At the Close of Play

I WAS BACK ON the mainland in February 1992 to represent the Cricket Academy in one-day games against the South African and Indian teams preparing for the 1992 World Cup which was held in Australia and New Zealand, and this was when I came across a batsman I would get to know well over the next 20 years.

We’d spent a morning practising at the Adelaide Oval and were supposed to go back home for lunch but I asked for permission to stay. I wanted to see this Sachin Tendulkar who everyone was talking about, and I took up a position behind the nets while he had a bat. It’s fair to say I was going to watch him bat for a long time to come, but that day I was studying his technique, trying to see what it was about him.

And then I was named in a 13-man Academy team that toured South Africa in March.

My head, as you can imagine, was spinning. One day I was walking out to bat for Mowbray, then I was being fitted for junior Tasmanian representative teams, flying to the Academy, flying back for more and then I was being fitted for an Australian team uniform. It might have been only the Under-19s but I was an Australian cricketer. Most of the side gathered at Sydney airport; by now I was getting used to all this flying business. We met up with the Western Australian players in Perth and then were met by officials from the United Cricket Board of South Africa in Johannesburg before jumping on the team bus emblazoned with our team name to go to our first team hotel. I didn’t want the experience to end in a hurry and looking back I guess it didn’t for a long time to come. Most of my adult life has been taken up by such journeys.

On that journey from the airport to our flash hotel, I saw squalor, I saw suburbia and then I saw a city that didn’t look too different at first glance from the big cities back home. I’m sure there was much to discover if I ventured out from our hotel, but we’d been told to be very careful if we did go out — these were tense times in Johannesburg — which only reinforced something I’d already decided: I’d stick with the group whenever possible and at other times stay close to home base as often as I could. And to think people thought Rocherlea was hard core …

In retrospect, it seems a bit amazing that the Australian Cricket Board sent a youth team to South Africa at such a critical time in that nation’s history. The country was still governed by a white administration, and no official senior team had gone there in more than 20 years. I was an uncomplicated sports-mad kid from Tassie, so almost all of the politics went over my head, but it was obvious this was a country going through a painful period of change. There was a tension about the place. I can still remember a coaching clinic in Soweto just a week before the referendum in which the white population was asked whether they supported reforms that would eventually lead to fully democratic elections. The enthusiasm, natural ball skills and hand–eye coordination of the kids in that township were special, but the referendum was what everyone was talking about. It was hard even for us not to realise how big this thing was — we’d been told that if the vote went against change, we’d be out of the country on the first available plane. I hadn’t been thinking of all those victims of apartheid; I was thinking only of myself.

Cricketers are not politicians or diplomats — hell, I was a teenager who’d left school at 15 — but as I said earlier, the game was already taking me out of my comfort zone and into extraordinary situations.

Cricket was my focus. It was what I knew; it was what I was good at. If the conversation turned away from cricket, most of the time I just listened, but I loved talking cricket or sport of any kind. On the flight to South Africa, I sat for a long time with our skipper, Adam Gilchrist, a keeper–batsman who was originally from the NSW North Coast but was now playing in Sydney — and all we did was yak about sport and play a dice-like game called ‘Pass the Pigs’ for hours and hours. Getting on the plane, I hardly knew ‘Gilly’ but by the time we landed in Jo’burg we were best mates. He already had a reputation as a special player and from our first practice session I knew that he was so much more advanced in his cricket and the way he thought about the game than I was. He also had a sense of fun that really appealed to me, and a captain’s ability to have a good time but never get himself into trouble. We’d see a lot of each other over the next two decades, and these were skills he never lost. There were a couple of others on that trip who you might have heard of too. One was a long thin farmer’s son who was living in a caravan in Sydney to advance his career. Glenn McGrath was a funny bloke even then. He reckoned the only way he could stand up in his portable home was to pop the air vent in the roof. Blocker Wilson was on that trip too and a leg-spinner, Peter McIntyre, who played a couple of Tests in the mid 1990s.

