Australia's last resort Joe Burns makes their first hundred of the summer
Was it something he said? Something he did? Something he didn't say? Something he didn't do? All of the above, perhaps.
Whatever the reasons, Joe Burns' absence from the Australian Test team for most of the past two years, having started off with three centuries in his first 10 matches from 2014 to 2016, has furrowed plenty of brows. His management, at a time when the national set-up has not exactly been flush with batting talent, reflects as poorly on the various selection panels looking over him as it speaks volumes for his resilience to keep restating his case with runs.
A top-order batsman schooled in Brisbane on what is generally regarded as the most challenging of surfaces for an opener, Burns was once regarded as one of those highly promising, potential 10-year players beloved of Australian selectors. When first picked for Australia A in 2012, he had played a mere 14 matches for Queensland.
He took a little while longer to emerge as a Test batsman than perhaps was expected, but looked the part when he did, at first in a middle-order role against India in 2014-15, then into the slot vacated by the retired Chris Rogers alongside David Warner in 2015-16. If the runs he made that summer were compiled against New Zealand and West Indies bowling attacks some way short of the highest class, they represented enough evidence for persistence.
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Yet the selectors began to show skittish tendencies when it came to Burns during the disastrous 2016 tour of Sri Lanka, where his Gabba background proved little use against Rangana Herath and company. Burns was far from the only player to struggle, but he was the only member of the top six to be dropped and then not immediately recalled in more familiar home conditions - Shaun Marsh was to be preferred at home to South Africa, before his injury led to Burns' recall.
What followed was a curious sequence in which wider events, philosophies and pressures appeared to take Burns' fate out of his own hands. Alongside Callum Ferguson, Burns played against South Africa in Hobart, where Australia were thumped by an innings for a fifth consecutive loss. When the selection chairman Rod Marsh resigned in the wake of the sequence, Burns and Ferguson were discarded amid a wholesale shift towards younger batsmen, even though at 27 and with a highly promising start to his career, the opener had done little wrong apart from twice feathering balls down the leg side at Bellerive Oval.
Nevertheless, he found himself pushed out of the top order by his younger Bulls teammate Matt Renshaw, who in turn made way for Cameron Bancroft. All the while, Burns churned out runs for Queensland with a level of consistency that begged questions about why he had been left out in the first place - at the very least it seemed a case of personal preference among the rejigged selection panel rather than a reflection of what Burns was actually doing.
In 2016-17, he compiled 724 Sheffield Shield runs at 40.22; 725 at 55.76 the season after that. Across his entire Shield career, in fact, Burns' worst season was 2015-16, when he was already in the Test team. During this period, not much could be found to substantiate why he was continually ignored, apart from a few vague references to Burns being a bit quirky, a bit different. In terms of the consistency with which he scored hundreds - now 16 in 104 first-class matches, and four in 16 Tests - Burns certainly was different.
There was to be another odd sequence before Burns came back, brought on by the Newlands scandal. Having opened together for Queensland in the Shield final, Burns and Renshaw were hastily summoned to Johannesburg, and fought through jetlag to open together. Burns' 42 in the second innings was Australia's top score, and amid the wreckage of a decidedly addled and traumatised team it was a rare moment of even the smallest consolation.
Once again, however, there would be a change in personnel on the national selection panel, as Justin Langer replaced Darren Lehmann as coach. Burns was duly omitted from the Test squad to go to the UAE to face Pakistan, with the white-ball specialist Aaron Finch at the top of the order in his place. Finch's contributions at the best times to bat in Asian conditions were enough to keep him in the Test team for India at home, where Ishant Sharma and Jasprit Bumrah wasted no time exposing his limitations.
It had been four years since Burns made his debut against India at home, compiling a pair of half centuries in two Tests in Melbourne and Sydney while looking nowhere near as out of place as Finch did. Unwanted once more, all Burns could do was return to making Shield runs, something he did yet again with consistency - 472 runs at 47.20 in six matches, four 50s - if not the sort of eye-popping innings Marcus Harris played to earn a call-up ahead of him.
But the progressive batting traumas of the India series meant further holes opened up in Australia's batting plans. Out went Finch, Peter Handscomb, and Shaun and Mitchell Marsh. In came Renshaw, Burns, Will Pucovski and, eventually, Kurtis Patterson. With so many possibles clamouring for a chance to face Sri Lanka in the final Test series before the Ashes later this year, and then a couple of low scores for the CA XI against the tourists in Hobart, Burns might have been forgiven for thinking he might face another test of patience.
Instead, he received some belated faith from selectors who had seemed intent upon leaving Burns until the last resort. He squeezed back into the Test XI marginally ahead of Renshaw, then held his place after being dismissed for 15 under lights in the Gabba Test. Further good fortune arrived when the captain Tim Paine won only his second toss of his tenure for Manuka Oval's inaugural match, affording Burns the chance to bat first.
The early loss of three wickets, when Harris, Khawaja and Marnus Labuschagne were unable to keep their bats from harm against a gently swinging new ball, required an innings at first cautious and later more expansive in the company of Travis Head. Before Brisbane it had taken Burns five years to play 14 Tests in which he averaged 36.76; Head had meanwhile been permitted to play six in a row while averaging 32.63.
In Brisbane, Head made it to the outskirts of a century before departing, but in Canberra both he and Burns would burst through the barrier, 113 days after Khawaja made Australia's previous Test century in Dubai. Head, of course, had already been appointed vice-captain of this team led by Paine and coached by Langer. Burns, whose many omissions from the Test team over the past two years look curiouser and curiouser, was content simply to stride to Australia's first century of the summer, and his fourth in 16 matches. The stand of 308 with Head also meant that, in spite of all the capricious selection calls, Burns had been involved in three of Australia's last four stands worth more than 250.
Last resort or not, Burns has reason to believe that, at 29, he cannot be discarded so easily this time around.