At the Close of Play

At the Close of Play Ricky Ponting Love him or loathe him, Ricky Ponting is one of the biggest names in cricket, having been at the heart of so many memorable Ashes and Test encounters over the years. Coinciding with the end of Ponting’s spectacular career, ‘At the Close of Play’ is a must-read for all cricket fans.For so long the scourge of English cricket, Ricky Ponting – unarguably one of cricket’s all-time greats – looks back on the story of his remarkable life and career.With his customary honesty and candour, Ponting reflects on a lifetime at the crease – from childhood prodigy to the highs and lows of his extraordinary international career.But beyond the triumphs, scandals and his own private struggle to maintain his later form, this remarkable autobiography will offer rare insights into an elite sporting career with Ricky’s reflections on leadership, captaincy, winning, defeat, competitiveness, teamwork, the greats of the game and the lessons learned at the helm of Australia’s cricket team.This autobiography, of a very private man, and one who the English public loved to hate, will resonate with lovers of cricket as well as anyone who strives to reach the top of their chosen field. COPYRIGHT (#u1a613d51-2819-5a3a-8040-6c44ec1edda0) HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013 FIRST EDITION © Ricky Ponting and Geoff Armstrong 2013 Thematic features © Ricky Ponting and James Henderson 2013 A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library The Publishers acknowledge the trademarks of Cricket Australia in these pages and where used note that they have been reproduced with the approval of Cricket Australia Ricky Ponting and Geoff Armstrong assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of this work All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/green) Source ISBN: 9780007544752 Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007544776 Version: 2014-07-23 For my beautiful wife Rianna and our gorgeous children Emmy and Matisse And for Mum, Dad, Drew and Renee Thanks to you all for always being there for me Cover (#u505e3399-4c9f-59c0-b440-b45dc332e075) Title Page (#ue99c726f-d1e6-5fe1-bc70-e1762b538527) Copyright Dedication (#u835722ab-41f8-5943-8cc4-bed06eca9237) Insights The Ponting Foundation (#ulink_ddca6f40-1f15-527e-8f2f-a82e85349379) Giving back My routine Prologue Invermay Park 1. THE FIRST INNINGS 1 Backyard Cricket 2 Playing with Dad 3 Out of Tasmania 4 Punter 5 In the Company of Boonie 6 An Angry Young Man 7 Making the Team 8 Retaliate First 9 The Hundred That Got Away 10 Best Seat in the House 11 High Security 12 Dropped 13 Hope Builds, Fear Destroys 2. AT THE CREASE 14 Solidarity Forever 15 I’m Not Going, I’m Staying 16 Betting Rings and Broken Helmets 17 The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time 18 Starting Over 19 Mateship Matters 20 Team First 21 Good Versus Great 22 Turning Pro 23 From Harbhajan to Headingley 24 Love Comes to Town 25 Three Amigos 3. AT THE HELM 26 Captain and Player 27 Swimming Between the Flags 28 Leading Our Defence of the World Cup 29 One Game After Another 30 Character 31 Doing the Right Thing 32 The Last Frontier 33 Playing with Brian 34 Behind the Times 35 Helmet On, Helmet Off 36 Resurgence 37 Test Century 38 No Fear 39 Mind Games 40 Getting Dizzy 41 Ugly Australians? 42 Ashes Regained 43 Most Tough Guys Cry 44 WC2007 45 Good Times 46 Zero Tolerance 47 Irreplaceable 48 Over-Rated 49 Last Man Standing 50 The Old Boy 51 Six Days in Potchefstroom 52 Public Enemy No. 1 53 Mug or Magician 4. AT THE CLOSE OF PLAY 54 Tactics and Tweets 55 Execution 56 Punted Out 57 Something New 58 Under Pressure 59 Matisse 60 Edge of the Abyss 61 Thanks for the Memories 62 It’s Time 63 End of the Journey Epilogue Winding Down CAREER RECORD Picture Section List of Searchable Terms Acknowledgments Final word About the Publisher (#u1a613d51-2819-5a3a-8040-6c44ec1edda0) Giving back (#uf23af6c8-7ba7-5775-ba91-89a24d48ae6f) My routine (#u9e64d1c4-f8d3-5cdc-8dad-61b5af842be5) The baggy green (#ua5f0a645-d5bb-55bd-bf84-77e0dfb6f216) Bravery (#ulink_236cc06e-0631-52ec-8d1b-7423e439f0e3) Family (#ulink_e37a4652-1b27-5e80-8590-bdc608c9357f) Life on the road (#ulink_3ba47af9-0243-5db4-90a4-323be55e8f00) Planning (#ulink_99de9967-9a40-5745-b3c8-41f9a4984c4f) Mentors (#ulink_8d0d026d-3e5e-51de-86be-d7fce93f14c5) Being in the zone (#ulink_e4302b0c-dd02-5717-bed0-fe0d3b5d5b49) Building a team (#ulink_4a884f11-24d5-55e7-8537-8778874cff70) Practice makes perfect (#ulink_54c70e18-68c8-547f-a35d-c6d4f94c6ceb) Honesty (#ulink_49570665-17de-5836-8745-88935987949f) Look at those around you (#ulink_ea1ef1bf-ce4b-5aad-a1e7-220276e89d2a) Role models (#ulink_054d025e-a826-588a-bcad-d6bfe9d3c2e3) Loyalty & trust (#u78ad2a3b-1ce0-5fa2-8c83-154cc224c7cb) Feedback (#litres_trial_promo) The media (#litres_trial_promo) Technique (#litres_trial_promo) Patriotism (#litres_trial_promo) Mateship (#litres_trial_promo) On golf (#litres_trial_promo) Brilliance (#litres_trial_promo) Communication (#litres_trial_promo) Mentoring (#litres_trial_promo) Tactical advantage (#litres_trial_promo) Criticism (#litres_trial_promo) Leadership (#litres_trial_promo) Captaincy (#litres_trial_promo) Team song (#litres_trial_promo) Coaching (#litres_trial_promo) Partnership, pressure & patience (#litres_trial_promo) Concentration (#litres_trial_promo) Celebrating success (#litres_trial_promo) Match-ups (#litres_trial_promo) Delegation (#litres_trial_promo) The Ashes (#litres_trial_promo) Great Australian players of Test cricket (#litres_trial_promo) Best ODI Australian team (#litres_trial_promo) Mumbai retrospective (#litres_trial_promo) Loss (#litres_trial_promo) Playing fresh (#litres_trial_promo) Top five English players (#litres_trial_promo) Winning (#litres_trial_promo) Losing (#litres_trial_promo) Unsung heroes (#litres_trial_promo) Top five Indian players (#litres_trial_promo) Favourite international players (#litres_trial_promo) (#ulink_959288a8-7670-551e-ba97-4db428388dae) How the Ponting Foundation makes a difference The Ponting Foundation is dedicated to doing everything possible to help young Australians and their families beat cancer. It provides funding for a wide range of essential services that comfort and nurture young Australians with cancer, while providing emotional support and financial assistance for their family. Through alliances with some of Australia’s leading cancer charities and research groups, Ricky has used his profile to influence widespread community engagement to raise important incremental funds for specific charity programs, hospitals and ground-breaking research projects engaged in the fight against cancer in Australia’s children and youth. The Foundation also funds programs that assist in the care and well-being of the wider family unit as they support their child through illness. How you can help Make a donation Visit www.pontingfoundation.com.au and make an online donation. Donations of $2 or more are fully tax deductable for Australian residents. Get Involved with the Biggest Game of Cricket The Biggest Game of Cricket is the Ponting Foundation’s major annual fundraising activity. Harnessing the pride of Australia Day, BGOC is a community based event with thousands of games being played and events all around Australia. Visit www.biggestgameofcricket.com.au for all the details. Corporate partners — building pride through great partnerships The Ponting Foundation sincerely appreciates the generous support of its corporate partners and invites interested companies to join the corporate team. Become a Ponting XI member A key pillar for the long-term success of the Ponting Foundation has been the creation of the ‘Ponting XI’. The substantial donations made by members of the Ponting XI have ensured the Foundation remains fully self-sufficient, allowing funds raised by other means to be distributed to the Foundation’s beneficiaries. By joining this thoughtful and generous group of leading philanthropists, you will be partnering with the Foundation and importantly, the wider healthcare community, in helping young Australians and families beat cancer. Please contact the Ponting Foundation at [email protected] for more details. With Prof Murray Norris and Prof Michelle Haber AM at the Ricky and Rianna Ponting Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory, Children’s Cancer Institute, at the University of NSW, Sydney. (#u1a613d51-2819-5a3a-8040-6c44ec1edda0) The issue of childhood cancer is something very dear to the hearts of Rianna and myself since a hospital visit we made together back in 2002. Phil Kearns, a good friend who was involved at the Children’s Cancer Institute Australia (CCIA) invited us to visit the Sydney Children’s Hospital to meet with some of the many children and their families in the oncology ward. Listening to each family’s story was one of the most emotional experiences of our lives. We were deeply saddened by the stories we heard but at the same time overwhelmed by the commitment of the families, doctors and nurses to help these children fight the biggest battle of their young lives. Following our visit, we sat outside the Children’s Hospital and with tears in our eyes made a commitment to one another to do everything possible to improve the lives of young Australians with cancer and their families. We worked as ambassadors of the CCIA helping to raise money to fund research into Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia, the most common cancer in children. It was through our work with the CCIA that we realised we were in a unique position to make a real difference. After very careful consideration, we decided to establish the Ponting Foundation with the aim of raising funds for the benefit of young Australians with cancer and their families. Since 2008, we have been steadily doing our best to give back to those most in need. We have partnered with a variety of incredible organisations, including the CCIA, Redkite, the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, the David Collins Leukaemia Foundation and the National Institute of Integrative Medicine, to spread our fundraising to the areas that we believe need the most focus. We visit hospitals regularly, spending time with the children and their families as well as meeting doctors, researchers and nurses, who always teach us something new about the issues of childhood cancer. With my retirement from cricket, we intend to become even more active in our work, not only from a fundraising perspective but just as importantly, from an advocacy and awareness point of view. We need to do more for our children to protect their future. Cancer is the major killer of our children and we have to do everything we can to increase the survival rates especially around the uncommon forms of cancer. Rianna and I couldn’t do this on our own. We have an incredible Board that includes some of Australia’s most respected business people, including Trevor O’Hoy, Stephen Roberts, Ray Horsburgh, Ian Foote, Katie McNamara, Steven Ivak and James Henderson. Our founding Chairperson, Margaret Jackson, was an amazing contributor as are our Ponting XI members, including Christian Johnston, Peter de Rauch, Sir Ron Brierley, Philip Allison, Sir Michael Parkinson, Honey Bacon, and David and Kelli Lundberg. (#u1a613d51-2819-5a3a-8040-6c44ec1edda0) Here’s a simple summary of the routine that I went through every time I batted for Australia. Last thing the night before a game or when I expected to bat • Write a list of what I needed to do out in the middle – Watch the ball – Play straight – Loud calls – Be patient – Be positive in attack and defence – Bat for a long time – Make 100 – Be man of the match – Be man of the series • Read this list out loud after writing it, underline each item when read and visualise each point for tomorrow • Write a list of each bowler and how they will try to bowl – Visualise how they will try to get me out • Then switch off the light and go to sleep Before going out to bat • Get ready the same way each and every time • Sit down and watch the openers with my gear all in same positions around me — ready to go • Sit with a bottle of water and chew three pieces of gum • Sip the water when needed • As soon as a wicket falls, remove the gum and put it aside. Drink water and leave for the middle Walking out to the middle • Display energy and walk to the middle fairly quickly • Do three or four butt kicks with each leg • Play a number of shadow ‘straight drives’ while walking • Flick my wrists with bat in hand — both hands On arrival at the crease • Take guard and get middle • Clear all the rubbish on the wicket around the crease line — must be perfectly clear • Walk down and look closely at the wicket • Identify the area that I think the bowler can bowl a good ball • Make sure that area is totally clear • Move to the side of the pitch and do my hamstring stretches with bat in both hands • Walk back to the crease while observing the field placement • Take my grip and take my stance in the crease Bowler’s run-up and delivery • Say ‘watch the ball’ to myself twice — halfway through run-up and just before release of the ball • Look at the identified area down the wicket and look up at the bowler’s release of the ball • Then whatever happens, happens • Switch my mind off completely until bowler is back near top of run-up • Switch back on and start this delivery routine again (#u1a613d51-2819-5a3a-8040-6c44ec1edda0) SO MUCH OF WHO I AM is where I came from. It started here and in a lot of ways it’s right that it ends here in these dressing rooms. I’m two months retired from Test cricket and back playing for the Mowbray Eagles. Back where it all began. I entered these rooms as a boy and left them 30 years later. I wore the baggy green cap at the crease and the Australian captain’s jacket at the toss. I wore one-day colours too in an era when we were unbeatable at World Cup cricket. I wore them all with pride, at all times striving to be the best I could, but if you stripped all that away you would find what matters most and what kept me going: cricket. It is simple really. I loved the game, the rituals, the fierce competition and the equally fierce mateship it promoted. Dressing rooms, hotels, cricket grounds and aeroplanes are the places where my life has been lived. The rooms are our refuge. For Test players they’re a place away from the cameras, journalists, crowds and constant glare. For club cricketers they’re a sanctuary where you can be with your mates away from work and the grind of daily life. You check in Saturday morning and you check out Saturday night a little wobbly from the long day and a few drinks after the game. Every club cricketer has got a dressing room routine, sometimes it’s hard to pick the pattern in the mess, other times it’s obvious. Me? I’m not neat, I take the bats out and stand them up to clear some room in the jumble of the kit bag. The gloves are numbered, but in no order and as the game goes on things spread out further. Matthew Hayden said I spread my gear round like a ‘scrub turkey’ but he was almost as bad; Justin Langer, Mike Hussey they were like me; others were neat as pins. Damien Martyn was, and Michael Clarke and Brad Haddin verge on the obsessive, everything laid out like it’s a display in a store window. Marto would mark the edges of his territory with tape and warn us not to let our mess trespass within. In different grounds we had different seating patterns that established themselves over the years. Spreading the bats and placing your bag somewhere is about marking your turf, setting out the boundaries of your space. From the time I was small I was drawn to the equipment. The bats, the shoes, the gloves and the pads … I was always looking at what somebody else had, always picking up bats and feeling them. They are, I suppose, the tools of the trade. If I’d followed through on that building apprenticeship when I left school I wonder if I’d have had the same romantic attachment to what was in the toolbox. Occasionally you’ll meet a cricketer who couldn’t give a toss, but most of us, particularly batsmen, are obsessed with our gear. Huss would carry a set of scales with him to ensure the bat was an exact weight. If it was over, out would come the sandpaper and he would start to scrape away. I’d give him a bit of grief about it, but when he wasn’t around I’d weigh mine too. Most of us arrive with an arsenal of bats: the lucky one, the one that’s almost broken in, the one that’s there and about … The secret to a good one is how it feels in your hands and the soft tonk sound a new ball makes on good willow. Your ear tells you. I suppose a guitar or a piano is the same, but you’d have to ask a musician if that’s right. My game bat never comes out until the morning of the match, it never gets an appearance at practice. The others are works in progress, bits of willow that will, with a bit of tuning and knocking, make it to game-bat status one day. Like players, bats have to earn a place in a game. WE PONTINGS ARE WORKING-CLASS PEOPLE from a working-class part of Launceston and our entertainment consisted of footy in winter, cricket in summer and golf whenever we could. It was the same with everybody we knew. From the time I was old enough to ride my bike past the end of the street I would come down to watch the Mowbray Eagles play. I was always drawn to the cricket ground and the dressing room. Uncle Greg played for the Eagles before he moved on to the Shield side and then to Test cricket. Maybe it was him who got me down there the first time, but I knew Dad had played for the same team and most of the adults in my life had something to do with the club. Every Saturday morning I’d be up early, have a quick breakfast and then climb onto my BMX and race down to here or wherever they were playing. If somebody was around I’d have a hit in the nets while the old blokes of the district went about the serious business in the middle, but the best of the times were in their half-lit dressing rooms. When they were on the field I’d come in and go through the kits. Weighing the bats in my hands, feeling the grips and the balance and examining the grain. Looking back it was pretty rudimentary gear, but at the time it seemed possessed of some sort of magic. I’d try on the gloves and the inners that were way too big for me and I’d memorise where everything was before I touched it to make sure it went back exactly there, so when they came in hot and sweaty from a couple of hours on the field everything would be where they’d left it, and I’d be in the corner where they expected me to be. I was small and could hide quietly in a corner so you wouldn’t necessarily know I was there. I would spend hours there listening to them talk about cricket as they drank beer and cooled down after play. It was a conversation I longed to join and one that when I did I’ve stayed engaged with all my life. Back then I was soaking it up like a sponge. Listening to their deep, gruff voices cracking jokes and weaving stories about that place out in the middle where I would long to be. The Mowbray boys had a reputation for being the hardest cricketers around. When we played Launceston or Riverside it was almost class war and the teams from the other side of the river used to quietly dread crossing into our territory. After the game, however, they were always welcome for a drink in the rooms. Sometimes Dad would drag me home early, other times someone would say ‘come on young fella’ and throw my bike in the back of their car and drive me home. Being the first to arrive and last to leave is a habit I’ve maintained ever since those early days. And today I’m back here at the cricket club that started it all. When, as captain of the Australian Test team, I would hand players their first baggy green I would tell them that they were following in a grand tradition and to think about the people who had worn it before, but I would also ask them to think about all the others out there at club and state level and how much it would mean to them. Cricket’s given me everything but it’s taken things from me too. I’m a Mowbray boy and it’s here I feel at home and it’s probably the greatest regret of my life that the game took me away from here too soon. As a boy I just wanted to be one of the men in this dressing room, but I suppose the trade-off wasn’t too bad. Instead of sharing victory with these men I shared it with some of the great cricketers of our time and some of my greatest mates. Matty Hayden, Marto, Lang, Gilly, Warne, Pidge … we ruled the world for a while there, climbed the mountain and we were as close as men can be. Having said that, I am just as close and just as comfortable with the people I met in these rooms when I was still a boy. The blokes who put their hands on my shoulder and pointed me in the right direction. NATURALLY I’M THE FIRST in the rooms at Invermay Park this morning. Had to open up myself. It’s fitting in a way as I’ve always been the first to arrive. The last to leave. Lately I’d found myself looking up expecting to see Gilly or Marto or Lang only to find they’ve gone and the spot that was theirs has been taken by someone else. One by one they had all left the dressing room until I was the last one left. Rianna, my wife, has a way of putting things in perspective. When everybody had become emotional at my retirement ahead of the Perth Test she said, ‘He’s not dead yet people, it’s just cricket,’ and I love her for that. I love that sense of balance she brings. Recently she came to me and asked if I had really made that many Test runs. She’d seen something on television. Sometimes I think she’s the only person who doesn’t know these things. (There are whole villages in the backblocks of India who know more about my career.) And I love her even more for that. To be honest it all became a bit overwhelming when I retired from Test cricket and I wish I could have had her sense of acceptance. Admitting to myself that I was no longer up to it, saying the words out loud to Rianna and then the team and then telling the world; wandering out to bat for that last time and seeing the South Africans lined up in a guard of honour as I approached the WACA pitch … all the other little things that happened for the last time ever in the few weeks leading up to that moment had been like a series of small deaths. I only ever wanted to play cricket and I could never bring myself to imagine a time when I wasn’t playing the game, but that time is approaching. Since leaving the Test team I have been like a salmon (Tasmanian, of course) swimming back upstream to where it all started. Before I put this old kit bag away for the last time I had some unfinished business. Cricket swept me up early. One day I didn’t know how to get on a plane and then for a long time after I wondered if I would ever get off one. International cricket expanded to fill every available space in my life. At the academy I had been able to get home occasionally, but after that visits got rarer until there was barely time to swing by and have a hit of golf with the old man, or a cup of instant coffee with Mum at the breakfast bar. My little brother, Drew, and sister, Renee — my whole family I guess — watched me on television and tracked my progress that way. I suppose all of Australia did and a few other nations as well. I was away when my pa died and will never forget the helplessness as I spoke to Dad on the phone from England. I wasn’t there for him when he needed me. I’m fiercely loyal. I’m proud of my background and the values I was taught in this town and these dressing rooms. No matter how many five-star hotels I’ve slept in, how many first-class flights I’ve been on, how many politicians and businessmen and celebrities have swept through my life I have never lost the sense that I’m that small-town boy who didn’t have much but wanted for nothing. So, in what’s left of this last summer of my cricket life, I am trying to catch up. It’s all rushed as it always is. I trained in Hobart yesterday, drove up to Launceston last night and will head back to Hobart first thing tomorrow. I’m so early for the game I park the car down the road a bit and call Rianna on the phone, even when I’ve done that I’m still the first there so I open the clubrooms and find a space where I figure nobody else will be, just as I did when I was a boy. It’s best to stay out of the way and not be noticed, although that’s impossible today. It’s early February and the Mowbray Eagles are playing Launceston on the parkland by the Esk River, next to the footy ground. There’re hundreds at the ground and they line up for autographs and I sign them all when I get a chance. There’s a lot of familiar faces, people from my past introducing me to their kids. My mum and dad are playing golf because it’s a Saturday and that’s what they do and I love them for that. They’re set in their ways but I have never for one moment felt they haven’t been with me every innings I’ve played. They’re locals and they like their lives down here. They don’t like their routine disrupted so they haven’t seen me play that much. They would never think of going overseas to watch a game of cricket. It was hard enough getting them to Perth for my last match. No, there’s a golf course down the road and every Saturday Mum and Dad have a date that starts at the first hole. I STRAP ON MY PADS and make my way out to the middle. Head down at first, trying to block out the crowd like I do whether I’m at the MCG, in Mumbai or at Mowbray. Hitting the grass I try and get a little feeling in the legs, running on the spot a bit. I make it to the middle and take centre, just as I learned all those years back, and I scratch my studs into the surface of the wicket. Marking out my territory again. I do it really tough. Cricket is such a great leveller. I last an hour, but it’s as hard an hour as I’ve spent at the crease. The council owns the ground and keeps the grass long and it’s impossible to hit a boundary along the ground. It’s been raining and the wicket is seaming. Finally I shoulder arms to a ball that cuts back a foot or two and takes my off-stump. This game rarely lets you get ahead of yourself. In the evening we have a few beers in the rooms with our gear all around us and the chat begins all over again. This is who I am and now this is finishing and I suppose that begs a question I am not too keen to ponder: I might not have been finished with the game, but it was finished with me and am I now the person it has shaped? Someone said when I walked out of the Australian dressing room the door slammed on a generation of cricket. That might be right, but for me there was something deeper. I had been raised in the game. The dressing room was a cradle, I was formed in these confines, I grew up in them and I have as good as lived in them for all my adult life up to this point. There was only ever the game and the team, the competition and the anticipation, and now it is time to move on. AFTER MOWBRAY it was back to Sheffield Shield. Twenty years ago I played my first game for Tassie as a 17-year-old and here I am again. At 38 I get to celebrate for the first time as my home state wins the coveted Sheffield Shield. It’s a great feeling and I’ve had a good year, even knocking up a 200 in the game against NSW that followed my Mowbray visit. Cricket is a cruel mistress and there she was at me again. I had started the summer in great form in first-class cricket and was the highest run-scorer going into the series against South Africa that would be my last. I felt like my technique, my reflexes, my game were in the best place they had ever been, but when it came time to wear the baggy green I could not make a run. So, going out and hitting a double hundred in the Shield a few months after I had literally landed on my face in Test cricket was a bitter irony, but a sure indication that there’s an enormous mental element to this game. No matter how hard I tried — and believe me there is nobody who tries and trains harder than me — I couldn’t put all the pieces back together at Test level. It still hurts to admit I had lost it, but it felt good to end the season giving back to my home state, a place that had given so much but for most of my career had been so far away, so hard to get back to. While Tasmania was winning the Shield competition Australian cricket seemed to be spiralling out of control during a series against India. They’d barely missed a beat after I left. In my last game in Perth we had a chance to regain the number one rank in world cricket, but now that seemed so far away. In the first series they played after my retirement they easily accounted for a Sri Lankan side. My only contribution was a lap of honour at Bellerive before the Test. After that things just seemed to go wrong and it was hard to watch. I know more than most how India can get on top of you. The cricket is like the country — it can be breathtaking, but at times it can close in on you and you feel like you are being smothered. It’s easy to lose your way there and the Aussies did. I had never led a team to a series victory in India, but not only did they lose 4–0 on the field, they lost their way off it. The dressing room that I loved had changed in the past few years and as hard as it was to see how bad they were going out in the middle, it was just as hard knowing how much they were struggling off it. I’d seen the signs. When we lost in Perth I went with the boys to have a drink with the South Africans and I was taken aback by the feeling they had in the sheds. Sure, it’s easy to be happy when you’ve won so well, but they were a tight group, a small travelling band that had gelled together and taken down the enemy and as I looked at them enjoying the afterglow I was gripped with a sense of loss. We used to be like that, I thought. Everything has to change in cricket, but I’m not so convinced that all the changes I’ve seen in the past few years are for the better. I was in that Australian dressing room for 20 years and it seemed every time a legend left his corner another arrived to take that place. I saw Adam Gilchrist replace Ian Healy, and Stuart MacGill pick up a lazy 200 wickets when forced to play understudy to Shane Warne. I remember when a 30-year-old called Michael Hussey first got his shot at the big time and a young bloke called Michael Clarke came into the side. Michael Clarke’s got the captaincy now and it’s fair to say that the trend that started in the last years of my time in the job has continued. First-class cricket just isn’t bringing up the players, particularly batsmen, it once did. There was a time when guys with 10,000 first-class runs, guys who had scored century after century all around Australia and in England for counties, could not get a look-in. Sure there were a few, myself included, who came in young and relatively inexperienced, but we knew we were always under pressure for our places from others who had equal rights to them. Anyway, I have to let that go now … (#ulink_959288a8-7670-551e-ba97-4db428388dae) The baggy green cap is the most powerful symbol in Australian sport. Nothing comes close to it for its tradition, meaning and representation. Only a small number of cricketers have played Test cricket for Australia and been presented with the baggy green. 365 cricketers achieved that honour before I made my Test debut in 1995. My Test cap number 366 is now almost part of my DNA. Fewer than 450 cricketers have earned a baggy green since Test cricket began in 1877. That’s quite phenomenal when you think how many Australians have dedicated their life to cricket but have never reached the level of playing Test cricket for Australia. This is what I’ve always talked about when presenting brand-new baggy green caps to players making their debut for Australia. You are joining a pretty elite group and have achieved a pinnacle of personal achievement in Australian cricket. You are now part of the baggy green family — an exclusive club. How lucky are we! During my career, I had two baggy greens. My original cap was stolen out of my luggage on the way home from Sri Lanka in 1999. I’d only played 24 Tests at the time and I was gutted to think that the cap was gone. I was given a replacement baggy green that would stay with me right through to my last Test in Perth in 2012. It was a constant companion on and off the field. After losing my first cap, I carried my baggy green in my hand luggage wherever I went. It was with me in 144 Test matches all over the world and was looking pretty worse for wear when I retired from international cricket. There had been calls for me to change to a brand-new baggy green. Some said I was not treating the cap with the respect it demands, by wearing a faded, torn and out of shape baggy green on which you could hardly identify the Australian coat of arms on the front. But I am traditionalist and my baggy green tells a story — the story of my career. It reflects where I was, where I went and, in the latter years, how it was on its last legs — just like me. To me, my baggy green was a symbol of national pride, a monument to all my predecessors, team-mates and future Australian Test players, and a trophy for all the successes we achieved together. That baggy green was me. Now it forms part of a very special presentation box that Rianna and the girls gave to me for my first Christmas as a retired international cricketer. It sits beside a brand-new baggy green with the most beautiful images of our family standing on the WACA after my last game. The new baggy green now symbolises the next stage of my life. A time of looking forward while never forgetting the incredible opportunities that 168 Test matches, with my baggy green, gave me. (#ulink_959288a8-7670-551e-ba97-4db428388dae) MY NAME IS Ricky Thomas Ponting and I played cricket. I played junior cricket, indoor cricket, club cricket, rep cricket, state cricket, T20 cricket, one-day cricket and Test cricket. When I didn’t play cricket, I trained to play cricket. I played cricket almost everywhere cricket is played and with some of the greatest players there have ever been. I played in what might have been the best team the world has ever seen. I tried to be the best cricketer I could possibly be. I gave everything I had to that cause from the time I was a small boy until long after most of my contemporaries had walked away. I was born in Launceston, Tasmania, a small town on a small island state that often gets left off the map of Australia. We’re proud people who look after ourselves and who figure Hobart is the big smoke and the mainland is another country. My early years were spent in the suburbs of Prospect and then Newnham, where we lived with my grandparents. When we could afford it, we moved to the housing estate at Rocherlea. I played cricket at school and then for the Mowbray Eagles, just like my dad and just like my Uncle Greg who was Mum’s brother. People identify me with Mowbray and that’s all right with me because that is where I learned the game. I was born on December 19, 1974 to Graeme and Lorraine Ponting. My mum reckons I was a ‘beautiful baby’ but she might be biased. ‘No trouble at all,’ she tells me. ‘Slept and ate, that’s all you did.’ One of her most prominent early memories of me is when I was sitting on the lounge-room floor, eyes fixed on the television, watching Kim Hughes bat. Kim was my first hero in Test cricket, a batsman who, when he was on, was unstoppable. I remember him taking on the West Indies at the MCG the week after my seventh birthday, their fast bowlers aiming at his chest and head, him hooking and pulling fearlessly. That knock stays burned in my memory and probably set the standard for the sort of cricketer I wanted to become. Australian cricket wasn’t going so well then, but he stood up that day and scored 100 out of an innings total of 194. Holding, Roberts, Garner and Croft threw everything they had at him, but he was undefeated at the end of the innings and the Australians went on to win that match. That didn’t happen all that often back then. There was no doubt in my mind, even then, that I wanted to be out there doing exactly the same. One of Dad’s early recollections of me is not as flattering as Mum’s. ‘When you were three, you used to wait out the front for the children walking home from school, and you’d run out and kick them and then run back inside,’ he once told me. It was, he reckons, one of the first signs of my ‘mischievous’ streak. I’d like to think it showed I was never going to be intimidated by anyone older or bigger and for the next 20 years of my life I always seemed to be the youngest person in the room. I was the boy in the men’s team, the 16-year-old at the cricket academy with Warnie who already had his own car and his own ways, the kid who was missing the final years at school to play first-class cricket, the 20-year-old walking onto the WACA to make my debut in Mark Taylor’s team. Fortunately by then I’d stopped kicking the big kids in the leg … I have a younger brother, Drew, and a sister, Renee, who is younger again. Today they both live within a couple of minutes of our parents’ place. I’m the only one that went away. Mum also has strong memories of me always being outside playing cricket as a boy. ‘You always had to be the batsman and Drew had to bowl or field,’ she says. ‘You’d bat for an hour before Drew would get a bat. Then Drew would finally have a go, but he’d only last two minutes and you’d go back in.’ My little brother was the first to suffer for my love. Most batsmen value their wicket, none like getting out, but I took it to an extreme and it all started in the backyard. Like all kids we built the rules of cricket around the circumstances of our backyard. Over the fence was out and God help you if the old man caught you wading into his prized vegetable patch to fetch a ball. He loved that garden and it lay in wait from point to long-on, ready to swallow a ball. Drew reckons I mastered the art of hitting the ball over the garden and into the fence. I never let him bat for too long because it seemed part of the natural order of things that I was there doing what my hero, Kim Hughes, had done, although with all due respect to Drew he was no Michael Holding. I’d knock him over with my bowling as quick as I could and then take guard again. I have to admit Drew’s ability to bowl endless overs was important to my development and I must thank him some time. As a kid, growing up, I looked upon Mowbray as being a flash part of town. We didn’t come from the wrong side of the tracks so much as the wrong side of the river. Launceston is divided by the Tamar river, one side was middle class and nice and the other was where we lived. On our side they had the railway workshops, the factories and all the key landmarks of my early life — at the centre of which was the cricket club. In the Mowbray dressing rooms on a Saturday night they used to tell beery yarns about having to fight to cross the bridge into town, they weren’t true but they told you a little bit about the ‘us and them’ nature of where I came from. Our greatest rivals were Riverside; they came from the nice part of town and sometimes complained that we played cricket too hard. It was a complaint I would hear on and off for a lot of my career, but I never heard them say we weren’t playing fair or honestly. My father was born in Pioneer, a mining village in the north-eastern tip of the island. His father, Charlie, was a tin miner who wanted a better life for his family so he worked two jobs, digging tin from the ground all week and then travelling to Launceston to dig foundations for houses on the weekends. With the money he made they moved to Newnham. They were people who knew a different life. Dad would tell stories about trapping rabbits and the like so they could eat, and I reckon that his enormous vegetable garden had something to do with that poor background. The Pontings had arrived in Tasmania back in about 1890. My great great grandfather was a miner, his son was a miner and so was his son, my grandfather Charlie, but Charlie joined the RAAF when the war broke out and that might have changed things. He married Connie, my grandmother, during the war and sometime later they moved from Pioneer into Launceston and that was the last time our family dug for tin. Pop kept greyhounds and Dad tells the story that he went to the races one night and an owner said to him, ‘You want a dog? I’ve got one that’s no good to me, it can’t win a race.’ Dad walked five kilometres home with the dog and put it under the house. Fed it some steak. His father said he couldn’t keep it, but when Dad came home the next day his father had built a run across the back garden and it all started from there. The dog won its first race and we were away. Or that’s how the story goes. In Rocherlea Mum and Dad rented a small three-bedroom housing commission home on the bend at 22 Ti Tree Crescent. It was a cottage that had a nice front yard and a reasonable backyard dominated by Dad’s vegetable garden. We were on the edge of town. It wasn’t the best neighbourhood and always had a bad reputation — there were some houses that seemed to be visited by the police on a regular basis and I suppose there was a bit of trouble around but I avoided it. I can’t ever remember our house being locked, which tells you a little bit about how life was. We didn’t have much money when I was growing up, but I never remember us wanting for anything. Dad left school early to pursue a life as a golf professional, which didn’t work out. He was a great sportsman and I think the interest he took in my life was because he wanted me to have a chance to do the things he didn’t. Dad was a good cricketer and footballer and a better golfer; I suppose you could say he was pushy, but that’s probably too simplistic. Dad saw I was good and did the right thing by letting me know when I could be better. I always wanted to make him proud and never resented the way he encouraged me. He worked at the railways and other jobs, eventually finding his place as a groundsman. He didn’t earn a lot but he loved — loves — the work. Mum and Dad’s life revolved around us kids. Mum worked, but always made sure she or Dad was there for us when we were home. She was raised in Invermay and for most of our early lives she worked at the local petrol station there. I sometimes think that if I hadn’t dragged them to the odd game of cricket in the past 30 years that they might never have left Launceston. From our house in Rocherlea, it was about two kilometres south to Mowbray Golf Club, a bit less than a kilometre further to the racecourse, and another kilometre closer to the city centre to get to Invermay Park, the former swampland that would become the home ground of the Mowbray Cricket Club in the late 1980s. That reclaimed land is why people from around this area have long been known as ‘Swampies’. I am extremely fortunate to have parents who love their sport. My mum represented Tassie at vigoro (a game not too dissimilar to cricket), played competitive badminton and netball, and later in life started playing golf because, as she explains it, her husband was always down at the clubhouse. Taking up the game was her best chance of seeing more of him. Mum and Dad wanted their kids to be happy, humble, brave and honest. There was a toughness about where I was growing up and my parents never hid me from that, but neither did they use it as an excuse to let me run wild. I was sort of street-smart, and that and a combination of my parents’ love for me and my addiction to all things sport kept me out of serious trouble. There was, though, a bit of rascal in my make-up. One evening I came home late, explaining that I’d been at a mate’s place doing schoolwork, which was in itself a long bow. Worse, my shoes were covered in mud from the creeks at Mowbray Golf Club, where we’d been searching for lost balls that we could sell back to the members. I’ll never forget how Dad belted me as he demanded that in future I tell the truth, and how the message sank in. At the same time, I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been, not cleaning my shoes before I got home. Honesty was important to Dad and he passed that on. I was never top of my class academically, but neither was I near the bottom. In Rocherlea, learning to stay out of trouble was as important as learning your times tables. Some might be surprised to learn I was a prefect for two of the years I was at high school. I suppose that shows that even at an early age I showed some hints that there was some leadership capabilities somewhere deep inside this sport-obsessed kid. Sport was the making of me. From a very early age I knew I could hold my own at cricket or football, which gave me plenty of confidence and a lot of street cred with boys bigger and older than me. Because of the rules governing school sport in Tasmania at the time I didn’t play any organised cricket or football until grade five at Mowbray Heights Primary School, when I was 10, and I didn’t make my debut in senior Saturday afternoon cricket with the men at Mowbray until 1987, when I was 12. Before then, though, I did take part in some school-holiday coaching clinics, watched the Mowbray A-Grade team play and won a thousand imaginary Test matches against my little brother and whoever else we could recruit into neighbourhood contests. There were other kids who might have had more material possessions, but living on the edge of town meant we had plenty of open space and in the days before laptops and the like we used it well. It could get icy in winter, but it’s never too cold to kick a footy, and Dad found me a set of clubs when I wanted to hit a golf ball. If Drew and I could get down for a round of golf Mum would pack us a flask of cordial and give us enough money for a pack of chips and we were away. There was always cricket gear around the house and when a group of us went down to the local nets or park we always practised with a fair-dinkum cricket ball. Mowbray boys learned not to flinch from an early age. Being born in a small town had its advantages as everything was close and parents never needed to worry too much about where the kids were. If I was missing Mum or Dad just had to find the nearest game of cricket or footy and they were comfortable that even if I was in the sheds with the older blokes that they were all neighbours and friends and they were all keeping an eye on me. I had a BMX bike that I used to ride about town, and often to senior cricket matches involving the Mowbray club, my home team, Dad’s old team, a club that in the years after it was formed in the 1920s used to get many of its players from the nearby railway workshops or the Launceston wharves. I started following them partly because I just loved the game, but also because my Uncle Greg was one of their best players. Cricket fans know him as Greg Campbell. He’s Mum’s brother, 10 years older than me and a man who had a significant influence on my cricket career. Greg encouraged me all the way and spent a lot of time playing cricket with me, but more importantly he set an example. Looking back now I can see how important it was to know that someone from our family could make the big time, could go all the way from Launceston to Leeds, where he made his Test debut in the first Test against England in 1989. That was a huge day in our lives. Not only was Mum’s brother bowling for Australia, another local hero, David Boon, was playing too. Our little town provided two Test players. It was like Launceston had colonised the moon, although in my world landing in the Australian cricket team was a bigger deal. Having someone in the family who could do that made the dream of one day doing it myself all the more real. Here was a bloke in the side who had played cricket with me in the back garden. It meant Test cricket was a viable option for people like us. Greg nurtured my interest in cricket and we could get pretty competitive when we played each other. One day, when he thought I was out and I thought I wasn’t, we had to go and ask Dad to come out and decide. The ruling went in Greg’s favour, which didn’t surprise me because he and Dad were best mates, to the point that when Dad coached the footy team at Exeter (a town 20 kilometres north of Launceston) one year, Greg went there and played as well. If there was one thing that could and still does get the men of our family into an argument it’s sport. You should hear Dad and myself when a golf game is on the line. To an outsider these disputes might sound pretty serious. They’re definitely earnest, but it’s just our competitive nature and I suppose it was something that got me into hot water a few times over the years. One of my strongest memories involving Greg is the day when Mum told me that his Ashes kit had arrived. I flew around on my bike to his house in Invermay to check it all out, to try on his baggy green cap and even his Australian blazer, which was many sizes too big but felt absolutely perfect. He was a hero of mine then and he remains a hero of mine today; he’s a good friend who helped show me the way. Standing in that Launceston house dressed in his gear I knew there was only one way my life was going. In the early and mid 1980s, when I started watching Greg and his team-mates at the Mowbray Eagles, they played their home games at the ground at Brooks High, the local high school at Rocherlea. Sometimes I’d be down there at nine in the morning, even though the game didn’t start until 11. I just didn’t want to miss anything. It was the same when I joined the team working the scoreboard at the Northern Tasmanian Cricket Association (NTCA) ground during Sheffield Shield games — I scored that gig after I rode my bike down to the ground, found the right person and asked for the job. They paid me $20 a day, but much more important than that, I had a bird’s eye view of the game, the warm-ups, the net sessions, everything. As I said earlier I loved to sit in the corner of the Mowbray A-Grade team’s dressing room. Some of the tactical talks and most of the jokes went over my head, but at the same time I was absorbing plenty. I saw their loyalty and passion for each other and the game. Not least, I saw how those men played hard and fair, enjoyed the wins and hated the losses, wouldn’t take crap from anyone and always sought to be friendly with the opposition once the game was done. Most times, that mateship was reciprocated and if it wasn’t, we knew who the losers were. Those were lessons in cricket etiquette for me. The men set the standard and they said ‘no matter what happens on the field you shake hands and you have a beer after the game’. It was a tradition in Australian Test cricket but one that all nations were keen on. Once it happened after every day’s play, then it shifted to the end of the Test and later, because everything was so hectic, it became something that you did at the end of a tour. I know whenever we had a drink with the opposition after a series it was a positive experience. Arguments happened on the field and stayed there, relationships were built off it. If Uncle Greg was my favourite, everyone else in the Mowbray dressing room was a star, too. I’d seen his fast-bowling partners, Troy Cooley and Roger Brown, bowling in the Sheffield Shield. Brad Jones, later my coach when I played for the Mowbray Under-13s, had played for Tasmania Colts. Richard Soule was the Tassie wicketkeeper. A standout was Mick Sellers, a strong burly left-hander who strode out to bat at the start of an innings and whacked the ball all over the place. He used a big Stuart Surridge Jumbo, four or five grips on the handle, batted in a cap and took on the fast bowlers every time. If there was ever a blueprint made of the classic Mowbray Cricket Club player it was Mick. He represented Tasmania in a few first-class and one-day games in the 1970s. He played over 400 games for Mowbray and was the club coach. After he retired, he would still be down at the ground, helping to roll the wicket, put on the covers, anything to help. He remains a legendary figure around the club. He was there, of course, when I came back at the end of my career. He looked after me in those days when I was a constant in their dressing room. He got me involved when the time was right, and sheltered me at other times. In doing so, he taught me so much. They all did. They were kind and generous men. At the same time, everyone feared playing Mowbray; I could see that from the looks on the opposition’s faces, what they said to each other while we were fielding. A game against Mowbray was a tough day at the office, plenty of words spoken, no quarter given. A lot of what you see in me today is a result of learning the game the way they used to play it. When we were truly at our best other sides hated playing Australia. South African cricket captain Graeme Smith admitted as much once, and while a lot of people took this the wrong way, to me and to the others in the side the point was we would not give an inch on the field. After stumps, if Dad had come from golf to see how the boys had played, he would put down his beer, and bowl to me so I could try to mimic the shots I’d seen played earlier in the day. At home games, we used a big incinerator drum as the wicket and just the same as when they were bowling to me at school my ambition was to never get bowled. Dad was my first coach, at cricket and footy, and he could be a tough marker, but he wanted me to be a winner and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. You often read or hear of the so-called bravery of sportspeople who overcome great adversity to win. I’ve certainly seen and been a part of some very brave sporting accomplishments over the years, but I must say that the use of the expression ‘bravery’ is completely over-stated when you are witness to some real acts of bravery in everyday life. Rianna and I have met some of the bravest children and families in our work around the area of childhood cancer. The children, especially, move us. While they fight the most horrible disease in the world, they show incredible resilience to go through their treatment and hopefully survive. Without a doubt, it’s even tougher for the families. Parents and grandparents continually ask the question: ‘Why our child or grandchild?’ They have to be brave for the child while maintaining a sense of normality to support siblings and other loved ones at a time that most of us cannot even start to imagine how difficult it must be. Some of the bravest families we have met had children who didn’t survive the battle with cancer. In our days of supporting the Children’s Cancer Institute Australia, I stayed in regular contact with a number of children, exchanging text messages and keeping up to date with their progress. Those close to me know that I’m a bit slack at returning text messages but my contact with these children was different — I always made a point of answering straight away. Sadly, in many situations, a message would come through from parents letting me know their child didn’t make it. Over the years, though, we have stayed in contact with many families whose children have survived. One very special child close to our hearts is Toby Plate from Adelaide. I first met Toby and his family on the eve of the Adelaide Ashes Test in 2010. During that series, I had a young cancer sufferer join me at each of the opening ceremonies. Of all the children I met that summer, Toby was the sickest — fighting a brain tumour and undergoing the most intensive treatment. We spent considerable time together that day and he left a lasting impression on me. The next day we stood together and sang the national anthem before the second Test began. Sadly not all the children who stood with me in the anthem ceremonies that summer survived their battle with cancer, but Toby did. We have stayed in touch and last year played cricket together at the MCG with Owen Bowditch, who was with me at the Boxing Day Test opening ceremony that summer. These boys and their families epitomise bravery for me. They are symbolic of what it means to overcome adversity. Not all the stories have a happy ending but the bravery shown by each and every child that is confronted by cancer is overwhelming, to say the least. (#ulink_212fe861-5e78-53b1-b416-764a3ddf9cc2) MOST KIDS PLAY CRICKET with their fathers in the backyard, but where we came from there was a bit of a tradition of the fathers dropping down in the grades to guide their sons through. We never had a big partnership, but I loved the year I played with my old man. Dad retired from weekend cricket to concentrate on his golf well before I played my first serious game, but after a number of seasons on the sidelines he was talked into making a comeback, the lure being the chance to play with his son. Up until this time I had played a little at school and some indoor cricket, but all the while I was waiting to join the men and that’s what I did on the eve of my 13th birthday. We were both in the thirds at the start of the 1987–88 season. Dad was captain, I was a tiny but promising novice who struggled to hit the ball off the square. My technique was pretty good, but lofted shots were risky because I was never sure I could get the ball over the fielders’ heads and there was just not enough power in my arms to play a forcing shot through the field. Still, Dad put me up near the top of the order, reasoning the experience would be good for me, and eventually the day came when he walked out proudly to bat with me at the other end. It was a home game against South Launceston. Just like my favourite players — Launceston’s own David Boon, former Australian captain Kim Hughes and the then Aussie skipper Allan Border — did in the Test matches I watched so avidly on television, I sauntered down the pitch before Dad faced a ball, to tell him the leg-spinner who was bowling, a bloke named Matthew Dillon, was getting a bit of turn. ‘Just be careful for a little while,’ I suggested. I was all of 12 years old. ‘Don’t play across the line because he’s getting a bit of turn.’ The first delivery was handled without a problem, but the second ball Dad went for the big shot and skied a simple catch to cover. I was really disappointed and a bit dirty that he’d thrown his wicket away, but thinking about it now, I guess this might have been the first time I saw what pressure can do on a cricket field — we’d talked so much about what it would be like to bat together, how we really wanted to have a decent partnership, and that seemed to be what Dad was thinking about rather than just playing each ball on its merits. At least that’s what we decided at the inquisition after stumps and it says something about the way we were that we sat down and analysed what went wrong. Ironically, in the matches that followed, it was me, not Dad, who struggled to make a big score. At season’s end, he was top of the competition for batting aggregates and averages, and having guided me through my first year, he promptly retired for good so he could get back to playing golf all weekend. I think part of his motivation to come back was simply to protect me, because he knew what senior grade cricket in Launceston could be like. I was sledged more in my first season with Mowbray than I would ever be sledged again in my life. I’d developed a bit of a reputation as a ‘young gun’ and some old blokes seemed very keen to put me in my place. There were a number of guys playing third grade who were in a similar boat to Dad — older, former top-grade players who were now helping young guys out and at the same time were eager to ‘educate’ teenage opponents who stood out. Old bulls out to slow the young bulls down and teach them a thing or two about how the game should be played. It was a time-honoured tradition and one that we might have got away from a little now in the select streams of Australian cricket where the best young players are channelled off into age competitions or lured by scholarships to private schools where they only get to play against people their own age. You can get put back in your place fairly quickly playing against cranky old blokes who played their first game before you were born. Respect is earned in these scenarios and if you have the talent and character to survive you come out a better cricketer and a better person. I got fearsome sledgings on a few occasions; one that stands out was the wicketkeeper from Riverside who had played some representative cricket a few years earlier and now gave me an almighty serve on their home ground after I made the mistake of responding to something he’d muttered from behind the stumps. If I’d been out of line, Dad would have said so. Instead, he got into this keeper and the language was pretty full-on. Most weeks someone tried to knock my head off, but nothing about playing with the men harmed me. Some people keep their kids away from real cricket balls and some talent streams lock them into playing in their age groups for fear they will be roughed up and mentally scarred. Fortunately I had no fear and came through unscathed. Indeed, the value of playing against cricketers twice, even three times, my age shone through in the January of that season, when I played for Mowbray in the Northern Under-13 Cricket Week — I scored four separate hundreds in the space of five days, all of them undefeated. To me the other team were just like Drew and there was no way they were going to get me out. It was a simple game in those years — you were either in or out and it was obvious who you were competing with; with age comes the doubts and mental struggles that all sportsmen face. Apparently at one point during this tournament a few of the parents became a little agitated because their kids weren’t getting a bat, so Dad suggested to our coach, Brad Jones, that he give someone else a go. Brad disagreed, saying he’d sort it out later. ‘I didn’t think it warranted this kid who loved the game so much being denied the chance of batting just because some parents wanted to watch their kid bat,’ he recalled when interviewed a couple of years back. Two weeks later, I was picked in Mowbray’s team for the final game in the Northern Under-16 Cricket Week and made another ton, which was enough for me to be selected in the NTCA’s Under-16s training squad and the Tasmanian Institute of Sport Under-19 squad, and for me to get my picture in the paper for the first time, alongside an article that was headlined: ‘Ricky’s Making a Big Hit in Cricket Circles’. From that time on, I never really thought about a working career outside of sport. When people asked me what I was going to do for a living, I’d reply, ‘Play cricket.’ I think they thought I was joking, but I was very serious. I was a student at Brooks High School, Rocherlea, by this stage, and one day at school I was interviewed by journalist Nigel Bailey. Today, the story is stuck in Mum’s scrapbook and my responses are exactly what you’d expect from a 13-year-old grade-eight student terrified of embarrassing himself. When asked if I’d like to play for Australia, I replied, ‘I’d love to play for Australia.’ When Nigel asked me if David Boon was a hero, I responded, ‘I look up to David Boon because he’s from here.’ And that was about it, except when I was asked what I liked to do outside of cricket. ‘I like to fish for trout with my dad,’ I said. THE FIRST TIME I threw a line in the water occurred during school holidays at Musselroe Bay, a village on Tasmania’s far north-east coast, where my grandparents had a caravan and we’d stay at one of the campsites. Quite often, Dad’s sister and her kids used to come up as well and other relatives of Dad’s had a shack a couple of minutes down the road, so family gatherings could be huge. You had to drive through old Ponting country to get there, the road running through the town of Pioneer which always had Dad telling stories as we drove. Getting there was half the fun. Dad had a few cars when we were young and none of them were very flash. There was an old Holden, a Ford Cortina and a Toyota Cressida he bought when he got laid off from the railways. My grandparents had a station wagon and would take most of our gear in the back of that. We’d squash into the family car and hold our breath most of the way, just hoping it would get us there. In Musselroe I’d watch the Boxing Day Tests on a little black-and-white portable TV, sitting on a couch or lying on the floor. I can remember Dennis Lillee bowling off his long run, Allan Border wearing down the opposition and Kim Hughes playing a brand of cricket that I hoped to emulate one day. At other times we’d go out on Pop’s little dinghy fishing for salmon. My childhood memories are of us never failing to bring back at least enough food for dinner that night. These were the happiest days of my childhood. If we weren’t fishing, opening Christmas presents or watching Test matches at Musselroe Bay, the odds were I was involved in a sporting activity of some kind. A couple named Sue and Darrel Filgate had a shack on a large, well-grassed block of land, and it was nothing for me to play cricket all day in summer with the Filgates’ two sons, Darren and Scott, who were around the same age as me. There were days when I’d bounce out of bed in the morning, have a slice of Vegemite toast for breakfast, and then be gone for the day. Often, one or more of Mum, Dad, Nan or Pop had to come up to the Filgates’ house to get me for dinner, because I had no sense of time when we were on holidays, especially if I was batting. I thought I was going okay and Nan obviously agreed with me. Around the time of my 10th birthday, it could have been Christmas 1984, she gave me a T-shirt that featured an ambitious message: ‘Inside this shirt is a future Test cricketer’. A few people had a friendly go at me whenever they saw that shirt, whether it was that Christmas or in the next few that followed. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t see a problem. UNTIL I WAS 13, most of the organised cricket I played was at school or indoors. Wherever I played I made sure bowlers worked hard if they were ever going to be rid of me. Drew wasn’t the only one who suffered. I don’t think I was dismissed in my two years of cricket at Mowbray Heights Primary and I do recall that in grade six they introduced a limit on how long anyone could bat — if a batsman reached 30, he had to retire — to stop me from batting all the time. Our coach was also the umpire and the scorer too, so whenever I was at the bowler’s end I’d ask him, ‘How many am I?’ My plan was to get to 29 and then aim for the boundary so I’d finish unconquered on 33 or 35. The indoor games were played at the Waverley Area Cricket Arena, at St Leonards in south-east Launceston, known across town as the WACA. I was our team’s wicketkeeper. Dad was captain. I played a lot of indoor cricket, including some big games in Hobart representing the WACA. I loved it, but my old man wasn’t so keen on me playing so much because he thought it was bad for my outdoor cricket. The key to indoor cricket is to push the ball into the side netting, which meant we were always hitting across the line. ‘You can’t play straight in indoor cricket,’ he’d sneer, because a drive back to the bowler could lead to a run out if the batsman at the non-striker’s end (who was always looking for a quick single) backed up too far. He was right, of course, and eventually I gave the game away for that reason. THE FIRST ‘SERIOUS’ BAT I ever owned was a Duncan Fearnley size five that Dad bought for me from a local sports store. Then, one day not long after my 10th birthday, Dad and I went along to watch the Mowbray Under-13 team in action. Within minutes of arriving, we learned they were one player short, because someone had dropped out at the last minute. It was my big chance and not one I hadn’t fantasised about. The people at the club were aware I was keen and they knew I could hold a bat and catch and throw, and as there was no one else available, I was drafted in, batting last and with no chance of getting a bowl. I was the most excited kid in the world. In our first innings I made one not out, but we were soundly beaten and the other team sent us back in, even though there was little chance of an outright result. I had the pads on and the coach said I could go in again if I wanted to, an invitation I wasn’t going to knock back. While I was waiting for the umpires to take us out Dad came over and said quietly, ‘If you can get to 20, I’ll buy you a new cricket bat.’ Years later, this was the knock Dad recalled when he was asked if there was a moment when he realised I was going to be a good batsman. I wasn’t much taller than the stumps but I knew how to play straight and I could leg glance and push the ball between the fieldsmen at mid-wicket and mid-on for a single. I certainly wasn’t scared. In the end, it was more a matter of whether I’d get to 20 before sunset, but I made it and by the following Saturday I had my Gray-Nicolls ‘Super Scoop’, a David Hookes signature. A year later, I was given some County gear — a bat, gloves and pads after impressing the right people at indoor cricket — but the Scoop remained my favourite bat until, in early 1988, on the back of those hundreds in the Under-13 and Under-16 Cricket Weeks, I was signed up by Kookaburra, whom I’ve been with ever since. This sponsorship deal was instigated by a gentleman named Ian Young, a man who became a family friend. Youngy was the hardest working bloke I’ve ever met, someone who was passionate about everything he did. I first ran into him when I got the part-time job as a scoreboard attendant at the NTCA ground, where he was the curator, but he really came into my life early in my first season playing for Mowbray. One night when we were using the indoor nets at the NTCA ground, he stopped to watch me bat and then came up to me afterwards and offered to help me out. Youngy had already devoted a lifetime’s worth of work to the game, as a player, mentor and administrator, and now here he was — clad in his King Gee work pants, steel-capped boots and big flannelette shirt — meeting me at Invermay Park on Saturday mornings after he’d worked on his pitches in the early hours, to bowl at me for over after over, all because he believed I was a good cricketer in the making. Not long after, he was appointed coach at Mowbray and our bond grew tighter. If he ever rang and said, ‘Let’s go have a hit,’ I’d be on my way. I’d bat, he’d bowl; as I remember my childhood, he was always around to throw balls at me or bowl to me. But he never forced me to go to practice; in those days, I would have batted all day every day if I could have. As long as I worked hard, greeted him with a firm handshake and looked him straight in the eye and listened when he spoke to me — that was all he wanted. When it came to batting technique, he was big on the simple stuff: play as straight as you can and wait for the ball. For me, the biggest buzz was simply that someone of his stature was taking such an interest in me; that he cared as much as Mum and Dad did. Youngy always stood out in the crowd, and not just because he was a tall bloke. He was confident, assertive, never short of a word but always talking sense. It was so good to have him on my side. He was a coach who, if he saw a problem, he tried to fix it and he was happy to work and work until things were right. He taught me the value of a good work ethic. He’d been an outstanding bowler in his day, and if I made a mistake in the nets on a cover drive, you could guarantee the next ball he’d bowl would pitch in the same spot, to give me the chance to do it better. Sometimes when he got tired Youngy would invite me back to the indoor nets, where he would feed one of the bowling machines so I could keep working on my technique. Often, we were joined by his youngest son Shaun, who was four-and-a-half years older than me and played his cricket with South Launceston. Two other sons, Claye and Brent, were also excellent cricketers. Claye even opened the bowling for Tasmania one season with Dennis Lillee. Shaun, a gifted all-rounder, and I would play plenty of Shield cricket together and in an Ashes Test at the Oval in 1997, an event that prompted the Launceston Examiner to organise a photo of two proud fathers, Ian and Graeme, which they put on the front page of the paper. In 1988, Youngy was good mates with a bloke named Ian Simpson who was working for Kookaburra at that time, and he told him, ‘There’s a kid down here who looks like he might be all right.’ I was introduced to Ian soon after, when he was in Tassie for the Kookaburra Cup final and about a week later, a kit, complete with bat, gloves and pads, landed on our front door. As the story goes, Ian Simpson went back to Melbourne and told Rob Elliot, the boss at Kookaburra, ‘We’ve got this kid down in Tassie we’ve got to look after. I’ve sent him some gear already.’ Rob, who is a terrific bloke but who can be tough to deal with, snarled back, ‘Why don’t you go back to the local prep school and find a few more kids. We’ll sign ’em all up!’ I’d like to think the deal I signed turned out to be a pretty good one for Kookaburra, but Ian Simpson left the company soon after, and within a few weeks he was actually mowing the lawns at the Kookaburra warehouse. Not that he was bitter about this development — his first venture after leaving the cricket-gear business was to take on a ‘Jim’s Mowing’ franchise, which worked out very well for him. One of his clients was Kookaburra and no one greeted him more warmly, if they crossed paths, than Rob Elliot. I obviously made a good impression in those days. Around that time Tasmanian ABC cricket commentator Neville Oliver told a reporter from the Examiner newspaper: ‘We’ve got a 14-year-old who’s better than Boon — but don’t write anything about him yet, it’s too much pressure.’ Back then, I continued working with Ian Young and our bond remained as strong as ever until he passed away, aged 68, in October 2010. He was always a fantastic friend and one of my strongest supporters. I was playing a Test match at Bangalore in India when Ian died and was on the flight home when he was laid to rest in Launceston. On that plane I had plenty of time to think about everything he taught me, about batting, leadership and life. Like just about everyone connected with the Mowbray club, he was big on loyalty, big on sticking with your mates and on looking after each other. And I thought about his ability to cut to the core of a problem but then help you find the correct answer for yourself, rather than just giving advice and hoping you understood. Wherever I was in the world, he would always call me if he thought he’d spotted something about my game that wasn’t quite right, and because he knew my technique so well his advice was inevitably on the money. But I was only one of a great number of promising cricketers he helped on and off the field, which is one of the reasons, in the days after he died, so many people referred to him as a ‘champion’ and a ‘legend’. The last time I caught up with Ian Young was when we arranged to meet at a restaurant located, appropriately enough, just across the road from Invermay Park. The thing that sticks with me of that final meeting was how we greeted each other: I looked him straight in the eye and gave him a firm handshake, no differently to how we did it when I was just a little kid, all those years ago. Missing Youngy’s funeral because of the demands of cricket was hard, but that was the nature of the job. From an early age the game took me away from the people who introduced me to it and made me the person I am. I did get used to it but I can honestly say it never got any easier, in fact as I got older it got harder but I suppose that’s just the way life goes. I know I wouldn’t have swapped my lot for anything and I know I was doing something that people like Mum, Dad, Youngy and so many others wanted for me. Still, it would have been nice to have been there for someone who’d always been there for me. Words can never express how grateful I am for the upbringing my family gave me. My childhood memories are always front of mind for me and are detailed in the early chapters of this book. They are special memories that have become even more important to me as I have travelled around the world. The toughest part of leaving home and becoming a professional cricketer was the disconnect from my family back in Launceston. When I first moved away, I didn’t realise that my cricket journey would end some 23 years later when I was married with two children and settling down in a new home in Melbourne. But that’s now a reality for me and I can’t wait to re-connect with the family back in Tasmania. That might sound quite dramatic, but a recent phone call from Dad reinforced the sometimes remoteness of our relationship. ‘So I can call you again now!’ Dad said with a cheeky chirp in his voice. You see, when I was overseas, Dad would never call me on my mobile. If he or Mum needed me, they’d get Drew or Renee to text or call me and I’d phone home. But that was very unusual. I’d keep up to date with how things were at home through regular texts and infrequent calls from Drew and Renee. The opportunity to go home was dictated by my cricket schedule. A game in Tassie meant I might squeeze in a quick trip home or more likely, the family would come to Hobart to watch me play and we would catch up for dinner. But that’s behind me now, and our move to Melbourne means I’m only an hour away from Launceston. When I left home, my little sister, Renee, was only nine years of age. Now she is married to Greg, has two children, Thomas and Macey, and we are closer than ever before. My little brother, Drew, has also grown up from our backyard cricket games and is married to Krysta. They also have two children, Josh and Chloe. Growing up, there was quite a bit of routine in our family. A lot of this hasn’t changed, especially around games of golf, family outings and celebrating special occasions. I’m longing to slip back into that routine now and enjoy more time together. No doubt there will be a lot more family golf games ahead, too. (#ulink_532e630f-86e5-5bd9-bc37-a36f14fa2c47) THE WORLD WAS WATCHING South Africa in early 1992 as the country decided if it should end years of white rule and the apartheid system. And, so was I, but from a lot closer than you would think. I had arrived in the country a week before with a side from the Cricket Academy and the day we played Orange Free State in Bloemfontein was the day white South Africans were asked to decide if the process of ending apartheid and sharing power should continue or not. We had our bags packed sweating on the outcome of what may have been the most significant referendums of the 20th century. If it had been defeated we would have been straight out of there and the ban on sporting ties with the country would have resumed. I was all of 17 and learning fast that cricket soon takes you right out of your comfort zone. It was a long way from Launceston, but life was moving fast. So let me just take you back a step. ONE OF THE THINGS I remember most clearly about my early games with Mowbray thirds was how big the grounds were and how I often felt as if I couldn’t hit the ball out of the infield. My lack of size and power held me back for a while, and it wasn’t until near the end of my second season that I was promoted to the A-Reserves — for the grand final, no less — when I was chosen as a specialist No. 8 batsman. It was a bit of luck really. Someone was injured, but you weren’t allowed to bring a player back from A-Grade for the A-Reserve final, so they picked me primarily for my fielding. All the indoor games, the fielding practice and the hours my mates and I had spent in the vacant land across the road from home and in the nearby park and surrounding scrub, not just throwing and catching cricket and tennis balls, but also throwing rocks at targets like telegraph poles and tree stumps and, occasionally, each other, had turned me into a pretty fair fielder for my age. I batted for almost three hours in that final, playing one defensive shot after another, though occasionally I’d tuck one down to fine leg for a single or maybe a quickly run two. It can’t have been much fun to watch. A tattered newspaper clipping in one of Mum’s scrapbooks describes my knock this way: ‘Mowbray was struggling at 6–114 against Riverside in the A-Reserve grand final at the Coca-Cola Ground before 14-year-old Ricky Ponting came to the rescue … the nephew of Tasmania’s latest Australian tourist Greg Campbell was finally out with the score at 9–246. Ponting scored 30 in 163 minutes at the crease in his A-Reserve debut. He combined with former state paceman Roger Brown for an eighth-wicket partnership of 65 in 76 minutes and with Ross Clark for 36 in 34 for the ninth.’ Having taken the best part of two seasons to earn a promotion to the A-Reserves, I promptly made my A-Grade debut for Mowbray at the start of the following summer, and in my very first game I snared what might have been the best catch I ever took. Troy Cooley, a Tasmanian opening bowler (and later the bowling coach for England and Australia), was bowling and Richard Bennett, a Tasmanian opening bat, was facing. I was pumped just to be playing. Troy, who was as quick as anyone in his day, bowled a full wide one and Bennett played a half slash, half cover drive, and I dived full length and caught it above eye-height, one handed. Before I knew it, everyone had a hold of me. I’ll also never forget a one-dayer against Riverside, when I came to the wicket at 5–44 chasing 147 and with our wicketkeeper, Richard Soule, put on 91 runs to win with little more than an over to spare. To bat in that situation with Richard, a former Australian Under-19 gloveman who’d been Tassie’s Shield keeper since taking over from Roger Woolley in 1985, was thrilling and enlightening, especially the way he stayed calm and smart when the pressure was at its fiercest. When Richard was away playing state cricket that season, Clinton Laskey took over as keeper, but Clinton had to miss our game against Old Scotch that year, which created my one and only chance to wear the keeper’s gloves in an A-Grade match. I was up for anything in those days. I think there was even a suggestion on one of my first tours as part of the Australian squad that I could act as reserve keeper if necessary. You learn on the job in cricket and I was blessed to get an apprenticeship among such good players. I can’t remember now if it seemed strange, but a lot of those guys were so much older than me and so much bigger. If Launceston hadn’t been such a small town the other sides would have mistaken me for the team mascot, but word got around pretty quick that I was a young bloke with a bit of talent. Naturally the opposition saw this as an invitation to take me down a peg or two. I can’t blame them for that and probably should thank them. Not long after that experience, I was on a plane to Adelaide for the Australian Under-17s championships, my first interstate tour. It’s funny, when I think of all the flights I have been on to all parts of the world since then, how the excitement I felt that day — packing my bag, driving to the airport, checking in, eating on the plane — remains in my memory. Dad was team manager, which was reassuring, because if there was something I wasn’t certain about (and there was plenty) I could ask him without fear of being embarrassed, but it also meant I had to stay firmly in line all the time. On the field, we defeated South Australia and the Northern Territory, and held our own against the ACT and Queensland. Cricket was consuming my adolescence. I was easily the youngest guy in the Under-17 squad, and then midway through the year, still six months short of my 16th birthday, I was included in the Tasmanian Sheffield Shield team’s winter training squad. I was one of 60 players chosen and it was weird to see my name in the paper alongside prominent Test and Shield cricketers like David Boon, Dirk Wellham, Greg Shipperd, Dave Gilbert, Greg Campbell and Peter Faulkner. I had to grow up quickly, and maybe the men at Mowbray Cricket Club were teaching me a lesson of sorts when early in the 1990–91 season they spiked my one can of beer with vodka. Having had a good laugh at my expense, they then dropped me on our front doorstep, which I’m sure didn’t impress my parents at all. But even this time, Mum and Dad knew that when I was with the cricketers I was safe, and if they ever needed to find me they knew exactly where I’d be. Not all parents in Rocherlea could say that about their 14- or 15-year-old sons. I PLAYED MY LAST full season of football in 1990, the end coming abruptly when I broke my right arm just above the elbow while playing in the Under-17s for North Launceston. The doctors had to put a pin in my arm, which stayed there for 16 weeks and meant I missed the early part of the following cricket season. By this stage of my life, I was confident cricket was my future, so it wasn’t hard to give the footy away, on the basis that it wasn’t worth risking an injury that might end my sporting dream. I think Dad would have stopped me anyway, if I’d tried to keep playing. Earlier in that 1990 season, not long after I captained the Northern team at the Under-17 state carnival, I was asked to answer a series of questions for our club newsletter. Mum stuck my responses in her scrapbook … Player Profile Name:Ricky Ponting Position:Wing Occupation:Student, Brooks High School Ambition:To play cricket for Australia Favourite AFL club/player:North Melbourne/John Longmire and John McCarthy Favourite TFL club/player:North Launceston/Todd Spearman and Marcus Todman Favourite ground: York Park Other sports:Cricket, Golf Favourite food:Kentucky Fried Chicken Girlfriend:No one (they give me the poops!) Dislikes:Hawthorn and Essendon supporters Most embarrassing moment:Getting dropped from senior firsts to the seconds at school after being the captain the week before! TWO WEEKS IN THE MIDDLE of winter in 1991 changed not just my cricket career but the way my life evolved. I had been selected in the Australian Under-17 development squad following the 1990–91 Under-17 championships in Brisbane, which led to me receiving specialised coaching from two cricket legends: Greg Chappell and Barry Richards. I left school at the end of Year 10. It was a big move I suppose, but it was pretty clear to everyone by then that cricket was the only thing I cared about. Ian Young got me a job as part of the ground staff at Scotch Oakburn College, one of Launceston’s most respected independent schools, located to the immediate south-east of the city centre, and that job confirmed for me that a life in sport was what I really wanted. Then it happened: I spent a fortnight at the Australian Institute of Sport’s Cricket Academy in Adelaide courtesy of a scholarship from the Century Club, a group of cricket enthusiasts based in Launceston who had come together in the 1970s with the aim of fostering the game and its players in Northern Tasmania. It is impossible to underrate what that scholarship meant to me and my life. The Cricket Academy, a joint initiative of the Institute of Sport and the Australian Cricket Board (now Cricket Australia), had been officially opened in 1988. Its policy was to invite the country’s best young cricketers, most of them Under-19 players, to work together and learn from some of the game’s finest coaches. The Australian Under-19 team was touring England at the time, which meant there were very few Academy cricketers in Adelaide when another top Tasmanian junior, Andrew Gower, and I arrived. There had recently been some major organisational changes at the Academy, the most notable being the appointment of the former great Australian wicketkeeper Rod Marsh as head coach. Rod had only been there a couple of months and I can imagine he was battling through any number of administrative issues, so the chance to work with a couple of keen young Tasmanians would have been a godsend for him. He took a genuine interest in us and I quickly came to realise he is a bloke who is very easy to talk to and he knows an amazing amount about our game. We were both in our element: Rod, the wily old pro, encouraging and teaching; me, shy but fiercely determined, listening and learning. One thing Rod said to us during my first full year in Adelaide has always stayed with me, ‘If you blokes aren’t good enough to score 300 runs in a day you can all pack up your bags and go home now.’ That was the style of cricket he wanted us to embrace, but it wasn’t the style of cricket you saw too often in Test matches back in the early 1990s. Rod was perceptive enough to realise that assertive cricketers were coming to the fore, that the game needed to be entertaining if it wanted to survive, and that we — the players of the future — needed to be ready for this revolution. Simply put, he was ahead of his time. Andrew was a very promising leg-spinner from the South Launceston club. While he never made an impact in first-class cricket he did build up an imposing record in Launceston club cricket, spending a number of years at Mowbray as our captain–coach. As teenagers, we played a lot of junior outdoor and indoor cricket together (I first met him at the Launceston WACA), and even after I’d faced Shane Warne I thought Andrew had the best wrong’un and top-spinner I’d seen. In the years to come, he’d do very well in business, and only recently bought a pub, the Inveresk Tavern, not far from Mowbray’s home ground, Invermay Park. It’s a small town, Launceston, and before Andrew and I went to the Academy together, Dad and I used to go to the Inveresk most Thursday nights, to have a wager or two (I was betting in 50-cent and one-dollar units) on the local greyhound meetings. For our first two weeks in Adelaide, Andrew and I lived in a room at the Seaton Hotel, which was located out near the Royal Adelaide Golf Club, right next to a railway line (which meant we could never get any sleep) and not too far from the state-of-the-art indoor facilities at the Adelaide Oval. During my first day at the Adelaide Oval indoor nets, Andrew and I were introduced to a strapping young pace bowler from Newcastle, Paul ‘Blocker’ Wilson, who had quit his job as a trainee accountant and apparently had been hassling Rod for weeks about getting an opportunity at the Academy. Beaten down by the bloke’s persistence, Rod had agreed to give Paul a try-out, which was at this time, and I was the bunny nominated to face the best he could offer. I guess in a way we were both on trial. The first ball was a quick bumper, and I did the same as I would have done if one of Mowbray’s senior quicks, say Troy Cooley, Scott Plummer or Roger Brown, had pinged one in short at practice: I hooked him for four. The next one was even quicker and a bit shorter, and according to Rod, Blocker ran through the crease and delivered it from a lot closer than he should have, but I smashed him again. Later, Blocker and I became good mates, but now he was filthy on the little kid who was threatening to ruin his Academy adventure before it even began. I had no fear about getting hit in the head — at this moment, when I was batting in a cap — or at any stage in my life. This was true when Ian Young was teaching me the basics of batting technique, when I was 13 playing against 16-year-olds, when I was 15 playing for A-Grade against men, at the Academy taking on Blocker or the bowling machine, or later in my cricket life when I was up against the fastest bowlers in the game, like Pakistan’s Shoaib Akhtar or the West Indies’ Curtly Ambrose. I had to try and find a way to hold my own. I’m not sure I could have done that if I was frightened, even a little. The combination of no fear and a lot of quality practice is why I ended up being a reasonable back-foot player. After those two weeks at the Academy in 1991, it was impossible for me not to think very seriously about my chances of playing for Tasmania and Australia. The Academy had been formed in 1987 and guys who had gone there before me had been some of the stars of recent Under-17 and Under-19 Australian championships. By the winter of 1991, 23 graduates had played Sheffield Shield cricket, including Shane Warne (Victoria) and Damien Martyn (Western Australia), who had made their respective Shield debuts while working at the Academy in 1990–91. No one had made the Australian team as yet, but it was just a matter of time. Perhaps the best bet for this elevation was Michael Bevan, who had made such an impact in 1989–90 he forced a rule change — back then, the Academy guys living in Adelaide could be selected in the South Australian Shield team, but when the NSW authorities saw Bevan (who was actually from Canberra, but in reality a NSW player) making a hundred for another state instead of them they quickly decided it wasn’t right. By 1990–91, Academy cricketers were playing for their home state. I’m extremely glad the change was made, because the only cap I ever wanted to wear in Australian domestic cricket was the Tassie one. It felt as if I got years’ worth of tuition in those two weeks and they obviously liked what they saw because I was invited back in 1992 to join the two-year program. I was leaving home. For the first half of my first full year at the Academy, we lived in serviced units called the ‘Directors Apartments’ in Gouger Street, not far from the city centre, where we ate pub meals every day — chicken schnitzel and chips for lunch and something equally exotic for dinner. We moved to the Del Monte Hotel at Henley Beach halfway through the year and that’s where we lived until the end of my second year. In January 1992 I was part of Tasmania’s Under-19 squad at the Australian championships, even though I was still eligible for the Under-17s, and after I scored a few runs Rod was on ABC Radio describing me as ‘a heck of a good player’ and adding, ‘He has a big future in the game if he keeps his head and keeps learning. He has a very good technique and appears to have an old head on young shoulders.’ Rod also made a point of praising the Tasmanian selectors for picking me in the Under-19s, saying, ‘Too often young players are pigeon-holed by age group instead of being allowed to play to their full potential.’ I’m sure there were some who thought I was being fast-tracked ahead of my time, but in my view my progress through Tasmanian cricket was handled fantastically well by the local administrators. There was always a suspicion where I came from that while many of the best cricketers were from the north of the state, many of the most influential officials were based in Hobart, but I never had any hurdles unnecessarily put in front of me just because I was from Launceston. Maybe the facilities and practice wickets in my home town weren’t always as good as those available to the young cricketers in Hobart and on the mainland, but that might have made me a better player rather than worse. The truth is I was encouraged at every level in Tassie. After that, the success of Launceston’s own David Boon at Test and one-day international (ODI) level (by 1992 he was as important as anyone in the Australian batting order) and the fact I’d gone through the Cricket Academy, paved the way for me to get a fair shot at the Australian team. 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. (#ulink_310da53c-105f-561b-8f94-12fbf2c26674) 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. Shane was the bloke responsible for my ‘Punter’ nickname, which he gave me because of my habit of sneaking down to the TAB twice a week to bet on the dogs. Everyone else called me ‘Pont’ or ‘Ponts’, but to Warnie that wasn’t quite right. I can’t remember if Shane ever came with me to the TAB, but he knew where I was and I think he was impressed with my nerve and the fact I liked a bet. What he definitely did try to do was ‘corrupt’ me by taking me to the nightclubs and casinos he liked to frequent. I had no time for that stuff and resisted for a while. My favourite excuse was that I didn’t own a pair of jeans or a decent shirt (which was 100 per cent true), but that alibi only worked for so long. Eventually, he found some gear, dressed me up and out we went. I might not have looked anything close to 18, but even back then there wasn’t a doorman in the universe who could resist Shane Warne. I can still remember Warnie saying to me during that night out, ‘Well, Punter, what do you reckon?’ And I just replied sheepishly, ‘Aw, mate, I dunno.’ I was like a rabbit in the headlights, not knowing which way to run. I realised the disco was all very colourful, even exhilarating, but my gut instinct said the old world I knew was better for me. Suddenly, I was feeling my age and considerable lack of sophistication. I got home in one piece that night and resolved to wait until I was a bit older before I went back. Cricket was my priority. Planning is a critical foundation to achieving success. I learned this from a very young age and developed my own preferred process for planning. As Australian captain, I was able to use it to its maximum but it’s also been with me in other teams that I’ve played with. It involves three Vs — Vision, Values and Validation. The Vision is the over-arching goal of what you want to achieve and how you will get there. It’s set by the captain — as leader you must have a vision for where you are heading with your team and what your critical goals are. I’ve always talked through this with the senior people around me but have set the ultimate goal myself. This is paramount to the position of leader or captain. The second stage of my planning process is Values. These are set by the leadership group and senior players and are a set of behaviours for how we do things together to ensure we achieve the Vision. The process to create the values empowers the members of the group and ensures that they work with the captain to set the right example and culture for the team. The third and final part of the process is the Validation. This is where we get the buy-in of the entire team including all the support staff and management. It establishes how we are all going to play a role in achieving the Vision and the principles for how we will go about it. It becomes part of the day-to-day activities of the team as well as the players as individuals. It creates the culture and the standards that the group becomes known for. Over the years, I’ve been involved in all types of planning processes but when I’m in charge, I prefer to keep it very simple and straightforward as I firmly believe that’s the best way to get full buy-in and validation from the team. (#ulink_92f37603-f255-5a70-82df-7dea7c8ed5f1) I WAS SOUND ASLEEP and then the phone was ringing. Or was it someone at the door? Maybe it was the alarm. I was confused, didn’t know what was happening, but eventually worked out it was the phone and when I picked it up there was an angry voice: ‘Where the hell are you?’ I looked at the clock and my heart sank. I’d slept in and no matter how fast I moved now there was no escaping the fact I was late. The team was already at the ground. Welcome to my first game of Shield cricket. I hadn’t gotten out of bed on the wrong side, I just hadn’t gotten out of bed at all. It was no way to start a first-class career. AT THE START of the 1992–93 season, most observers of cricket in Tasmania believed the selectors would be wary about choosing a 17-year-old kid in Tassie’s Sheffield Shield team. David Boon and Richard Soule had been picked as 17-year-olds, but the pool of players from which the team was chosen was stronger now. Of course, I wanted to be promoted as soon as possible, my expectations fuelled in part by a conversation I’d had with Greg Shipperd, the coach of the Tasmanian team. Greg had brought a group of players to Adelaide for some pre-season training and while he was there he sought me out to say, ‘Mate, you’re in the selectors’ minds. We rate the Second XI games you’ll be playing highly and we’ll be watching them closely.’ One of the changes Rod Marsh had made to the way the Academy was run was to stop scholarship holders from playing Adelaide grade cricket. Instead, from October to December, we played a series of one-day and four-day games, mostly against state Second XIs and usually on first-class grounds, before going back to our home states until the next Academy ‘year’ began in April. When I scored 59 and 161 not out for the Academy against the South Australia Second XI in Adelaide I figured — if Greg was fair dinkum — I must have been a chance for the Shield. When I heard that Danny Buckingham, a stalwart of the Tassie batting order, was out with a groin injury my hopes became even stronger. And then, on Recreation Day, a public holiday held each year in Northern Tasmania on the first Monday in November, I made a hundred for Mowbray against Riverside at Invermay Park. It was — remember I had spent most of my time from age 15 away from Launceston — my first hundred in the top grade for the club. The Shield team was due to be announced 13 days later. Now, I was certain to be in the state side according to the Examiner’s correspondent at the game. I’d only returned home on the previous Friday, having been away for the best part of seven months. Mum’s first words were to remark on how much fitter I looked, then Dad and I hit Mowbray Golf Course as soon as we could for the first of a number of rounds we played in the following fortnight. David Boon had been 14 days away from his 18th birthday when he made his first Shield appearance in December 1978, and the local papers were making a fuss about the fact I was in line to make my debut at a younger age (by 15 days). If you had asked me three months earlier if beating Boonie mattered I would have said not at all, but as the first Shield game of the season drew closer and the speculation in the press, around the cricket club and around the family dining table became louder, I suddenly really wanted it to happen. By the middle of the following week I was like the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof, buzzing down the fairways, going for jogs around Rocherlea and out into the bush, anything to keep me occupied. Fortunately — for everyone — I got sent to Canberra to play a four-day game for the Academy, and when I came off at the end of the first day I got the news that I would be playing for Tassie in the first game. I guess I’m supposed to say that when I heard I’d been chosen I was gripped with a panic, but the truth is I knew I was in good form and I was pretty confident, based on what I’d seen and been taught at the Academy, at Tassie squad practice and in the matches I’d played with Mowbray, that I could step up to the higher standards of the Shield. My debut game would be at Adelaide Oval, a ground I knew so well even the benches in front of the Members’ Stand were familiar to me. It was all excitement and eager anticipation, no fear or dread. I don’t think this self-belief meant I was brash or cocky, but on the cricket field I was definitely comfortable in my own skin. In the Tassie dressing room, I did what I’d always done when surrounded by men: sat quietly in the corner, listened, did as I was told, and thought twice before asking a question. In the papers, before the game, Rod Marsh had described me as ‘a very sensible, quiet lad’. Still, I couldn’t wait to get out of Canberra and catch up with my new team-mates in Adelaide, which I did late on the Wednesday night, about 36 hours before the biggest game of my life to that point was due to begin. I WAS ROOMING with Michael Di Venuto, who wasn’t in our starting XI but had travelled with the Shield team as part of an ‘Ansett Youth Cricket Scholarship’ he’d been awarded at the start of the season. Hobart-born, Diva is 12 months older than me but we had played a lot of cricket together in the juniors and become great mates. He was a left-hand opening batsman with serious talent. Diva made over 25,000 first-class runs and 60 centuries but only played a smattering of ODIs for Australia. In another era he’d have played quite a few Tests I reckon. Here in Adelaide we were both very keen to impress by doing everything right. So we retired to our room early, ordered room service, watched a movie and made sure we set the alarms next to our beds so we’d be down early for breakfast. Next thing we knew there was a ringing noise buzzing through the room and I stumbled out of bed thinking it was the alarm. But it was the phone. It was Greg Shipperd ringing from Adelaide Oval: ‘Where the hell are you?’ he shouted down the line. ‘What are you doing?’ We looked at our damn clock-radios and saw it was 9.30am. I couldn’t believe it … we’d set it for 9.30pm. All we could do was get dressed as quickly as we could and bolt down to the ground. Luckily, it was raining so we hadn’t missed anything, but the impression we’d made was appalling. The team had started their warm-up in the indoor centre next door. David Boon had told the rest of the team that if anyone said a word to either of us they’d get fined. If they even looked at us, they’d be fined. We said a sheepish, ‘Sorry boys,’ as soon as we got there … and there was no reaction. Nothing. I tried to start a conversation … no reaction. Nothing. This was day one of my Sheffield Shield career. After warm-ups, we explained ourselves and said it was an honest mistake, and Boonie gruffly told us to make sure it didn’t happen again. Later, he pulled me to one side and reiterated the message. I’ve rarely felt less important in my life. I SPENT MY FIRST TWO DAYS of Shield cricket either in the field or watching the rain, which actually wasn’t a bad way to settle in. South Australia was able to declare at stumps on day two thanks to centuries from Joe Scuderi and Tim Nielsen, but we spent most of the afternoon watching it rain again. I then had a pretty restless night knowing I’d be batting the next day, probably on a wicket with some moisture in it. As it turned out, the pitch was still terrific to bat on, but I was still in fairly early, at 2–50. There was something very reassuring about being met in the middle by the legend himself … David Boon. Like me, Boonie is a former player from the North Launceston Football Club. Typical Launceston, he’s a master of the understatement and seriously loyal to those he trusts. He’d been there and done that, but didn’t overload me with advice. All he did when I came out to bat was to remind me the wicket was nice and we had plenty of time. And, last of all, he said simply, ‘Good luck.’ Still, I can’t begin to tell you how lucky I was to have the reassuring presence of the great man at the other end. I was determined to do the little things right — call loudly, run hard, be assertive. It took me 13 balls to get off the mark, then Tim May came on to bowl, and things changed. I had never faced an off-spinner of May’s class before. The way the ball looped away from my bat and then spun just that little bit more viciously than I’d ever previously seen was a genuine eye-opener. I felt out of my depth; I couldn’t get off strike and I started to hear the sledges the fielders were aiming at me. I was fine against the quicks, especially as they were so keen to bounce me, but I couldn’t get comfortable against the off-spin and I didn’t like it. This was a weird experience for me, one I’d never felt before other than in my first games against the men, but in those situations I knew I’d be okay when I got a little older. This time, the fear was I wasn’t good enough. Boonie took it upon himself to take most of May’s bowling and that plan didn’t come unstuck until he was caught at first slip for 60. We’d batted together in a little less than two-and-a-half hours. Straight after Boonie was out I hit their quick bowler Damian Reeves, who was also making his debut, for three straight fours to reach my 50. This prompted South Australia’s captain, Jamie Siddons, to bring his fastest bowler, Denis Hickey, back on. That proved the end of me. Hickey bowled (another) short one, but this was quicker than anything Reeves had delivered and I nicked my attempted hook shot through to keeper Nielsen. As I walked slowly back to the dressing room, I was more dirty on the hundred missed than happy with the 56 scored, especially as I’d let myself get a little excited by those three consecutive boundaries. I wasn’t a victim of over-confidence so much as I just didn’t quite appreciate how intricate the challenges can be at this higher level. Tim May had put me through the ringer, and though I had clearly struggled at times, I sort of came out the other side. Then Boonie was dismissed and suddenly I was the ‘senior partner’, a situation that created new expectations, at least in my mind. And then I hit those three fours, which did me in. It was natural for my blood to be pumping, but at that stage of my life I didn’t have the nous to put a lid on it. I’d never heard of the term ‘mental strength’ at this point in my life but that’s what I was lacking. And experience. Siddons knew what he was doing when he brought his No. 1 quick back and Hickey knew what he was doing when he tested me with that quick bouncer. In junior cricket I’d have gone on to a big score, but this wasn’t junior cricket. I still had plenty to learn. When I look back on my career, I realise I had three significant mentors who helped me become the best that I could be as an international cricketer. They all played key roles in my development at different times and I am forever indebted to them for all their support and encouragement. Ian Young was my first mentor and first real coach. I first met Youngy when I was nine years old, at an NTCA school-holiday coaching clinic. While I was in the nets, I noticed a tall, skinny bloke in a white floppy hat watching me bat. He stayed until I finished and then introduced himself. Straight away I could tell that he was someone who cared. From that first meeting way back in 1983 Youngy was a constant in my life right up until he sadly passed away in October 2010. We spent hours and hours talking together about cricket, practising in the nets and in the field, talking about football and how to be as good a person and sportsperson as you could be. Apart from my family, Youngy made the biggest impression on my life. He was a great motivator, listener and confidant. He had an incredible ability to help me find the answer myself while reinforcing the critical points to become better — as a batsman, leader and person. Youngy gave me a great foundation, which helped me when I arrived at the Cricket Academy in Adelaide. There I came under the watchful eye of Rod Marsh, who gave me a wonderful opportunity at the Academy and became my second mentor in the game of cricket and life. Rod pushed me very hard from my earliest days with him, and I look back on that now and know that it set the platform for the way I apply myself to training, preparing and playing my cricket. We got on well and spent a lot of time talking about cricket, the difference between good and great, and experiences that Rod had that he felt would help me. And they did. I probably didn’t realise it then but my time at the Academy with Rod taught me to grow up as a person, learn to be independent and self-reliant and to always give 100 per cent to my training and preparation. These lessons from Rod have been with me right through my career and it was great to have him back around the Australian team as a selector in my final years with the team. My other significant mentor is current Victorian and past Tasmanian coach, Greg Shipperd. He made a huge impression on me when I first came into the Tasmanian team, and right through my career was around the most when I needed someone to help me with something in my game. He was also very hard on me and would tell me exactly what he thought — all of which I really appreciated. If I got out playing a bad shot, Shippy would be at the gate as I walked off to tell me. But then he would watch the video with me to break down where I went wrong so that I wouldn’t make that mistake again. We have become good mates and he has been great for my batting, especially in the latter years of my career, where I’ve had a few challenges creep into my technique. What stands out for me with my three mentors is that they all pushed me hard, taught me to work harder than anyone else and, above all, to aim to be a good person. I am forever indebted to all three of them. (#ulink_b601fc45-7dee-5af3-853a-79cceaff1ac7) THERE WERE A COUPLE of good young players going around in the Sheffield Shield in the summer of 1992–93 and if I was one of them I was a fair way down the pecking order. Today it’s hard to believe how much talent was bubbling away in domestic Australian cricket back then. A half-century in my first game wasn’t a bad start, but I struggled a bit after that, getting only 4 in the second innings of that game. I got a few starts after that but didn’t get to 50 again until my fifth game, which luck would have it was at Bellerive against South Australia. Against Western Australia in Perth I saw a young bloke called Damien Martyn score a century, he was only 21 and had just made his Test debut against the West Indies and he was one of those setting the standard. He was one of the best batsmen I had seen and to this day I still say the same thing. Justin Langer didn’t do too badly either against us. We went up to Sydney in late January to take on NSW at the SCG, which in those days always helped the spinners. Glenn McGrath was playing his first Shield match and opened the bowling with Wayne Holdsworth, an honest fast bowler who took over 200 first-class wickets. At six was another making his debut for the Blues, my former Academy captain Adam Gilchrist who had been chosen as a batsman because Phil Emery was the wicketkeeper. Gilly was 21 and had been killing them in the seconds and even got a shot playing in the Prime Minister’s XI, but until then couldn’t force his way into the state side. It still amazes me that he took another seven years to make it to the Test team. It was, however, a bloke who was a bit older who sticks in my mind from that match. Greg Matthews is one of the more unique people to have ever played for Australia. He was a great bowler and will always be remembered for getting the final wicket in the Madras (Chennai) tied Test but he also made valuable runs. He could be different, but there’s no doubt he was talented and on this day he put me through one of the hardest exams of my cricketing life. Pace bowling never worried me that much, but as you can tell by now it was the spinners who challenged me to knuckle down and do the really hard yards in the middle. I batted for four hours that day, much of the time doing my best to hang on as we went off three times for rain delays. Scoring had been relatively easy at first but then the Blues put on the handbrakes. We lost a few wickets then, but I managed to find the mental energy needed not to throw things away. They extended play for an hour to draw out my pain and Matthews, aided by Emery, really tied me down, but when they eventually did call us in at stumps I had moved to 98 not out. Apparently I spent the best part of an hour in the 90s. I can’t say I wasn’t thinking about a century, but the overriding feeling I had as I made my way back to the sanctuary of the dressing room was pride that I had shown so much patience. I was also pretty pleased that my footwork had really improved. Tim May had pinned me to the crease in Adelaide but now I was following the advice of Ian Chappell who had told us during a coaching session at the Academy that you have to get to the ball on the full or the half volley when playing spinners. He’d also advised using the sweep but it wasn’t a shot that I ever truly mastered so it wasn’t one I was willing to play. No batsman should sleep soundly on 98 not out, especially one who hasn’t scored a Shield 100, but I was the most exhausted 18-year-old on the mainland that night and fell straight into a deep sleep when I got back to my bed. Okay, I admit waking with the cold sweats during a dream where I had run myself out trying to get to three figures, but even then I was so tired I think I just passed out again. I got there the next morning and it was a great feeling. It wasn’t just getting my first hundred, it felt like I had matured as a cricketer and taken my game to another level. When I went home Mum showed me how the papers had covered the innings, and the quote that stayed with me was from Richard Soule, when he said the difference in my batting now to where I’d been before was ‘astronomical’ in terms of my ‘mental application’. That’s how I felt, too. There was a fair degree of excitement in the papers about that century. I was the third youngest ever in the Shield to reach three figures, Archie Jackson did it at 17 and Doug Walters at 18, but he was about a month younger than I was. The journos must have asked Rod Marsh if I was the ‘next Doug Walters’, but he was too smart to fall for that. ‘There’s a touch of Doug Walters about him ... there’ll never be another Doug Walters, make that clear, he’s Ricky Ponting.’ Later that year Launceston cricket writer Mark Thomas shot down comparisons between me and Boonie by saying ‘there will never be another David Boon; but there could be the first Ricky Ponting’. It was all starting … It’s funny looking back, but I think we were all pushing each other onto bigger things then whether we knew it or not. Gilly said later that watching me score the hundred made him think, ‘If he can do it I can do it.’ When our time did come there was a sense among us that we could do anything because I think we’d seen the talent in each other and watched as our contemporaries took things up to the next level. If he could do it, I could … Greg Matthews finally got me in the second dig when I’d got to 69. Running through someone’s Shield stories can be a bit eye-glazing but there was something that happened in the next game against Victoria that I reckon I was reminded about every time Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland got to speak publicly with me in the room. Back then he was a long thin medium-pace bowler and while he didn’t play a lot of first-class matches he did in this one and as anybody who has been on the receiving end of one of his speeches will know by now, he got me out. I’ll give James his due, he tells a good story and he follows that boast by explaining that I was out ‘hit wicket’. I’d actually played a pretty good shot and set off for a run or two, but had made the mistake of wearing a new type of shoe. When I tried to take off, my foot slipped back and I knocked off the bails. I wasn’t happy at the time, but it gave the man who was later to become my boss something to talk about for years to come … In the penultimate game of the year I got back-to-back 100s against a Western Australian attack that included Jo Angel, Brendon Julian and another tall bowler, Tom Moody. It was a nice thing to do as I was playing against a home crowd at Bellerive, but in those days the pitch was a road and if you considered yourself a batsman then Tassie was the place to fill your boots. Three centuries and four 50s is a pretty good start to a Shield career, but it had me a fair way down the table compared to some of my contemporaries. Damien Martyn played four matches and got four 100s, Matthew Hayden bagged a couple and reached 50 five times playing up at Queensland where the wickets were pretty juicy, Jamie Siddons got four 100s too and Michael Slater scored over 1000 runs in the competition. There was an Ashes series coming up that winter and some talk that I might get a look-in. Marto and Lang had already made their Test debuts and while Lang missed this time round they took Marto and big Mattie Hayden. My old mate Warnie also made a bit of a splash when he got his first chance to bowl in England. The batting line up for the first Test was M Taylor, M Slater, D Boon, M Waugh, A Border and S Waugh with Marto and Haydos in the wings … I was a lot further back in the pecking order. I didn’t really expect to be picked for that tour, but I went into the next Shield season thinking I could be a long shot to go to South Africa at the end of the summer. I went all right too, scoring three 100s and as many 50s, but on reflection I knew I had let things get to me. The season started well, WA came down to Hobart and in the first innings Justin Langer and Damien Martyn knocked up 100s. In our innings me and Michael Di Venuto both did the same. The pair of us put on 207 and had fun wearing down the visitors. After that I went through a frustrating run of ‘starts’ but could not kick on. I felt in terrific form, but was playing some really dumb shots and I can remember more than once sitting in the dressing room after I’d been dismissed thinking, What did you do that for? People kept telling me to be patient, as if I’d forgotten the lessons of my debut season, but with hindsight I reckon my struggles were more a case of me trying to be more than what I was. A pressure was building in my mind for me to be a spectacular player (as some critics were suggesting I could be), which I never was and never would be, rather than just being technically sound and consistent. When I did finally make another hundred, against WA in Perth, it took me the best part of five hours and it was one of the most sensible innings of my life. A win in Adelaide would get Tasmania into the Shield final for the very first time, and I had a field day in an eight-wicket victory, scoring 84 not out and 161. Unfortunately I failed twice in the final in Sydney. Michael Bevan got a hundred and so did Brad McNamara and that was us done. It was pretty disappointing, but I wasn’t 20 yet and I guess at that age you figure there’ll be other chances. If you’d told me I wouldn’t get there for another 18 years … Anyway, I came out of the season with my reputation as one of Australia’s most promising young batsmen reasonably intact. More importantly, I was a smarter cricketer now. I’d learned to bat within my limitations and felt pretty good about where I was going. Even if taking the next step meant spending the first winter for a couple of years — and the last for decades to come — back at home. THE REASON FOR THIS was simple. After two years of pretty much constant cricket, I needed a break. An incident at the Australian Under-19 championships in Melbourne was telling. Because of the Shield schedule, I was available to play two games in this championship and the first of these was against South Australia. When we batted I was 83 not out at lunch and absolutely flying. Straight after the break, I was facing Jason Gillespie, a future Test star and at this point one of the best young quicks in the country. The strategy they’d come up with was to put every fielder in a semi-circle on the offside, with no one on the legside. It’s a ridiculous field and one you don’t see too often although MS Dhoni did it to us in India years later when they wanted to stop us chasing runs. I remember that time well: Simon Katich was batting and he was forced to play balls way outside off onto the onside. Eventually he went out and later that night an Indian journalist made the mistake of asking him why he’d been so defensive out there. He blew up and unfortunately that was what happened with me in this Under-19s game. Jason was aiming well wide of the off-stump, so for the first couple of overs I just let everything go, but eventually I went for a cut shot and nailed it … straight to the fielder at backward point. Of course, they carried on as if they were geniuses while I was extremely annoyed with myself. As I turned to storm off I went to swing my bat over the stumps. I connected with the top of the off-stump, it came clean out of the ground and I knew I was in trouble. At a hearing at the Victorian Cricket Association offices they made the point that it must have been deliberate because I didn’t bend down to put the stump back in, but the truth was I was too embarrassed. I just wanted to get out of there. I was suspended for a game, which we thought was over the top — no one got hurt and the only person I’d embarrassed by behaving the way I did was myself — but there was no avenue of appeal. After going out with the boys that night I flew home. At times I could be an angry young man on the cricket field. Earlier in the season, during our Shield game against WA at Bellerive, their quick Duncan Spencer — next to Pakistan’s Shoaib Akhtar, the quickest bowler I’ve ever faced — was bowling to me with the second new ball. Again, I played a cut shot and Brendon Julian, who was an unbelievable fielder, dived in the gully and took a screamer. I was out and they were laughing and shouting and throwing the ball in the air. But it was a no-ball! Now they were spewing and I was grinning. Spencer was blowing up big time. Next ball, he charged in and, no surprise, it was a short one, right at my throat. I managed to block the ball down at my feet, it dribbled up the wicket and Spencer grabbed it, looked up at me, I eyeballed him back, and then he threw the ball as hard as he could straight at me. It was all I could do to jerk my head back out of the way as the ball went whistling past my chest. In those situations the adrenalin kicks in. It was on! I dropped my bat and ran straight at him and we banged chests in the middle of the pitch as players, umpires and fieldsmen raced in from everywhere. They had to pull us apart before the game could proceed. Later, I found out he was a pretty good boxer, but even if I’d known that then it wouldn’t have stopped me. I seriously regretted knocking the stumps over in the Under-19 game against South Australia. A large part of that reaction was frustration at the field they set for me, but that was no excuse. I should have worked out a way to outsmart them. Duncan Spencer was different. He was not entitled to throw the ball at me from three or four metres away. The way I reacted might have looked bad and I guess those people who talk about certain things ‘not being cricket’ will say I was wrong, that I should have left it to the authorities to work out, but that was not how my brain worked in such situations. My natural reflex was to try to set injustices right as quickly as I could, a reaction that was formed in part on the field with my comrades at Mowbray who strongly believed in playing hard but fair. Part of that equation meant if something wasn’t fair you’d go hard. I went where my emotions took me, in this case straight up the pitch to confront the bloke who’d done me wrong. AS THE END of the 1993–94 Australian season approached, I talked to a number of people — Dad, Ian Young, Greg Shipperd, David Boon and Rod Marsh among them — and they all agreed that after two nine-month stints at the Academy, two full seasons of Shield and one-day games with Tasmania, and youth tours to South Africa (March 1992) and India and Sri Lanka (August–September 1993), some time away from the game would do me good. My life that winter was fairly predictable and really good. On the weekend I went to as many North Launceston footy games with my mates as I could. On Monday nights we went to the dogs, on Thursdays, we played golf ($50 in, winner takes all) and on Tuesday and Thursday nights we were at the gym, in the indoor nets, or just running laps of the oval. By the end of a winter of playing pennants for Mowbray my golf handicap had dropped from six to four and my head was clear. I guess I could have done what my good mate Shaun Young — Ian’s son — did and sign a deal to play league cricket in England, which he did after being named Tasmania’s Sheffield Shield player of the year. But to tell the truth, a little part of me simply wasn’t game — I didn’t like the idea of being that far from home. Going over with a squad was one thing, going over on my own seemed pretty daunting. I guess I was still a Rocherlea boy learning his way around the world and I wasn’t going out there unless it was with a tour group. The plan was to take a complete break from cricket from April to September and I did that except for when Rod Marsh invited me to be part of an Australian XI that played three games against an Indian XI in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. It was fantastic to share a dressing room with some of the country’s best young cricketers, including Stuart Law, Jimmy Maher, Andrew Symonds, Damien Martyn, Justin Langer, Brad Hodge, Darren Berry, Shane Lee, Matthew Nicholson, and a future Tassie captain in Daniel Marsh, but the real buzz was to play against a team that included some big names in world cricket. There was a touring group of Indian players, including Sunil Gavaskar, Gundappa Viswanath, Ravi Shastri, Sandeep Patil, Anil Kumble and the best young batsman in the world Sachin Tendulkar. I made a few runs against the Indians in the first game and Gavaskar, no less, singled me out for praise, saying I reminded him of Dean Jones. ‘There’s the same aggression, going after the ball, and the way he hits off the back foot,’ he said. That quote was especially topical, because Jones had announced his retirement from international cricket just a few days earlier, at the conclusion of Australia’s tour of South Africa. There were also rumours about that Allan Border was going to call it quits as Australian captain, which meant there might be an opening in the Aussie batting order. For a second I thought I was a bolter for the tour of Pakistan that was to begin in August, but the last two batting spots went to Michael Bevan and Justin Langer. At the same time, I was heartened by the announcement that a fourth team, ‘Australia A’, would be included in the World Series Cup one-day competition for the 1994–95 season, alongside Australia, England and Zimbabwe — getting into that side was an ambitious but realistic short-term goal for me. In the meantime, I kept having fun with my girlfriend and my old school and cricket mates back at home, and worked on a strength and fitness program that had been specifically drawn up for me by the physios from the Academy. In two years, I’d gone from being on the fringes of Tasmanian selection to being on the fringe of the Australian Test and one-day teams. For a 19-year-old from Rocherlea, that seemed like a pretty good place to be. The best sports stars consistently appear to have more than others to execute their skill. They look to be doing it comfortably, seem to be in the right place at the right time, and perform the so-called ‘one percenters’ when they are most needed. They are also the sports stars who play ‘in the zone’ — doing what they do best in a ‘semi-conscious’ state. Over the years, the best batsmen have been those who give themselves more time to play their shots. They use triggers in the bowlers’ run-ups and release points to pick up the line and length of a delivery quicker. They move their feet less, giving themselves more time for shot selection and execution. For me, I reckon that happened half a dozen times in my entire career. In those knocks, I was seriously oblivious to what was going on — I was in auto-pilot mode. I’ve seen plenty of other batsmen do the same, and Andrew Symonds’ 143 not out in the first game of our 2003 World Cup campaign stands out for me as the best example of this. Symmo was a late call-up for that game after Shane Warne and Darren Lehmann were suspended and Michael Bevan was injured in our preparation. He took his chance and dominated the game for us. I sat with him in the dressing rooms after the knock, and was bouncing all over the place recounting great shot after great shot. But Symmo couldn’t remember any of those amazing shots and just took it all in his stride. Bowlers would give different signals to show that they were in the zone. Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath are the two best bowlers I ever played with but they displayed completely opposite traits when they were in the zone. Glenn had a reputation for being a bit chirpy out in the middle but he did his absolute best when the ball and his bowling did the talking. If he started to chat to the batsmen, I knew it might be time to give him a spell. Warnie was the direct opposite: he thrived on getting under the skin of the batsman at the other end. He would chat away to them as he dished up his variations ball after ball. The more he spoke, the more the batsmen seemed to fall into his trap. That was when Warnie was in the zone. The game of cricket doesn’t present opportunities for players to be in the zone all that often in their career. The game is about intense spells of concentration broken up with the ebbs and flows that go between each ball that is bowled. Staying on top and dominating is not easy. (#ulink_26cc25c6-8fac-5551-b2e6-8902aeec3fc8) I CAME IN AT FIVE. Darren Lehmann, Matthew Hayden, Damien Martyn and Justin Langer batted ahead of me and Tom Moody after. Phil Emery had the wicketkeeping job ahead of Adam Gilchrist. And, you know what the amazing thing was? We weren’t good enough. We were the B team. Well, they called us Australia A that summer, but we were the ones not playing for the Australian side, the one with Taylor, Slater, Warne, McGrath, Boon, Bevan … It’s remarkable what depth of talent we had in Australian cricket then. There was a bottleneck of players just waiting for their chance, or another chance. I can’t stress too highly how important the opportunity to play in an A side against good opposition was and is. Like most of the players I came through with, I benefited greatly from the chance to test my skills against the top rung. When Australia A took on Australia in the World Series one-day tournament that also included England and Zimbabwe there was as much, if not more, riding on the outcome of the matches between the home sides as those with the visitors. In footy there is no game played harder than an intra-club match and in cricket it has to be said that this was as close to that as you got. ONE OF THE CRITICISMS I’ve often heard about one-day international (ODI) cricket is that we play too much of it. A consequence of this over-supply is that too many games are quickly forgotten. There is some fairness in this criticism — mostly, in my view, when there are too many games in a single series or tournament. The seven-game marathons in England in 2009 and against England in Australia in 2010–11 come to mind, or even the 2007 World Cup, which lasted 47 days from opening game to final. I reckon I’m qualified to make observations here as I’ve played more ODIs than any other Australian … there’s no way I can remember them all. I can tell you, however, I have never forgotten playing those games against the Australian team. It was a great chance for a few of us young bucks to get out there and try to prove ourselves. While there wasn’t an edge to the game in the sense of cricketers from the two teams constantly sledging each other, there were a few words exchanged and the games we played during the summer were extraordinarily competitive. The Australia A team contained a couple of hard-nosed seniors in Merv Hughes and Tom Moody, a few blokes like Martyn, Hayden, Langer and Paul Reiffel who had been in and out of the Test and ODI teams in the previous couple of years, and young blokes like me who were anxious to impress. So there was never any question we’d try and take it up to the blokes on the next level. In Adelaide we kept them to 202 from their 50 overs. When I came out to join Matt Hayden we were 3–77 and in with a real chance. Time wasn’t really an issue and when our keeper, Phil Emery, and I started building a decent sixth-wicket partnership I really thought we could win. However, Shane Warne came back on to bowl, and I found myself in a real battle. This was a different bowler to the skilful spinner I’d faced in the indoor nets when I was at the Academy — this bloke was turning them just as much but now he was the most competitive bowler I’d ever faced. Every ball felt like an exam, no two deliveries were quite the same, and while Warnie’s chat to me seemed friendly enough a few things he said seemed to stay in my head. What was he thinking when he asked Mark Taylor loudly if he could put a man in at bat-pad? Previously I’d felt we had the run-rate just about under control, but now it seemed to be climbing rapidly and we were under pressure to get things moving. And, when I did middle an attacking shot, there was always a bloody fielder in the road. I’d get to see this relentlessness in Shane’s bowling time and again — the remarkable way he could put the pressure back on the batsmen, so he had the whip hand. Eventually, having scored 42 from 63 deliveries (which sounds awfully slow by 21st century standards but was actually okay for the mid 1990s), I tried to slog-sweep him out of the ground, but the ball wasn’t quite there and it ballooned out to Michael Bevan on the fence. The final margin was just six runs in their favour, but we choked in the end, losing our last four wickets for six runs when we’d needed 13 to win from 21 balls in hand. Afterwards, a number of people said nice things about the way I batted, but I was very disappointed. I thought I’d cost us the game. Four weeks later, the two teams met again in Brisbane, and this time we were chasing 253 to win and Michael Bevan (who’d been dropped from the top Australian team) and I were going all right. Then, totally unexpectedly, David Boon came on to bowl. If Warne was the Ace in the pack in the previous game, this time Mark Taylor was playing his Joker. It was very good captaincy. Now Boonie didn’t really enjoy bowling, he never bowled for Tasmania and in the previous 11 years he had sent down the grand total of 6.4 overs in ODI cricket, and taken exactly no wickets. I knew he’d come on to bowl for my benefit — they knew how much I idolised Boonie and that I’d probably be too scared to play a shot, for fear of getting out. I figured he’d probably bowl off-breaks, and I think that’s what they were. And jeez they were hard to get away. ‘Don’t you get out, Ponts,’ he kept chirping down the wicket, ‘If you do, I won’t ever let you forget it.’ ‘Bowled Boonie,’ chimed in wicketkeeper Ian Healy, as if he was keeping to Warnie or Tim May. My fellow ‘Swampie’ admitted later that it was he who had conned the captain into giving him a bowl. ‘He’ll be that scared of getting out he might not go for many,’ he’d said. Boonie didn’t get me out, but my fellow Swampie only went for 17 from four overs, at a time when we needed more than that. They’d outsmarted me. Bevo and I both ran ourselves out as we lost our last eight wickets for 52 runs, and we could only rue another opportunity lost. The real casualty, though, was poor Phil Emery. So impressed was Mark Taylor with Boonie’s bowling against me that he used him again in the second of the World Series Cup finals (we’d beaten England once and Zimbabwe twice to finish second on the table after the round-robin games), and this time he bowled five overs for just 13 runs and knocked Phil over with a slow, straight delivery that was somehow inside-edged back onto the stumps. Afterwards, Boonie wouldn’t leave our keeper alone, until eventually Phil had to say, ‘Piss off, will you, I don’t want to hear about it again!’ We lost that best-of-three finals series 2–0, but we ran them mighty close. It came down to the 50th over of their run-chase, and our quick, Greg Rowell, bowled nearly the best last over in the history of the game: five perfect yorkers before a low full toss just outside off-stump was slashed over gully by Heals to win them the game. The second game of the finals series wasn’t as exciting, but they still needed 49 of their 50 overs to get home. The other thing was we beat England in one of the games. Which just goes to show how much depth there was in our cricket. I think the Australia A experiment was a fruitful exercise, but having gone on to captain Australia myself I can see why Tubby Taylor didn’t like the concept (and he certainly wasn’t the only one in his team who felt that way). If they won, they were the bad guys, but if they lost, their Test and ODI places were in jeopardy. The guys in the main team told me later they hated getting booed at home and fair enough. Things got heated at times and in one match I remember Matty Hayden and Glenn McGrath going at it before Pidge pushed Matty away. On balance, though, I believe the good outweighed the bad, so if Cricket Australia ever wanted to revive the idea I’d be for it. I didn’t have a very productive tournament, but it was still a chance for me at age 19 to share a dressing room with blokes who’d been there, done that, to showcase my technique on a national stage and to come up against the best in the business in matches that mattered. For guys like Greg Blewett (who came into the Australia A team for our last four games and scored a hundred and two fifties) and Paul Reiffel (who was controversially ‘promoted’ to be Australia’s 12th man for the finals), it offered a springboard into the Australian Test team. My ‘lucky break’ came three weeks after the one-day finals, when Michael Slater had his thumb fractured by England fast bowler Devon Malcolm in the fifth Ashes Test at the WACA. Australia was scheduled to fly to New Zealand straight after that game for an ODI tournament that would also feature India and South Africa and with Slats injured, a new batsman was needed. Realistically, the selectors could have picked any one of seven or eight players (Stuart Law, Damien Martyn, Justin Langer, Darren Lehmann, Michael Bevan, Matt Hayden, Tom Moody, Shaun Young …) but I was the bat they went for, which for me, the entire Ponting family and it seemed much of Mowbray, was just unbelievable. I was home in Launceston when the phone call came late on a Thursday. I have to admit there was a celebration that night and a stack of phone conversations the next day, as friends, family, cricket officials and reporters queued up to offer their congratulations. I was also quickly invited to a lunch in the city organised by the Century Club, but was a little embarrassed when I realised that my jeans and collared T-shirt hardly met the dress code of the club where the function took place. Boonie, much more up on these sorts of things, was wearing a jacket and tie. Mind you, if I’d known more formal wear was required I’m not sure what I would have done, because at that point in my life I certainly didn’t own a suit and I’m not sure if I even had a necktie to my name. With all this activity, it took a little while to sink in that I really was an Australian cricketer. The best chance I had to think about what was happening to me came on the Saturday, when I turned out for Mowbray against Launceston, opened the batting, and was out in the second over for a duck. Those who say cricket is a great leveller know what they’re talking about. On the Sunday, I was at Bellerive, playing for Tassie against WA in a Mercantile Mutual one-dayer, and this time I made it to 10 when we batted. I tried to cover-drive Brendon Julian on the up but hit a catch to Damien Martyn, my Australia A captain, at cover. ‘Take that to New Zealand with you,’ Martyn sneered at me as I began the long walk back to the pavilion. Twenty-four hours later, I was on the plane to Wellington, wearing a blazer with a very similar crest to the one on the blazer Uncle Greg wore to England in 1989, sitting in the same block of seats as some of the biggest names in Australian cricket. It was a happy time. The guys had just retained the Ashes pretty emphatically and their partners and children had all come along too. Mark Taylor was accompanied not just by his wife Judi and son William, but also their new baby Jack, who was less than two weeks old when he set off on his first overseas trip. I wasn’t too intimidated by the whole experience. In a way I had been preparing for it all my life and I had already met most of the guys on the plane somewhere in my travels. Initially, I stuck close to the blokes from the Australia A team, such as Grew Blewett and ‘Pistol’ Reiffel, but of course I knew Warnie, Boonie and Glenn McGrath pretty well and a guy I found I had plenty in common with was Mark Waugh, who loves talking racing, particularly harness racing. A day out at the Dunedin Golf Club, when I discovered that Blewey and I (the two youngest guys in the team) had the lowest handicaps, was an off-field highlight, not least for the way the senior guys reacted when Warnie claimed he played off 14. I heard the term ‘burglar’ whispered more than once before we teed off and then shouted by just about everyone after the wonder leggie walked away with all our prizemoney. The vibe through the group was terrific. When I look back on that short tour — indeed, on my first couple of seasons in the Australian set-up — I can’t help but think how lucky I was to start my career as a junior member of a team on the rise. I played in all four of our games, batting six against South Africa and New Zealand (scoring 1 and then 10 not out) but being promoted to first-drop for the game against India, when I made 62 from 92 deliveries. It wasn’t the most flamboyant dig of my life, but at the time I felt it was one of the most important because I made this half-century in a fair-dinkum one-day international (remember the Australia A games weren’t granted full status) in front of men whose respect I craved. Every time one of them said, ‘Well played,’ I felt even more important. In the final I was back at No. 6 and I walked to the wicket with us needing 17 to win and more than 20 overs available in which to get them. David Boon was at the other end and he challenged me to be with him at the end, two Swampies together. I was 7 not out when we sealed our six-wicket victory, and after the presentation, back in our dressing room, Boonie led us in a triumphal singing of our team anthem, ‘Underneath the Southern Cross’, which only happened after a victory in a Test match or a one-day series. As I looked around the room I saw how much it meant to them — even for a minor tournament like this (though, of course, it was miles from ‘minor’ for me). An amazing rush of pride and humility dashed through me, and, cheesy as it sounds, I really did feel I was the luckiest bloke in the world. THE REASON FOR MY selection for that New Zealand trip became clear near the end of the tour when the Australian side for the upcoming Test and ODI tour of the West Indies was announced. The final two batting places went to Justin Langer and me, so I had to assume that I’d been given the Kiwi experience as an entr?e to the Caribbean main course. I had enjoyed another pretty successful summer with Tasmania, averaging 75 in the Shield and scoring my first double century — an innings of 211 against WA that occupied seven hours and 20 minutes. It was my fifth straight first-class hundred against WA, dating back to the twin hundreds I scored against them at Bellerive in March 1993. I always liked playing against the Western Australians, loved batting on the bouncy Perth pitch, and enjoyed their competitive nature, the way they were always up for the fight. Guys like Damien Martyn and Lang encapsulated this spirit. Other highlights of 1994–95 for me were an innings of 82 from 86 balls for an ACB Chairman’s XI in the opening game of England’s Ashes tour, played at Lilac Hill in Perth, and my selection in the Australian XI side that played England in Hobart a week before the start of the Ashes series. The critics described the team as a virtual shadow Test team and the fact the game was staged in my home state meant I felt extra nervous during the lead-up. No way could I get to sleep the night before the game, even though I stayed out with quite a few of the guys for a couple of beers. Next morning, I was up early, worked extra hard in warm-ups, and when we batted I got to 71, enjoying a good partnership with Marto. I went out for a few beers that night, happy that I’d made some runs in what, for me, was a very important audition. Most of the batsmen were out with me, which was the way it worked in those days — if we were going to be fielding the next day, the guys who’d already batted usually went out for a while. Next morning, however, I slept through the alarm (again) and by the time I got to the ground the boys had left our dressing room and were about to start their warm-up on the field. Bob Simpson, the long-time coach of the Australian Test and one-day teams, was working with the Australian XI and he was out there with them. Simmo was a renowned disciplinarian, but after I’d apologised and said it would never happen again and he replied it had better bloody not, there was nothing more said about it … until the warm-up was completed. The boys started to walk off, but the coach stayed where he was. ‘Ricky, you can stay out here with me till the game starts,’ he said. First up, Simmo had me catching high ball after high ball — he was renowned for hitting balls where you had to sprint as hard as you could for 30, 40 or 50 metres to just get your hands on the catch, and then he’d do it again. And again. That’s what we did until the game started, which wasn’t good for a bloke with a hangover. I was buggered by the end of it. Later in the dressing room, I guess I should have been thinking about how I’d let myself down, but instead I was preoccupied by the thought that I’d been caught out doing what my more experienced team-mates had also been doing, but they’d got to the ground on time, so the coach was none the wiser, or at least more forgiving. I liked Simmo. He made you work, he could be hard, but in my experience he was always fair. I quickly came to learn that one of his party tricks was to make hungover, late or ill-disciplined players work doubly hard in practice, and that he was testing me out on that second morning of the Australian XI game. Fortunately, I survived every challenge and we got on well after that. At least he couldn’t question my work ethic. In fact, I revelled in his fielding drills, though I never needed anyone to push me with that part of my game. I knew I was a good fielder and catcher, but I was never satisfied. Where this came from, I don’t know — but as with batting and golf, once I realised I was good at it, I kept trying to improve. I remember going to training with Mowbray, Tuesday and Thursday nights, and I fielded all evening. As soon as I’d done my batting, I was running around, catching high balls or ricochets off the slips cradle, taking pride in every aspect of it, trying to be better than everyone else. It was the same when I was at fielding practice with the Tasmanian and Australian teams. I didn’t care how good the best fielders, guys like Mark and Steve Waugh, were, I tried my best to outdo them. That trait stayed with me right up until my last game. I found Simmo to be a helpful and perceptive coach, who had a very similar philosophy to Rod Marsh when it came to teaching cricket. Neither man set out to massively change the way I batted on the basis that I was obviously doing a few things right to get to the level I had reached. As a result they restricted their advice to fine-tuning my technique. THAT FIRST AUSTRALIA A game we played in Adelaide happened in late November. A little more than three months later, I was at Sydney airport, walking into business class of a Cathay Pacific 747, finding my seat for the flight to Hong Kong, from where we’d fly to London for a two-day stopover before heading to Barbados. It was genuinely exciting to be in London for the first time, but what I noticed most was how different the mood was on this tour from the atmosphere in New Zealand, when partners and kids were with us, and the week had a ‘holiday’ feel. This time, we were serious. Yes, there was time to walk around London, but we also spent time under team physio Errol Alcott’s expert supervision in the gym at the Westbury Hotel, watched some videos of the recent West Indies–New Zealand Test series and had a lengthy team meeting chaired by captain Mark Taylor that established the approach he wanted the team to take in the Caribbean. I was struck by how professionally run this gathering was, and how astute and perceptive many of the comments were — from Tubby, Simmo and a number of the senior guys. This was clearly a team with plenty of cricket nous and a tour that meant a great deal to them. I didn’t say anything during the meeting, just listened intently and lapped it all up. The next morning, we had to be downstairs not long after 6am for the start of the next leg of our journey, and that hour of the morning was not one I usually enjoyed seeing. This time, however, I was the first one ready for the bus. If I had a choice between two very similar standard players, I would always select the player with the right temperament, make-up and personality. While I was never a national selector, nor would this situation be a regular occurrence, my point is that the character of players is really important to building a successful team. We are always looking for the best talent to come through our system and play for Australia. In the most successful teams that I have been a part of, the talent in the team was outstanding and our performances showed that. We had a team of individuals from which you knew there was always at least one player who would stand up and deliver when the team needed something extra. Success breeds success, and success also builds teams. But teams that do not achieve consistent success require a completely different approach. Sometimes you can’t build a team around individual brilliance, group dynamics and group leadership. Sometimes you have to pick players with particular character to support the younger, less experienced players or to add value to the leadership group or simply for their experience. Over the final third of my time in the Australian team, there was a lot of turnover in our teams. As players retired, a new generation of players made their Australian debuts. Many of these never quite became permanent fixtures in the team and played only a few games. This was a challenge for me as captain. Players would come in to debut and we would have a data bank of information on their technique, strengths and weaknesses and other game data to help me and the team get the best out of them. But we lacked the detail on their character and personality. I had to spend as much time as I could with these guys when they first came into the group getting to know them, working out what made them tick and what I needed to be aware of in the game situation. A lot of this was done on the run and wasn’t always a success out on the field. It’s when the pressure comes on that you really find out about an individual and their capacity to perform at the international level. When you are building a team or preparing for a period of change in a team, more time and care needs to be taken to focus on the character and make-up that will be required to balance the critical need for talent and the ability to perform consistently at the highest level. (#ulink_ccc76d5f-4d61-5be6-a68e-3f0542a0085d) ‘THOSE HANDSHAKE AGREEMENTS between you blokes, where you don’t bounce each other, they don’t exist anymore,’ he said, looking straight at our pace bowlers: Craig McDermott, Glenn McGrath, Damien Fleming and Paul Reiffel. That sounded pretty fair to me, but then I wasn’t one of the late-order batsmen who were about to cop as good as they gave, maybe even worse. Steve ‘Tugga’ Waugh had a reputation for being a tough and combative cricketer and he demonstrated it here, arguing that it was inevitable that the West Indies quicks were going to fire bumpers at us, so we had to bounce them too. Furthermore, they were going to attack our tail, so we should do the same to them. As it turned out, Steve would have a famous tour, most notably when he stood up to the fearsome Curtly Ambrose on a dangerous wicket during the third Test at Port-of-Spain, and then followed up with a brave and brilliant double century in the series decider at Kingston. Tugga was one of our most experienced players — having come into the Australian team as a 21-year-old in late 1985, when the side was losing more often than it won — and many times in the years we played together he would reminisce about those days, emphasising that we should never take winning for granted. In the days leading up to this Test series, he wanted us to know that during the 1980s and into the 1990s the West Indies played cricket bloody hard and to make this point he’d recount stories of fast bowlers like Malcolm Marshall, Patrick Patterson, Courtney Walsh and Ambrose firing bouncer after bouncer at battle-weary Australian batsmen. David Boon, who would play his 100th Test in Port-of-Spain during this tour, recalled how Marshall had whispered to him at the non-striker’s end during his Test debut, ‘Are you going to get out, or am I going to have to kill you?’ Mark Taylor, Craig McDermott, Mark Waugh and Ian Healy had similar stories, so it was hardly surprising that the senior blokes backed Steve’s call to stand up to them this time. We were going to, as old footballers like to say, ‘Retaliate first!’ Part of this process was to have our quicks bowling plenty of short stuff in the nets, as a rehearsal for what they’d be doing in the Tests and to get the batsmen used to the reprisals they’d be copping from the Windies’ quicks. This helped me, I think, because I was never shy about playing the hook and pull shots. I desperately wanted the leadership to believe I deserved to be on the tour, and whenever Tubby or Steve or Bob Simpson complimented me on the way I handled the short deliveries I felt I was on the way to achieving that. With Greg Blewett established in the Test line-up at No. 6 (he’d scored centuries in each of his first two Tests at the end of the 1994–95 Ashes series), Justin Langer and I realised we were the two ‘extra’ batsmen in the squad. Rather than let this situation get us down, we made a pact in Bridgetown, in the early days of the tour, that however much we enjoyed ourselves off the field, when it was training time we’d work tenaciously hard. It was on this tour that I came to realise how hard I needed to work if I wanted to become a very good international player. Justin and I were able to watch how the accomplished players prepared themselves for games, what routines they kept, even little things like what they did as they waited to bat. No two blokes were exactly alike; what I had to do was watch what they were doing, work out why they were doing it and then decide what was best for me. As it turned out, I made little impact on the actual field of play, chiefly because I had few opportunities. I appeared in the third and fifth ODIs, one other limited-overs game and one three-day tour game, and in all three of the 50-over games we played in Bermuda at the trip’s end. I knew, going in, that unless there were injuries I was very unlikely to play in a Test, though I would have loved to have made at least one big score. I was unlucky in one respect, as an agonising bout of food poisoning in St Kitts forced me out of the three-day game against a West Indies Cricket Board XI that was played between the second and third Tests. On the evening before the game, we’d been invited to one of the island’s finest seafood restaurants, but while everyone else went for the lobster or one of the succulent fish dishes, I chose the ‘conch chowder’ and paid the price, spending all night and most of the following day throwing up at regular intervals. My best innings on the tour was the 43 I scored in the ODI at Port-of-Spain; my only half-century came in the last game before we flew home. I was pretty disappointed about getting sick as there was an outside chance in that tour game I could press my case for a Test place. I had never been on a tour before where you did nothing and it was a steep learning curve. One of the things that is important on a tour is not to have guys weighing down others. When you get picked or are in the team and struggling to make an impact it is important to stay positive. Self-indulgence is something of a crime and there are many blokes who have had their cards marked as bad tourists and possibly missed the chance of being in the squad because they became a liability. Later, when I was captain, one of the things I would tell every new player coming into the squad was that it was the job of the 12th, 13th or 14th man to keep everybody happy and to bring some energy to the group. If you weren’t playing that was your role. Back then David Boon was a great help to me when he saw how upset I was to miss the tour game, telling me to keep my spirits up and to ensure I used the opportunity to learn as much as I could about being part of the squad. I was so fortunate to have him around. He was one of my people, we had played footy for the same club and he was just a typical Launceston bloke. He never had much to say, but when he did it was worth listening to; his humour was dry and devastating. He adopted me in those early days and had a lot of positive things to say about my future. When he released his autobiography Boonie wrote a small piece suggesting I would make more Test runs than him. He had a lot of nice things to say, but couldn’t help sledging me about the fact he and Shaun Young had been driving me around for years and I still didn’t have a licence. Oh, and he couldn’t help but bring up his bowling performance against me that summer. ‘The only thing Ricky Ponting fears on a cricket field is facing my bowling. The thought of losing his wicket to me obviously has him petrified.’ I suppose I had that one coming. AT THE START OF THE TOUR, most of the boys were still calling me ‘Pont’ or ‘Ponts’ but eventually Warnie got his way and I became Punter, the nickname that will never leave me. I guess my actions on our very first day in the Caribbean might have hastened this evolution, as Mark Waugh and I skipped a fancy lunch so we could get to the races in time for the first. It was Barbados Cup day, an event we believed needed to be savoured in its entirety, so we were on our way to the track as soon as we’d collected our first tour allowance. If we wanted an early introduction to Caribbean culture, this was perfect. There was plenty of calypso, a sea of colour and a strong bouquet of rum that wafted over proceedings. I loved being able to stand back and watch the locals with Tugga and Warnie, who joined us during the afternoon and we were immediately feted like rock stars. I couldn’t help but be impressed by how nice and friendly everyone was to us. When the cricket started, however, the locals proved to be not so friendly. The next morning, we played our opening game and the first ball was a beamer to Michael Slater, which nearly decapitated him, and the third was a vicious riser that ballooned off his glove to first slip. The short stuff would continue throughout the Test series, but just as the boys had promised they stood up to every single bumper, while our pace attack, spearheaded by Glenn McGrath, gave at least as good as we received. The way Pigeon took them on was magnificent and the positive body language of all the boys was so impressive — it seemed to intimidate the West Indies players, which was almost stunning given the manner in which they’d steamrollered all challengers over the previous 15 years or more. When we won the Frank Worrell Trophy in Jamaica our dressing room was filled with TV cameras and reporters and they were allowed to stay to do their interviews while the room was doused in beer and champagne and some of the worst renditions of Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sanh’ ever heard were telecast via satellite back to Australia. Eventually, though, everyone except those in or very close to the team were asked to leave, we formed a tight circle, and Boonie led us in a rendition of our anthem that literally had the hairs on the back of my neck standing to attention. Even though I didn’t play in the series I still felt part of it all. In the years that followed, there would be some rousing renditions of ‘Underneath the Southern Cross’— I’d even get to lead the team in a few — but I’m not sure any had the raw emotion of this one. That night, we ended up at a hotel next door to the one where we were staying, but most of the guys stayed in their whites and along with a few past players — Allan Border, Dean Jones, Geoff Lawson and David Hookes — who had been savaged by the West Indies in the past, we sat on deck chairs, glasses never empty, and talked about how good it was to win. I hardly said a word, just took it all in. In the years that followed, all the senior guys on this tour would talk about how their memories of the losses they suffered in the 1980s and early 1990s acted as a spur to keep going when the team started winning consistently; how it taught them to be relentless. Coming later as I did, I never experienced those painful setbacks, but I saw how much winning in the Windies in 1995 meant to the older guys. It was a lesson I never forgot. THE TWO MONTHS WAS an education for me in other ways, too. Rooming with Steve Waugh, for example, meant I could grill him on how he approached Test cricket. Tugga was a cricketer who had thought deeply about the mental challenges of batting against giants like Ambrose and Walsh, and he was also happy to talk about his struggles at the start of his international career, like how he coped with not scoring his first Test hundred until his 27th Test. It wasn’t that he was trying to scare me; more that he wanted to stress that success wasn’t going to come easily. If I persisted, he explained, I was a chance for a long career. After Steve, I ‘bunked’ with Tim May, which was a completely different assignment. Maysie was not in the Test XI and had made the assessment that with the team going well that situation was unlikely to change, so he set out to enjoy the tour as much as possible. What was most remarkable was his rare ability to turn up at breakfast seemingly as bright as a button despite the fact he’d been out until sunrise. He knew there were boundaries and he never crossed them, and rather than get people into trouble his natural instinct was to make sure everyone was sweet. When I said at midnight I’d had enough for the night, Maysie never talked me into kicking on (which, more than once, he easily could have), because he was always in my corner. He is also a born comedian, and remarkably astute at mimicking people and exposing their foibles, which meant that sharing a room with him was a laugh a minute. As well as a couple of days at the races, the odd spot of deep-sea fishing and a few rounds of golf (especially in Bermuda), there were numerous activities organised by the team’s social committee. These ranged from team dinners to beach volleyball to, at the start of the tour, a facial hair–growing competition, where we were given a specific assignment — handle-bar moustache, bushy sideburns and so on — with prizes to be awarded to the best achievers. I was assigned a goatee beard. Apparently, this competition had been a bit of a hit on the Pakistan tour in 1994. This time, however, the guys quickly lost interest, but I kept at it, mainly because I copped such a ribbing during my slow early progress that I was determined to see the thing through. In the end the goatee stayed with me for the best part of the next two years. In Guyana, where we played the final one-day international of the tour and the first of two first-class games before the first Test, I got my ear pierced, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Dad had always told me if I came home with an earring he’d rip it straight out, and to this day I wonder why he didn’t. Maybe the fact Boonie got his ear done at the same time had something to do with it, but it didn’t last too long. Another way I confirmed my novice status on this tour came after we were told not to stay on the phone if we called loved ones in Australia. I made a couple of calls home to Mum, kept talking, and was horrified to discover when we checked out of the hotel that I was hundreds of dollars out of pocket. When we arrived in Bermuda at the tour’s end, the boys were ready to party. We hadn’t been at our flash resort for long and I was down at the bar with a trio of seasoned campaigners — Boonie, Tubby and Errol Alcott — and after a couple of ales someone proposed we check the island out on the mopeds that were available for guests to use. We didn’t get far before we lost Boonie. First, we decided to give him a chance to catch up, but when he didn’t reappear we figured we should go back and look for him, and when we couldn’t find him we assumed he’d returned to the bar. That seemed like a good idea so back we went. But he wasn’t there either. What to do? We ordered a beer, having decided that if he didn’t return by the time the drinks were finished we’d organise a search party, and it had reached the stage where that’s what we were going to do when our hero finally emerged with blood seeping from cuts to his legs, arm and chin and an unlit cigarette perched precariously on his bottom lip. It was one of those situations where everyone wanted to ask, ‘What happened to you?’ But everyone was waiting for everyone else to ask that obvious question. Then, before anyone said anything, Boonie quietly deadpanned, ‘Anyone got a light?’ He’d been riding at the back of our pack when he failed to take a turn at high speed and he and bike parted company. Perhaps his mishap should have been a warning, but there was no holding back when a larger group of us went out that night for some more exploring. This time, Ian Healy stalled his moped and I volunteered, because of the basic mechanics Dad had taught me, to get it restarted, saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll catch you all up.’ I was able to do that, but then the bludger conked out again on the way back to the hotel and as I tried to get it going the back wheel got caught in a gutter. My response — part bravado, part frustration, part eagerness to return to the pack — was to go full-throttle, and when the bike did free itself it took off on me straight into a pole on the opposite side of the road. I’m not quite sure how I survived, but the bike was a write-off. This wasn’t the only time a moped took a battering while we were in Bermuda. Right at the start, we had to get a permit before we could ride the things, which involved a basic test in the resort car park. A number of the guys had their partners with them for this final leg of the tour — until then, it had been boys only — and the girls had queued up so they could ride around the island too. All each of us had to do was go in a straight line, ride around a tree situated on the edge of the bitumen, and then come back, dodging a couple of witches’ hats along the way. I passed the course easily, we all did, except for one of the girls who had no idea how to ride a bike and when she was supposed to slow and turn instead she panicked and accelerated straight up a steep rise behind the tree. Near the top of the rise, the bike flipped back over itself while she kept hanging on, and for a moment it looked like things might turn really messy. Fortunately — and a bit miraculously — she survived, but then, when she picked up the bike, the back wheel was still spinning and as soon as it hit the ground it took off again. The two of them — bike and terrified rider — shot straight across the car park and it was a miracle (again) that she was finally able to get the thing to stop. Despite all this, she was then given a pass and soon we were on our way. STRICTLY SPEAKING, I SHOULDN’T have been given a permit, because when we were making our applications we were required to fill out a form, and one of the questions was: Do you have a driver’s licence? The correct answer — if I wanted a permit — was ‘yes’, so I had to lie. I could have got my driver’s licence any time after I turned 17, but I never felt like I needed one, at least not until I was well into my 20s. From the time I first went to the Academy when I was 15 I was never really in one place for any length of time, so getting an opportunity to do the lessons was tricky. And when I was back in Launceston, there was usually someone able to give me a lift and more often than not at other times I could get to where I needed to go without too much of a hassle. It’s not that big a town. Most of the time I was going no further than the golf course, the cricket ground, the footy or the dogs, and I was rarely going to any of those places on my own. I certainly wasn’t scared of driving, more just lazy, I guess. If I’d found myself constantly marooned at home unable to get to places I needed to go, I’m sure I would have got my licence in record time, but the blokes I spent my time with were all happy to pick me up or Mum or Dad were usually there if I needed a lift. And if you arrived at the club on time there was a bus to take you to the away games. Ironically, one of my first sponsors was Launceston Motors, the city’s biggest Holden dealership, and they offered me a car as part of the deal. (Perhaps my favourite sponsorship from those early days was with a local bakery. I didn’t get anything out of it; instead the funds were used to renovate the clubhouse at Invermay Park.) When I was 24 I bought a house in Norwood, a suburb in South Launceston, which I shared with my then girlfriend. It was after we broke up early in the 1999–2000 season — and I found myself living in the house on my own — that I finally felt the need to get my L plates. I suppose I can tell the story of finally getting my licence now. There was a policeman in a small town about three hours’ drive from Launceston on the north-west coast who may not have been the strictest when it came to those sorts of things. I don’t know how I heard of him, but Mum drove me up there and I basically went for a little drive with him and before I knew it I was a registered driver. If Boonie ever needed a lift all he had to do was call. SIX WEEKS AFTER WE returned home from the West Indies in 1995, I was in England as a member of a ‘Young Australia’ team that was captained by Stuart Law. With hindsight, it’s easy to say that this was a classy outfit — of the 14 guys in the squad, four had already played Test cricket (Jo Angel, Justin Langer, Matthew Hayden and Peter McIntyre) and eight more of us would before our careers were over (Stuart Law, Matthew Elliott, Michael Kasprowicz, Shaun Young, Adam Gilchrist, Martin Love, Brad Williams and me). The only blokes who didn’t go on to win a baggy green cap were the South Australian pacemen Shane George and Mark Harrity, but if you’d told me at the time that they would be the two to miss out, I wouldn’t have believed you. They were two excellent quicks. We were reminded in our first team meeting that an Ashes series would be played in the UK in 1997, so the guys who did well in English conditions on this trip might gain some inside running. To be honest, though, while some blokes might have been planning that far ahead, I think for batsmen like Haydos and Lang, who’d experienced Test cricket, and myself and Stuart Law, who had played ODI cricket in the previous 12 months, we were hoping to crack the top side before the middle of 1997. The problem was, given that the Frank Worrell Trophy was now in the Australian Cricket Board’s trophy cabinet, there didn’t seem to be an opening. All we could do was make a case to be next in line, and that process began with this tour. In this regard, I didn’t do myself any harm, going past 50 five times in 12 first-class innings, but the other blokes had a good time of it as well, so I never felt as if I was standing out. A highlight for me came at Worcester, when I scored 103 not out against an attack that included the former Test bowler Neal Radford, but the enormity of the task I faced to make the Test side was underlined in our one-dayer against Surrey at the Oval, when I thought I batted really well to score 71 from 87 balls. Trouble was, at the other end Stuart Law was in sensational form, smashing 163 from just 126 deliveries and in the process making everyone forget I was even out there. There were numerous examples of this happening, where one guy would play really well but another would do something even better. Against Somerset, for example, Shaun Young made an excellent hundred, but Adam Gilchrist hit 122 from 102 balls, reaching his ton with a colossal six. The competitiveness among us would serve us and Australian cricket well for the following decade. The only downer of the tour for me was that in the six weeks I was in England I never once had the chance to get to a dog track or a racecourse. Sure, I got to see iconic tourist attractions like Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament, and to play at famous grounds like the Oval, Headingley and Edgbaston, but a number of blokes back in Launceston had told me how different and interesting horse and greyhound racing can be in Britain and I wanted to experience it for myself. All I could do, as I tried to find some sleep on the long flight home, was to make a commitment to do all I could to get back to England in the near future, preferably with the blokes I’d been with in the Caribbean, this time as a member of an Australian Ashes touring team. Practice makes perfect is one of those everyday coaching lines that you hear all the time. But for me it goes one step further than that — perfect practice makes perfect! You have to train as specifically as you can for what you require and do it at an intensity that is as close as possible to match conditions. For me, cricket has a long way to go to replicate this specific training. We train away from the centre wicket and outfields — on surfaces that are nothing like what we play on during a match. As a batsman preparing in the nets, you are at the end of a wicket that is almost certainly nothing like the centre wicket for the game. You face four or five bowlers — all of different paces and techniques — bowling in an order one after the other with different balls. Again, nothing like what happens in a game, when you face the same bowler with the same ball — for six balls in a row. Bowlers are faced with similar challenges. Many of them are unable to train with their full run-ups, with a full set of different balls to replicate different times in a game, no field placements to bowl to, and most bowlers are limited to the number of balls they will bowl in training to protect their capacity for a game. I had a saying ‘train hard and play easy’ that summed up the need for more specific training. I think this was one of the reasons we weren’t at our best in the 2005 Ashes series, where we lacked the specific training we required. We certainly fixed that for the 2006–07 Ashes series, where I demanded that Brett Lee, Glenn McGrath and Jason Gillespie bowl new balls at full pace at me in the nets, day in and day out. The bouncers, movement and sheer intensity of those training sessions helped us all and was a part of the foundation for our 5–0 whitewash of England in that series. Fielding practice has certainly come a long way since my early days in cricket and it’s as specific today as ever. Most days you now get on the outfield of the ground you are playing on. You can replicate a whole range of typical game situations from catching to runs-outs and throws. I had a set routine as part of my one-day training, where I had someone hit balls to me at backward point or extra cover, and I would field the ball and get it into the stumps as quickly as possible. I also had a variation of this where I would attempt to throw down the stumps at either end of the ground. I did tens of thousands of repetitions of this, at high intensity, and it certainly was perfect practice that made perfect. (#ulink_cb012850-2030-5835-a0d1-5c57343de23d) AT THE START of the 1995–96 season, Justin Langer and I were at the front of the queue to get into the Australian Test team if an opportunity came up, but Stuey Law was one of a number of gifted batsmen who were close behind. Of all of us, he was the one who started the season best in the early Shield and Mercantile Mutual one-day games. Then in early November, I finally found some form in a Shield game at Bellerive against Stuey’s Queensland, scoring 100 and 118, but he replied with a stylish 107 in their second innings. At the same time, poor Lang could hardly score a run for WA, until he cracked a second-innings 153 in Adelaide. It was that old, quiet battle again, all the fringe players pushing each other. Australia was involved in three Tests against Pakistan, and as that series unfolded concerns grew about the form of the Australian batting order, with most attention being on David Boon and Greg Blewett, who were struggling. In the third Test, which Pakistan won by 74 runs, Boonie and Blewey both missed out, while at the same time I made some big runs against the touring Sri Lanka, whose three-Test series against Australia was due to begin at the WACA on December 8. First, I scored 99 in a one-dayer at Devonport and then 131 not out in Tasmania’s first innings of a four-day game against the tourists at the NTCA ground in Launceston with Test selector Jim Higgs watching. I was a little lucky, to be honest, as I had been dropped on 14. The media believed Blewey was gone for the opening Test against the Sri Lankans, and I was the obvious option to take his place. Then it was announced that Steve Waugh was out because of a groin strain, which seemed to make my selection even more likely. THE DAY BEFORE THE TEAM was announced, the Examiner ran a back-page headline which shouted: ‘Pick Ponting!’ Inside, it pointed out that if I was selected it would be the ‘best 21st birthday present he could wish for’, because the Test was due to start on December 8, which was 11 days before I would turn 21. The next day, the front-page banner headline was more exuberant: ‘He’s Ricky Ponting, he’s ours … and HE’S MADE IT!’ Underneath was a big photograph of me giving Mum a kiss, while the accompanying story began: ‘Tears of pride welled in Lorraine Ponting’s eyes yesterday as she told of how her son Ricky had always said he would play Test cricket for Australia.’ The Test side was named on the last day of Tassie’s game against Sri Lanka, and that photo of Mum and me was snapped just before the news was announced over the PA system at the NTCA ground. There was something a bit special about learning of my promotion at my home ground with family, some of our closest friends and my Shield team-mates there to share the moment with me. Mum was never keen to watch me play — after I failed a couple of times when she was there, she started thinking her presence might be the cause — so when I saw her in the grandstand when I walked off the field I figured something must have been up. She ran down to meet me at the gate and was the first to tell me I’d been picked for Perth along with Stuart Law. It would be Stuey’s first Test as well. Unfortunately, Dad was working, rolling the pitch at Scotch Oakburn College (Ian Young had teed up that groundsman job for him), but we caught up at home that evening and then, when the phone finally stopped ringing for a minute, the whole family dashed out for a celebratory dinner. After that, I raced over to the greyhound meeting at White City, where I met up with a few mates. It wasn’t a late night, but it was a beauty — everyone at the track seemed to know that Tasmania had produced another Test cricketer and I was overwhelmed by the number of people who came up to wish me all the best. Inevitably, there were plenty of well-meaning individuals who wanted to give me advice. I’m not sure who suggested I get a haircut (probably Mum), but I did as I was told. Of all the suggestions offered, a couple stand out, not so much because of the advice offered but who was giving it: Uncle Greg told me to ‘stick to what you know best’ and then David Boon said I should just ‘go out there and enjoy it’. Nothing more complicated than that. Not long after I landed in Perth, captain Mark Taylor reminded me I was a naturally aggressive batsman and fielder. ‘I want you to add some spice to the side,’ he said. ‘And don’t go away from the style of cricket that got you into the team. It’s worked for you in the past and it will work for you here.’ I was actually one of three newcomers, with Michael Kasprowicz (for the injured Paul Reiffel) also coming into the 12-man squad, the likelihood being that Kasper would be 12th man, with me batting at five, one place lower than I’d been batting for Tasmania, and Stuart Law at six. We flew to Perth on the Tuesday, three days before the Test was due to begin, but I honestly can’t remember feeling particularly nervous, at least until the day of the game. I guess the fact I’d been with the guys in New Zealand and the West Indies helped me, plus the fact that I’d also come into contact with a number of the players at the Academy, or with the Australia A team in 1994–95 or on the Young Australia tour. It’s funny thinking back, but while my memories of the actual game remain strong I recall very little of the build-up — except for my constant modelling of my very own baggy green cap in front of the mirror and the fact I took the stickers off my bats, sanded the blades down and then re-stickered them all and put new grips on the handles. I also knew the occasion was special because my parents, as well as Nan and Uncle John (Mum’s brother) and Aunt Anna Campbell flew over. Since he retired from cricket, I could count on two hands the number of times Dad had given up his Saturday golf to watch me play, and he’s never been a bloke to move too far away from his comfort zone unless he has a good reason to, but here he was in Perth, a long, long way from home. Pop, however, was too set in his ways to fly all the way to Western Australia. I do remember going out and buying an alarm clock, to complement the clock-radio next to my bed at the hotel, and the two wake-up calls I organised and the early-morning call from Mum and Dad, all to make sure I wasn’t late for a day’s play. No way was I earning the wrath of Boonie or Shippy again. HAVING SAFELY GOT TO the ground on time, we bowled first after Tubby lost the toss, which gave me a day to ‘settle in’ and also meant I could prove that, as a fielder at least, Test cricket was not going to be a problem for me. More often that not in those days, almost as a rite of initiation, the youngest member of a Shield or Test team became the short-leg specialist (rarely a favourite fielding position for cricketers at any level), and I’d fielded there a few times for Tasmania in the previous couple of years, but Boonie had made that position his own for the Australian team, so I was allowed to patrol the covers, which gave me a chance to burn off some of the nervous energy that was surging through me. On day two, Michael Slater scored a big century, he and Mark Taylor added 228 before our first wicket fell, not long before tea. I went looking for my box and thigh pad. Boonie was controversially given out just before the drinks break in the last session, so I went and quickly put my pads on and then, as the last hour was played out, I grew more and more fidgety, going to the toilet more than once but never for long. Out in the middle, Slats and Mark Waugh looked rock solid on what had become a perfect batting wicket, while Tubby saw I was getting very edgy, to the point that 10 or 15 minutes before stumps he asked Ian Healy to pad up as nightwatchman if a wicket unexpectedly fell. The move proved unnecessary; my first Test innings would have to wait another day. I was shattered when I got back to our hotel — it had been a long day, even though I’d never got a chance to bat. (I always found it very difficult having to wait so long to have a hit, and didn’t have much practice at it as I rarely batted as low as No. 5 in a first-class game; having to adjust to sometimes waiting around for ages before I got a bat was one of the hardest things I had to do in my early days as a Test cricketer.) I went out for dinner that night with Mum and Dad, and in their company I felt reasonably relaxed. My sister Renee had called from home to say she had scored 48 Stableford points while playing for Mowbray Golf Club against Devonport GC in a competition known as the ‘Church Cup’ — a colossal effort which would take three shots from her handicap — and it appeared our parents were just as proud about her achievement as they were in me playing a Test match. Mum insisted on an early night, but when I went to bed there was no way I could get to sleep. The strange thing was that whereas in the days leading up to the game I’d been picturing myself doing something positive, playing a big shot, even making a hundred, now I was a fatalist — picturing myself getting out for a duck, run out without facing a ball, or maybe I wouldn’t get a bat at all, then get left out of the side when Tugga came back and never play for Australia again. When I woke the next morning I felt as if I hadn’t slept a minute, but at the ground I was a lot calmer than I’d been the previous evening and I hit the ball pretty well in the nets before play. Slats was 189 not out at the start of the day, and there was some talk among the team about him having a shot at Brian Lara’s then world record Test score of 375, but in the first hour, totally out of the blue, he drove at Sri Lanka’s spinner Muttiah Muralitharan and hit an easy catch straight back to the bowler. Just like that, he was out for 219, Australia 3–422. I DON’T REMEMBER WALKING out to bat, taking guard or talking to my batting partner, Mark Waugh, before I faced my opening delivery. However, I do recall that from early in my innings I was batting in my cap (rather than a helmet) and I will never forget the first ball I faced in Test cricket … a well-flighted delivery from ‘Murali’ that did me fractionally for length as I moved down the wicket. I pushed firmly at the ball but it held its line and clipped the outside edge of my bat … and for a fateful second I thought my Test career might be over as soon as it had begun. Fortunately, I’d got just enough bat on it for it to shoot past first slip’s hand and down to the fence for four, which took away the possibility of a duck on debut and slowed my heartbeat a little. In fact, it calmed me down a lot — it doesn’t matter whether you’re batting in a Test match or in the park, if you nick your first delivery and it goes to the boundary you feel lucky, like it might be your day. For the next four hours, it looked like it was going to be mine. Initially, I was a little scratchy, but then they dropped one short at me and I belted it through mid-wicket for four. Middling that pull shot was what I needed; it was as if I shifted into a higher gear. From that point on, my feet moved naturally into position, I had time to play my strokes and my shot selection was usually on the money. I’d batted at the WACA a couple of times before and loved the extra bounce in the wicket and the way the ball came on to the bat, and the light, too, which seems to make the ball easy to pick up. All I focused on was ‘watching the ball’, a mantra I repeated to myself before every delivery, the way Ian Young had told me to do. Being out there with Mark, who always made batting look easy and was a brilliant judge of a run, helped me enormously and then, when he was out for 111 to make our score 4–496 Stuart Law came out. Two of us out there in our first Test. He started very nervously, which in a slightly weird way was good for me as well, because suddenly I felt like the senior partner instead of the rookie. When I reached my half-century, I looked straight away for my family in the crowd, especially for Mum, and I pointed my Kookaburra in her direction. It was a very satisfying feeling getting to fifty, because I knew — even with Steve Waugh coming back into the team and Stuey now looking comfortable — that I’d get another game. Now, I just wanted to enjoy it. We were already more than 200 in front, so I knew a declaration was coming sooner or later, certainly before stumps, but Tubby never sent a message saying I had a set amount of time to try to get a hundred. So we just kept going. It was only when I moved into the 80s that I really thought the ton was on. By that point, the way Stuey and I were going through the last session of the day, he’d get to a half-century and I’d make three figures about half an hour before stumps, and that seemed a logical time for a closure. But it wasn’t to be. Sri Lanka had just taken the third new ball and I was on 96 when left-arm paceman Chaminda Vaas got one to cut back and hit me above my back pad — closer to my knee than groin. They did appeal, quite loudly considering how much it had bounced and the state of play, while I panicked for that split-second after I was hit (as a batsman always does as a reflex when hit on the leg anywhere near the stumps), but I quickly calmed down when I realised the ball was clearing the stumps. Nothing to worry about. Then, Khizar Hayat, the umpire from Pakistan, gave me out lbw. I simply couldn’t believe it. I looked down at the ground, fought the urge to complain or kick the ground, and began to trudge slowly off. What else can I do? The Sri Lankan captain, Arjuna Ranatunga, rubbed me on the head, as if I was a kid who’d just been told to go inside and do some homework, and for a moment I felt a surge of anger, but I managed to let his gesture go. I felt so empty, a feeling accentuated by the mass sigh and stony silence that immediately greeted the decision, though the crowd was very generous in their applause as I approached the dressing room. You only get one shot at scoring a century in your first Test innings and I’d done the hard work … and that opportunity had been snatched away from me when everyone, me included, thought I was home. Apparently sections of the crowd got stuck into the umpire, but I didn’t hear it. All I could think of was the hundred that got away. Tubby declared immediately, with Stuey left at 54 not out, which meant that there was plenty of activity in the room as we prepared to go out for the final four overs of the day. There was still time for the boys to congratulate me on how I’d played and to tell me I’d been ‘ripped off’, a fact that was confirmed for me as I watched the replay of my dismissal on the television in our room. I was gutted. I felt like I’d got a duck, like everything I’d done was a waste. Back on the field, the fans were now really giving it to umpire Hayat, and this time I heard every crack, from the obvious to the cruel. Umpiring mistakes, as much as your own, can cost you records and matches, and this one cost me the chance to join that very exclusive club of Australians who have made a century in their debut Test innings. I guess there were extenuating circumstances; it was a really tough Test match. Hayat had been out on the field for five-and-a-half hours on a very hot day, and he was under pressure after reporting the Sri Lankans for ball tampering and then giving David Boon out when he shouldn’t have earlier in the Test. Making it worse, we went out and bowled four overs, and in the last over of the day I was fielding bat-pad on the offside for Shane Warne, and Warnie got a ball to fizz off the pitch, straight into the middle of the batsman’s glove and it popped straight up to me. All I had to do was catch it and throw it jubilantly up in the air, which I triumphantly did, but umpire Hayat said, ‘Not out.’ Afterwards, I said all the things they expected me to say: that I would have taken 96 if you’d have offered it to me at the start of the Test; that good and bad decisions even out in the end; if the umpire said I was out, I was out … but I was still disappointed and I don’t think I truly got over it until I went out for dinner that night with my parents and Nan. ‘Another four runs would’ve been nice,’ Dad said. ‘But I’m proud of you, we all are.’ Of course, with the Decision Review System (DRS) in place, you’d like to think decisions like that wouldn’t happen today. They’d have gone to the replay and then promptly reversed the decision. But at the time, I was not even aware that Hayat felt he’d made a terrible mistake. When he saw the replay at tea, his umpiring partner on the day, Peter Parker, recalled him being shattered he’d made a mistake. When they first introduced the DRS, I was hesitant, because I always worry about tampering with our game in any way on the basis that it’s pretty good the way it is. But then someone would ask, ‘Don’t you remember your first Test?’ And I’d think, Maybe a review system isn’t such a bad idea. The last word goes to Nan, who couldn’t hide the fact she was so thrilled with all I’d done and was doing with my cricket. I was so happy she was there to share my first Test with me. As I batted on that third day, and the possibility of me making a debut ton grew closer, the TV cameras found her in the crowd and a reporter went over to see how she was going. Of course, she was asked about that T-shirt — the one she made when I was nine or 10 that said I was going to be a Test cricketer — and she quipped that she was going to print up another one. ‘What’s this one going to say?’ the reporter asked. ‘I told you so!’ Nan replied, and everyone laughed. I’d missed out on the debut ton, but Nan was right: I was a Test cricketer. AT THE START of the 1995–96 season, I had been awarded a contract by the Australian Cricket Board. To tell the truth, I can’t remember what it was worth — if I had to guess I’d say around $50,000, with the potential to make quite a bit more — which reflects the reality that at this stage of my life I just didn’t care what they were paying me. Occasionally, I’d hear a senior member of the Australian team muttering about how badly we were being paid, how the ACB was ripping us off, and I’d just nod my head and move on. I just wanted to play. The ‘security’ a contract brought meant nothing to me, because it didn’t guarantee I was going to be involved in the next game. What mattered to me was how well I played, not how my bank account looked. For me, the best part about getting the Board contract was that it meant the people running cricket thought I deserved it. The combination of their backing, the camaraderie I felt in the Caribbean and the belief I had in my ability meant I felt a genuine sense of belonging when I played top-level cricket, even though I was not yet 21. This was a step up from the confidence the Century Club had in me when they sponsored my trip to Adelaide, that Rod Marsh had in me when he freely told others that he thought I could play, or that companies like Ansett, Kookaburra, Launceston Motors and the Tasmanian TAB were showing in me when they signed me up for cricket scholarships or sponsorship deals. It was as if I’d moved from standby to actually having a seat on the plane. I felt like I’d never have to work again. And in a sense that’s what happened, because playing cricket has always been a joy for me. I’ve never felt like I had to be there for someone else’s sake, or because I needed the money. I think if I’d never played in a grade any higher than park cricket I would have been one of those blokes who kept playing forever, into my fifties, just because I love the game so much. I was getting well paid for doing something I would have done for nothing. Few people get this lucky and I’ve never forgotten that. Every year of my cricket life I’ve had to pinch myself. Being honest shouldn’t be that hard. It’s a value that every person should have. Honest team members create an honest team — and if you don’t have that, then trust and team values break down. Honesty has been a core value of mine for as long as I can remember. It’s been essential to me, right through my whole career — being honest to myself and to my team-mates, to the media and, above all, to the Australian public and cricket fans all over the world. It’s not a trait that you manufacture; it’s a way you live your life. It’s also the way you should play your cricket. Honesty in the way you prepare, in your training, in your interactions with your team-mates and in your mental approach to a game. Honesty is integral to how you play the game. Always giving 100 per cent, being true to the values of the team and of your country, and of your team-mates. It’s also about being true to the spirit of the game of cricket. Playing to win, playing within the rules and playing with the integrity that is expected of all cricketers. Honesty is for the public eye but also behind closed doors with the way you communicate and interact with others. For me, honesty is not negotiable. (#ulink_76e8dc04-78f8-59d1-b156-d088b87825ef) IN MY FIRST THREE TESTS, I saw a ball-tampering controversy in Perth, Muttiah Muralitharan no-balled for throwing by umpire Darrell Hair in Melbourne and David Boon announce his retirement from international cricket in Adelaide. In between, relations between the Australian and Sri Lankan teams became pretty ugly, to the point that the two teams refused to shake hands after we won the World Series Cup in Sydney. Simmering in the background was the continuing match-fixing controversy, which had become a headline story in Australia back in early 1995 when it was revealed that Mark Waugh, Shane Warne and Tim May had accused Salim Malik of trying to bribe them to play poorly in a Test match and a one-day international on Australia’s tour of Pakistan in 1994. During the following October, Malik was cleared by Pakistan’s Supreme Court. But the so-called Malik affair didn’t end there. It was to be in and out of the courts for another ten years. Then on January 31, 1996, two days after Boonie’s farewell Test, a huge bomb blast went off in Colombo, where we were scheduled to play a World Cup match two-and-a-half weeks later. The loss of life was horrifying. Some of the guys received death threats, I was being asked questions about being a possible terrorist target, and not everyone was keen to go to the subcontinent for the Cup. I hadn’t been prepared for any of this and wasn’t sure what to make of it all. I was supposed to be soaking up every moment of being a Test cricketer, but there was so much going on around the games it was almost overwhelming. The ball-tampering episode in Perth was a bit of a joke, because the umpires didn’t take the allegedly damaged ball out of the game, so it was a bit hard later on for anyone to determine if the Sri Lankans had done what the umpires reckoned they had. In the Boxing Day Test, Darrell Hair cast his verdict against Murali from the bowler’s end, where I would have thought it was harder to make a clear judgment than if he was standing at square. Mark Waugh reckoned Hair’s no-ball calls were the worst thing ever, because for the rest of the day every time Murali bowled the crowd was yelling, ‘No ball!’, which was very off-putting for the batsmen. Mark was eventually bowled, when he gave himself some room and late cut the ball onto his leg stump. Not his off-stump, his leg stump! In our dressing room, we initially thought Murali had been no-balled for over-stepping the popping crease, but when the umpire kept going we quickly realised something awful was happening and I couldn’t help thinking that if there was a problem with his action there had to be a better way to fix it than to slaughter him on such a public stage. There had been some talk among us about Murali’s action, with a few guys adamant that his action wasn’t right, but I’d say the overriding view was that it wasn’t for us to worry about. Our job was to work out a way to counter him. I came to see his action as unusual rather than bent, and because his top-spinner often deviated from leg to off, we had to be wary of him in the same way we’d be careful against a leg-spinner with a good wrong’un. Over the years, scoring runs against Murali would become among the biggest and most enjoyable challenges I’d face as a Test batsman. As things turned out, the only time Sri Lanka beat us in Australia in 1995–96 was in a one-dayer in Melbourne, the irony for me being that this was the game in which I scored my first ODI century. Batting at No. 4 and in at 2–10 in the seventh over, I lasted until the last ball of the innings, when I was run out for 123. There are two things I clearly remember about this knock. One, I hit a six, which was very rare for me in those days. I wasn’t sure I could hit it that far on bigger grounds like the MCG and the SCG, which is a reflection on where I was in my physical development and also on the bats we used then compared to today’s much more powerful pieces of willow. Here, I charged down the wicket and hit one as hard as I could right out of the middle of my bat … and it landed three rows beyond the boundary fence. And two, I didn’t claim the man-of-the-match award. That prize deservedly went to Romesh Kaluwitharana, who set up Sri Lanka’s run-chase with a superb knock of 77 from 75 balls. Ironically, when we talked about the defeat straight after the game we thought his effort was a fluke — it was only his second innings as an opener in ODI cricket and most people in those days still thought it was a top-order batsman’s job to build a platform and help ensure there were wickets in hand for a late-innings assault. In fact, Kaluwitharana’s smashing innings was the start of a revolution that would gain traction during the 1996 World Cup and explode from there in the hands of dynamic top-of-the-order hitters such as Australia’s Adam Gilchrist, India’s Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag, Sri Lanka’s Sanath Jayasuriya and South Africa’s Herschelle Gibbs. The best thing about my hundred was that it locked up a World Cup spot for me. I thought I batted really well when I scored 71 in the Boxing Day Test (a game in which I also took my first Test wicket: Asanka Gurusinha, caught by Heals before I’d conceded even a single run as an international bowler and after I thought I had him plumb lbw with a big inswinger), but my batting form in the early World Series Cup games was mediocre and with Steve Waugh due to come back into the team, my place might have been in jeopardy if I’d failed again. Instead, Michael Slater was dropped when Steve returned, Mark Waugh went up to opener and I became the new No. 3. I’d stay at first drop pretty much full-time for the next 15 years. THREE DAYS BEFORE the Adelaide Test, we met with the ACB to discuss the World Cup tour. A civil war in Sri Lanka had been going on for more than a decade, and while Australian teams had toured there as recently as 1992 and 1994 (and I’d been there with an Academy team in 1993), fighting in the country had escalated in recent times and there was a real fear that terrorists might see the World Cup as a vehicle to push their cause. Further, some Australian players and coach Bob Simpson had received threats suggesting their lives were in danger if they went to Sri Lanka, a frightening state of affairs. However, I was still keen to tour and I went into the meeting dreading the idea that choosing not to tour might be an option. With hindsight, thinking this way was naive, and I have to say that not everyone shared my enthusiasm, but I didn’t want to miss a minute of being an international cricketer. Mark Taylor initiated discussions by asking what our alternatives were. Did we have to play every game or could we just go to India and Pakistan, where all our World Cup matches bar the Sri Lanka group game were scheduled? Was it one Aussie player out, all out? The ACB bosses said we could pull out of our pre-tournament camp and opening game in Colombo, but if we did that it would put back relations between Australia and Sri Lanka by a decade. ‘Okay then,’ said Tubby. ‘What security measures will be in place?’ First, we were assured that the ACB had been to Pakistan and was happy with the arrangements that had been promised. For Sri Lanka, we would be treated the same way as a visiting head of state. We would leave the airport from a different exit to the general public, after going through a special passport control. There would be no parked cars on the sides of the roads we’d be travelling on and armed guards would look after us 24 hours a day, patrol the ground at practice and ride with us on the team bus. Our luggage and gear would travel on a different bus to us, and no one else would be allowed on our floor of the hotel. The only time we could escape this protection was when we were in our hotel rooms. It all blew me away, such a total contrast to the days when I used to ride my BMX bike from Rocherlea to Invermay Park. We were grateful for all this, though that feeling was tempered by the news that the ACB had only just received a fax saying that we would be greeted by a suicide bomber when we landed in Colombo. Craig McDermott had received a chilling message that stated he would be ‘fed a diet of hand grenades’, Warnie was advised to look out for a car bomber, and a couple of their players had told us on the field during matches that if we went to Colombo we’d be ‘blown up’. Our security experts advised us that if we received a suspicious-looking parcel it would be best not to open it. Before the final day’s play of the Test, we had a players’ meeting in which we decided unanimously to go, with the one change that our pre-tournament camp would be in Brisbane. But two days later, a huge bomb blast exploded in the centre of Colombo, just a few blocks from what was going to be our hotel, killing more than 100 people. When I heard about that, I suddenly didn’t want to go to Sri Lanka. I would have gone if we’d been made to, but soon the call was made by the ACB, in consultation with Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs, to abort the Sri Lankan leg of our tour. We were criticised by some people on the subcontinent and a few dopey columnists in England, and the World Cup organising committee ruled it a ‘forfeit’ and gave the two points to Sri Lanka, which seemed a bit ridiculous but didn’t worry us at all. Thinking about it now, I’m sure not going was 100 per cent the right decision. SO WE WOULD BE going to the World Cup, but one man who wouldn’t be travelling with us was David Boon, who called time on his international career after the Tests against Sri Lanka. It is one of my regrets in cricket that even though we played three times together at the highest level I never managed to bat with Boonie in a Test match. However, that doesn’t diminish the huge influence he had on me as a cricketer, how much he helped me from the time he was making it possible for all young cricketers in Northern Tasmania to realistically dream of greatness to the days we were together in the same Aussie dressing room. Of all the things he taught me about big-time cricket, the thing that stands out most for me is patience. I was lucky in that from when I first came into the Tasmanian team, I could observe him closely at training and in games and study the manner in which he made the bowlers come to him, how he would wait until the ball was in his area, and then he’d score his runs. ‘You have to know your game,’ he would say. ‘And try to stay out in the middle for as long as you can.’ I thought I knew what he meant when he advised me to ‘know my game’, but in fact I didn’t really get it for a few more years. And that last line might sound obvious, but in my early days in the Tassie team I often threw away a potential big score by trying to blaze away. A rapid-fire fifty might excite the fans, but Boonie knew it was big hundreds that win games and impress the selectors. After I scored my first ODI century, I really felt a part of the side, much more than I did after making 96 in my first Test. In cricket, the difference between two and three figures can be huge, even if it is a matter of two, three — or four — runs. Unfortunately, my promotion to the Australian side coincided with Boonie’s fight to prolong his Test career. From afar, I’d seen the media pursue out-of-form stars in the past, great players like Allan Border, Merv Hughes, Dean Jones and Geoff Marsh. But that was when I was a spectator; now I got a whole new perspective on the situation. I was at a stage of my career where everything that was written about me was positive, so I was always keen to head to the sports pages. Boonie, about to turn 35 and — as far as some reporters were concerned — well past his use-by date, probably hadn’t read a paper in weeks, but he couldn’t avoid the whispers, the well-meaning advice to ‘ignore what they’re writing about you’, the negative tone of the journalists’ questions. Watching him in the nets, I wondered if he was working too hard, but there was no way a young pup like me was going to say anything. I saw how stoic he was in the dressing room at the WACA after he was fired by Khizar Hayat (I think I’d have flipped in the same situation) and I admired how he fought so hard in Melbourne to score 93 not out on the day Murali was no-balled by Darrell Hair. He went on to his final Test century the following day. I also was taken by the way he handled his omission from the one-day squad, a decision announced straight after the Perth Test. The sacking of a long-time player always cuts at the psyche of a team, but there was no way Boonie was going to sulk or make it awkward for his mates; instead, as usual, he was one of the first guys down to the hotel bar to toast our Test victory before we headed back to Launceston — me to play golf with my brother, Drew, at Mowbray; Boonie to visit his wife Pip in hospital, where she was recovering from a minor operation. Of all the things on his mind, that was easily the one he was most concerned about. I’ll never forget how good he was to me on that flight, despite all the turmoil that must have been spinning through his head. He told me how proud he was seeing a ‘fellow Swampie’ making runs in Test cricket, and how determined he was for the two of us to go to England together on the 1997 Ashes tour. It wasn’t to be. I think Boonie found it hard to adjust to being in the Test side but out of the one-day team, and when it became clear he wasn’t going to make the World Cup squad he pulled the pin. He told us at a team meeting just before the Adelaide Test, reading from notes he’d prepared so he got the words right, emphasising how much playing for Australia meant to him and how he had treasured the camaraderie he shared with his team-mates. For 30 seconds straight afterwards there was silence, before Tubby, Simmo and a few of the boys told Boonie how grateful they were to have shared the ride with him. I didn’t say anything, not then anyway. It was a bit different for me, because Boonie was not so much my team-mate as my hero. One thing he kept saying was that he was very comfortable with his decision to retire, that it was the right time. Well, it might have been the correct call for him, but I’d had visions of playing a lot of Test cricket with David Boon. I wish I could have batted with him in a Test match. One part of my cricket dream was over almost as quickly as it had begun. (#ulink_733a026e-4c7d-5326-b302-84818cdba20b) I WAS SEATED in an aisle seat for the first leg of our flight, from Sydney to Bangkok, next to Steve Waugh. Michael Slater, who’d been recalled to the squad, was sitting directly across from me, and he noticed me studying the flash Thai Airways International showbag. ‘It’s just toiletries, mate,’ he said helpfully. ‘Try the breath freshener.’ I unzipped the bag, went through the soap, toothpaste, breath freshener … no, that’s the shaving cream … deodorant. Finally, I found the breath freshener, but initially I was worried it might be an elaborate trap. What was Slats up to? I took the cap off the small bottle, and gave the button a gentle prod, so that just a smidgen of spray came out. Hey, that’s not too bad, I thought to myself, as I nodded in Slats’s direction. Thai’s business class was so impressive I was beginning to think they’d be serving Tasmanian beer on the flight. Then I looked to my right and saw that rather than checking out what freebies might be on offer, Steve Waugh was intently studying the new laptop one of his sponsors had given him to help him type his next best-selling tour diary. He hadn’t heard what Slats and I had been talking about. ‘Hey Tugga, have you tried the breath freshener?’ I asked, as I passed a bottle over to him. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he replied, as he put the nozzle to his mouth and pushed hard. But it wasn’t the breath freshener; it was the shaving cream. I’d done him beautifully. He spat the foam out all over his new laptop, muttered something about me being a ‘little prick’, and then had to call a flight attendant over to clean up the mess. Once that was done, he looked over at me and said, as seriously as he could, ‘Don’t worry, young fella. I’ve got a memory like an elephant.’ He has, too. But while I’m sure Steve would have tried to square the ledger at some point over the following six weeks — and with our first game cancelled he had plenty of time before our opening match — I don’t think he ever did. AUSTRALIA’S RECORD IN WORLD CUPS prior to 1996 was hardly flash: winners in 1987; finalists in the inaugural Cup in 1975; but couldn’t get out of the first round in 1979, 1983 and 1992. Still, we thought we were a real chance this time, even if we were giving the other teams in our group (bar the West Indies, who also refused to go to Sri Lanka) a game start. There was a sense of relief and anticipation among us when we finally set off for India, as if we were bidding farewell to the stresses and turmoil of the previous few weeks. In fact, once we landed, we’d be subject to a fair degree of hostility from the locals, who thought we’d overplayed our hand by choosing not to tour to Sri Lanka, but on the plane, at least, we felt far away from that. THERE WERE ACTUALLY 13 DAYS between our arrival in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and our first game, against Kenya in Visakhapatnam. Those in the squad like Steve and Glenn McGrath, who like to explore, did venture out on occasions, but the high security that accompanied our every move made that even less inviting for blokes like me who aren’t into that sort of thing. As it was I lost a couple of days to a stomach bug and wasn’t going too far from the bathroom anyway, but when I was healthy I was jumping out of my skin at training, and this caused a bit of grief at one session where Errol Alcott had us working in pairs, one guy wearing boxing gloves and throwing punches while the other held up a circular pad to absorb the jabs. All was going well until I aimed a straight right but missed the pad and instead struck Paul Reiffel bang on the bridge of his nose. Fortunately, Pistol was stunned rather than hurt. He quickly told me I was a bloody idiot and then we got on with it. The fact we were treated as ‘outcasts’ by critics in India helped galvanise the group, to the point that we could belt each other and still be good mates, and our spirits remained pretty high despite the days without on-field action. Interestingly, while some officials and a number of commentators seemed dirty on us, the local fans were mostly positive, and I was astonished by just how many of them squeezed into the ground floor at our hotels — not to harass us, just to wish us all the best and, hopefully, to nab a prized autograph or photograph. Over the years of playing in India this is something I have noticed. The media can be tearing you limb from limb, but the fans are among the most generous in the world and sometimes it pays to remember that. We were one down before we even started courtesy of missing the first game, but made up for it in matches against Kenya, India and Zimbabwe. Mark Waugh won man of the match in the first two games and Warnie was outstanding in the third. It was when we headed to Jaipur to take on the West Indies that I started to get some traction and played my best innings of the tournament. Remembering back to our early team meetings in the Caribbean a year before, where Steve Waugh talked at length about not being intimidated by Ambrose, Walsh and company, I went out to bat in my yellow Australian cap. It may have been a reckless show of defiance, but one that had me feeling very good about myself after I survived my first few overs. Mind you, this was after I ducked under the first three balls I faced — all bouncers. My best moment of the innings came when I charged one of their best quicks, Ian Bishop, and put him into the crowd beyond deep extra cover — this might have been the best shot of my life — and I managed to get to my hundred before our 50 overs were up, but then their captain Richie Richardson and star batsman Brian Lara came together in a match-winning partnership. Late in the day, we were still an outside chance of winning if only we could dismiss the Windies’ skipper. Mark Waugh did him slightly in the air as he went for a slog-sweep over mid-wicket. I was riding the boundary and I back-pedalled and back-pedalled … and held the catch Australian football-style above my head … then stumbled on the rope and fell back into a Coca-Cola advertising hoarding perched just beyond the playing field. Six! Soon after, the game was over, Richardson was undefeated, 93 not out, with my innings from earlier in the day all but forgotten. This meant I’d scored two ODI centuries and we’d lost both times. In between this loss and our quarter-final against New Zealand in Madras, we flew back to Delhi, attended a function at the Australian Embassy, and then early the next morning set off by bus for Agra to have our official team photograph taken with the Taj Mahal as the backdrop. The photo was taken with us in our canary-yellow uniforms, and when someone produced a footy I was one of a number of Aussie cricketers seen trying to take ‘speckies’ among the tourists. Four days later the Kiwis set us an imposing 287, but Junior was in imperious form as he made his third hundred of the tournament and we won by six wickets with 13 balls to spare, to set up a rematch with the West Indies, who’d stunned the favoured South Africans in their quarter-final in Karachi. OF THE MANY ONE-DAY victories I enjoyed over the years, this semi-final against the Windies in Mohali is often forgotten, but it is right up among the best I was involved in. For much of the day it looked like we were going to lose, but there was real spirit about our team and we just refused to be knocked out. I was dismissed for a 15-ball duck, one of the four wickets to fall in the first 10 overs of the game (Ambrose was charging in with the setting sun right behind his bowling arm), but Stuart Law, Michael Bevan and Ian Healy all batted really well and we managed to set them 208 to win. It looked all over when they reached 2–165 in the 42nd over, but Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne were magnificent, Mark Taylor’s leadership was inspirational and Damien Fleming was nerveless at the end. Having failed earlier in the game, my contribution was obviously minimal, but I was very proud of one piece of fielding I completed near the death, when I turned a four into a three with a diving save on the boundary. At that point, every run mattered but I still wasn’t quite sure how I managed it — the only explanation being the adrenalin pumping through my body. Immediately after the game, it was as if everyone needed time to take in all the drama of the final 10 overs. The mood was pretty sedate, at least until Heals got up and led us in a rousing rendition of ‘Underneath the Southern Cross’. We don’t sing our anthem after every one-day victory, but our vice-captain couldn’t resist the temptation this time. We did manage a couple of celebratory beers before we headed back to the hotel, and then back in team manager Col Egar’s room we started to party. Too quickly, though, the clock raced round to two or three o’clock, and then someone mentioned we had a final to win. So, reluctantly, we called it an early morning. Bags had to be packed and in the hotel foyer by 10am. That was the easy bit. Then we had to get to the airport, get luggage checked in — rarely a formality at anything but the biggest Indian airports — then battle through passport checks and customs clearances because the final was to be staged in Lahore, Pakistan. It was early evening before we staggered into our new hotel, which left us with only one full day to prepare for the final. Sri Lanka, our opponents, had arrived 24 hours before us, which was a significant advantage for them. Training on that one day was a bit of a fiasco, because both teams turned up at pretty much the same time, so we each had to make do with a single net, which inevitably prolonged the session. Our pre-final team meeting was conducted in the manager’s room, which was hardly big enough for the purpose, and we based most of our strategy on how Sri Lanka had gone against us in the recent Tests and one-dayers in Australia, without taking into consideration how they’d been playing in this World Cup. Muttiah Muralitharan was still their main spinner, but Sanath Jayasuriya and Kumar Dharmasena, who’d been largely ineffective in Australia, had bowled some key overs in their quarter-final and semi-final wins. They would play key roles in the final, not least in the way they and Aravinda de Silva (normally a ‘part-time’ off-spinner) would slow our run-rate just when Tubby and I were due to press the accelerator. Sure enough they did the same in the game. We were 1–134 after 25 overs, but finished with a below par 7–241 after 50. Of course, you’re always disappointed to get out, but how I fell in this final really nags at me. I’ll never forget how I slammed my bat into my locker when I returned to the dressing room. There is no joy in being dismissed for 45 when your job as a top-order batsman, once you’ve got that sort of start, is to go on to make a big score. As I recall it, I sensed something bad was going to happen. Tubby and I began to struggle to get their spinners away and I could feel the mood was changing. One thing I would learn about batting on the subcontinent is that, when the ball is turning, it can really hurt to lose a wicket, because it’s hard for incoming batsmen to come out and keep the scoreboard ticking over. In this instance, I was bowled at 3–152 and soon after Tubby was caught in the deep, which meant two new batsmen had to try to maintain our run-rate. That was never going to be easy. Arguably the worst indication of our lack of preparation related to the fact that this was the first time we’d played a day–night game at Lahore. We had no idea how damp the field would become (a result of the evening dew) and when that happened the ball became desperately hard to grip. It hadn’t occurred to anyone in our camp to check if there was anything special about the local conditions. It’s too late for that final now, of course, but as a result of what happened in that World Cup final, changing conditions between day and night is one thing that is always talked about in Australian team meetings. We should have known then; we know now. When Sri Lanka batted, we quickly broke up their opening partnership but de Silva strode out to strike a match-winning century and this time there was no amazing Aussie fightback. At least this time the two teams shook hands after the game, but then we retreated to a very sombre dressing room where we had to concede we’d been beaten by the better team on the night. WHEN I GOT HOME and I was asked about my World Cup experience, all I wanted to talk about was the semi-final, about just how electric it was being out on the ground for those final few overs and in the rooms after the game, but when I was on my own, on the golf course or maybe in the gym, I thought mostly about the final and how empty I felt after the game. After we lost a really big game I felt like I’d let a lot of people down: my mates, my fans, myself. And there was no quick fix; the next World Cup was more than three years away. The difference in the mood of those two dressing rooms — one in Mohali after the semi-final; the other in Lahore after the final — was colossal. I was comforted to a degree by the knowledge that after all the stress and rancour that went with our decision not to go to Sri Lanka, we’d actually done pretty well just to get to the final, but the memory of how I felt after that defeat stayed with me. As my career unfolded, I’d enjoy many big wins and be part of some massive celebrations, but there would also be a few losses along the way that really scarred, where straight after the game and even for a few days afterwards I didn’t like being on the front line, where I wanted to be miles away. This was the first of them. My cricket journey has been long and fulfilling. From my earliest days playing school and grade cricket right through to my last game in August 2013 in the Caribbean, I’ve enjoyed so many highs and my fair share of lows. I’ve developed lifelong friendships, been to some of the most amazing places and had the honour to captain my country. I’ve played with and against childhood idols, on all the great cricket grounds around the world, and mingled with royalty as well as the poorest of the poor. But for all these great opportunities and happenings, I’ve always tried to stay as grounded and as true as possible to myself, my family and my team-mates in everything that I’ve done. I’ve always tried to be thinking of other people and doing what I could do to support them, of how my team-mates could improve, do better or enjoy their cricket more, as well as observing what their strengths are and how they could make them even better, plus what their weaknesses are and what I could do to help them both on and off the field. I worked really hard at this support, especially when we were on the road, when we could spend more time together. Stepping back and looking at those around you and working out what you can do to help them is something all cricket captains, leaders or business people should do regularly. You’re only as good as the team around you. (#ulink_7c785028-68fe-515c-8361-61ef4a91db10) I ANSWERED THE PHONE at home a few days before Christmas. As soon as he said, ‘G’day Ricky, Trevor Hohns,’ I knew I was in trouble. It had become a standard quip among the players that the only time we heard from Trevor was when he called to say you’d been dropped. ‘We want you to go back to Shield cricket and score a hell of a lot of runs,’ he said. I was out of the Test side and the one-day squad too. As early Christmas gifts went, this wasn’t one of the best I’d ever received. My manager Sam Halvorsen, a Hobart-based businessman who’d been looking after me since Greg Shipperd introduced me to him in late 1994, had negotiated a number of sponsorship deals and was telling me that I was very much in demand — well, at least I was in Tasmania. All I’d done from mid-March to mid-July was keep myself fit, work on my golf handicap, raced a couple of greyhounds and had some fun. In July, I travelled to Kuala Lumpur to play for Australia in a Super 8s event and soon after that I was in Cairns and Townsville playing for Tassie in a similar tournament involving all six Sheffield Shield teams. Life was good. I was just 22 years old and batting at three for Australia. I’d filled that position throughout the World Cup earlier in the year and with David Boon retired from international cricket I took his spot at first drop for a one-off Test against India. After just three Tests at No. 3, I was out of favour and out of the team, confused and a little angry with the way I’d been treated. I wasn’t really sure why I’d been cast aside so quickly and still don’t know why. Some people wanted to assume it was for reasons other than cricket, but I’d done nothing to deserve that. I’ve always wondered if they were trying to teach me some sort of lesson, as if that’s the way you’re supposed to treat young blokes who get to the top quicker than most. I got sick of the number of people who wanted to kindly tell me that everyone was dropped at some stage during their career: how Boonie was dropped; Allan Border was dropped; Mark Taylor was dropped; Steve Waugh was dropped; even Don Bradman was dropped. I nodded my head and replied that I was aware of that and that I would do all I could to fight my way back into the team, but the truth was I was in a bit of disarray. It wasn’t so much a question of whether I deserved the sack but that it had come out of the blue. For the first time in my life the confidence I’d always had in my cricket ability was shaken. If someone was trying to teach me a lesson, what was it? Years later, when I was captain, I would push for a role as a selector because I believed I should always be in a position to tell a player why they had been dropped, or what the selectors were looking for. There were a few times when I was baffled by their decisions but had to keep that to myself as nothing was to be gained by making that public and nobody was going to change the selectors’ minds. In the year after I retired I saw batsmen rotate through the team like it was a game of musical chairs. I know what this sort of treatment does to the confidence of players and I found it hard to watch from a distance. If you’re looking over your shoulder thinking this innings could be your last then you’re adding a layer of unnecessary pressure when there’s enough of that around. A FEW MONTHS EARLIER, in late August, we’d been in Sri Lanka for a one-day tour that was notable for the ever-present security that kept reminding us of the boycott controversy of six months before and for the fact Mark Taylor was not with us because of a back injury. Ian Healy was in charge and I thought he did a good job as both tactician and diplomat, with the tour being played out without a major incident. Heals wasn’t scared to try things, such as opening the bowling against Sri Lanka with medium pacers Steve Waugh and Stuart Law rather than the quicker Glenn McGrath and Damien Fleming on the basis that Jayasuriya and Kaluwitharana preferred the ball coming onto the bat, and he also made sure the newcomers to the squad, spinner Brad Hogg and paceman Jason Gillespie, had an opportunity to show us what they could do. We did enough to make the final of a tournament that also featured India, but lost the game that mattered, against Sri Lanka, by 30 runs. The security was ultra-tight wherever we went, to the point that a ‘decoy bus’ was employed every time we were driven from our hotel to the ground. This, to me, was just bizarre. There were two buses that looked exactly the same, with curtains closed across all the windows, and the first bus would take off in one direction, while the second went the other way. First, I couldn’t help thinking that if someone was planning to attack our bus, we were playing a form of Russian roulette. And then I’d wonder: Why are we here? Is what we’re doing really that important? If we need to be protected this closely, doesn’t that mean something is not right? Security-wise, touring the subcontinent went to another level after the 1996 World Cup, and it’s been that way — maybe even more so — ever since. For almost my entire career, it’s been awkward to venture outside the hotel. I was one of many Aussie cricketers on tour who spent most of my time in the hotel, drinking coffee or playing with my laptop. As the internet became more accessible, a few guys became prone to give their TAB accounts a workout, focusing on the races and footy back home. Soldiers or policemen carrying machine guns outside elevators, even sometimes outside individual rooms, became a customary sight. Guests were not allowed on floors other than their own, outsiders were kept away from the hotel lobby. For the 2011 World Cup, friends and family needed a special pass if they wanted to get through the hotel’s front door. It was life in a fishbowl and not always reassuring. Being constantly under guard did wear me down from time to time, but I don’t think it’s shortened anyone’s career. No one ever came to me frazzled, to say, ‘I can’t cope with this anymore, I’m giving touring away.’ That thought never once occurred to me. Rather, a little incongruously, the guys who have retired in recent times have almost to a man kept returning to India to play Twenty20, pursue business opportunities and to seek help for their charities. I guess, in the main, we became used to it. A MONTH AFTER THE AUGUST 1996 Sri Lanka tour, we were in India for a tour involving one Test match and an ODI tournament also involving the home team and South Africa. I started promisingly, scoring 58 and 37 not out on a seaming deck in a three-day tour game at Patiala, but after that I struggled against the spinners on a succession of slow wickets. However, I wasn’t the only one to have an ordinary tour, which was reflected in our results: we didn’t win a game. During the month we were in India, we criss-crossed the country, playing important games in some relatively minor cricket centres, covering way too many kilometres and staying in some ordinary hotels. It was one of my least enjoyable tours, and not just because I didn’t score many runs. To get from Delhi to Patiala and back, for example, we spent upwards of 13 hours on a poorly ventilated and minimally maintained train, and then stayed in accommodation that was frankly putrid. The Indian Board had arranged the warm-up match for us and said we’d enjoy the short trip through some lovely countryside, but it took forever and the train was so filthy you couldn’t see through the windows. We’ve been stitched-up a few times over the years with travel arrangements — such as when we’ve been on planes that have flown over the city we’re going to, continued in the same direction to another airport and then we’ve landed, got off, got on another plane and flown back a few hours later — but the ‘Patiala Express’, as we sarcastically called it, was the worst of them. Tugga said it was a good ‘team-building exercise’, but he was wrong. Complaining about these things might sound precious, but too often when we were trying to prepare for a series we were sent to play at places that had substandard facilities. For future tours, we learned not to worry about ordeals such as this, working on the basis that it was just part and parcel of the careers we’d chosen for ourselves. There is no doubt the good times far outweighed the bad. They’d make us travel all over India for ODIs, and we’d feel they were trying to make it hard for us to win, but we’d use it as motivation: You can send us wherever you want, we’ll still find a way to win. Most of the time we were well looked after on tour and the team hotels were the best available, but there were always exceptions. You talk to the older guys and they tell terrible stories from earlier tours. Rod Marsh says that for a whole tour of Pakistan he never drank anything apart from soft drinks and beer because there wasn’t even bottled water. The one thing as a cricketer you are most scared of is getting sick. I do remember once sitting opposite Adam Gilchrist at dinner in a hotel that is infamous in Australian cricket and seeing something that was simply unbelievable. Gilly’s meal came with a small bowl of soy sauce and when the waiter put it down there was a cockroach in it. Gilly pointed it out and the bloke just grabbed it and stuck it in his mouth and said ‘there’s nothing there’. We were absolutely horrified. The waiter was struggling to talk because he still had it in his mouth and I can tell you we couldn’t eat after that. I came to think that it was a good indication of how the team was going if we were whingeing or fighting with each other on tour and I think you can see that from the outside too. The worse the performance on the field, the more likely you are to hear about things happening off it. I knew the team wasn’t in great shape if there was a lot of griping or squabbling going on. This India tour might have offered proof of that — at a time when we weren’t sure where our next win was coming from, on a flight from Indore to Bangalore after about three weeks of touring, I was involved in a dust-up with Paul Reiffel. I still think the catalyst for the blue remains one of the funnier things I’ve seen while travelling with the team, but the result was anything but amusing and I regret my part in it. We’d just lost our opening game of the one-day tournament and I was sitting across the aisle from Pistol when they brought out our meals. There was a very old Indian fellow on the other side of him, and I could see this gentleman trying to open a tomato-sauce satchel by twisting it this way and squeezing it that way. It was one of those situations where you know what’s about to happen. Finally, he decided to bite the satchel open … at the same time he kept squeezing … and, sure enough, the sauce flowed all over Pistol. Our pace bowler, who’d go on to become an international umpire, cried out in a mix of anger and anguish, while I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. ‘Tone it down, Punter,’ he said to me, and then he started cleaning himself up. After a couple of minutes, Pistol and his sparring partner sat down to continue their meals. Everything was fine until the man decided to try to read a newspaper while he tucked into his curry, at which point, he knocked his cup of water straight into Pistol’s lap. Again, Pistol’s cries of dismay were heard around the plane, while I just lost it completely. Maybe you had to be there, or perhaps I’m just a bloke with no compassion … I tried to rein myself in, but I couldn’t. Pistol was spewing, but he couldn’t take his rage out on the old bloke. ‘What are you laughing at?’ he snarled at me, to which I rather naively replied, ‘What do you think I’m laughing at?’ Pistol went to tap either the top of my head or the top of my seat, as a way of underlining the fact he wasn’t happy, but he missed his target and clipped me across the mouth. Now, I wasn’t laughing; instead I tried to stand and confront him, but I had my seat belt on so I couldn’t get up and suddenly I was looking like a goose. Embarrassed and angry, when I finally got to my feet I went to grab him by the scruff of the neck, which was an over-the-top reaction, but where I come from you never hit someone unless you want a reaction, and he’d hit me. A few of the boys had to come between us and settle us down, with more than one of them reminding us that the Australian reporters covering the tour were also on the plane. Pistol was happy to let it go but — ridiculously, thinking about it now — I was not, and a little while later, as we waited in the aisle to disembark, I said just loud enough for him to hear, ‘You wait till we get off this plane.’ I’d scored 35 batting at three in the game against South Africa we’d played before the flight, and Pistol had opened the bowling, but we were both dropped for our next game. Tubby brought the two of us together and told us that while he understood that touring isn’t always easy, and inevitably blokes can get on each other’s nerves occasionally, we had to be smarter than to get into a fight in such a public place. When I stopped to think about how I’d reacted, I realised I’d totally underestimated how much the stress of travelling back and forwards was getting to me. Recalling the incident now, it’s amazing it never made the papers but those were different times. A great irony for me is that Pistol is a terrific bloke, someone I like and just about the last person I would have imagined myself fighting. Except for this one time, we always got on really well. I WAS HAPPY to get home, and this showed in my only Shield game before the start of our Test series against the West Indies, when I had a productive game against WA at the beautiful bouncing WACA. I was duly picked to bat at three for the first Test in Brisbane, and at the pre-game team meeting Tubby underlined the same points he’d made before the celebrated series in the Caribbean: how we mustn’t be intimidated by them; how we had to be aggressive; how the blokes who like to hook and pull had to keep playing those shots. My ‘baptism of fire’ came quickly enough, as I was in on the first morning when there were only four runs on the board, after their captain, Courtney Walsh, sent us in and new opener Matthew Elliott (in for Michael Slater) was out for a duck. At lunch I was 56 not out, with Tubby on 19, and I was flying. Ambrose, Walsh and Bishop had all tested me with plenty of ‘chin music’ but I went after them, and it was one of the most exhilarating innings of my life, right from the moment the first ball I faced kicked up at me and I jabbed it away to third man for four. All my early runs came through that area, and then I put a bumper from their fourth quick, Kenny Benjamin, into the crowd at deep fine leg. When Bishop tried a yorker I drove him through mid-off for four, and then I did the same thing to Ambrose, while Walsh fired in another bouncer and I hooked past the square-leg umpire for another four. On the TV, Ian Chappell described me as the ‘ideal No. 3’ but others may have been thinking differently. Benjamin came back and I moved into the 80s with a drive past mid-on for another four. I was thinking not so much about making a hundred as going on to a very big score, but then he pitched one short of a length but moving away, and I hit my pull shot well but straight to Walsh at mid-on. It was a tame way to get out, and I had one of those walks off the ground where I was pretty thrilled with my knock but upset that it had ended too soon, so I was hardly animated as I acknowledged the crowd before disappearing into the dressing room. I made only 9 in our second innings, caught down the legside, but we went on to win the game by 123 runs and I felt my counter-attack on the first day had played a significant part in the victory. My bowling had also played a part, after Steve Waugh strained a groin in the Windies’ first innings. I was called on to complete his over and with my fifth medium-paced delivery I had Jimmy Adams lbw. This meant my Test career bowling figures now looked this way: 29 balls, two maidens, two wickets for eight. A week later we were in Sydney for the second Test, but I suffered a double failure, out for 9 and 4, both times playing an ordinary shot. But we won again to take a firm grip on the series — the only way we could lose the Frank Worrell Trophy was for the West Indies to win the three remaining games. I had a month to prepare for the Boxing Day Test and in that time I played in three ODIs, for scores of 5, 44 and 19 run out, a Shield match against Victoria in Hobart, where I managed 23 and 66, and a tour game against Pakistan (the third team in the World Series Cup) where I scored 35 and we won by an innings. Sure, none of this was special, but it wasn’t catastrophic either so I didn’t expect the bloke on the other end of the line to be chairman of selectors Trevor Hohns when I answered the phone at home a few days before Christmas. When he told me I was out of both sides I was so stunned I didn’t say much. I certainly didn’t complain, but I didn’t ask any questions either. Matthew Elliott was hurt and Michael Bevan and I had been omitted, with Matthew Hayden, Steve Waugh (returning from injury) and Justin Langer coming into the side. Lang would bat at three, which might have given the best clue as to the team hierarchy’s thinking. I would come to learn that both Trevor and Mark Taylor were reasonably conservative in much of their cricket thinking, and I think their concept of the ideal No. 3 was a rock-solid type, what David Boon had given them for the previous few years. At this stage of his career, Lang was like that, whereas my natural instinct was to be more aggressive. Looking back, given the attacking way I played when I was 21, I probably needed to score a lot more runs than what I did at that time to keep the spot for long. But the truth is I didn’t know then why I was dropped, because they never told me, and I still don’t know now. I was never told anything specific about my original promotion up the order — it just seemed like a logical progression — or why I was abandoned so quickly. If they thought I had weaknesses in my technique or my character, why did they move me to the most important position in the batting order in the first place? Almost immediately after Trevor’s phone call, Mum and Dad took me out to the golf club, in part because they thought we’d escape the local media there. It was good to get out of the house but Launceston is not that big a city and the reporters were waiting behind the ninth green. Over the years, journos learned that if they wanted to find me the golf course was the best place to look. This time, I think I handled it okay and they were sympathetic with their questions, but it was almost bizarre as I watched them walk away. I felt like calling out to them, Don’t forget about me! One of the things that nagged at me was that I had been keen to bat at three when Tubby offered me the opportunity. But maybe I signed my ‘death warrant’ when I took on the challenge. Perhaps it would have been smarter to stay at six to give me more time to settle into Test cricket. Boonie had told me I should bat down the order for a couple of years, had even made me bat at four in that Shield game after the second Test, and maybe I should have listened to him. In fact, a lot of thoughts spun through my head, none of them pretty, all of them amplified because I hadn’t seen the sack coming. