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Jake Weatherald and Justin Galeotti travelled separately on the short journey from the coffee shop to the nets for their scheduled hit. They trained as usual and with Galeotti oblivious to the fact Weatherald had just fielded a life-altering phone call from Australia’s chair of selectors, George Bailey, telling him his baggy green dream had almost arrived. The uncapped Weatherald was in the 15-player Ashes squad for the first Test.
“It lasted about two minutes,” Weatherald says about the call with Bailey. “I didn’t want to bring it up [with Galeotti] because I felt like it would distract from the net session. I didn’t want to make it all about me. We’d have been talking about it the whole time and not training.”
Surely the 31-year-old told his housemate straight afterwards? “No. He found out through the media so was pretty frustrated,” Weatherald says. He did at least communicate with his wife – “if she’d have found out through the media, she’d have murdered me” – and mum.
With David Warner’s vacated spot still unfilled despite his last Test being 22 months ago, a light breeze should see Weatherald open the batting against England in the Perth Test starting on 21 November.
Since the start of the 2024-25 summer, Weatherald has scored 1,391 runs at an average of 53.5, including 183 for Australia A against Sri Lanka A in July. Weatherald is, in runs terms, the standout candidate. However, such a low-key reaction might seem odd – until his path to Test cricket is considered.
Growing up in Darwin, Weatherald had talent but lacked drive. “When you come from a very small place at the top of Australia, you don’t really have the same understanding and core concept of hard work,” he says. “There was no pressure, no one pushing you. There wasn’t a pool of elite cricketers around. [I was] just a big fish in a small pond.”
Weatherald moved to Adelaide at the age of 15 and says he “probably got caught out. I realised that I was so lazy and very unorganised.” He had to change and did so.
Then there is Weatherald’s insistence on training rather than celebrating his maiden Test call-up. Obsession. The word peppers his conversation with Guardian Australia.
Twice since the pandemic, Weatherald has taken time away from cricket to protect his mental health. He was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder and, initially, “didn’t understand it and gave into it too much. It’s been a blessing at some stages and an absolute curse at others.”
The latter times led to some lengthy “depressive based episodes.” He could not fathom why the things he previously enjoyed – training, fishing, spending time with his wife, playing the guitar – no longer brought him solace.
“For some reason I had no joy in them, no interest at all,” Weatherald says. “You spend hours and hours in bed. You don’t want to get up or sit in the sun or see any light. Your thoughts are just nowhere. You think about the worst. This constant negative bias of everything comes in your mind. I didn’t understand the decisions I was making, and my self-loathing continued through my actions.”
Weatherald’s self-care became non-existent. His diet was poor, and he stopped training. “I just saw it as an absolute task,” he says. “I was in the throes of playing professional cricket, something I’d dreamt of my whole life and all I could think about was lying in bed.”
Escape came thanks to his wife. “I lost a lot of respect for myself, but I respected her greatly,” Weatherald says. “When she said, ‘you need to sort yourself out because this is terrible,’ I got back on it. I needed to get help so that I could be the partner I wanted to be for her.”
Weatherald sought, with the South Australian Cricket Association’s help, the care he needed and realised he had been “compounding” his own issues. “It took me a while to understand that, while my thoughts will come for the rest of my life, my actions and what I decide to do about them are driven by me. It’s probably why it’s taken me a while to get where I am now in my cricket.”
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There are still bad days. But that is where his new-found knowledge kicks in. “How I act upon my thoughts has a bigger impact than my actual thoughts themselves,” he says. So, he pushes himself to get up, to socialise, to train. His wife calls him out when he doesn’t, and he has the humility to listen.
“That correlated with my cricket as well,” Weatherald says. “I can go, ‘what would a person who’s performing do? How would he act when he walked out to the middle?’ Sometimes you’ve got to fake it ‘til you make it.”
Ahead of the 2023-24 season, Weatherald left South Australia for Tasmania having scored 3,837 Sheffield Shield career runs at 34.25. An early net session in Hobart was Weatherald’s Eureka moment, so much so that he still watches the footage at times now. “I sit there and think, ‘oh my God, this was the moment I just committed’,” he says. “It’s strange. It took me until I was 28 to realise that maybe mastery is finding something you just try to nail, and not be too concerned with being perfect.”
Despite having found his way, Weatherald played the opening Shield game of the summer and was then left out for the rest of the season. He had not previously been dropped in red-ball cricket.
“Maybe it was a good moment for me to reflect,” he says. “I’d been a very chop and change cricketer, constantly looking for the next bright new thing to try. Now I was thinking, ‘if I get an opportunity to play in this team again, I want to be un-droppable.’ I wanted to come in and be the best player on that team and have a method that I back every time.”
That winter, having remained on the sidelines despite scoring heavily in the Big Bash and in Second XI cricket, Weatherald almost joined Victoria to play under his friend and mentor Chris Rogers. Tasmania convinced him to stay and Weatherald ended the 2024-25 Sheffield Shield season as the top scorer with 906 runs at 50.33.
His strike rate swelled to 68.27 – second only to Alex Carey among those to reach 500 runs that summer. A conscious decision to score more quickly? “No, definitely, not,” he says. “It’s just the way I flow sometimes. I’m lucky that it’s my natural state of play. But not every innings is going to look like that.
“If I play Test cricket I might have to bat for a day and score 40. I’ve got to be adaptable. I feel as though I’ve got the skill to rein it in and bat for long periods of time without taking any perceived risks.”
