Matt Renshaw away 'as much as possible' from the Ashes selection headache

Adelaide, Oct 22 (IANS) Matt Renshaw has found peace in not chasing the dream that once consumed him. As talk builds around a possible recall for the Ashes, the 29-year-old Australian batter remains unfazed — a far cry from the anxious youngster who once obsessed over scorecards and selection chances.

A rejuvenated Renshaw, now a father of two, has rediscovered balance in life and cricket. “Obviously, I want to be there; it would be remiss of me not to say that,” he admitted ahead of Australia’s second ODI against India in Adelaide. “But I try and stay away from it as much as possible.”

The left-hander was caught off guard when picked for the ODI squad. “I had to Google when and where the games were scheduled,” he said with a grin. “It’s (knowing) if I get everything else in order, the cricket will just take care of itself.”

Renshaw’s transformation is striking. The same player who once rushed off the field to check others’ scores has now learned to let go of comparisons. “There’s been times in my career where I come off after a Shield game, and obviously all the Shield games are on at the same time, and you’re looking at the scorecard, you’re looking at different names, seeing how they went,” he recalled. “Now, like the first Shield game (this season), I couldn’t tell you who scored runs in other games.”

He understands now that someone else’s success doesn’t define his own journey. “Knowing that it doesn’t really matter, in terms of someone else scoring runs, doesn’t matter to how I’m going to go out and play my game,” he said.

That maturity stems from perspective off the field. “Being a father of a two-year-old girl and five-month-old boy was now my validation, rather than earning a Test recall or judging myself on my run-scoring,” Renshaw reflected. “A lot of the time, you try and force a few things, you see someone else gets runs, and you go: ‘I need to score runs because then I’m going to be picked for Australia, then I’m going to become a good person’. That whole mentality when you’re young is that’s how you view yourself as a person. Whereas now I go home and I’ve got to change nappies, I’ve got to put kids to bed, I’ve got to try and calm screaming babies down.”

He laughs now at how all-consuming cricket once was. “When you’re young, you go home, you have got nothing to do, so you’re just sitting on your phone scrolling,” he said. “I hide. I don’t have the Cricket Australia app, I don’t try and look at any news, I hide all the cricket stuff on my Instagram so I don’t see it.”

Renshaw’s renewed outlook has come with results — a mountain of domestic runs and a recall to the ODI setup, keeping him in the Ashes frame. Yet he shrugs off any talk of selection. “12-year-old Matt, I talk to him a lot, and if I told 12-year-old Matt that I was in a room of 30 journalists, he wouldn’t believe you,” he smiled. “I (now) think, ‘How cool is this, how awesome is it that I get this opportunity’ rather than, ‘If I score runs, I will get this opportunity’. Even the other night … I was a bit nervous, and Virat Kohli made a duck, and he’s the best player in this format ever. It’s OK to fail.”

Having debuted as a 20-year-old in 2016, Renshaw’s journey since has been anything but linear. But through it all, he’s taken lessons from teammates who’ve fought their way back. “Once you sort of realise that it might not happen again, you talk to people,” he said. “I am really close with Uzzy (Usman Khawaja). He thought his Test journey was over, and look at him now. I try to talk to him about how he’s going about it. It’s just amazing, it’s almost like once you let go of that one side of playing for Australia, that’s what I need to do.”

For Renshaw, cricket is no longer his only identity — and perhaps that’s what makes him more dangerous now. “I have two kids now, they’re a huge part of my life, so it’s knowing that cricket’s not like my sole reason, it’s everything else,” he said. “If I get everything else in order, the cricket will just take care of itself.”

--IANS

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