Canada will commence its first-ever T20 World Cup
campaign with the 2024 competition’s opening
fixture, a Saturday, June 1 encounter against archrivals
and neighboring tournament co-hosts the United
States. One of the Canadian players who should be exciting
to watch will be the belligerent opening batter, Jamaicanborn,
Aaron Johnson.
51, 84, 109*, 0, 1, 89, 68. Those were Aaron Johnson’s
recorded scores for his seven crease appearances as
Canada’s opening batter during the 2022 four-nation Desert
Cup 2022 T20I Championship that was played in Oman from
November 14-21. Johnson’s seven-innings aggregate for the
tournament was an impressive 402 runs. His average at 67.00
was simply staggering in terms of T20I norms.
Not surprisingly, his performances with the bat deservedly
earned Johnson Player Of The Tournament honors after the
seven-day Championships. What was even more impressive
about Johnson’s performance was that his participation in
Desert Cup 2022 was his very first overseas tour in Canadian
colors. He’d made his Canadian international debut in a
friendly match against Nepal that was played
in Toronto earlier that summer, but Desert
Cup 2022 was his first-ever participation in a
full tournament outside of Canada.
With Navi Dhaliwal, the Canadian team’s
usual captain and opening batsman having
made himself unavailable for the Oman
Tour, it was left to Johnson to shoulder the
responsibility of getting Canada’s T20I innings
off of to a flying start. And shoulder it he did in
a breathtakingly aggressive manner that few
might have imagined possible!
When at the crease and firing at his very
best, Johnson evokes memories of that most
successful of all West Indies opening batsmen
Gordon Cuthbert Greenidge. Very many of
Johnson’s shots are indeed reminiscent of
those Greenidge himself played during his
illustrious career as an opening batsman for
the West Indies, Barbados, and England’s
Hampshire County.
A career that produced 7,558 runs in Tests, 5,134
in ODIs, and 37,354 in First Class matches during its
tenure which began in the early 70s and lasted until
his official 1991 retirement. One of Greenidge’s
trademark shots, for which he became internationally
famous, was a one-leg pull to the midwicket
boundary for four, oftentimes even six.
Johnson now plays that exact shot to the somewhat
greater effect of often resulting in a six over the
midwicket or backward square boundary rather than
merely a four. Furthermore, he does so with absolute
disdain, not even bothering to look to check on
the eventual result of the shot. Such is his supreme
confidence in both its timing and placement.
26 sixes and 43 fours. Those were the staggeringly
unbelievable numbers for Johnson’s boundaries
tally during the Oman Tour, which also included his
participation in the last two of the three ODI matches
Canada played against their Oman hosts.
With his consistency and devastating belligerence,
Aaron Johnson has added a new
dimension to Canada’s batting and
importantly so at the very start of the
innings. In Oman, Johnson had three different
fellow team members as his opening
partner. Srimantha Wijeyeratne, Matthew
Spoors, and Pargat Singh were all tried
at various times by the Canadian team
management. It didn’t seem to have any
effect on Johnson as to who his opening
batting partner was at the other end. He
just went about his business,
scoring runs with admirable
consistency and at a rate that
was at times breathtaking.
Born March 16, 1991 in
Jamaica Aaron Johnson
has to date played 12 T20I
matches for his adopted
homeland Canada. 589
runs at an overly impressive
average of 58.90, inclusive
of 2 centuries and four half-centuries
while being scored
at a staggering 172.2 strike
rate are definitely statistics
worth noting. Exciting to
watch during T20 World Cup
2024? Aaron Johnson certainly
should be!