Membership of the Australian cricket team is a little like the cast of a long-running soap opera – a Neighbours, or a Home and Away, in which characters appear, achieve familiarity, behave to type, start to pall, then fade away. Like a lot of Aussie soaps, too, it has tended to stereotypes and stock characters, to a preponderance of Shanes and Mitches with a suburban burnish. Captain Steve Smith, a cricketer as Australian as the Weet-Bix he used to flog, seems to incarnate this, while his vice-captain Travis Head might almost have been dreamed up by musical comedian Kevin Bloody Wilson.
