Gqeberha: Australia’s celebrations of a 214-run thrashing of South Africa in Durban stretched from the Kingsmead dressing room to dinner at the palatial Oyster Box Hotel overlooking the Umhlanga Lighthouse.
Later, some players and staff split off into pockets along the area’s Chartwell Street bar and dining strip, before a nightcap or two at the team hotel further up the hill. Gold Coast captain Noah Anderson was a guest for the week, and the AFL player flew home starry-eyed to Australia on Wednesday.
Many of those celebrations have been captured by the camera crew documenting a fourth season of The Test, the Amazon documentary series that has been revived to follow overseas assignments in South Africa, India and England over the next 12 months.
Having lived through three previous seasons, Mitchell Starc and Travis Head remain adamant that neither of them has watched a single complete episode, despite being unable to avoid glimpsing the occasional clip on social media, although they agree that some players are somewhat inclined to ham it up for the crew led by Andre “Doc” Mauger.
“There’s certainly guys that still enjoy playing up to the camera,” Starc says. “The whole watching it thing, I don’t need to watch. I’m not a great reflector anyway, but I don’t feel the need to then go watch everything back after I’ve just been through a tour or lived it as well.
“I don’t watch a lot of cricket anyway. I’m not going to go watch what tour life was like when I was on it. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s great for the sport lover, the cricket lover, getting insight into a few of our characteristics or how people perform and hold themselves in pressure situations, or what life is like on a cricket tour because it’s not all sunshine and roses.
“But personally, I don’t feel the need to watch it. And look, I love watching that sort of stuff in terms of whether it be watching QB1, and watching all the AFL inside the change rooms and how the guys go about it, or Hard Knocks or whatever, I love watching that stuff. I just have no interest in watching cricket.”
Starc recalled the first series Mauger documented, a difficult white-ball tour of England in 2018, and how the visibility of the cameras gradually receded.
“I reckon it was definitely weird the first week,” he says. “Maybe at most two weeks was a bit unusual because it was new for everyone, and the change room had been this sort of locked away, sacred place. And all of a sudden, there was a camera there all the time, or there was a GoPro set up.
“After that, I think obviously with Andre there, who was well known to a lot of us to start with, I think he had the trust of the group from the get-go, which plays a part in people sort of being comfortable with him around or a camera around, and sort of opening up a bit more.”
For Head, the series have documented his rise from a Test debutant in season one to a genuine matchwinner in season three. Now he is vice captain and a principal gauge of the team’s inner life.
“So I see them with the bits that I’m in, and then social media, seeing the bits pop up, but they do an incredible job,” Head says. “They’re out of sight. They’re unseen. They’re out of mind. And we’ve had them obviously a couple of times. So Doc was in there filming the other day, and you don’t even know he’s in the corner.
“And you use fruity language, and you’re giving each other shit. Hopefully, some of it doesn’t get through the tape – you get in trouble for what you say. But I feel like I can be as natural around him as possible and can say what I want, which means it’s good.
“Yeah, [it’s like] there’s no one in that room.”
One player getting plenty of attention early on this trip was Marnus Labuschagne, as he plays Test cricket in the country where he was born.
“I’ve been giving Marn shit for it being a bit about him and South Africa, and I think he’s trying to hijack the whole series one at the minute,” Head laughs. “He might be trying to hijack the first four or five episodes, and we just take the piss out, and that’s funny.”
Head notes that there is now some level of unofficial policing of how much some play up to the cameras.
“I’ve said a few things, looked over, and he’s there, and I didn’t realise,” he says. “And that’s the important part of it. It’s very natural. We’ve had them before, so no one’s trying too hard.
“If they do, they get shut down pretty quickly by the boys. So it’s good to have them. I think everyone loves it. I think everyone has enjoyed the doco. I think it gives a good understanding around where the team’s at.
“Like guys like Mitch Marsh, who actually excelled from it, from what people thought he was like to what he actually is like. It drew out a lot, and I think people like that.”
The four-man team on tour work long days of both capturing footage and sending it back to Australia for director Adrian Brown to start to shape it. They certainly do more than the team, which as Head says, is a major reason why the cameras keep being welcomed back – it’s easier than formal media duty.
“When it’s as easy as what it is, and we don’t do anything, one guy does all the work,” he says. “We don’t have to do anything, so that’s fun.”
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Daniel Brettig is The Age’s chief cricket writer and the author of several books on cricket.Connect via X.