People say baggy green caps are never given away lightly. It’s a myth. Budding baggy green wearers, you hear it said, must first conjure a rainbow of runs or a thunderclap of wickets. That’s bollocks. Mark Cameron, Phil Hughes, Mitchell Starc, Usman Khawaja and Steve O’Keefe have not done enough to be considered compelling baggy green candidates. So goes the logic. The logic is bollocks built on a myth and it is holding Australia’s cricket back.

What makes a young cricketer compelling is not what a scorebook tells you but what the eyes see. One canny Australian selector, John Benaud, once described another, Lawrie Sawle, like so: “The skin at the edges of his eyes and mouth is sparrow-footed, creased in the squint of assessment, concentration…” Andrew Hilditch, David Boon and Jamie Cox crouched behind the netting at Australian team practice, that ain’t.