Bowling coach Andy Bichel and a few of the Queensland players were milling around the heavy roller ahead of the first ball of this year’s Sheffield Shield final, when the Karen Rolton Oval big screen sparked into life.
“The Bulls Masters had put together a package of our past players talking about Queensland’s Shield wins over the years,” Bichel tells cricket.com.au. “And we were lucky – somehow we’d managed to get it up on the big screen.
“We’re all standing in the middle of the field, watching this little recording that had been sent to us. It was really nice.”
Moments later, wandering up to the group came South Australia quick Brendan Doggett. To his former Queensland teammates, and sporting a wry grin that is something of a trademark, he offered just a handful of words.
“Thanks for the rev-up, boys.”
Not 36 overs later, South Australia had skittled Queensland for 95. Doggett, in 11.5 devastating overs, had taken 6-31.
“Looking back,” grins Bichel, “maybe it backfired on us.”
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Domestic veterans like Bichel have long theorised there is no better stage for a Baggy Green audition than a Shield final.
Allan Border goes as far as to say the first-class domestic decider feels like a sixth Test of the summer; a cauldron into which liberal doses of high pressure, high standards and highly competitive cricket are thrown, and then slowly brought to the boil.
Those who emerge from the mixer with their reputations considerably enhanced might well have played themselves into the big time. Think Mike Veletta in 1987. Adam Gilchrist in 1996. Josh Hazlewood in 2014.
And now, Doggett in 2025.
“He was definitely the one we were most worried about,” says Bichel, reflecting on that final. “He got that soft start, when Usman (Khawaja) pulled one down to fine leg. You could just see Brendan running through, pumping the fist, he sprinted down to fine leg.
“And then he bowled quite a few jaffas, and just ripped the heart out of us, really.”
Phenomenal Doggett sets new Sheffield Shield final benchmark
Five more wickets followed in the second innings, for match figures of 11-140 – the best return in a Shield final.
South Australia captain Nathan McSweeney, a close friend of Doggett’s who lived with him near West Beach for a couple of years after they both made the interstate switch from Queensland in 2021, notes the differences in his performances between the first and third innings as the Bulls fought their way back into the contest.
First came the blitzkrieg. Then came a repeated assault across seven spells and 35 overs.
“In the first innings, he was able to use his skills,” McSweeney tells cricket.com.au. “And in the second innings, when nothing was happening, he’s got a big heart, Brendan, and he just kept on coming. He bowled over after over of short balls, and that was just on pure ticker.
“It was pretty impressive to watch such a complete performance.”
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The way Bichel remembers it, Doggett’s Premier Cricket career in Brisbane began when his older brother Samuel volunteered him for a game at Wests.
“Sammy was going along pretty well, and I think it goes that they were a bit short of quality quicks in second grade, and he said something like, ‘My younger brother, he goes alright – he’ll come down and play’,” he recounts.
“So Brendan’s popped up, and it didn’t take long before he was playing first grade.”
Bichel can sum up in a single word what initially struck him about the young quick.
“Athlete,” he says. “We’ve got all the GPS stuff now, where the good athletes can really run at around 26kph. A lot of people operate around 24kph. Brendan in those early days was 27-28kph, and he just looked so easy.
“We had to try to put a bowling run-up on the end of that. So we had to reel him back in, and get him going nicely. He had a long jump, and a load-up behind himself a little bit. He’s worked hard to change that over the years, and he’s even got that run-up speed back a little bit, controlled it, and got himself in better positions on the back foot.”
Doggett’s first summer was also his breakout one: 28 wickets at 27.71, a Shield final triumph, and selection in Australia’s Test squad for a series against Pakistan in the UAE.
What followed was six matches in two summers, as the harshness of the trade revealed itself via back, quad and side injuries. Doggett made the best of that time, learning the art and craft of fast bowling from the second-most prolific quick in Shield history. Laidley product Bichel saw a lot of himself in the Toowoomba kid. They spoke about being fitter than the next guy. About maintaining speeds across spells, and about finding ways to be fresh and fast after a couple of long, hot days in the field.
