Revitalised Ed Cowan sheds batting shackles

Strike rate: Ed Cowan is going on the attack with the bat. Photo: Philip Gostelow

Being a resolute opener got Ed Cowan into the Test team - but by the end of last season it had sapped almost all the enjoyment he had savoured from playing the game over the past decade.

The NSW-born Tasmanian never relished the constant public depictions of him as the dour opener who served as the yang to David Warner's yin, because he felt it sold him short as a batsman. As he digested the 2013-14 season, however, he conceded it was warranted. His record of 662 runs at 38.94 was solid but his strike rate of 42.88 of was the third lowest of the Sheffield Shield's top 30 run-scorers, in front of only Cameron Bancroft and Scott Henry.

Simply, batting "had become a bit of a grind - making runs was hard work".

"I think I'd faced 300 more balls than I had in any other shield season, but I ended up with 300 fewer runs than my best year. That to me says I just wasn't scoring, I was surviving," he said.

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Cowan is not an inherently defensive player; it is just that he has been ever since he was on the radar of Australian selectors. When the now 32-year-old moved from NSW to Tasmania five and a half years ago it brought a change in approach "came about from batting on a pretty green Bellerive wicket where driving was really out of the question, unless you enjoy doing crosswords".

"I sort of manufactured a technique to score runs at home that involved cutting and pulling and locking into a front-foot defence. I held my bat up high so I could drop my bat into the line of the ball and play a perfect forward defence, but I couldn't drive the ball, let alone swing at the ball."

Cowan's response, devised while he was simultaneously electing whether to stay in Hobart or return to Sydney to better suit his family and also creating his fledgling Tripod Coffee business in what little spare time he had, was to attempt to turn back the clock a decade in terms of his batting philosophy, albeit complemented by "the mental skills of 10 years of first-class cricket".

"My technique had become a bit of a caricature of what it was reputed to be ... but I've flipped that on its head, I've changed my thinking. Now, rather than 'how is this bowler going to get me out?' it's 'how am I going to attack him?' That's come about through not only through a shift in thinking but having the mechanics to do that," he said.

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Revitalised Ed Cowan sheds batting shackles