Putting an end to much debate and deliberation, Australia selected the uncapped 31-year-old opener Jake Weatherald for the first Ashes Test.
Down 0-1 in the 1970/71 home Ashes, Australia dropped Bill Lawry as captain from the XI for final Test match. England won the Test and clinched the Ashes with a 2-0 win.
Ken Eastwood, Lawry’s replacement at the top, made five runs in two innings and never played again. However, over the past hundred years and a bit, he remains the only debutant Australian to bat in the top four (other than the occasional night-watch) in a home Test after their 31st birthday.
It is clearly not something Australia prefer to do. Yet, they are willing to make an exception for Jake Weatherald. How did he leapfrog his rivals, all of whom had either age on their side or Test experience or both?
Weatherald made his first-class debut in 2015/16. The following summer, he finished only behind Hilton Cartwright in the race for the Bradman Young Cricketer of the Year. In the summer of 2017/18, he finished fourth on the runs chart in the Sheffield Shield. That included 152 and 143 in the same match against Western Australia, a first for a South Australia batter in the 21st century in the Shield.
One might have expected him to soar to great heights after that, but Weatherald went through a slump. When cricket returned from the global lockdown of 2020, Weatherald started the season but soon withdrew from the squad, citing mental health issues. The demons returned again, and he had to take a second break, in 2022.
He credits his wife for the suggestions that put him back on track: “When I went through my dark times, and the times where I was going through all the mental struggles outside of cricket, she was someone who went, maybe cricket is a trigger, but maybe also there’s other life stuff, and how am I going to help you through it?” These days, he works with a private mental performance coach.
The runs returned, of course. A move to Tasmania ahead of the 2023/24 season helped. In his second season, 2024/25, Weatherald finished as the leading run-scorer in the Sheffield Shield, with 906 runs at 50.33. The Indian Test team visited Australia that summer, as did India A and the England Lions, but Weatherald’s runs had come too late for the selections.
However, when Sri Lanka A toured Australia in July 2025, Weatherald played “Tests” for Australia A for the first time: he celebrated the call-up with 54 and 183 in the two games. Back to Shield cricket for Tasmania, he made 67 and 57 against Queensland, and 18 and 94 against Western Australia before a rare failure (0 and 12) against Victoria.
The last game could not offset Weatherald’s incredible run on Australian soil since the start the last summer. There were several candidates in the race for Usman Khawaja’s opening partner, but one can see why Weatherald pipped them all.
Will Weatherald debut at Perth? Not necessarily. Australia had tried Marnus Labuschagne at the top, without success, in this year’s World Test Championship final. Labuschagne was dropped from the XI, but he earned his way back through an incredible streak of across-format runs in domestic cricket. Labuschagne is not a specialist opener, but Australia may prefer his experience.
Even if Weatherald does not play immediately, however, he is in the reckoning. Khawaja will turn 39 next month, and a second place will open up at the top. He may be 32, but Weatherald still has some time.
