How Ollie Davies became the Blues' latest run machine

Last winter, not long before his 23rd birthday, Ollie Davies sat down with three important people in his life for two separate conversations. Both were designed to chart his course for the coming years.

The first was with his parents, Simone and Kevin.

"I said to them, 'I want to take a little break from studying, and just see what happens if I put all of my effort and focus into playing cricket, and when I do have my downtime, just really utilise that by playing golf, going surfing, not stressing about studying, and just see how that goes for a year'," Davies tells cricket.com.au.

"They were very supportive when I said that."

The next was with Blues batting coach Nick Larkin. To that point, Davies' extraordinary batting gifts had cut both ways; the various paths opening up for him in the chaotic world of elite cricket were proving distractions as much as opportunities, and his vision of his future was opaque.

Larkin knew the rookie bat had decided to go all in on cricket. Yet the vagueness of that notion meant more discussion was needed.

"Ollie's catalyst at the start of the year was identifying what he wanted from his cricket – where he wanted to go with it," Larkin says. "I think putting his eggs in the cricket basket is the way to go for him, but the details around that were, what does he want to do? Does he want to go and play Twenty20 cricket? Does he want to be a multi-format player?

"Those questions, he didn't quite have perfect clarity on, which then clouds your practice, and your approach to different games.

"He was able to get some clarity on that, which then allowed him to hear the things that coaches like 'Shippy' (NSW head coach Greg Shipperd) or senior players might have been saying to him – suddenly those things make more sense and you start to understand what you're practicing for.

"With Ollie, he's got a pretty simple technique, so there was certainly no need to really rebuild anything or dig too deep on that side of his game.

"The challenge for him was answering those questions, and then us saying, 'OK, I hear what you're saying, and that's going to take a lot of work – are you willing to do it?'"

Davies was adamant he was, but matters soon became more complicated. Having played his first two Shield games at the back-end of the 2022-23 summer, and then performing solidly for Australia A in a one-day series against their Kiwi counterparts, he was initially enthused about all that lay ahead.

"Whilst I didn't actually score too many runs (86), I think I was (Aus A's) third leading run-scorer in that series," he says. "So I actually thought there was no possible way that I couldn't get picked in the first Shield game of the year."

Yet Davies and some senior figures at Cricket New South Wales were not exactly on the same page. The young batter was made 12th for the Blues' opener, then dropped altogether for their second match, after which he had a conversation with NSW's chief of cricket performance, Greg Mail, about his immediate future.

"I was a bit shocked," Davies says. "I said, 'I actually don't think that I've been hitting the ball too badly, and I've been working quite hard'. He said, 'Look, we just think that you probably aren't batting as well as we'd like you to at the moment'.

"It was very honest, and probably what I needed to hear. I actually didn't think I was going to play any Shield cricket (for the season)."

Davies was rattled by the selection call and assessed his options. Having made his name as a power hitter, the world of domestic T20 leagues was potentially there to explore, while he might have joined the lengthy list of New South Welshmen to head interstate and prosper. He is also eligible for a Trinidadian passport via his mother's heritage.

"I must admit, I had a couple of chats with a few people," he says. "My theory was: what's the point of doing all this pre-season work and trying hard to play red-ball cricket when there's a lot of opportunities to play white-ball cricket around the world?

"And there was a stage there where I did think that I might call it quits on red-ball cricket, which was probably immature of me. But then I was like, 'You know what? Let's give it a red-hot crack for the rest of the year, really put in, and see if I can play a couple of Shield games'. And then the next thing you know, I got picked."

The conclusion Davies arrived at – that of the red-hot crack – aligned with the thinking of Larkin, who wanted his charge to "work really hard in a focused way", and Shipperd, who had known of his talents since his days at the Sydney Sixers academy, but believed a change in mindset was required to unlock them consistently at the elite level.

"Some young players have a real belief that they have their routines sorted out even at that young age," Shipperd says. "But for those of us who have been around the business a long time, we know that those things evolve.

