Bosisto takes long road to resurrect Test dream

Will Bosisto was accustomed to taking the long road en route to realising his lifelong ambition to play Test cricket, but he never reckoned that trek would encompass the Eyre Highway that stretches more than 2,500km from Perth and Adelaide.

Since captaining Australia to the final of the 2012 Under-19 World Cup, and being named player of the tournament for his batting exploits, Bosisto has found the onward journey to be strewn with roadblocks that would have tried the resolve of a lesser character.

The most recent, and potentially most devastating came midway through last year when he was told his playing contract with Western Australia would not be renewed even though senior coach Adam Voges acknowledged that 2018-19 had been the best of Bosisto's seven senior seasons.

As one of the WA legends Bosisto had aspired to emulate since his schoolboy days in Perth, Voges concedes breaking the news to the former junior prodigy that he was surplus to requirements at the WACA was poignantly painful.

He made it clear to Bosisto that the door to the WA team remained open if he was able to mount a strong case for a recall through performances in Perth's Premier Cricket ranks.

But Bosisto had already spoken to Tim Nielsen, the ex-Australia men's team coach now South Australia's high-performance manager, about a shift to Adelaide in the hope of resurrecting a career that had blazed so brightly as a teenager.

Nielsen offered him no guarantees of senior selection, and Bosisto held no direct connection to Adelaide other than a distant relative who was once the cricket world's most feared fast bowler.

Yet in September last year, shortly after celebrating his 26th birthday, Bosisto packed his life into his small four-cylinder car and, with girlfriend Olivia Saunders as companion and co-pilot, drove out of Perth and into the unknown.

Prior to embarking on that three-day road trip, he made a courtesy phone call to Voges to thank him for his guidance over recent seasons and to advise that – despite the chance to re-establish himself in the WA line-up – he was seeking opportunities elsewhere.

"He didn't have to make that call, but he wanted me to hear the news from him directly," Voges told cricket.com.au prior to this week's Marsh Sheffield Shield match between SA and WA at Adelaide Oval.

"It's a measure of his character.

"He's a ripper of a bloke, he works incredibly hard and you want success for those guys, so I'm really pleased to see him get his opportunity over here."

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Ever since Bosisto used to race home from school at Scotch College in Perth's beachside suburbs and head straight to the WACA Ground to catch the final session of Shield matches or domestic one-day games, he aspired to take the field for his home state.

A technically sound right-handed bat who was not overburdened with stroke-making options, but was renowned for his powers of concentration and cool thinking under pressure, Bosisto seemed destined to realise that ambition sooner than many of his similarly gifted contemporaries.

The Under-19 team he led to the runners-up prize (behind winners, India) at the 2012 World Cup in Queensland featured Travis Head, Kurtis Patterson and fellow Perth-based contemporaries Cameron Bancroft, Joel Paris and Ashton Turner.

The teams he captained against in that tournament also included future international skippers Babar Azam (Pakistan) and Quinton de Kock (South Africa).

But despite making his senior debut for WA in a one-day fixture against Victoria at the WACA the following month, Bosisto found the step-up from under-age domination tough to nail.

Over the ensuing seven summers, he found himself in and out of WA's limited-overs and first-class teams and played an aggregate 49 matches (including 11 BBL outings with Perth Scorchers) while the likes of Head, Bancroft and Patterson surged past him and into Baggy Green Caps.

Then, in the course of a short meeting with Voges last year, Bosisto realised his future lay beyond the Perth cricket scene that had been his life.

"He played some really good innings for us in the middle-order in red-ball cricket, but we've probably got guys lining up for that position at the moment," Voges said.

"And he probably didn't quite nail his opportunities at the top of the order which was what we were hoping him to do.

"But he's taken his chance, he's come over to South Australia off his own bat and forced his way into the team which is great to see."

Bosisto acknowledges that leaving his family and friends was no easy decision, but no sooner had he settled into his new digs in Adelaide's inner-west and got to work in the practice nets than he understood he'd made the right call.

He also had some inkling of the challenges awaiting a cricketer trying to make his way in a new town, having shared a house with expatriate Victorian Ashton Agar when the spin-bowling allrounder first moved to Perth in 2012.

"I felt like my opportunities might be greater elsewhere and it was also an opportunity to expand my game in different conditions, and a different environment," Bosisto told cricket.com.au.

"I've played a bit of cricket overseas and I had a good stint in Sri Lanka, and I've found that in different environments my game has thrived in the past.

"So I thought why not look at that as a more long-term thing in a new environment?

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Bosisto admits that in the years immediately after his stunning World Cup campaign, in which he was dismissed just once and averaged a remarkable 276 from six outings with the bat, he put pressure on himself to live up to excel in senior company.