His comeback in 2020-21 was emphatic. In his first Shield match in almost 15 months, Doggett took 4-66 in 34 overs against South Australia. Four months later, he was Queensland’s best-performed quick in another title-winning season: 22 wickets at 26.81 in six matches, including the final wicket to give Queensland another Shield title.
It was the last ball he bowled for his native state.
“My cricket didn’t progress the way that I thought it would, and I started to fall out of love with the game a little bit,” he told cricket.com.au earlier this year. “All that led to the move to South Australia, just to gain some perspective and treat the game for what it is, and why I started playing.”
Bichel was saddened by Doggett’s move, and disappointed. Yet the pair remain close mates.
“He and his wife, Jacqui, they’re good people,” he says. “I’ll probably never agree with why he went to Adelaide, because he was top of the tree here. But he thought Michael Neser, and (Mark) Steketee, (Xavier) Bartlett were pretty good cricketers too, and he’s right, but I tried to say to him that you need four or five good quicks to get through a good season, and he was in that pack.
“In that (2021) Shield final he was so impressive. He bowled fast, bowled those beautiful outswingers, and against a good batting line-up, he bowled us to victory.
“I reckon (national selector) George Bailey was pretty keen on him after that. And maybe it’s just taken him a bit longer to get back (in the national selection conversation) … now he’s just nailing it.”
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In the rearview mirror, it’s easy enough to see the signposts that were pointing to Doggett’s landmark Shield final performance.
He had stayed on the park more consistently, and bowled more balls, than through any summer in his eight-year professional career. He had also taken more wickets – 33 – at the excellent average of 23.18, while he had managed his first five-wicket haul (and then two more) since his maiden summer, in 2017-18.
Bichel had watched Doggett bowl for Australia A in Mackay, against India A, at the very start of the season. On the opening day of that match, coming on second change under the captaincy of McSweeney, he took a wicket in his first over. He barely let up thereafter, finishing with remarkable figures of 11-6-15-6.
What struck Bichel though was not so much the wickets, but the way he was bowling.
“He bowled some beautiful, beautiful outswing,” he says. “I was so happy he’d gone back to that approach instead of just trying to run it back in all the time.”
Bichel had been frustrated at times watching Doggett at South Australia. At Queensland, the old stager had always encouraged him to shape the ball away from the right-hander – just as he had done so effectively through his own storied career.
“I really felt with Brendan, they were going from one spell with the new ball, then straight into a bouncer plan,” he says. “And you might say it got a few wickets, but it’s not much good for Brendan and his development – you’re not going to do that in Test cricket.
“It was forcing him into this weird sort of role, you might say, and with the new ball I felt he was even power fading the ball, where he’s attacking the stumps more and bowling an aggressive line, for bowleds and lbws.
“It sort of worked in those Adelaide conditions, but I think he was born to bowl outswing.”
Bichel uses the term ‘power fade’ to describe a new ball being naturally “pushed” into the right-hander by faster bowlers, likening it to reverse swing for the way it ‘goes’ in the metre or so before it reaches the batter.
Harris, who has a long history working with Bichel, also uses the term when describing Doggett’s bowling. The SA head coach, who was initially recruited to Adelaide from Queensland as a bowling coach under Jason Gillespie in mid-2023, is another who has been influential in Doggett’s recent evolution, as the below statistic illustrates.
“No way am I going to take all the credit for that,” Harris laughs. “Those stats are phenomenal, but I think the work he did with Andy Bichel – and still does, he still speaks to him – has been crucial, and I guess I operate similar to ‘Bich’.
“But I think the last couple of years is just more about him getting his body right.”
Harris also points out that Doggett’s stock delivery in the past couple of seasons has in fact been his outswinger, with the ‘power fade’ essentially a happy accident that occurs when he “goes across himself in his action”.
“When he does that, he comes across the ball, which fades it in a bit,” he explains. “Whereas if he comes down behind it, he swings it. That’s something he’s worked on, is trying to get consistently behind the ball. Every now and then he’ll fade one, which is not a bad thing – it’s just natural variation.
