In October, I wrote about how I had become alarmed at the increasing level of apathy that the general public in Australia has around our national sport, cricket.

Rightly or wrongly, there has been an increasing disconnect between the general Australian sports follower with the men who don the baggy green over the last decade.

Players aren’t admired as demi-gods in the fashion that they were in the late 1990s and early 2000s, despite the success of the last five years.

I will stress this article is more an observation rather than a personal opinion – but the general public doesn’t warm to the names Pat Cummins, Marnus Labuschagne, Dave Warner, Steve Smith (despite his irrefutable greatness) and Mitch Starc the way they did to Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne, Ricky Ponting, the Waugh brothers and Matthew Hayden.

Why is this? As always with such things, the issue is nuanced and there isn’t a singular answer.

The mix of the haunting spectre of sandpaper gate, the messy removal of fabled 2000s legend Justin Langer as head coach and the fact that the aforementioned crew are different kinds of characters to your ‘traditional’ Australian Cricket heroes has mixed with an Australian society that increasingly looks to the sport as pure escapism from a tough world.

Critics of the current Australian team love to point out the current group as a ‘woke’ boys club. That’s despite the fact they’ve won the World Test Championship and the World Cup (in India), a series in Pakistan for the first time since the 1990s, retained the Ashes away from home and absolutely smoked South Africa after only winning one of the previous five Test series against them.

You can argue whether this critique is fair or not until you’re blue in the face – I personally don’t think it is – as politics and social issues have been as much a part of sport since Jesus batted at five for Nazareth.

The lack of renewal in this side is another thing and has merit. Whatever your take is, my observation is that this critique has crept into the general Australian sports fan psyche and stuck.

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The Australian cricket team may have found the antidote to this in the form of a swashbuckling five foot 10 batsman from Adelaide’s northern suburbs.

Travis Head is box office. He is an absolute matchwinner. He plays the game the same way if he comes in at 3/300 as he does if it’s 3/15.

He backs himself, and his eye, into the hilt. If it’s there to hit, he will hit it – and hit it bloody hard.

If he bats for two hours, Australia will win a lot more test matches than it loses. In the fashion of one Adam Gilchrist, he can take the game away from the opposition in the blink of an eye.

The way he plays not only moves the scoreboard at an incredible rate but also the momentum of test matches. At his best, he is irrepressible, with his ability to lower his body weight and scythe genuinely good balls through backward point for four being reminiscent of Phil Hughes or Damien Martyn.

The way he puts teams onto the backfoot so quickly is remarkable, and in turn makes it easier for the man at the other end, as teams are so focussed on saving the cavalcade of runs coming from his slashing blade.

The perfect example of this was Steve Smith on Day 2 in Brisbane, who genuinely struggled to hit it off the square for 90 minutes after coming to the crease, but eventually found his groove to grind out his first hundred since the infamous Lord’s Test of 2023.

Head has also stood up in big moments when Australia have needed him. He scored 137 in the World Cup Final in front of 100 thousand fanatical Indian supporters, in addition to taking the match-turning catch, a stunning back-with-the-flight effort to dismiss Rohit Sharma.

He came to the wicket at 3/76 in the World Test Championship final and left with 163 next to his name and the score 4/361.

He scored 119 out of 283 against the West Indies in Adelaide last year, 77 out of 222 at Leeds in the Ashes, and his latest masterclass of 152 in Brisbane came with the score at 3/75.

Even his 89 in the second innings of the first test debacle in Perth was out of only 238 and saved an already embarrassing result from being worse.

He has become Australia’s most reliable bat, in spite of the cavalier nature of his stroke play.

In addition to being must-see TV, Head embodies the same larrikinism we have grown to love in our sporting heroes over the years. He is the 21st century’s version of Doug Walters, David Hookes and Dean Jones.

He will look as comfortable out the back in the Village Green in 10-years time nursing his sixth schooner (or pint, you weird South Aussies) of Coopers as he has in the middle plundering three 100s in successive Adelaide Tests.