After easily winning a one-dayer at Pretoria to launch the tour, our second game was at the famous Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg, a three-day contest against the Transvaal Under-23s. In our first innings, I batted at six, and then in our second dig we collapsed to 2–4 and Gilly, our regular No. 4, was feeling crook so someone had to go in at short notice. I put my hand up and went on to bat for nearly three hours for 65. To me, volunteering to bat near the top of the order was nothing exceptional — I always wanted to open or bat at three or four, as it was where I batted in junior cricket in Tassie and it was where I was always keen to bat at Mowbray — but I sensed I earned a bit of respect from my team-mates, and from Rod, too, which set up my whole tour. I finished second on the batting averages, behind South Australia’s Darren Webber, and topped the bowling averages, too, taking three wickets for 43 with my part-time off-breaks. More important than any numbers, even though I was younger than my team-mates, I didn’t feel out of place. I was heading in the right direction.

Life as a professional cricketer sees you on the road more often than being at home, which sounds glamorous to many — but let me assure you that after doing it for almost 20 years, I’m looking forward to settling down in retirement in our new home in Melbourne.

The highlight without a doubt has always been the tours to England. There’s something very special about an Ashes tour when you can spend up to four months on the road with your team-mates. It builds a special camaraderie as you travel around the country by bus, playing at the traditional grounds of cricket and living in a culture that is similar to what we are used to at home. New Zealand is very similar as well, plus it has some amazing golf courses, so it’s always been one of my preferred touring spots.

Test cricket tours, despite the length of time away, tend to give you the best opportunity to adapt to life on the road. You can unpack a suitcase and make yourself more comfortable in your home away from home. We would stay in each Test location for at least a week, so we could settle in and create a few little home comforts. But one-day cricket was mostly the direct opposite. Always on the move, travelling from city to city as well as regional and smaller towns to play, made it much more difficult to settle down. But that’s life as an international cricketer.

A lot of international cricket is played in developing countries, so I have seen great diversity on my travels around the globe. India is the best example of this for me, where I’ve seen its grandeur, royalty and wealth but have been really touched and moved by its poverty and its underprivileged areas. Front of mind for me is the work the Mumbai Indians do with the ‘Education for All’ initiative. It’s focused on the 62 million primary school age children who drop out of school before grade eight. They are doing amazing work with these children, and I was most fortunate to see it all first-hand in 2013. Don’t get me wrong: I have been so lucky to see some of the most amazing sights, cities and wonders of the world, but it’s the diversity and social inequality that has probably left the biggest impression on me. Cricket makes a big difference in these countries and we, as international cricketers, should continue to do everything we can to visit these areas, give the people something to enjoy and aspire to and most of all, do our bit to put a smile on the faces of those less fortunate than ourselves.

ON THE PLANE HOME from South Africa, I was confident I’d never be going back to the groundsman’s job at Scotch Oakburn College. As it happened I was only going back home to leave again.

My year was pretty much mapped out: after just a couple of weeks back with Mum, Dad, Drew and Renee I’d be returning to Adelaide, first to train with the Australian Under-19 Development Squad and then to live for the rest of the year as a full-time resident at the Academy. My life was now wall-to-wall cricket, whether in the nets, playing in games, talking cricket or doing physical work and mental conditioning for cricket. I’d get a little homesick at times but never to the point where I was sitting in my room depressed about the fact I wasn’t home. Rod Marsh ran a tight ship and if anyone fell short of his high standards we paid a price, sometimes individually, often as a group. Washing cars and gym sessions that moved from eight to six in the morning were two of his favourite punishments.

One not-so-pleasant memory I have of my time in Adelaide was a job fast bowler Simon Cook and I had to do at the Adelaide Oval. In the years that followed, I never gazed at any of the glorious features of the ground, such as the cathedral that overlooks the field or the famous scoreboard or the Victor Richardson Gates, I just grimaced at the sight of the wooden benches in front of the Members’ Stand. That was because Simon and I had to change every nut and bolt in those benches. We had to remove the old ones, replace them with new ones, and then go back and retighten them all one more time, before our work was given a tick of approval. My memory is it took the best part of a year to get the job finished.

