Michael Neser has just signed for Glamorgan for the 2021 season – you may have heard his name, but who is he? What’s his style of cricket? Learn more about Glamorgan’s newest recruit here…
Neser is similar to Glamorgan’s other overseas signing, Marnus Labuschagne, in that he was born in South Africa before moving to Australia when he was only 10, and like Marnus, will arrive in Cardiff having been knocking on the doors of the selectors for some time.
In the three seasons before this one, Neser had taken 105 Shield wickets for Queensland at 20.79, and was named Queensland’s player of the season for 2019/20, for the third time in his career. He also named as their Sheffield Shield Player of the Year, and the Players’ Player, demonstrating his popularity in the dressing room.
Somehow, Neser has played just two ODIs, both in Australia’s difficult 2018 ODI tour of England and Wales. Neser is a regular in Australian Test match squads, and was on the 2019 Ashes tour, but the combination of Hazlewood, Cummins, Lyon and Starc/Pattinson/Siddle has proved hard into in recent years, with the 30-year-old reckoning he’s been 12th man 10 times now.
Did you know?
Michael Neser grew up playing under the same coaches and mentors as Callum Taylor at The Southport School!
The Queenslander recently took 5/32 and scored 121 in his most recent Sheffield Shield match against Tasmania in Adelaide, becoming the first player since Mitchell Johnson in November 2010 to score a century and take a five-for in the same Shield match (and was shortly followed by Ashton Agar).
Coincidentally, the man who opened the bowling in that match, and was Johnson’s final partner in his rapid century, was Glamorgan’s bowling talisman Michael Hogan.
Adam Collins, writing for The Cricket Paper in 2019, described Neser as being one of the few bowlers to have ‘the world’s best batsman… under his thumb’, such was the quality that Neser was bowling with in the nets on the Ashes tour last year. Smith was said to be ‘constantly heard talking to himself, wondering ‘how did he do that?’'. (Read more here – subscription required)
Neser had originally intended to play the 2020 season at The Oval after he signed for Surrey, but will now make his maiden County Championship appearance with the Daffodil on his chest, and we can’t wait to see him in action at Sophia Gardens in 2021…
We're excited to watch Michael Neser at Sophia Gardens in 2021, and you should be too!
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