"Oliver had some little gaps potentially in his learnings … (and) we saw some opportunity to give him some information around rounding out his preparation before games, and his routines, and just add some information about what's likely to make you successful in the various formats."

Having been in the bubble of professional cricket since his teens, Davies had heard much of the advice before. The difference this time around was that, at Shipperd's urging, he became willing to listen.

"(Shipperd's) whole point recently to me has been about listening and taking in what the coaches have to say, rather than trying to discuss your way of things," he says.

"I think at the start of the year, before I was picked, I wanted to go about my innings the way that I wanted to go about it, and I didn't really listen to what some of the coaches had to say to me.

"I think that was a maturity thing. When I was younger, I always thought that, you know, I was hitting the ball well, I was scoring runs, and I was like, I don't really need to change anything, because I'm scoring runs, so why would I?

"But that's about understanding that Shippy's played a lot of cricket, he's seen a lot of cricket, and something that he says to me can actually be beneficial for me."

Part of the work Shipperd wanted his young star to focus on was his defence, off both front foot and back. He wanted Davies to be able to bank on it when he needed it, and he wanted those shots to be as powerful as his many others in what they were conveying to a bowler: this kid is going to be hard work.

The veteran coach remembers watching Davies during a training session at the beginning of last November and seeing "the penny drop" in the way he set about his work.

"He'd been listening," Shipperd says. "He'd had a realisation that having a quality defence is part of the overall process of being able to bat enough balls to exhibit your attacking flair.

"So I guess he's understood that some of the advice that's come his way is designed to help him, and he's helped himself by engaging in that.

"I saw a competitive edge to his training, and I saw a more balanced approach in the nets that reflected training like you want to play. We selected him on the basis of that, and he hasn't looked back since."

Davies, who reminds Shipperd of his former Victoria charge David Hussey with his ability "to keep that scoreboard ticking over at a phenomenal rate", came in for the injured Jack Edwards in a Shield match at the SCG.

In a contest that saw WA bowled out for 141 and 136, his 129 out of the Blues' 276 was far and away the decisive contribution. That it came from just 143 balls, against the two-time defending champs on a tricky wicket to end a 15-match winless run for NSW, made it a maiden first-class hundred straight from the top drawer.

While Shipperd knew Davies had the talent, he concedes he was surprised by "how poised and organised and thoughtful he was", while the batter himself recalls heading to the middle with some oft-heard advice from Larkin that has become something of a mantra.

"He would just say to me, 'Give yourself 20 balls – give yourself a chance to get the pace of the wicket, and you can go from there'," he says.

Adds Larkin: "Because he's got all those shots, sometimes that can be a burden for players – they want to play them early, or before he's got a read on the conditions or the attack. And if he just takes that little bit of time, he can become hard to stop.

"Often he was 20 off 20 balls, regardless of what I said (laughs), but at least he's hearing it."

New South Wales' next assignment came in Hobart, where a confident Davies kicked on from his impressive initial showing by making 67 (65) and 62 (93). During the first of those knocks he received some mid-innings feedback from Shipperd that gave him pause.

"We were four for 50-odd and I think I was 20 off 10 balls – I'd hit four cover drives for four," he says. "I was 45 off 35 and I came off (during a break) and he was like, 'I really want you to focus on your defence when you get back out there, and really lock in'.

"It's a good mix, because whilst I want to be aggressive, he's also just reminding me that, if they do bowl you good balls, you're allowed to defend."

Shipperd grins as he tries to recall the anecdote, pointing out it's what he's always telling Davies, while captain Moises Henriques goes the other way, imploring the coaching staff not to "squash his brilliance".

"He's learning rapidly," adds Shipperd of the Manly product whose family home sports a synthetic pitch in the backyard. "And he's had a pretty good, deliberate partnership where we've connected Moises and he as much as we could – the old bull and the young bull – and they formed a terrific relationship out in the middle."

