Border-Gavaskar Trophy: Picking Sam Konstas for Boxing Day Test the right move but harsh on Nathan McSweeney

Picking Sam Konstas for the Boxing Day Test feels like the first genuine step national selectors have taken for planning for next year’s Ashes. It is the first admission they tried something with Nathan McSweeney that hasn’t worked yet and a chance to try someone else in the role. As daunting as Jasprit Bumrah is, particularly for a 19-year-old with not even a full summer’s worth of first-class experience, this will give Konstas the chance to bat on home conditions before he likely plays some sort of a role in the five-Test series against England at the end of next year. It might be a better time to look at him then in Galle next month on low turners against a dangerous spin attack, or in the West Indies later this year. He has been tossed in the deep end, no doubt, but the New South Wales teenager has shown he can swim with the best of them. He monstered India in a rain-reduced Prime Minister’s XI match just weeks ago with a century off more than a run-a-ball and made twin tons to start the Sheffield Shield season to go with 88 in his most recent game. Then this week he had all the tricks in a rapid half-century on Big Bash League debut. Konstas is one of the six most in-form batters in the country now and deserves to be picked for a dream debut on Boxing Day in Melbourne. But that’s not to say that McSweeney can consider himself a little bit hard done by. Through the first three Tests of this series Australia has had two openers. McSweeney and Usman Khawaja. McSweeney is a makeshift opener. He had done it just once in first-class cricket before he was thrown to the wolves in Perth. He is 25 and considered a player of the future. Khawaja has scored less runs, looked just as shaky against Bumrah, and is 38. He has declared he wants to play through to next year’s Ashes, but like his former opening partner David Warner, selectors might later come to regret giving him that chance. All of Australia’s great batters have been dropped at one point in their career and many of them, like McSweeney should, have returned in a different role. It is the right call to pick Konstas to finish this series, but the last man in being the first to go is sometimes the easy move.