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He felt something click in the Sheffield Shield final and hopes to build on that this season
He admitted considering whether it was the right time take over the Sheffield Shield captaincy from Peter Nevill amid looking for a batting revival but having had a taste of the role at the end of last season it he believes having other areas of responsibility will be an advantage.
“I guess being able to do it last year doing for the one-day final and the last couple of Shield games was good for me to see how I reacted and how I thought with it,” he said. “To be honest with you, half of my battle with my batting is getting myself out of my own head, so the captaincy does that naturally because you can’t just think about yourself you have to think about the rest of the team.
“I certainly felt that when I was batting last year as captain that it allowed me to kind of see the bigger picture. But it certainly was something that I thought about because at the end of the day, even now that I am captain, first and foremost I’m a batter, certainly when we are batting it’s no longer Kurtis the captain I have to perform as a batter.
“It’s something that I probably won’t really know the answer to until we’re in the depths of the season, but last year I felt really comfortable, it didn’t feel like it hindered my batting at all. It felt if anything like it helped. So looking forward to hopefully seeing that come through again this year.”
“I feel like I’d got to a place that I was satisfied with before the Shield final and it wasn’t until before the final that I’d looked back on my lead up, my Test series I played, and the Australia A game. I watched some footage and just tried to focus on one or two of the basic things that I did well. Really they were just being still a point of release and looking to get forward.
“I had a really good chat with Chandika, just spoke about simplifying things as much as we can. I only scored 40-odd in that Shield final but in terms of just the way I felt, it felt like I was back to my normal self, which was nice in a way but also a bit disappointing that it took me the whole season to work that out.
“I think that was just I was just lacking confidence last year coming off coming off the injury the year before, there was probably an extra layer of thought in my head that probably didn’t need to be there. It was a challenging year for everyone. It’s been nice to take a step back and take learnings out of it.”
Andrew McGlashan is a deputy editor at ESPNcricinfo