“I think you always fear the worst when you can’t really move,” he told Cricinfo in Durban. “But probably the cold at night might not have helped my case.”
That early concern subsided over the next 24 hours as a scan cleared him of major damage and he made a gradual return to action over the weekend, firstly in the nets and then with 32 on the second day of the warm-up match.
“I’d been thrust into this international environment with some of my heroes,” Renshaw said. “And I didn’t really know how to cope with that. So just got a bit caught up in that, and that’s fine. Probably felt a lot of internal pressure there. Whereas I think now I deal with that internal pressure a lot better.
“I’d been thrust into this international environment with some of my heroes. And I didn’t really know how to cope with that”
Matt Renshaw
“I think it was that sort of the wow factor. Out of nowhere I had scored a hundred pretty quickly. News headlines were up and about and I was reading them all. And then you go to India, you have some success over there, you keep riding the high.
“Then Bangladesh, I felt like it was alright. At the back end, I missed out on a pretty good wicket. Came home and the Ashes was always a pinnacle for me. Growing up in England, moving to Australia, the Ashes is always something; Boxing Day, any Ashes Test, you’re always wanting to watch that or play that.
“So I put a massive bit of pressure on myself out of nowhere. Unfortunately, kept reading every article. After every finish to a Shield game I’d just be on my phone reading, he’s missed out or he scored runs, or whatever.
“I just got too caught up in that. Every time I was batting, I was just stressing about how many runs I was going to make. And, yeah, got myself into a real, real hole that was tough to get out of.”
But then Renshaw surged again in 2018, briefly being recalled amid the post-Cape Town carnage to play in Johannesburg, and by September of that year was the fourth-highest first-class run-scorer in the world. He was set to play against Pakistan in the UAE but suffered a concussion in the warm-up match. Aaron Finch opened with Usman Khawaja, then Marcus Harris was preferred for the home series against India amid an indifferent Shield season for Renshaw. He returned to the squad against Sri Lanka in early 2019 but didn’t make the XI.
What followed was a difficult time and, in early 2020, shortly before the pandemic, Renshaw was dropped by Queensland after a run of one half-century in 31 first-class innings.
“I was feeling so good during that 2018 year,” he said. “I broke my finger while [at Somerset] but came back and got myself really fit when JL [Justin Langer] took over. Unfortunately, that concussion probably cost me a few Test matches. Whether that was the best thing for me at the time, we’ll never know.
“But I felt like at that time I was sort of really hitting my straps. That created myself a big hole until probably when I got dropped from the Queensland team. It was a really big part of my life where I was just like, well, if I can’t get picked when I’m [one of the] leading run-scorers in the world in first-class cricket, then when can I get picked?
“I think that probably pushed me back for a long time and I worked out why I want to play cricket. Asked myself some really honest [questions] about what I wanted to do and all that sort of thing. It always came back to that love of the game of wanting to play the game, rather than [it being] the job.”
When the 2020-21 Shield season began in its Adelaide Covid bubble, Renshaw was back in the Queensland side but in a new role at No. 5. In the third game of the season he made an unbeaten 168 against South Australia. “It had been a really long time between hundreds,” he said. “It was sort of like a relief that I could it again.”
Over the next 18 months he worked his way back up to No. 3, firstly with Queensland, then Australia A and latterly Somerset before his county returned him to the top of the early during the 2022 English season. Since then, he has been exclusively an opener again except, somewhat ironically, when he made those Test appearances in 2023.
At the start of last summer, Weatherald’s previous season had put him in pole position for the Ashes so Renshaw had to continue to bide his time. In what may have been considered an unexpected twist, Renshaw first found his international recalls coming with debuts in both ODIs and T20Is which have suddenly made him a three-format player. Plans for franchise stints in the PSL and MLC were quickly shelved as his winter filled up.
“It’s been a lot busier than I thought it would be,” he said. “It’s been a crazy year.”
The cricketing rebirth has come alongside a personal life of changing priorities after Renshaw got married during Covid and then had children. He believes all the factors added together have given him the balance he needs for the next phase of his career, however it ends up playing out.
“I think it’s hard for people to hear sometimes, a cricketer saying it’s not the most important thing when they’re playing cricket,” he said. “But I look back at a big moment for me last year during the One-Day Cup. I got out, I was filthy, I was fuming, I’d missed a straight one and I was just like getting really angry.
“And then I just hear my daughter started shouting my name and I looked over and she was running over. She didn’t care that I got out. She didn’t care that I didn’t get any runs. She just wanted to have a bit of a play.”
A different perspective has helped Renshaw get back to Test cricket. Now it’s about staying there.
Andrew McGlashan is a deputy editor at Cricinfo