Phillip Hughes, only 20, is playing his fifth Test match under pressure. Yesterday his average dropped from 64 to 56 when he became the first of several Australians to struggle in the damp atmosphere. If it had gone from 6.4 to 5.6 there might have been some panic in the visiting dressing room, but his colleagues had other things to worry about.

Hughes certainly has some thinking to do about balls lifting towards his ribs and England’s fast bowlers will keep hounding him until he sorts it out, but there was a slightly unlucky element to his dismissal yesterday, gloving a pull to the wicketkeeper down the leg side. Even after two failures in the series so far it is very early and almost certainly unwise to come to the conclusion that his quirky technique is going to prove unequal to the demands of cricket at the highest level.

He scored a century in his first Sheffield Shield (the Pura Cup as it was at the time) final and another in his second Test in South Africa, which is a bit better than Marvan Atapattu, who started his Test career by scoring five ducks — and one run — in his first six Test innings but ended it with 5,502 runs from 90 Tests for Sri Lanka.

Australia’s champion players, both before and after Don Bradman, tend to emerge early and last the course. There are 64 players in the country’s long cricketing history who have been picked to play in a Test only once, rather more than one might imagine, but these days it is highly unusual for them to back a young player without him being exceptionally good. It was different in the days of Dr Roy Park, who was rewarded for his medical services to the team with a Test cap in 1920. His wife bent down to pick up her knitting as he faced his first ball in the international arena and thereby missed his entire Test career.

Hughes proved to the selectors that he had the necessary “bottle” when he made 93 out of 172 and 108 out of 173 in a Shield match on a tricky pitch in Hobart last winter. His brilliant but unorthodox batting for Middlesex this season on generally friendlier pitches — he marked his first match here with a hundred at Lord’s — seemed to confirm as much.

Angus Fraser, the Middlesex managing director of cricket, was at once surprised by his technique, delighted by his natural ability and impressed by his social maturity. Like most Aussie country boys he seems relaxed in whatever circumstances life throws at him.

The fascinating question remains of whether or not he can continue to play from a closed position, with his leading shoulder and front foot angled towards mid-off; or to back away from the line of off-stump balls. He does so not because of any reluctance to get into line but in order to give himself the room to cut, carve and drive through the off side. Bradman did the same in 1932-33 to counter Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, but that was a special response to an exceptional challenge, not the basis of his technique.

It is part of the point of Test cricket that what batsmen can get away with in Twenty20 will not do for long when the games is played on a broader canvas. Kevin Pietersen’s attempt to sweep a wide ball from Nathan Hauritz in Cardiff would have brought him at least a single in a one-day match but there was a short leg to catch him in a Test.

As Trevor Bailey used to say, good batsmen score runs, good bowlers take wickets. The basics of good batting, especially footwork, remain essential for Test cricket, although definitions of orthodoxy change.

Look at early moving pictures of W. G. Grace batting in the nets and you see a portly, bearded figure (long past his prime) working the ball into the leg side with what seems to be a staccato break of the wrists. Ranji used to move across his stumps and flick the ball away to fine leg to the outrage of opposing fast bowlers. They must have thought that they could knock out his middle and leg stumps with yorkers but genius will have its way.

In more recent times one could certainly not call Sanath Jayasuriya a classical, orthodox batsman. He, too, liked to stay inside the line and carve, but when bowlers aimed at his body he would go the other way and flick them over square leg instead. He made a few short of 7,000 runs in Test cricket.

When Simon Katich fell to a brilliant catch by Stuart Broad off the waspish Graham Onions on Friday Australia had their two most purely orthodox players at the helm. Mike Hussey and Michael Clarke play straight from the textbook, much to the pleasure, no doubt, of the watching Geoff Boycott, who practised exactly what he now preaches on questions of technique.

Their alliance was brief, however, and, like Hughes, the chances are that their methods will be given another stern examination by England’s fast bowlers today.