Peter Roebuck says in the Sydney Morning Herald Phillip Hughes, the 20-year-old New South Wales opener, has come of age and batted his way into Australia’s Test team.

From the moment he took guard on a slow pitch in sunblessed Newcastle, the compact left-hander displayed the combination of tenacity and skill required to open the innings for his country. Throughout, the country boy came across as a well-grounded youngster with a distinctive game and a fondness for scoring runs.

Nothing upset him, not catching a bus from Canberra the previous evening and arriving in the dead of night, not the watching eyes of a national selector, not the casting of his opening partner as a rival, not the imminent fulfilling of his dream and certainly not a persistent attack thwarted by a sleepy surface.

The squad for South Africa will be decided on Wednesday and the Herald Sun’s Ron Reed hopes Andrew Symonds isn’t in it.

Symonds is a bad look for cricket these days, and while image is not necessarily a crucial asset in sport, it certainly helps to have a good one rather than a bad one.

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