A Konstas reminder of another whiz kid of Oz

The Greek name 'Konstas' is derived from 'Constantine', which means 'steadfast' or 'constant', the name supposedly gifting its bearer the virtue of resilience. On our first acquaintance with Sam Konstas on Thursday morning, constancy and steadiness were not the qualities that came to mind. At the MCG, Konstas was the dashing buccaneer, radiating swag that perhaps only youth - and Virender Sehwag - can muster up on a glorious summer Melbourne day.

But the person whom the young man in the middle reminded me of was a fellow Australian whom I had never seen play. I have only read descriptions about his batting, and have been bewitched by one iconic photograph - arguably cricket's most famous photo - showing his legs wide apart, front foot raised above the ground like a padded-up Nataraj, hands gripping the extreme end of the thin bat in full pendulum/baseball upswing: Victor Trumper.

After the first couple of overs of Jaspreet Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj keeping a lid on Konstas - and Usman Khawaja at the other end - you could hear a wire trip inside the 19-year-old debutant. It initially looked like yet another young buck throwing caution to the wind, and the elders on the field and commentators' box all ready to tut-tut and give him a lesson against impertinence, intemperance, and impatience.

But as he sprinkled his shots -- at first hesitatingly, and then with his gloves getting warm around the handle of his bat - he became the boy warrior in Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky' going, 'One, two! One, two! And through and through/ The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!'

TV close-ups showed him under the helmet muttering some Oz wizard's incantation as he faced the 'best bowler in the world'. With his Billy Idol curl of the lip - his not-stiff-at-all upper lip holding a high school pencil moustache as if to give the man-boy the facial right to play with men - he went for strangely calibrated wild shots. Missing twice in his attempts to reverse scoop Bumrah's 135+/- kmph projectiles, it seemed that he was bent on blundering his way out of the record books, as if only to impress some girl back home.

But then, in the 7th over, he Jabberwocks Bumrah, and how. First ball, a scoop shot over the keeper to the boundary. Second ball - that reverse scoop, taking the yorker as if it's pizza dough to be hurled into the air and then into the oven. The ball goes over the ropes over deep third man like a Napoleonic artillery shell. The fifth delivery is also reverse scooped as if an icecream parlour is being vandalised, falling just short of the boundary.

This is not 'T20 in a Test' jhaadu play. It's ripping up multiple orthodoxies: that Test cricket needs to be played in a certain way; that youth must be tempered with experience; that the Boxing Day Test has far too much at stake to forego 'technique'....

What follows is scooping, ramping, reversing, charging, pulling, square driving all over the park, with the fielding side looking not just dumbfounded by Konstas' strokeplay, but also by his very attitude that is paradoxically calibrated and yet off the charts.

Like Trumper, Konstas' bat also doesn't touch the ground each time he faces the incoming delivery. Like the fellow New South Wales legend, this boy-man also brings chaos to the strategic table. Like Trumper, in his iconic 'Jumping Out' photograph taken by George Beldam around 1905, MSG's opening batsman on Thursday, too, is always keen to meet the ball 'halfway'. Perhaps it's no coincidence that Kogarah, a Sydney suburb where Konstas was born in 2005, is a 20-minute drive away from Darlinghurst, where Trumper was born in 1877.

Gideon Haigh in Stroke of Genius, his splendid book on Victor Trumper, quotes Neville Cardus about the 'rightness or otherwise' of cricketers' names: 'Had Trumper been named Obadiah he could scarcely have scored a century for Australia against England before lunch.' I reckon that over time, the cricketer by the name of Konstas will develop to become a (by)word for steady nonconformism, measured mayhem.