“We went through a stage (in early 2023-24) where we didn’t give him the new ball, because he was trying to swing it and float it.
“‘Dizz’ (Gillespie) and I had a few chats with him about how we wanted to use him. It was just a different mentality – from the new ball, to one that’s nine overs old – to find the right length.
“But once he caught onto it, and got the feeling of it – which wasn’t long – he was a different bowler. To be able to bowl a nice, fuller length with real pace, real energy on the ball, it’s bloody hard.
“But I think what he’s always had – and what he’s been able to produce more consistently in the last 15 months or so – is getting that late swing away, rather than swing from the hand.”
In that sense, in the age of the wobble seam, Doggett is a throwback to the Bichel-Harris era, and those before.
“You hear a lot of bowlers talk about three-quarter seam, and wobble seam in this day and age, and I just can’t believe that fast bowlers don’t try and swing the ball still,” says Harris, who collected 113 Test wickets at 23.52.
“For me, it’s a killer. I know (hitting) the seam is good, and I get that, and I’m sure Josh Hazlewood and Patty Cummins will argue that black and blue, because they’ve done bloody well with it, but I’ve just grown up with it, and I look at ‘Bich’ and he was like me – we relied on nice, late outswingers.”
What Harris likes most about Doggett though is his versatility. He thinks back to this year’s Shield final and the way he took his wickets.
“He destroyed them in the first innings, and then he had to work hard in the second,” he says. “He was bashing guys on the pads, bowling a ball that was coming in with a power fade, or just leaving the seam up and it nibbling off the seam at decent pace and hitting blokes in front of the wicket.
“He can do all different roles. He can bash the wicket if we need him to, he’s good on the green ones, and he’s good on the flat ones.”
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Doggett this week described himself as having a skiddier trajectory than the ‘Big Three’. The 31-year-old is marginally shorter than Cummins, and according to Harris, “bowls a beautiful Test match length”.
Scott Boland ranks his six wickets on debut
McSweeney, who debuted in the first Test at Perth Stadium last year and says he still has nightmares about facing Indian ace Jasprit Bumrah in that match, believes the wicket at the venue “will suit (Doggett) to a tee”.
“In Perth, it actually can be challenging to hit the stumps, especially in the first innings,” he says. “So I think he’ll be able to bring all modes of dismissal in, bowling naturally quite a full length. It should be fast, but he doesn’t need any help with that.”
McSweeney, who says Doggett’s skills with the new ball “have improved dramatically over the last 12-18 months”, expects the right-armer to comfortably hit 140kph once he settles into a rhythm, and cannot wait to watch his old mate do his thing on the Ashes stage.
He’s not alone. Bichel texted Doggett on Tuesday morning, sending him luck and love and positive reinforcement. And Harris spoke with him one final time late last week, before he joined the Test squad.
“He’s obviously going to be a little bit nervous because of the occasion,” he says. “But his body is in the right spot, he’s bowling well enough, and deep down, he knows he’s ready.”
2025-26 NRMA Insurance Men’s Ashes
First Test: November 21-25, Perth Stadium, 1:20pm AEDT
Second Test: December 4-8, The Gabba, Brisbane (D/N), 3pm AEDT
Third Test: December 17-21: Adelaide Oval, 10:30am AEDT
Fourth Test: December 26-30: MCG, Melbourne, 10:30am AEDT
Fifth Test: January 4-8: SCG, Sydney, 10:30am AEDT
Australia squad (first Test only): Steve Smith (c), Scott Boland, Alex Carey, Brendan Doggett, Cameron Green, Travis Head, Josh Inglis, Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Michael Neser, Mitchell Starc, Jake Weatherald, Beau Webster
England squad: Ben Stokes (c), Harry Brook (vc), Jofra Archer, Gus Atkinson, Shoaib Bashir, Jacob Bethell, Brydon Carse, Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett, Will Jacks, Ollie Pope, Matthew Potts, Joe Root, Jamie Smith (wk), Josh Tongue, Mark Wood