"There's no doubt that as a 20 and 21-year-old, I had some expectations on myself that, in hindsight, I didn't fulfil as I would have liked," Bosisto said as he prepared for his first Shield clash against his former WA teammates.

"But I've probably lost those feelings of looking back on my junior cricket career.

"I guess no young kid thinks they're ever going to move and play for what was once an opposition side.

"But it was good timing for me to have a fresh start and a different perspective on things."

Needing to start from scratch in an unfamiliar city and a competition that cared little for his past achievements, Bosisto averaged 74 in 11 Premier Cricket games for Adelaide University (with three centuries).

In addition, he averaged 41 in the one-day competition and 38 in the T20 tournament that University won which means they will contest the national T20 championships to be held in Adelaide next month.

On the strength of those performances, Bosisto was named in SA's Second XI and then elevated to the Sheffield Shield line-up for the match against Tasmania that preceded the mid-season break, and which yielded the Redbacks' first Shield win in almost two years.

"Tim Nielsen had said 'by all means, if you want to come over here and give it a crack – if you put the right performances on the board there could be opportunities for you'," Bosisto recalled.

"I feel like I've done that, I've put the runs and wickets on the board to earn my opportunity and now it's about capitalising on that.

"I feel like I'm a better player now than I was in September when I drove over here.

"Mentally, I'm far more assured of my game.

"You always add to your skills set, you're always adding to your craft right up until the day you retire or stop playing."

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Prior to his club cricket experience, Bosisto's fondest memory of playing in Adelaide was scoring a patient 58 in almost four hours to guide WA to victory in a Shield match last summer, a knock that surely stuck in the memories of the Redbacks' brains trust.

There is also the family connection to legendary ex-Test fast bowler Ernie Jones, which Bosisto's mother Helen regularly reminds him of, but which remains a source of intrigue to her son whose bowling tends to gentle off-spin rather than express pace.

Jones was regarded by many as the most-feared fast bowler of the 19th Century, having supposedly sent a searing full-toss through the beard of esteemed England pioneer WG Grace (although subsequent reports suggest it struck the doctor under the armpit).

"Sorry doctor, she slipped," was reputedly the apologetic offering from Jones, who was born in South Australia's mid-north and played 19 Tests before moving from Adelaide to Perth in the early 1900s.

"I know he is a relation, but I'm not 100 per cent sure what it is," Bosisto said of Jones, whose photograph overlooks the practice nets at Adelaide Oval.

"I think he's a great-great uncle.

"It wouldn't be a hard one for me to look up, so I might have to do a bit of homework on that."

In addition to his WG Grace controversy, Jones was also twice called for throwing in matches played during the summer of 1897-98, almost 120 years before the same fate befell his great-great relative.

Bosisto's action was deemed illegal when he was bowling his part-time off-breaks in a Futures League match for WA in 2014, and he undertook remediation work with legendary coach Daryl Foster who has also worked closely with Sri Lanka's Muthiah Muralidaran, among others.

Not only has Bosisto eradicated the flaw in his bowling, he has worked so assiduously on his off-spin craft he now sees himself a budding allrounder, an addition to his skills-set that he believes can only boost his credentials as a three-format cricketer.

"I see myself as an allrounder down the line," Bosisto said. "The bowling is one aspect of my game that's improved enormously in the last 12 months because of the tremendous amount of hard work I've done on that craft.

"Quite a while ago I had some remediation to my action, but that's not something I've had to go back to.

"I did quite a bit of work with Daryl Foster to get some cues that helped me make the new action a habit, not just something I had to be consciously thinking about.

"There's no doubt my batting is the key element of my game presently, and I don't think I ever see that really changing.

"But I'm just going to work my butt off at both skills to try and improve as much as I can."

It's the growing potency of his bowling, coupled with the additions he's making to his game through stints in the Northern Territory T20 Strike League and other limited-overs competitions here and overseas, that has Bosisto confident he can succeed as an all-format player.

But he acknowledges the strengths that served him so well in his heady junior days – his solid defence, his stamina and his strategic acumen – remain paramount, which means he's more naturally suited to the first-class format.

"It's always been an ambition of mine to play Test cricket for Australia, so whatever avenue that requires is what I'm prepared to do," he said.

"I've never doubted my strengths – being able to bat for long periods and wear the opposition down, and make big scores and capitalise on starts – it's just about making those performances more consistent.

"But I absolutely want to be a three-format player.

"To date, I've prioritised the Test game over the shorter formats of the game, just because that's where I see the challenges, and they're the aspects of the game that I love.

"I think the tactical nous of wearing players down, and the mental strength required to play in all different situations whether it's varying conditions, deteriorating wicket, green wickets, swinging ball – that's what I like about the longer formats.

"It's never been a difficult thing for me to enjoy those challenges.

"It's just about embracing them in a new environment."