Professional sports teams are naturally made up of individuals of all different kinds: the quiet, the eccentric, the intense, the laid-back and so on. The diversity is healthy; homogeneity would make life on tour and in the dressing room quite a bore and could rob a side of its edge.
Which brings us to Glenn Maxwell, who has just responded to his omission from the Test side by thumping the biggest score by a batsman in the Sheffield Shield in the past five years.
Maxwell is an often polarising personality within the Australian team, someone who doesn't always rub people the right way. Enormously gifted, he does things his own way and his relationships with some others in the Australian side and hierarchy have as a consequence been strained at times.
A complex character who is great mates in particular with Australian limited-overs opener Aaron Finch, Maxwell can also be brilliant company. This column has certainly always found him only friendly, honest and engaging.
Yet there has been a suspicion in the lead-up to the Ashes that he would have to do more than others to retain his spot in the line-up against England. Selectors will never admit it, but how a player gels with the team, which spends many months a year on the road, would appear to be at least one consideration when the panel sits down to pick a side.
Michael Clarke said as much on Channel 9 when talking about the recall of Shaun Marsh, a very popular figure inside the Australian set-up.
"There is something about him," Clarke said. "As a captain, you want him in your team. He is a wonderful team man. I'd imagine that's played a big part in why Steve Smith wants him in this team."
On the flipside, Matthew Wade lost his Test spot at the Gabba to a player who had been behind him in the pecking order at Tasmania. He couldn't buy a run in the Shield before the Test squad was chosen but can also be a prickly type.
Clarke, in summarising the Marsh selection before the 34-year-old's gritty half-century came to an end on Saturday, added: "Don't get me wrong, you've got to score runs."
Marsh did that in the first three Shield rounds, although not any more emphatically than several other potential candidates including Maxwell, an incumbent.
Marsh, in fairness, did exactly what was asked of him by providing crucial support for Smith's rescue act at the Gabba and his place in the XI won't be question in the immediate future.
With 278 for Victoria at North Sydney Oval, though, Maxwell has made a case impossible to ignore, no matter what issues there have been in the past. Briefly in Brisbane with the Australians as injury cover for Marsh, national selector Trevor Hohns told him to go away and score centuries and he's promptly done that with what he described as an "innings of substance". The selectors talk about bashing down the door.
"I spoke to 'Cracker' [Hohns] briefly after the warm-up, obviously when the team had been announced," Maxwell told ABC radio. "He wanted me to go back and make hundreds. That was pretty simple. I said, 'I've been trying ... it's not like I've been trying to get out for 60.' There is never too much of a complicated chat. They're not talking about technique changes or anything like that. It's just 'go pile on some runs', like they tell every other batter."
The immediate reaction of Maxwell to his dumping for the Ashes was instructive of his desire to get back. He's not only doing but saying all the right things.
"I was obviously disappointed," he said. "I suppose, like a lot of guys, especially the guys that played the last Test, I'm sure they would have all been disappointed not to be picked. But you can understand the guys that have been picked and all you can do is wish them well.
"I hope I play some part at some stage, but that's if someone is out of nick and gets injured ... you don't wish that on anyone."
Coming clean
Ricky Ponting and his former teammates have lifted the lid on a secretive episode from the 2005 tour of England that has barely been discussed since. In the new documentary, Forged in Fire: Cricket's Greatest Rivalry, which premiered in Brisbane on Saturday night, Ponting and co detail the team's late-night excursion to an empty England change room at Lord's to sing their team song after victory in the first Test.
They were led into opposition territory by Justin Langer, then the team song leader, but later had regrets about it, believing their messing with the natural order of things had conspired against Australia, which went on to lose that famous series and Lord's Test matches on the following two tours, in 2009 and 2013.
"Justin Langer was in charge ... he took us down into the England change rooms to sing the song, albeit after the team had gone, thankfully - there would have been fisticuffs," Adam Gilchrist told BT Sport. "But bit of a bad omen that."
Ponting says in the doco: "Looking back now, I wish we hadn't had as many beers as we had before we went down there. I'm not sure that the English know that we actually did that, they might not, to this day."
England's captain in 2005, Michael Vaughan, was also interviewed.
"There's a karma in sport, isn't there," he said.
"They probably look back and think that 'karma has bitten us on the arse here'."