Most of the boys used to go out for a big one on Saturday nights and use Sunday to get over it, but in my first year I stayed away from most of that. In those days I was determined not to squander the chance I was given, and I remember Gilly telling me years after that South African trip that he couldn’t believe how focused I was and how hard I worked.

Inevitably, with the boys concentrating their drinking to just one night, there were some stories to be told, but I can’t recall anyone getting into serious trouble. One of the more bizarre moments concerned a room-mate of mine at the Academy, a guy who would go on to play Test cricket. This bloke used to love going out and was rarely home early on Saturday night, even though we were required to attend coaching clinics with groups of young cricketers every Sunday, starting at 8am. One Sunday morning, we couldn’t find this bloke — he wasn’t in his room, hadn’t been home, so all we could do was leave without him. We had to go across a bridge over the River Torrens on our drive from the Directors Apartments to the Adelaide Oval, and the lanes on that bridge were separated by a wide median strip. That morning, as we approached the bridge, someone spotted a body lying on the middle of that median strip, which on closer inspection proved to be my ‘roomie’, sound asleep with a big bag of Twisties tucked under his arm. After a big night, he’d realised there was no point going home, so instead he parked himself on the route he knew we’d take to the ground, in a place where he knew we couldn’t miss him. We stopped the van, picked him up and five minutes later he was coaching the kids as if nothing unusual or untoward had happened. The grog on Saturday night was part of club cricket back home, so it was hardly surprising that it became part of the culture at the Academy, too.

We were all pretty fair cricketers when we got to the Academy, so the coaches concentrated on fine-tuning our techniques and toughening us up so we’d be ready for first-class matches. One drill we had at the Academy was described as a ‘bouncer evasion session’, where we put indoor-cricket balls in a bowling machine that seemed like it was set at 100mph. Then the machine fired bouncers at us and the trick was to drop your hands and rock out of the way, or duck. I’d been brought up never to shirk a challenge and as I’ve already said I had no fear. It’s not a boast, because it takes a lot more courage to do something if you are scared than if you are not; I just simply wasn’t worried about getting hit. When it came to my turn I would stand there and pick the balls off, hooking and pulling. I’m pretty sure I didn’t own a helmet back then and they were only indoor balls, but they could still do some damage. One of the students, Mark Hatton, a slow bowler from the ACT got hit flush in the helmet six times in a row and I remember Marshy dragging him out of the nets before he got hurt. Rod loved my aggression at these sessions and used to invite people down to watch this kid hooking like an old-fashioned cricketer. It got to the point where he would yell out ‘in front of square’, ‘behind square’, ‘on the up’ or ‘on the ground’ and I would do my best to oblige.

I enjoyed that and those shots remained an important part of my cricket arsenal. If you can pick off a ball that’s just short of a length it robs real estate from the bowler. He knows if you pitch it up you will drive and if not you will play the cross bat shot and it leaves him very little room for error. There was a time later in my career when the pull shot let me down and there were suggestions I stop playing it, but it would have been like cutting off a limb.

WHEN I ARRIVED at the Academy in April 1992 I had just a few hundred dollars in my bank account; when I left at the end of 1993 things were pretty much the same. We made a few bucks helping kids with their cricket and I also coached some junior footballers and umpired their games (for $5 an hour), but most of the time I was just about skint. When we were living in the Directors Apartments, we received something like $120 a week as an allowance, and we were required to pay for our own meals, laundry and so on. When we moved to Henley Beach, all that was taken care of, but they reduced our stipend.

In my first year, while I didn’t drink at all, I would head to a nearby TAB most Monday and Thursday nights, to bet on the greyhounds. I didn’t make a lot of money, but I enjoyed myself and I didn’t lose. I couldn’t afford to. I’d been following the dogs since I was very young, from the time I’d go to my grandfather’s place at Newnham, where he had a few greyhounds of varying ability kennelled in his backyard. There are photo albums of me when I was a baby with a dummy in my mouth on a picnic rug with the greyhounds around me, and we had one of Pop’s old racing dogs, which we named Tiny, as a pet. Dad also trained and raced some dogs, and he liked to have a bet as well. I’d sit with him and listen to the races, picking out my favourites and cheering them on, and I was hooked from the first time he took me to the White City track in Launceston. Mum reckons that when I was a kid I spent more time in our family home talking about the dogs than my cricket, and she might be right. One ambition I had was to earn enough money to own my own greyhounds. When that happened I made sure I went into partnership with friends of mine, especially with Tim Quill, my best mate through school, junior footy and junior cricket.