Davies' first-innings 81no from 115 balls was the top score of NSW's next match – a win over the Tigers – and made it four straight 50-plus scores for the counter-punching No.6, who by that point was beginning to incorporate new methods in preparing for and pacing his innings.

"A lot of the coaches, especially 'Shippy', wanted me to hit more balls at training, and especially before games," he says. "I've always been someone that didn't really like to hit too many balls and 'Shippy' basically asked me if I could do that. So I did, and I actually found that it did really help – hitting 30 or 40 balls the morning of a batting innings or the day before a game, just to get a bit of rhythm.

"Now I do that religiously before every single day of cricket that I play, and every morning of a Shield game, just to keep feeling good."

From the other end of the practice pitch, Larkin has watched the evolution.

"He's not in the style of a Smith or a Labuschagne, hitting until the wee hours of the morning," he says. "It's more: keep your rhythm, turn up, bat regularly.

"He would have hit the least balls of any player in New South Wales this season, and got the most runs. So there's a real efficiency there, because he knew what he was trying to do in the nets.

"From a practice point of view, there's still a lot of challenges he'll have to overcome. He's not the finished product. And his practice method I'm sure will evolve again at some point, but he just embraced the challenge 'Shippy' laid down to him, which was: practice a bit more, practice a bit more regularly, and practice with a bit more purpose.

"And then he started to find joy in his practice, he started looking forward to batting, which was great."

Out in the middle, Davies' instinctive aggression against spin – which he traces back to the gentle throwdowns his dad Kevin would lob up, encouraging him to use his feet – needed a slight refinement for red-ball cricket.

Against Queensland at Allan Border Field earlier this month, he came in at 4-97 to face leg-spinner Mitchell Swepson, who was on a hat-trick and bowling well.

"When he faces a spinner, he might be thinking: Well, usually they should go at about 10 to 12 an over," Larkin says. "So for him it's about managing his own expectations of what it looks like to face spin. 'Sweppo' bowled beautifully in that game, and Ollie negotiated some challenges early on."

On Davies' arrival to the crease, the game had to that point seen 14 wickets fall for 236 runs in less than a full day's play. Across the next two-and-a-half hours he made a match-winning 131 from 147 balls, in the process becoming the first Blues batter to score a Shield century at the venue.

"He's one of those players who's always looking to score, and before you go through Plans A, B and C, he's 50 off 60 and he's gotten away from you already," Swepson tells cricket.com.au. "As a bowling unit, we couldn't bowl maidens to him, and we couldn't stop him from scoring boundaries."

Swepson did however feel in the game against Davies, due to his willingness to play his shots. Larkin says it is another balancing act that remains a work in progress.

"When he sits back in that more neutral gear against spin for longer formats, and realises, 'there's a couple of guys out (on the boundary) already because I'm a destructive player of spin, and I'll just take the runs that are on offer', then he can collect them across the course of a session or a day, as opposed to trying to get them all in one over," he adds.

"He actually did that to (SA spinner) Ben Manenti – the hundred he scored at Cricket Central the week before, he stayed in a lower gear for longer, while still scoring really freely.

"It just eliminates so much of the risk from his game. Ultimately he collects those runs across a longer period of time, and that's what hundreds – and big hundreds – are usually made of in red-ball cricket."

Davies has been encouraged on occasion by the words of his opponents as he looks to cement his reputation as one of the country's most feared young batters. After his first-up hundred against WA, his Blues teammate Kurtis Patterson relayed a conversation he later had with paceman Joel Paris.

"Paris said that (I was) the first batsman this year that he felt pressure that if he missed, he was going to be punished," Davies recounts. "And against Queensland, I wanted to put the debutant (paceman Callum Vidler) under a bit of pressure … and he came up to me after the game and just said, 'Man, you were so hard to bowl to – if I miss, I think I'm going to go the journey'.

"I guess that's the way I want to go about my batting – if a bowler bowls a bad ball, then I'm going to try and put it away. That leaves them less margin for error, and they feel more pressure to put more balls in the right spot. So they were some real nice things to hear."

