Cameron White
Fair-haired and level-headed, Cameron White has long seemed destined to play a significant role in Australia’s future. Only the precise nature of that role has baffled his admirers. Nagging legspinner? Aggressive middle-order bat? Intuitive skipper? Or a bit of all three? The over-eager Shane Warne comparisons that festooned his first-class arrival have long since died away. Indeed White is a peculiarly unAustralian-style legspinner, tall and robust, relying on changes of pace and a handy wrong’un rather than prodigious turn or flight. He can even start a spell with an offspinner or quicker ball.
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He bowls a good line and does a neat line in self-deprecation too: “There’s no flippers or anything exciting like that in my repertoire,” he professed a while back, “I’m just trying to get my leggie right.” What is not in doubt is his cricket sense, nor his maturity. Captaining Victoria in 2003-04 at the age of 20, the youngest skipper in their history, he won rave reviews for his cool head and warm handling of more hardened contemporaries. For all that, he remains a largely unassuming country lad. Picked to tour Zimbabwe when Stuart MacGill withdrew for moral reasons, White cancelled a fishing trip to attend the press conference then boyishly shrugged aside questions about the circumstances of his selection: “I don’t really know very much about politics.” He was chosen as much for his no-frills batting as his bowling; David Hookes, the late Victorian coach, felt White’s best chance of representing Australia was to earn a top-six spot. For a long while it looked more like the way forward, until the retirement of Brad Hogg in early 2008 opened up an ODI spin position. White was given the first chance to secure the role and even won a call-up to the Test squad in India when Victoria’s first-choice legspinner Bryce McGain went down with a shoulder injury.
Until 2008, it had been only White’s batting that had been of any real value on the international scene. Playing eight CB Series games in 2006-07, he started by showing his impressive muscle, thumping a 32-ball 45 in the second match, but he was unable to offer a repeat until he crashed 42 from 19 deliveries in the Chappell-Hadlee Series. Between those innings he had been dropped for the tri-series finals and missed the World Cup squad, mainly because his bowling was unconvincing. After finishing the season with the Bushrangers, capturing 437 Pura Cup runs at 39.72 and nine wickets at 49.77, he held on to his Cricket Australia contract before heading to England for more plunder at Somerset. A more productive 2007-08 domestic season brought him back into the national frame. Although his six Pura Cup wickets cost 47 each, he scored 748 runs at 49.86 and guided Victoria into the first-class, one-day and Twenty20 finals.
As far back as December 2002 his hero Warne had predicted: “I think he’s a [future] Australian player provided he sticks to the way he plays and doesn’t try to be someone different.” White made his limited-overs debut during the Super Series a year after missing a first Test cap when Nathan Hauritz was preferred in India. He had little impact and lost his national deal after a below-average Pura Cup season in 2005-06. White had a wonderful 2006 as Somerset’s captain, giving the strongest indication yet that he was focusing heavily on his batting. He feasted on the county bowlers, scoring 1190 first-class runs at 59.5 and his 55-ball Twenty20 century was a record. That led him into a better home summer that featured Pura Cup and FR Cup centuries, although he was sometimes criticised for not taking enough bowling responsibility.