get back into better positions, and trust that you're going to have the power in the right spots?"

So Murphy drove the two hours up the Calder Highway from Melbourne, two-thirds of the way back to where he grew in Moama on the Murray River, to the ground he had played a club season at with Howard before he linked up with Premier Cricket powerhouse St Kilda.

Their roughly hour-long session, the pair's first in some time after Howard returned from stints abroad in Sri Lanka and New Zealand, put Murphy back on the right track.

"It felt like from that point onwards, I was back to what I was doing, I felt like I was in good positions again and I felt like I had the energy back on the ball that I sort of was looking for over the (previous) year, year and a bit," said Murphy.

Howard, who is back working with Victoria's spinners on a part-time basis this season, observed the significant follow-up work Murphy has done on the back of their bush rendezvous.

The turnaround has been stark. Murphy travelled to India the following month and emerged as the standout spinner from two 'A' games against a strong home team, while his 10 wickets from four subsequent Shield matches have come at just 23.10. He took 3-64 against the England Lions last month in Brisbane, a haul that included the scalp of their senior team’s current No.3 Jacob Bethell.

Had Lyon injured himself during Murphy’s lean seasons, there is some chance Australia would have turned elsewhere. Corey Rocchiccioli's 104 wickets over the past three Shield seasons are the best of any bowler in that time, while Matthew Kuhnemann was preferred as Lyon’s sidekick in Sri Lanka earlier this year as he snared 16 victims in two Tests.

But Murphy’s remastering of his best asset – the stock off-break that drifts from right to left, dips late and can turn to varying degrees depending on the surface – left selectors confident he remains their best alternative to Lyon.

"It's all well and good saying (there's a problem), but then you have to go to work – which is what he did," said Howard, who played 16 first-class matches as a leg-spinner for Victoria through the mid-90s. "He went to work in drilling it and he was playing games a month later in India.

"Everyone sort of could tell pretty much straightaway that it (his stock ball) was back doing what it should do, and everyone was quite excited heading into the season about where he was at. He's certainly performed that way."

Murphy’s success has come in the face of the challenges Shield spinners around the country face in simply getting the chance to bowl on seam-friendly surfaces, the kind the ladder-leading Victorians have exploited to good effect this summer with their skilful pace attack.

Against New South Wales at the Junction Oval in November, Murphy took three wickets in as many overs after the Blues had cruised to 0-90 chasing 255 in the fourth innings. He was taken off after his third scalp, a cunning delivery that accounted for Kuris Patterson, and did not bowl again for the game.

In the return fixture at the SCG a few weeks later, Murphy sent down just 12 overs on a dry surface on which a beastly crack opened up mid-match. Lyon, playing for the home side, bowled 51.1 overs for the match.

Victoria won both matches comfortably.

"I've probably learned that in Shield cricket that your job's not always to come on and take wickets," said Murphy. "It might be to play a holding role for four or five overs for the quicks so they can have a break and then come back. And that can be just as important.

"You've got to find ways to try and still be effective out there and still be able to play a role for what the team needs."

Only a Sydney pitch as grassy as the one in Melbourne can now prevent Murphy from playing his first Test on home soil. If he does, expect England’s batters to mutter the same words as Smith did earlier this week.

2025-26 NRMA Insurance Men's Ashes

First Test: Australia won by eight wickets

Second Test: Australia won by eight wickets

Third Test: Australia won by 82 runs

Fourth Test: England won by four wickets

Fifth Test: January 4-8: SCG, Sydney, 10:30am AEDT

Australia squad (fifth Test): Steve Smith (c), Scott Boland, Alex Carey, Brendan Doggett, Cameron Green, Travis Head, Josh Inglis, Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Todd Murphy, Michael Neser, Jhye Richardson, Mitchell Starc, Jake Weatherald, Beau Webster

England squad: Ben Stokes (c), Harry Brook (vc), Shoaib Bashir, Jacob Bethell, Brydon Carse, Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett, Matthew Fisher, Will Jacks, Ollie Pope, Matthew Potts, Joe Root, Jamie Smith (wk), Josh Tongue