Heads' up: How Travis turned himself into an Ashes hero

There was a time – perhaps as recently as earlier this summer – when the sight of Travis Head bustling to the centre on a cloudy, bowler-friendly day with Australia 3-12 and staring at capitulation might have seen even his strongest supporters offer up a silent prayer.

While Head's raw talent and capacity to change the course of games in a session or two of swashbuckle is rarely disputed, his record in conditions decidedly English and against a ball that swings with the propensity of the pink one under heavy cloud is vexed at best.

But in the space of three hours at Blundstone Arena yesterday, the 28-year-old not only single-handedly swung a Test hanging by a thread firmly back in his team's favour, he announced himself as that bloke you want to see surge through the gate when you've lost a handful of quick wickets.

The change in the likeable left-hander – from forever on the periphery to the point he was stripped of his Cricket Australia contract last summer, to a fixture in the middle-order as destructive as he is indispensable – has arrived like so many success stories in professional sport.

To the casual observer, it might seem the uber-attacking South Australia skipper has simply found his feet at Test level more than three years after he arrived amid a period of flux in the national team.

To those who work closely with him, most notably men's team coach Justin Langer and SA's high performance boss (and former Australia coach) Tim Nielsen, Head's emergence is the end product of the batter's obsessive quest for improvement that belies his freewheeling batting style.

For all his audacious talent and the leadership honours bestowed upon him at a young age in recognition of his promise, Head's Test career prior to this season was defined by an inability to conjure his best when it was most needed.

His return of 191 runs at an average of 27.29 (highest score) in the four Ashes Tests he played in the UK in 2019 before losing his place raised concerns about his capacity to counter the moving ball, particularly with England's quicks getting him lbw or bowled in six of those eight knocks.

And even in Australia, his returns against the pink ball hinted to a similar shortcoming given he averaged barely 30 across 11 previous day-night innings in Test and Marsh Sheffield Shield matches with a best effort of 84 against Sri Lanka at the Gabba almost three years ago.

Throw in his return from a hit-and-run stint with Sussex in the UK county championship last year – 183 runs from 11 innings at an average of 18.30 without a half-century – and it's understandable some questioned his recall to the Test XI for the Vodafone Ashes Series opener in Brisbane.

He answered those queries with the innings of the summer to date, an audacious 152 from 148 balls that included an historic hundred within a single session followed by an invaluable 51 (off 54 balls) that helped set up Australia's victory in the second Test at Adelaide.

It therefore seemed nonsensical his return for the final Test, having been forced out of last week's Sydney match after returning a positive COVID-19 result in Melbourne, was debated even allowing for the feats produced by his replacement, Usman Khawaja.

And as Head revealed in the wake of his game-changing 101 yesterday, in which he joined with Marnus Labuschagne and Cameron Green to lift Australia from 3-12 to 5-204 in less than 40 overs of relentless counter-punching, his metamorphosis is as much mental as technical.

"I definitely came into the series more relaxed," he said last night, noting the strong endorsement  he's received from Langer and new skipper Pat Cummins.

"The fact that Pat and J.L. (Langer) have backed me in quite hard over the period, and asked me to go out and play the way I see the game ... I've been able to go out and express myself in that manner.

"I also feel like I've come off some strong Shield seasons to know that my game is in good order, and have a fair blueprint on Test cricket and with a fair crack at it over a period of time."

A "fair blueprint" represents typical understatement, given that midway through his 23rd Test he boasts an average (44.17) only marginally inferior to Steve Smith's (46.03), as well as more runs (1502) and more centuries (4) than both Mark and Steve Waugh at the same point in their respective careers.

The technical changes Head made to his game in the aftermath of his axing from the Test team midway through last summer's ultimately failed campaign against India have been recounted previously.

However, what was lesser known until he detailed it last night were the steps he implemented in response to Langer's observation last summer that he might want to consider "becoming a better net player".

When that was initially raised, Head's rationale was he used training sessions to work on the technical aspects of his batting over which he's known to obsess while paying little heed to the number of times, or indeed the manner, he lost his wicket while doing so.

The tightening-up of his practice regime began after he was jettisoned from the Test set-up last summer, and has proved integral to him averaging almost 60 in Shield cricket since then and now a series-high Ashes return (with an innings to play) of 349 runs at almost 70.

"That's been something for a couple of years now, having chats with JL and Tim Nielsen at the SACA," Head said of his mission to meet Langer's expectation of becoming a better nets player.

"There has been a tendency over my career that I haven't been the best net batter, and I put that down to in the past I've been hard on my technique and I've been a hard thinker of what I'm doing at training.

"I do a lot of drill work, a lot of ball machine work, a lot of top-hand, strong right-side stuff and moving in good positions and I felt like I wasn't taking the time to do my technique stuff and then also bat in the nets the way I should bat at training.

"I was just sort of mashing the two together.

"Then, if you try to work on technique when you face Starcy (Mitchell Starc) and Hof (Josh Hazlewood) and whatnot in the nets, you're never going to get the desired results.

"I had to really transition my technical side to training, and against the bowlers to make sure I was game-ready.

"There's times to do both and I think I've been able to find that balance.

"I did that technique stuff in Sydney for three days (after rejoining the squad from isolation in Melbourne), had two days off and then the last two days (in Hobart) was facing bowlers around game style and being tough to get out.

"So I tried to bat the way I would start my first 20 balls, and I think that's been a real shift in the way I've trained."

Vodafone Men's Ashes

Squads

Australia: Pat Cummins (c), Steve Smith (vc), Scott Boland, Alex Carey, Cameron Green, Marcus Harris, Travis Head, Josh Inglis, Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Mitch Marsh, Michael Neser, Jhye Richardson, Mitchell Starc, Mitchell Swepson, David Warner

England: Joe Root (c), James Anderson, Jonathan Bairstow, Dom Bess, Sam Billings, Stuart Broad, Rory Burns, Zak Crawley, Haseeb Hameed, Dan Lawrence, Jack Leach, Dawid Malan, Craig Overton, Ollie Pope, Ollie Robinson, Ben Stokes, Chris Woakes, Mark Wood

Schedule

First Test: Australia won by nine wickets

Second Test: Australia won by 275 runs

Third Test: Australia won by an innings and 14 runs

Fourth Test: Match drawn

Fifth Test: January 14-18, Blundstone Arena