Even in his rare failures through the summer Davies was able to walk away with a spring in his step, knowing he had learned more lessons. In February, against Victoria at the SCG, he made four and six and was undone by good balls from Will Sutherland and Scott Boland respectively. With the former though, he immediately knew his error, which came from just the fourth ball he faced.

"That was actually a big eye-opener for me," he says. "I tried to straight drive Sutherland on the up and got bowled, top of off stump. Whilst it was a good ball, it wasn't the right shot to play, and Greg Shipperd had a little talking to me, just about decision making and resisting the urge to play those big drives really early.

"My next two (Shield) innings, I ended up scoring hundreds, and just gave myself those 20 balls at the start."

At that point in the summer he was relishing his nets sessions with his Blues teammates, including squaring off with a fired-up Liam Hatcher during one particularly intense battle.

"Liam was running in around the wicket and trying to rip his head off," Larkin says. "Most batters would've shied away from that, but Ollie leaned into that discomfort and actually smacked the ball everywhere, in a situation where most guys would have walked out of the net, and Ollie in the past would have walked out of the net.

"I sat back and watched that and thought, That's fantastic – that's growth. If you can take on that challenge in the nets, there's not too much in a game that should really scare you."

By the end of the regular season, Davies' tally of 670 runs was the fourth-highest in the competition. More instructively though, it was the first time since Brad Haddin's 902-run (SR 83.28) Shield campaign in 2004-05 that a Blues player had scored as many runs at such a strike rate (81.01). In fact, across the competition in the intervening years, only South Australia legend Darren Lehmann (1,168 runs, SR 82.02 in 2005-06) had gone higher, faster.

There is something of Haddin in Davies' relaxed stance as he prepares to face up, while there is also a hint of Glenn Maxwell in his swashbuckling stroke play. This month, Henriques likened him to Steve Smith, David Warner and Phillip Hughes in the way he is always looking to score – an approach Davies also credits to his father.

"He would always say to me, 'The aim of the game is to score runs'," says the player who in 2018 hit six sixes in an over at a National Under-19s tournament, and 11 more en route to a record-breaking double century. "I guess I like to say I'm a bit unique with my batting, in that I try and score off more balls than other batters do."

Davies had his end-of-season review at Cricket NSW last week. The message relayed to him was similar to that he received last season: if he's again willing to toil, the sky is the limit. Certainly the appetite for run scoring is as strong as ever: in the two Saturdays after sitting down with his coaches, as many of his teammates were putting their feet up, he hit consecutive centuries for his Premier Cricket side, Manly, to push them into the grand final.

"He's put in a lot more work this season, and he's got the results that his work warranted," Larkin adds. "If you put that work with the gifts he's got – and I actually think he's only scratching the surface there – it'll be frightening to see, if we get a few flat pitches next year, what he can actually do."

In recent years, Davies has seen Cameron Green and Jake Fraser-McGurk leapfrog more experienced players into the national set-up. Far from being cowed when he compares their talents with his, he is viewing their rapid rises as a possible blueprint.

"Hopefully I can get picked up in some Aussie set-ups soon, like 'Greeny' and (Fraser-) McGurk have done," he says. "(Their selections) definitely give me a little bit of confidence to think that that's what I can do as well.

"The plan now will probably be just to put a bit more focus again onto my cricket this year and give it a red-hot crack. If I have another good year, then I'm hopeful that I could be playing cricket for Australia."

Shipperd, who has overseen the rise of prodigious talents like Warner and Ricky Ponting through more than 30 years in coaching, is unequivocal.

"He's very, very capable of being an Australian player in all formats," he says. "He's an exciting prospect, and the runs speak for themselves; this season he played (seven) games, and if he'd played the other three perhaps, and I hadn't had the handbrake on him, he might have topped the (Shield) run-scoring list, and what an achievement that would have been.

"Nevertheless, the numbers that he's generated would have turned some heads, no doubt, further up the food chain."

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