My first dog was named Elected, which won a number of races and made a Launceston Cup final. Like quite a few of the dogs I’ve been connected with, he was trained by Dale ‘Jacko’ Hammersley, who I’d met at White City and I also knew from the North Launceston footy club. Tim and I then purchased a pup from Melbourne called My Self, who went on to win the Tasmanian final of the National Sprint Championship. Of all the greyhounds I’ve raced over the years, a dog named First Innings — which started favourite in the Hobart Thousand in 2007 — probably won the most races for me, but My Self had the best strike rate. She only had about 30 starts and won half of them. I also won a Devonport Cup with Ricky Tim, which like First Innings I raced with Tim Quill and his dad, John.

I’ve raced a few slow greyhounds too, and I’m the first to admit I haven’t made any money out of the hobby, but that doesn’t matter to me. I still get nervous whenever I watch one of my dogs race. It was pretty much the same throughout my career — whenever I was away, I’d organise for races to be taped so I could listen to them later over the phone. Of course, these days I can get on the internet and listen to the replays wherever I am in the world, and the buzz is still the same. As Pop and Dad told me when I was young, you shouldn’t bet with what you haven’t got and if you never sway from that policy, the racetrack is always a good place to be.

Anyone who says you shouldn’t go to the greyhounds has never been.

IF I WASN’T IN an Adelaide TAB in 1992 and 1993, most of the time I was giving myself every chance to one day be a Test batsman. I hit as many balls as anybody there and spent my spare time analysing the better players and the international stars who came to use the facilities. I was very, very happy, and made friendships that will last forever, including some with guys who’d go on to stellar careers.

Among the future international cricketers I played or trained with at the Academy were Michael Slater, a precociously talented opener who figured if you were going to have a whack at a ball outside off you might as well throw the kitchen sink at it (he was a dasher but he had an unbelievably good technique, and his 152 on debut at Lords was a master class); Colin ‘Funky’ Miller, who was a medium pace swing bowler in those days and noted lower-order hitter, turned to spin bowling later and I can recall him opening the bowling in a match with medium pace and then coming back to bowl his offies; Paul ‘Blocker’ Wilson, who we’ve already met; Michael Kasprowicz, the mild-mannered fast bowler from Queensland whose heroic efforts in sweltering Indian conditions should never be forgotten (he has a massive heart and is a champion bloke); my mate Adam Gilchrist is reasonably well known; Murray Goodwin was my room-mate at the Academy, a funny bloke who loved a night out and who went on to play for Zimbabwe and scored a gutsy 91 against us in Harare some years later; the leggie Peter McIntyre, who played a couple of Tests before Warnie came on the scene and ruined it for everyone, but had a good career for South Australia after that; Brett’s brother Shane Lee, who was a hell of a good all-rounder, I think the best we had until Shane Watson came on the scene; Brad Hodge went through with me and he was a man who would have played 100 Tests in any other era; the fast bowler Simon Cook, who helped me fix the seats at Adelaide and then went on to take seven wickets in his first Test, none in the next — he never played at that level again, probably because of injury (he was an unlucky bloke, managing to run himself over with a steamroller some years later); John Davison passed through and he ended up playing for Canada in World Cups, breaking a record for the fastest century in a match against the West Indies and he popped up later as an Academy bowling coach; and Wade Seccombe, who was a great gloveman but spent his time living in Ian Healy’s shadow.

As a keen student of the game I learned so much by being around such diverse cricketing talents and such diverse people. And, it seemed the cricketers I encountered at that formative time would later show up here and there and travel part of the journey with me.

