Amid the swirl of changes ahead of the Adelaide Test, with four debutants and six new selections roiling the baggy green XI, the origins of the 25-year-old Handscomb are not a pressing issue. But the question remains: how is it that Victoria, self-styled sporting hotbed of the nation, so infrequently produces prolific international batsmen?

The proof is in the record. Unless you’re prepared to count Matthew Elliott’s 21 Tests around the turn of the millennium, you have to go back to Dean Jones to find a run-scoring fixture from Victoria in the Australian side (some would point to Melbourne-born Marcus North, who played his state cricket for WA).

May reasons have been offered for this curious absence: a historic selection bias toward NSW, the largely anecdotal claim that the AFL seduces all the best potential cricketers. Whatever the case, Victoria has been underrepresented at the crease. It’s only look more pronounced over the last couple of years as the Vics have twice won the Sheffield Shield.

Enter Handscomb, who made the most definitive claim during this Test team spill with an impressive double-century in the recent Shield round. This is hardly out-of-nowhere though – he’s been a consistent presence in Australia A sides, and was a player likely to get a chance at some point.

“The thing is, especially as a batsman, you can make one wrong decision, play one false shot, and that’s your innings,” Handscomb said in an interview with Inside Sport.

“And that might be your only innings, so you don’t get to showcase what you can do. But on the flipside, you can get dropped early on and then you can go on to make a hundred, and everyone forgets you were dropped.

“Batting’s quite a tough one. It’s definitely something where you go out and try to score as many runs as you can. But you know that selection is not in your hands. If you get picked at the next level, well, happy days.”

Handscomb has an interesting background – he has two English parents who met in Australia, and he’s yet another Aussie Test player who might have declared for our old rivals. He also was a top-class tennis junior, running around those circles at the same time Bernard Tomic did.

He gave up tennis because chasing that circuit would have been more expensive. Instead, he turned his classy stroke-play skills to cricket, honing a batting style that has put him in line for a Test debut. “I was never a big kid growing up,” he says. “I made up for it a bit in how I played, I was a serve-volleyer. I couldn’t hit winners from the back of the court.

“Trying to hit sixes and fours just wasn’t my game. I had to learn had to hit it through the field or manipulate it for singles. I had that passion since I was a kid for moving the ball around rather than the crash and bash.”