Meet Australia's deadly-accurate 'hired assassin'

Scott Boland's nickname goes back well before requests for a statue to be erected in his honour in Melbourne gathered pace.

"He was built a little bit like the shape of a barrel," says Nick Jewell, Boland's coach at Frankston-Peninsula Cricket Club on the outskirts of Melbourne.

"He had a lot of talent but was very young and very raw - nowhere near professional enough in the way he presented himself."

18 years on, Boland, who has gone by 'Barrel' ever since those teenage days, was always expected to play a key part in the upcoming Ashes series. Injuries to Australia team-mates Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood have only pushed him further to the fore.

The back-up bowler with the best average since 1914, kept on the sidelines by three all-time greats, is now a guaranteed starter.

He nearly missed the start line altogether.

Boland weighed around 115kg when arriving at Frankston before Jewell, who was still playing state cricket for Victoria at the time, set his player a challenge: lose 5kg over the next two months and he'd be picked in the first XI.

"Not long after we had that deal, I walked past his car and had a look in," Jewell says.

"There were still some KFC and McDonalds wrappers. I reminded him not very subtly about our deal.

"He swore to me they were old ones and he hadn't cleaned his car."

Boland fulfilled his part of the bargain. His journey to cricket's summit is a throwback – a far cry from academy pathways and state under-age teams.

"His transformation over two years was hard to believe," Jewell says.

"He is almost like a hired assassin. He is so calm, cool and collected.

"You very rarely see a change in his attitude or demeanour whether it is going good or bad.

"At times you thought as a coach 'am I getting through to this bloke?' but you saw it in the changes in his game and performances."

Success in the Melbourne grade system and years of wicket-taking in the Sheffield Shield opened the door to an initial foray in white-ball cricket.

Seen as a yorker specialist for the death overs, Boland played three T20s and 14 one-day internationals in 2016, around the same time he learned of his Indigenous roots through his maternal grandfather which would take him on a tour of England with an Aboriginal XI in 2018.

It is the start to Boland's Test career that has been a statistical phenomenon, however.

Sixty-two wickets at an average of 16.53. At home those wickets cost just 12.63 runs.

No Australian to have taken as many as him – not Shane Warne, nor Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc or Josh Hazlewood - can better that record in the game's history.

"Warney used to talk about developing a new ball every year," says his state coach Chris Rogers, the former Australia opener.

"It is almost like Scotty has figured out one more thing every year and just keeps adding to his weaponry and his skill."

He adds: "Bowling yorkers and delivering them under pressure was a skillset he owned for a while.

"The white-ball game has changed though and it is probably more about your change-ups and sequencing of different deliveries through an over and so forth.

"From that point of view he has then switched over to Test cricket."

After 14 Tests, Boland stands as the most accurate pace bowler in the database of analysts CricViz.

He may not hoop the ball or deliver it at frightening speeds but, helped by the pace and bounce of Australian pitches and a new Kookaburra ball that seams, he has made a habit of finding enough movement to take a batter's edge or beat their defence.

"When we do our measuring in terms of lines and lengths he is always at the top of our lists," Rogers says.

"Every time he gets the ball he is almost exactly the same."

While a hat-trick against West Indies earlier this year added to the list of achievements, it is six scalps on debut that have gone down in Australian sporting legend.

Haseeb Hameed's thin snick, Jack Leach bowled shouldering arms, Jonny Bairstow pinned lbw, Joe Root's edged drive, Mark Wood taken in the follow-through and Ollie Robinson snaffled at third slip.

Six for seven at The G.

"We didn't know an awful lot about him," Leach recalls.

"He seemed to be moving the ball just the perfect amount both ways and was finding the edge.

"I remember how relentless it was, him hitting his length hard.

"It wasn't that it was fast but how hard he hit the pitch and that he made the ball talk."

Boland has described that day as "life-changing". In a spell of 24 deliveries, an introvert became a cult hero.

"He found it challenging," Rogers says.

"A guy that has gone through his whole career where he has had to earn everything and chip away at it to have a day like that where everything comes together.

"He is a bit reclusive in some respects but that is the charm of it as well."

Jewell recognises those traits from the Adrian Butler Oval.

"Because he came into the system a long way back and didn't go through the pathway system he probably had nothing to be overly confident or chest beating about but that is probably not the type of guy he is anyway," he says.

"You see when he gets 6-7 at the G you struggle to get a smile out of him."

Instead, consistency has been Boland's big strength. "His floor is his ceiling" is how Rogers neatly describes it.

"It is just the same performances day in day out," he adds.

But in the 2023 Ashes series, with less bounce and seam movement on offer in England, that repeatability became a weakness.

Ben Stokes' Bazballers knew where the ball would be pitched and attacked.

The result was two wickets in two appearances. He was not seen again after England won the third Test in Leeds.

"He will have thought to himself what could he do better," Rogers says.

"It might not have been anything technical, more how did he react in the moment and how are his mental skills through that.

"He might have been a bit surprised it happened. He is going into this series with his eyes wide open."

Domestically this season Boland has been near his relentless best.

He has taken 14 wickets in three matches at an average back in the mid-teens and, as Rogers puts it, provided a match-winning five-wicket haul "not many in the world could do" on a final-day pitch against New South Wales.

"He is tapering nicely to the first Test," Rogers says.

"When the news came through about Pat Cummins it was almost like 'OK I have got to be cherry ripe'."

Those early days are long gone. Now, The Barrel waits for England once again.