On my final tour with an Academy team — to India and Sri Lanka in 1993 — one of my fellow travellers was Tim Nielsen, a no-nonsense wicketkeeper who later became the Australian team coach. Tim was working at the Academy as a coach and brought with him an approach to the game that made him a good man to have around. He was treated poorly later on, but we’ll get to that in due course.

I have vivid memories of Glenn McGrath back then. I wasn’t interested in fashion, but it was obvious that the farm boy struggled to get a pair of pants that could fit. His cricket trousers finished closer to his knee than his ankle and consequently exposed a pair of seriously raw-boned legs. He was nicknamed Pigeon because he had legs like a bird. To complement this look Glenn wore huge leather-soled bowling boots that were laced like boxer’s boots. He looked like something from a different age, but there is one other thing about him from back then that stays strongly in memory: he was quick, real quick. I can still clearly picture Pidge at the Wanderers in Jo’burg, where the pitch was like Perth, fast and bouncy, and Adam Gilchrist was back 30 metres and taking them above his head. The two of us — Pidge from Narromine in north-western New South Wales and me from the outer suburbs of Launceston — had a certain affinity which came from the reality we were pretty unsophisticated compared to many of our city-slicker comrades. We quickly forged a friendship that remains rock-solid to this day.

This came about even though, in many ways, we were very different. My favourite videos were anything cricket or the 1975 VFL Grand Final (the year North Melbourne won its first premiership, beating Hawthorn by 55 points); his preference was an instructional number that demonstrated how to skin a wild pig. One day in Adelaide, I went up to Pidge’s room to discover that he had lined up a collection of empty cereal boxes, side by side, along a window ledge.

‘What did you do that for?’ I asked.

He didn’t say anything, just slowly walked over to his cutlery drawer, from which he dug out all the dinner knives he could find. Then, with a flick of the wrist, he started firing those knives across his bed at the boxes. How do you come up with this stuff? I thought to myself, my back safely up against the wall. Then I looked over at the carnage on and around the window ledge. And how is it that you hit the centre of the boxes every single time?

Warnie was different again and always seemed a little more mature than the rest of us. In a Warnie sort of way. He had a flash car, while we got around on buses and bikes. He had a contract with the Australian Cricket Board that had numbers on it that we could only dream about. I first met him in the winter of 1992, when he came to Adelaide to work at the Academy with his spin-bowling coach, the former Test leg-spinner Terry Jenner, in preparation for the Australian Test team’s tour of Sri Lanka. Shane had made his Test debut the previous January. I was 17 years old; he was 22, nearly 23, but despite the age gap he was headed in the same direction as me and we shared plenty of time together. He and Terry needed someone to bowl to and I put my hand up every time — and not just because I liked them and I wanted them to like me. Warnie was miles ahead of any spin bowler I’d ever faced before. I knew I could improve plenty by working with him.

One day, Shane announced that he had to head down to Glenelg to visit a friend, and he asked me if I wanted to go along for the ride. On the way back, we stopped to get a drink — a frozen yoghurt soft-serve for me and a slurpie of some kind for Warnie — and then we set off, with my drink in my left hand and Shane’s in the other, which he grabbed off me whenever he had the chance. We came to an intersection with the lights working our way, but a very old lady driving a gold hatchback Torana wasn’t paying attention and she went straight through her lights, Warnie only saw her at the last second, tried to swerve out of the way, but couldn’t avoid crashing into the back end of her car. From there, she shot straight across the road up onto the footpath, through the front fence of a house and smashed into a big tree, while the soft-serve and the slurpie went all over the windscreen (though at that moment that was the least of our worries). Fortunately, the other driver and her elderly friend in the passenger seat were okay, if a little shellshocked, and we were fine, though I couldn’t stand still from the adrenalin shooting through my body. Warnie, meanwhile, having established that everyone was safe, was staring blankly at the crumpled front of his Nissan Pulsar Vector, which was eventually taken away by a tow-truck. The poor bloke looked like he was farewelling a dear friend going off to war as his car slowly disappeared from view. He wasn’t totally bulletproof after all. We had to get a cab home.