Phillips' dream ride from surf to Test turf

Three days ago, Glenn Phillips was riding the waves at Tawharanui, one of the premier surf and swimming beaches along an idyllic peninsula dotted with picnic spots and pohutukawa trees around 75 kilometres north of Auckland.

On Sunday, he rode luck that delivered him a couple of missed catches and a dismissal that wasn't, as he crowned a Test debut that arrived out of the blue with a first-up half-century that will sustain him forever.

It was soon after Phillips had completed a relaxing body surf, to refresh him after a late finish on New Year's Eve spent playing a domestic T20 match for the Auckland Aces, that he received a phone call which he, at first, believed was from a mate he'd been trying to contact.

But the voice on the other end was New Zealand Cricket's chief selector Gavin Larsen, telling the 23-year-old he needed to get himself to the city's airport for an 8pm flight to Sydney where was to join the illness-ravaged Black Caps Test squad in Australia.

Phillips' immediate challenge was negotiating Auckland's notoriously gridlocked traffic to make his flight, which arrived in Australia around 9.30pm on Thursday evening.

At which point he was still expecting to be an auxiliary member of the playing group when the Test started at the SCG next day.

When the viral infection that had swept through the New Zealand team from New Year's Day reduced that playing group to 13 fit players – with skipper Kane Williamson and fellow top-order batter Henry Nicholls not among those available – coach Gary Stead approached Phillips during the pre-match warm-up.

And informed the easygoing keeper-batsman that he was about to become a Test cricketer, batting at No.5 behind one of his boyhood heroes, Ross Taylor.

"Obviously everyone gets called up a different way, and mine was a little more entertaining than others," Phillips said on Sunday evening after his maiden Test innings, which sees him hold a batting average of 52.

"It certainly gives me a story to tell the kids and grandkids one day."

As if that story of his frantic trip from the rolling surf of the north island to the smoke haze of bushfire-ringed Sydney wasn't a sufficiently gripping tale, the manner in which his first outing as a Test batter unfolded renders it barely believable.

Walking to the wicket shortly before lunch after his team lost two wickets in the space of three deliveries, to join none other than Taylor (who had also presented him with his Test cap on Friday morning), Phillips found himself pitted against the most potent bowling attack in the contemporary game.

Certainly, the most consistently fast bowling he's encountered, as he later confirmed.

Having scored his first two Test runs from the second ball he faced – a neat tuck off the hip behind square leg from the world's top-ranked bowler, Pat Cummins – Phillips should have been out on that very score from the eighth.

A tantalisingly full delivery from Australia's greatest-ever finger spinner drew the debutant into a drive that nerves and unfamiliarity led him strike with over-exuberant force, and it flew back to Nathan Lyon who is renowned as a peerless fielder from his own bowling.

Not only did Phillips gain a reprieve when the catch went down, but he drew blood for his team as the impact split open Lyon's right thumb which required the application of thick gauze tape and likely contributed to an almost identical dropped catch around an hour later.

By this stage, with 17 Test career runs to his name, Phillips began to believe the dream that had first manifested on the beach at Tawharanui might feasibly stretch for the entirety of his innings, which somehow seemed destined to never end.

The sense of a fairytale ending to the tale that would already spellbind his descendants became palpable when Phillips played one of his favoured hook shots against James Pattinson, and was caught at deep square-leg, only to have the entry annulled from the scorebook because the Australia quick had over-stepped.

So emboldened was Phillips by his escalating luck that he decided at the tea break that came shortly after his non-dismissal – in consultation with his then batting partner, Colin de Gradhomme – to re-emerge swinging.

"Obviously it's a shot in my game plan," Phillips said of the pull that should have ended his maiden Test knock on 28.

"The first one wasn't very well executed, for obvious reasons, but talking to Dutchy (de Grandhomme) at tea, he said 'just hit it up', and I said 'okay, I'll hit it up'.

"It was a tactic from them to bowl short and they did it very well."

But not before Phillips had pulled Cummins over square leg for a mighty six, and then unveiled a potentially better version that rocketed along the ground and bisected two fielders placed strategically at fine leg and deep backward square, yielding the boundary that brought him 50.

But two deliveries later, the dream ended when Cummins lived up to his billing by squeezing an off-cutter between Phillips' smoking bat and his front pad, and on to the top of off stump.

"Obviously something in the universe was saying after 50, you've got no more chances mate," Phillips reflected on Sunday evening.

"It's just been that sort of lucky day, lucky couple of days, and that's the way cricket goes sometimes.

"Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't.

"Someone takes a screamer one day and you're stone dead lbw in a club game the next day and you're given not out.

"So, things swing both ways and today it swung my way.

"I wish I could have gone on a little bit longer with that luck, but one slight mistake and that's all it takes to end your innings at this level."

It might be tempting to suggest that a reason why Phillips was able to top score for his team, despite having arrived at Test cricket amid such a flurry of happenstance and uncertainty, was that his opponents had not been afforded time or opportunity to formulate battle plans to quell him.

But as Lyon revealed at day's end, after completing his first five-wicket Test haul at the SCG, they had seen enough vision of Phillips' batting in the days before he took strike for the first time to understand how he plays.

And to note one or two key features.

"We spoke about it - he's a clone of Steve Smith," Lyon said of the many familiar idiosyncrasies in Phillips' batting technique.

"So we had a fair indication of what he does and how he plays his cricket.

"He's a decent player, and he likes to move the game forward quite fast; he plays his shots.

"And it seems like he's a nice guy as well."

Phillips revealed he had spoken briefly with Smith during last year's Caribbean Premier League T20 tournament, of which they were both part, and that the former Australia skipper showed the young enthusiast the collection of high-quality cricket bats he travels with.

In addition to assessing that Smith is "a pretty cool guy", Phillips admits to adding an element or two from Smith's on[-field repertoire to his own game while also adding that some of those embellishments came about through mere coincidence.

"Back in four-day cricket, I used to shuffle across (the crease) every second or third ball even though I'd stay still in between them," he said on Sunday evening.

"Then, over the winter, I just struggled to move my feet one day and decided to do it every ball and it brought a little more rhythm to my technique.

"Although I did take one thing out of Smudge's technique – where his bat goes way out from his body.

"When I brought my shoulders back into line, everything came down a bit more central as opposed to when I first started with it straight behind me - it would pop out the other side and I'd get into trouble.

"Obviously, I've watched him (Smith) a lot.

"I'd love to have a chat with him someday, but for now we are competitors.

"And that's what it is out on the battlefield."

Domain Test Series v New Zealand

Australia squad: David Warner, Joe Burns, Marnus Labuschagne, Steve Smith, Matthew Wade, Travis Head, Tim Paine (c, wk), Pat Cummins, Mitch Starc, Nathan Lyon, James Pattinson, Michael Neser, Mitchell Swepson

New Zealand: Todd Astle, Tom Blundell, Trent Boult, Colin de Grandhomme, Matt Henry, Kyle Jamieson, Tom Latham, Henry Nicholls, Glenn Phillips, Jeet Raval, Mitchell Santner, Tim Southee, Ross Taylor, BJ Watling, Neil Wagner, Kane Williamson (c)

First Test: Australia won by 296 runs

Second Test: Australia won by 247 runs

Third Test: January 3-7, SCG (Seven, Fox & Kayo)