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t quite sure how to feel … sorry for myself … determined to get back … embarrassed … distraught … all of the above … All I ever wanted to do was play for Australia … and now I’ve blown it. Am I ever going to play Test cricket again? In the end, after only a couple of days, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to get myself back in the team that quick it’s not funny. I’m going to go back to state cricket and get a hundred every time I bat. I’ll train so hard they’ll have to pick me again.’ IF YOU LOOK AT MY SCORES in the Shield for the rest of the 1996–97 season, you’d think it took me a while to rediscover my form. But I actually felt good from my very first innings in January, when we played Victoria at the MCG. I went out with the intention of batting all day and reasonably quickly I felt the ball hitting the middle of my bat. But when I was on 26 Tony Dodemaide, the veteran fast-medium bowler, suddenly got one to seam back sharply and I managed to get a faint nick through to the keeper. As I walked off after getting a ball like that I felt like I was the unluckiest cricketer on the planet, but in our second innings I made 94 not out, my knock ending only when Boonie declared in pursuit of an outright victory. Then came a frustrating fortnight, where I was hitting the ball beautifully in the nets but could only make 8 and 6 against WA at Bellerive and then 39 against SA in Adelaide. I thought the world was against me. Trevor Hohns had told me to score heavily and if I wasn’t doing that, I knew I was no chance of making the upcoming Ashes tour. After that Shield game in Adelaide, I thought, This is not working. By ‘this’, I meant working my butt off. We finished early on day four and as soon as I could I booked a short holiday to the Gold Coast. For the next three or four days I didn’t think about cricket and I left it as late as possible to get back to Hobart for our next match. When I did get home, I only had time for a couple of training sessions and then I immediately scored a hundred in each innings against South Australia at Bellerive. I actually learned a lot about myself and what was best for me during this time. Hitting a million balls a day and training as hard as possible was not always the solution, especially if I felt I had to do it. Sure, I’d spent a lot of time in the nets before this but I’d never forced myself to go, to do even more, as if that was the only answer. When things weren’t working, I was better off trying to freshen up mentally, and the best way to do that was forget about the pressures of the game. I learned there is a difference between letting it happen and forcing it, in trusting my skills rather than searching for something more. The other thing that was crucial for me at this time was the support I received from Tasmanian coach Greg Shipperd. When I was working hard at practice, hitting ball after ball, he was always in my corner. He also offered what proved to be a critical piece of advice. My confidence had taken a hit, and Shippy was convinced I’d got into the habit of trying to hit my way out of trouble when things grew difficult. Of course, every batsman has rough spots during an innings of any length, especially if you bat near the top of the order and the pitch is offering some assistance to the bowler, but my brain was getting cluttered when this happened to me. In the first innings against SA, I scored 126 out of 248. Then Jamie Siddons, the SA captain, made a very positive declaration on the final day, which gave me the opportunity to produce an even better effort than my first dig. We had to win to keep our Shield chances alive and I was in at 2–52 as we chased 349 to win. Four hours later, we’d achieved a terrific victory and I had played an important part, finishing 145 not out. Selectors love match-winning hundreds, but even more important than that I’d been intimately involved in a special team victory, which reminded me of just what a great game cricket can be. In all the stress of losing and then trying to revive my international career, I’d forgotten a little of that. I made another big hundred in our next Shield game, against Queensland and finished the season with scores of 64 and 22 against NSW at the SCG. It was time to wait for the Ashes touring party to be named. I went through all the options available and realised that even with my big finish to the season, I was hardly a sure pick. The Test team had won the home series against the West Indies 3–2 before heading to South Africa, where it was in the process of claiming a hard-fought three-game series 2–1. However, question marks were hovering over the batting order, with Mark Taylor completely out of form and none of the excellent batsmen from my generation on the tour — Matthew Elliott, Michael Bevan, Greg Blewett, Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer — having cemented their spots. But none of them had cruelled their chances completely either. The media in Sydney was campaigning for Michael Slater to be recalled, while it was certain that Adam Gilchrist, who had enjoyed a fantastic season with bat and wicketkeeping gloves for WA before flying to South Africa to bolster the ODI line-up, would be Ian Healy’s back-up. What if the selectors looked upon Gilly as a batsman too, and decided to take an extra bowler? What if they decided to look for experience, and opt for either of the Shield’s leading run-scorers for the season — Tasmania’s Jamie Cox or Darren Lehmann of South Australia — or Stuart Law, who was still playing one-day internationals but who hadn’t appeared in a Test match again since we debuted in the same game. In the end, I think I was very lucky. Looking at the make-up of the squad now, it was top heavy with batting talent. Bevo was picked as the second spinner and Gilly as the second keeper, but the selectors still chose eight more specialist batsmen: Taylor, the two Waughs, Elliott, Blewett, Slater, Langer … and Ponting. I’ve always wondered, but I’ve never been game to ask, if that request Trevor Hohns had made of me — to go back to the Shield and score a ‘hell of a lot of runs’ — was what got me over the line. I’d done what he’d asked me to do, so maybe he and his fellow selectors felt obliged to honour their side of the bargain by giving me another go. It would have been far from illogical to pick one less batsman and one more bowler; as things turned out, a couple of the batsmen hardly had a dig on tour, while we had to call up some extra bowlers after the first choices suffered major injuries. What I know beyond question is that my career might have turned out very differently if I hadn’t been chosen for this Ashes tour. Matty Hayden missed the trip and didn’t get another opportunity for two-and-a-half years. Great players like Damien Martyn and Darren Lehmann had been picked for Australia as prodigiously talented young players in the early 1990s, but after being discarded it would be ages before they would be granted another go at the top level. In contrast, I was very fortunate. My second chance came quickly. I was determined not to waste it. I’m a watcher, a listener, a learner. I like to sit back in the corner and take everything in; learn as much as possible from as many people as I can. I’ve never really had any defined role models in my life but there have been plenty of people who I’ve watched very closely to help me be a better person. Bottom line for me has been that it’s up to me to be the best possible person that I can be. I had an understanding of where I wanted to be as a cricketer and as a person. I’ve always just been me. Anytime I messed up along the way, I’ve given myself a kick up the backside and then got on with things, making sure that each day I got up, looked in the mirror and asked myself how I could be a better person today. In many ways, I’ve been my own harshest critic but it’s helped me respond at times when I’ve most needed to. It’s helped me be true to myself and those around me and probably also helped me be a better role model for those looking to me as an example for how they might live their lives. That’s a big responsibility in many ways but one I have always been comfortable with. (#ulink_f9791692-0589-5623-84ae-58b39e26b52c) IT WAS A WEIRD experience, reacquainting myself with the other members of the Ashes squad for our flight to London via Hong Kong. I felt like I’d been out of the team for ages, rather than just five months, and quickly I discovered that things had changed a little in the time I’d been away. Mark Taylor had been struggling for runs, but had stayed in the Test team and ODI squad despite his lack of form, a policy that impacted on the positions of a few other players. Most people were talking about the selection of Michael Bevan, a left-arm wrist spinner as well as a fine batsman, who was picked as the fourth bowler for the Tests in South Africa ahead of Paul Reiffel, seemingly to stiffen the batting order, even though the pitches over there suited the quicks. When Pistol then missed selection for the Ashes tour some critics reckoned his career had been set back for the sake of the captain. At the same time, Steve Waugh replaced Ian Healy as vice-captain, which seemed to have shaken our champion wicketkeeper. You could see, even on the flight to England, that he wasn’t his usual chirpy self. That change, we all understood, had been made so that if Tubby was dropped from the Test XI in England, Tugga would be his replacement, but Heals couldn’t understand why he couldn’t remain the deputy no matter who was in charge. I couldn’t either. In the years since, I have read stories of how the team was split, but I can’t recall any major blow-ups, just that mood shift, that sense that things weren’t quite right. Looking back over the statistics, it is a little surprising that Tubby survived his run of outs — at the start of this Ashes tour, he hadn’t scored a Test fifty since early December 1995 and since I’d been dropped he’d scored 111 runs in 10 Test innings — but I was not the sort of person to get involved in conjecture about another player’s place in the team, especially when he was the captain and I was a young bloke lucky to even be on the tour. I’ve always hated seeing behaviour or hearing talk that might divide my team. This time, my attention was devoted to forcing my way back into the side. However, there were moments that showed just how much our captain was struggling with the bat, and not all of these were in the early weeks of the tour. The day before the third Test at Old Trafford, I was standing near the entrance to the nets, waiting for my turn to bat, which gave me a close-up view of him struggling to lay bat on ball. It looked like Michael Kasprowicz and Paul Reiffel (who’d been called up as a replacement after Andy Bichel was hurt) were bowling at 100 miles an hour, and when Tubby walked out of the net, he said to me, ‘If you can lay bat on those blokes in there you can have my spot in the Test.’ In reality, batting in that net wasn’t all that difficult. I also recall him saying to Matthew Elliott one day, ‘Next time, I’ll wear your helmet out. If I look like you out there maybe I’ll get a few half volleys and a few cut shots like you’re getting.’ Tubby had convinced himself his batting was just one long hard-luck story. Everything was going against him. In fact, if my memory is right, he got a bit lucky. We played Derbyshire just before the first Test and when Tubby batted in our second innings, his former Aussie team-mate Dean Jones dropped him a sitter at first slip, and he went on to make 63. Four days later, the boys were bowled out for 118 after being 8–54 on the first day of the opening Test at Edgbaston. England replied with 478 before Tubby famously saved his career with a sterling 129. Even though we lost the game by nine wickets, the turnaround in our fortunes was massive. Finally, we could stop responding to the rumours that the skipper was about to get dropped and start concentrating on retaining the Ashes. To this point, my on-field contribution had been minimal. I batted with little success in our first three matches — an exhibition game in Hong Kong and one-dayers at Arundel and Northampton — and then didn’t play for a month, missing a limited-overs game against Worcestershire, three ODIs, three-day games at Bristol and Derby, and the opening Test. First, I was told they had to give the guys in the one-day team the playing time; then it was the guys in the Test team. At practice, I often had to wait for ages to get a hit and it reached the stage where I was spending more time bowling off-breaks as a net bowler than I was playing off-drives. When I did eventually get a chance, in a three-day game against Nottinghamshire, the first day was washed out completely, and when we did get on the field I batted at three and was lbw for just 19. Fortunately, they chose me again for the next fixture, at Leicester, and I managed to score 64 in our first innings, when the only other contributors to get past 20 were Heals (34) and extras (48). When Michael Bevan failed with the bat in the third Test, which we won to level the series, I was suddenly in the running for the Test team. Things really did change that quickly. Before the first Test, the selectors were auditioning Greg Blewett and Justin Langer for the No. 3 spot, with Bevo certain to bat at six because his spinners added depth to our bowling attack. Greg made a hundred against Derbyshire, while Lang failed in both innings, and from there my little mate from Perth gradually faded from contention while Blewey hit a century in the first Test and locked up his place for the series. There were three weeks between the third and fourth Tests, and after a sojourn to Scotland we found ourselves at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff, for our tour game against Glamorgan. Tubby won the toss and batted first, and I went out and scored 126 not out, while my main rival for Bevo’s spot, Michael Slater, was out for exactly 100 runs less. When we batted again, Slats opened the batting and was out for 7, and I was kept back to give others a knock, as if I was now one of the Test regulars. There was one more game before the fourth Test, against Middlesex at Lord’s, and I was picked again, to bat at six after the guys who had batted one to five in the first three Tests, and the strong impression I was given was that this was being seen as a rehearsal for the big game a week later. If it was, I didn’t do myself any favours — out for just 5 — but it didn’t matter. When they announced the team for Headingley I was in, and I felt the same emotions as when I’d learned I was going to make my Test debut, only this time the stakes were higher. It wasn’t just that this was the Ashes, cricket’s oldest trophy, the contest all budding Aussie cricketers dream about; this time, I really thought my career was on the line, that if I stuffed up this chance I might not get another. It’s funny how cricket takes you down a rung. By comparison I’d been reasonably confident when I made my Test debut, but from the moment you’re dropped the game becomes another proposition and the older you get the harder it becomes to deal with those mental pressures. For that reason I have always been wary of axing young players or any player when it comes to that. If you’re going to do it you have to understand the profound effect it will have on the person and be aware that it can genuinely set people back. Greg Chappell always said it was better to give somebody one Test too many rather than one too few and I agree. THE OTHER BLOKE who might have been a chance to bat at six for Australia in that fourth Test was Adam Gilchrist but, cruelly for him, he wasn’t available. Instead, he was flying home, having hurt himself during a training session in the lead-up to the third Test. We were playing ‘fielding soccer’, which as its name implies is a game where you pass a cricket ball to a team-mate by throwing it below knee-height and attempt to score. I was standing slightly in front of Gilly when someone threw the ball to his left, and I dived in front of him to try to cut the ball off, he put his left leg in front of my dive, I clipped the side of his knee, and down he went. Within 10 minutes, you could prod your fingers into his leg and it felt and looked like Play-Doh, all the way from his ankle to his knee. The eventual diagnosis was a torn ligament and poor Gilly was on that plane home. We still have a bit of a laugh about my dive being ‘deliberate’ — that was the only way I was going to get a game on the tour. It would have been a bold call, picking our second keeper as a specialist batsman in the Test team, but he had played in two of the three ODIs as a batsman, so it wasn’t completely out of the question. I was very sorry to see Gilly depart. In the early days of the tour, when morale wasn’t as bubbly as it could have been it was almost inevitable that we young blokes would seek refuge in each other’s company, and bonds that were first established at the Academy or on youth tours were forged tighter. Gilly and I have a lot in common, from a love of harmless practical jokes to enjoying working hard at practice. But the team-mate I grew especially close to on this tour was Blewey, who shares my passion for golf, and we had time to experience a number of famous courses, including the Belfry, St Andrews, Sunningdale and Royal Portrush. The day at St Andrews felt almost like a pilgrimage to me; I’m not sure I felt a similar sense of golfing anticipation until the day I visited Augusta for the US Masters in 2010. However, purely from a quality-of-layout perspective, Royal Portrush on Northern Ireland’s north coast was superior, as good a links course as I will ever see. In fact, I enjoyed every minute of our three-day trip to Ulster that came near the end of our tour: the local Guinness was superb and I scored an unbeaten hundred and took 3–14 in our one-day game against Ireland. Another enjoyable excursion was to the famous Brands Hatch motor racing circuit where I met for the first time Australia’s future Formula One ace Mark Webber. Mark was a cricket tragic and we would catch up quite often in the following years. For a guy who drives million-dollar racing cars at a million miles an hour he is as laid-back and unassuming as anyone you would ever meet. Keeping up with the AFL and the greyhounds back home was one of the challenges of travelling, and more than once I’d call home and ask someone to put the radio to the phone so I could listen to an important race. Junior was much the same. In the match against Nottinghamshire, I was dismissed in the first over of the day after he had said to me, ‘I’m next in, so don’t you dare get out early today. I’ve got to listen to a race.’ He was in a toilet cubicle at the back of the change room and the horses were lining up behind the mobile start when I let him down. He had to hang up with his horse in contention a couple of hundred metres from the winning post. MY RETURN TO THE Australian team for the fourth Test was confirmed on the same day we met the Queen at Buckingham Palace, a visit I remember most for Michael Kasprowicz’s extended conversation with Her Majesty about the virtues of the Gladiators television show. Two days later the critical Test started — the series was level at one-all — and we were in the field on a day that was interrupted by rain and England finished at 3–106. The next morning, Jason ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie ran right through them, bowling outswingers like the wind and taking 7–37 as we knocked them over for just 172. Our reply started badly, with Mark Taylor caught behind off Darren Gough for a duck and Greg Blewett going the same way for 1, leaving us at 2–16. At this point, I went to find my box and thigh pad. Matthew Elliott and Mark Waugh steadied the ship a little, until Junior was caught and bowled by Dean Headley, which was when I started putting the pads on. Steve Waugh, fresh off scoring a century in each innings in the third Test, strode out to put things right, but I had only just taken up a position in our viewing deck when ‘Herb’ Elliott edged a sitter to Graham Thorpe at first slip. The chance went so slowly I was actually up off my seat, ready to get out there, but then I saw the ball on the turf. Not that it seemed to matter, though, because next over Tugga was caught at short leg. My first innings in an Ashes Test was about to begin and at 4–50 we were not in a good position. I’d been nervous before the game, but not so much now. It’s not like I was relaxed, as if it was just another innings, but when I walked out there my main thoughts were about getting us back into the game, rather than what might happen if I failed, or what the wicket might be doing, or how everyone here and back home was watching me. Maybe the fact the experienced guys had been dismissed cheaply took a little personal pressure off me. Mostly, I think the situation of the game was good for me, in that I was in a position to do something really big for the team. The great golfer Peter Thomson once wrote how ‘hope builds, fear destroys’ and my mindset as I began this innings reflected that. I wasn’t thinking about failing, only about fighting back. I was also lucky in that I’m not sure the Poms were too thorough when they did their homework on me. The ball was seaming about but they seemed keen to test me out with some short stuff and I relished the chance to show them I could hook and pull. To get off the mark, I pulled a bumper from Headley which rocketed to the boundary and the confidence that one shot gave me was liberating. None of the English quicks were very tall, so whereas Pigeon and Dizzy had got the ball to lift a little dangerously from this wicket, their short ones just came onto the bat sweetly. And then my on-drive started working and I knew it was going to be a good day. Herb and I were also helped, I’m sure, by the fact the pitch settled down as the day went on. I reached my fifty just after we passed their first-innings score. The sun had come out and by late in the afternoon the conditions for batting were excellent, the Englishmen dropped their heads, and we reached stumps still together with a lead of 86 (coincidentally, I was 86 not out). Not for the last time, I discovered how much batting conditions at Headingley can change when the sun comes out. The only time I felt the nerves getting to me occurred on that third morning, when I was in the 90s, but luckily a couple of loose deliveries helped me out. I’d slept better than I’d expected overnight — no dreams about crazy run outs — but then right away I played a streaky shot down to third man to go from 87 to 91, and for a moment I had to fight the memories of Perth and the frustration of falling short there. There was some cloud cover and Headley’s outswinger was working, but then he bowled a nice half volley, which I drove to the extra-cover boundary, and then a short one which I hit off the back foot to exactly the same advertising hoarding. The second new ball was due in a few overs, so they had their off-spinner Robert Croft bowling at the other end, and when I got down there I was very keen to take him on. On 99 I actually ran down the wicket and tried to slog one through or over the legside, but all I did was inside-edge it onto my leg and it finished down near the stumps as I rushed back into my crease. Just calm down! Now my plan was to nudge one into a gap on the legside any way I could. I’m not really sure it would have mattered where his next delivery pitched, that’s where it was going, but Croft helped me out by flighting one into my pads. I called Herb through and as I dashed down the wicket I nearly pulled my right arm (the one holding my bat) out of its socket as I punched the air in delight. I can think back on a range of emotions. Later, even a few seconds afterwards and certainly that night when I thought back on what I’d achieved, there was a huge sense of relief that I’d reached the milestone and answered those who’d doubted me — you can see it on the video, how I let out a deep breath and then had my tongue out, a bit like a runner at the end of a tough mile. But the first moment after I reached three figures was sheer joy. I was also very, very proud of myself, that I’d made the ton and that I’d fought back successfully from the hurt and embarrassment of being dropped the previous December. From the time I was seven or eight years old I had been dreaming about this moment. All the training, the time at Mowbray and the Academy, the junior and senior and Shield cricket, had all been about making centuries for Australia and scoring runs in pressure situations in Test matches. No, not just Test matches, in Ashes Test matches. There is a lot of work that goes into your first Test hundred and I revelled in the sense of satisfaction. And it was so rewarding to see champions like Warnie, Heals and Junior up on the players’ balcony, applauding. Those guys, all the guys, were genuinely happy for me and that made me feel very important. We carried on and on until we’d added 268, one of the best partnerships I was ever involved in (apparently it was the third highest fifth-wicket stand for Australia in Ashes Tests at that time). I was dismissed for 127, Herb went on to become the third man and first Aussie to be out for 199 in a Test. That was the only downer of the whole experience — he batted beautifully, there was no question he deserved a double ton. We went on to complete an emphatic victory, winning by an innings and 61 runs, and two weeks later we retained the Ashes when we decisively won the fifth Test at Nottingham. Not even a loss at the Oval, when Phil Tufnell spun England to victory on a substandard wicket to make the final series score 3–2, could take the gloss off what had become a brilliant experience. Today, I think back fondly on both the hundred and the way I handled the stress and disappointment of being out of the team as if the two go together. I also like to reflect on how we retained the Ashes in England, which despite what a few outsiders thought at the time is no easy task. The speculation that had followed the team for the first month of the tour was long forgotten, the credit for which must primarily go to Tubby, for his persistence, the mental strength he showed when under duress, and for his great tactical ability, which during the middle of the series shone brightly time after time. The way the team regrouped under his leadership was remarkable, and I was proud to have played a small part in that. (#ulink_a2840238-8153-5e01-9011-9eb16de92a42) Loyalty and trust are two of the most important traits that I look for in a person. They are certainly core values in my life and are becoming even more important as I grow older and wiser. A successful team will have a high level of trust and loyalty built into its values and performance. The individuals within that team will have a strong team ethic as a natural behaviour, having taken themselves out of their individual approach and behaviour. These individuals are conscious of the needs of their team-mates, providing a level of co-operation and trust that helps the whole team perform at its best. I probably trusted people too much. While I was aware that not everyone shared my views on the importance of putting the team before oneself, I still gave all of my team-mates the opportunity to develop these characteristics to strengthen the team. If players broke mine or the team’s trust, I would let them know straight away. I would make it very clear that they had let the group down and they needed to go away and rebuild the team’s trust, my trust, and their own trust. Most of the time, this happened, and I’d sit back and watch the players do their best to make up for their indiscretions. If they fell back again, for a second or third time, I was a lot harder on them but overall was probably very forgiving. My own loyalty to the team and my players was really important to me. I was absolutely willing to back all the players I played with. I wanted stability around the group and would do my best to fight change. I wanted new players who came into the group to feel this loyalty and trust. I treated everyone as an equal and went out of my way to give new players this feeling, in the aim they didn’t feel less valued than those players who had been with the group for a long time. (#ulink_7e505cfb-0a88-549d-a098-68f8dcabf00d) AS A YOUNG PLAYER, I was often surprised by the self-importance of some cricket officials. Not all of them — there were many smart, hard-working administrators who went way beyond the call of duty for the sake of the game and its players, but there were others who I came to view as nothing more than hangers-on. These people seemed to be there for what they could get out of it, the free lunches and the plum seats in the stands. They were the bosses and we Test players merely the workers who if they had their way would come and go from the tradesmen’s entrance. Their attitude whenever a cricketer or group of cricketers sought improvements to wages or playing conditions appeared to be simple: ‘If you don’t like what you’re getting, there are thousands of others out there who’d gladly play for nothing.’ Some, astonishingly, were past top-level players, who’d had this attitude ingrained into them and now fought to preserve the status quo for as long as they could. Here’s just one example. In 1997, our manager Alan Crompton agreed to a request from Mark Taylor for the players’ wives and partners and children to travel with the team for the month from the start of the second Test match. I was only 22, but even I could see the benefits of this move, not least for how the older guys treasured the chance to share the experience with their kids. Today, few would argue with the concept of families being on tour, but things were different back then. I learned recently that a number of Board directors, one of whom was a former Test player, were vehemently against the innovation, their argument being, I guess, that ‘it didn’t happen in my day’. By the mid 1990s, the senior members of the Australian side were sick of this. I might have been new to international cricket, but it seemed to me that in arguing for a better deal my experienced and battle-hardened team-mates had a pretty fair case. And so it was that I was a first-hand witness as men like Tim May, Shane Warne, Steve Waugh and Ian Healy fought long and hard to win Australia’s front-line cricketers a much better deal than we might have otherwise enjoyed. Their battle also led to an improved relationship between the players and the Australian Cricket Board, and it increased the professionalism of the Board, too. In the years that followed, the way our administration thought and operated finally moved with the times, and some of the Board’s revenue streams— including media rights, sponsorship and merchandise — increased dramatically. This would not have happened, at least not as quickly, if my team-mates, some of the great players of the 1990s, had declined to make a stand or if some of the officials had got their way. Having gone on to captain the Australian team, and to have enjoyed so much of the fruits of their labours, it would be nice to describe here how I played a major role in the birth of the Australian Cricketers’ Association (ACA), but the truth is I was on the periphery. I certainly didn’t feel underpaid — I was probably the best-paid 21-year-old in Tasmania — but that didn’t stop me being 100 per cent behind whatever direction Maysie, Tugga, Warnie and Heals wanted us to go in. I was young and new to international cricket, but I believed strongly in the concept of ‘team’ and I had complete faith in the leadership group. ‘You can count me in,’ I quickly said after the ACA concept was explained to me. For me, the story began at the start of my first major trip — the West Indies in 1995 — when everyone in the team was invited to a pre-tour meeting in Sydney. Thinking back, it was a pathetically unprofessional scene: the players were lying on a bed or on the floor while then Board CEO Graham Halbish told us how things would be. Some of the players were clearly frustrated with Halbish’s responses to their questions on subjects like player payments, personal sponsorships, TV rights and insurance, and there were some terse exchanges. This was also the meeting when we were officially told that Salim Malik had been accused of attempting to bribe Tim May, Shane Warne and Mark Waugh, a story that had just been broken in the newspapers, and that Mark and Shane had been punished by the Board for ‘supplying information’ to an Indian bookmaker. Apparently, we were firmly told these matters were not to be discussed with anyone outside the room, but I can’t recall that direction being given. I guess I’d tuned out by then. I was new to debates about player payments. Whatever they wanted was fine by me; whatever they paid me was more than I could have dreamed of when I was pushing lawn mowers for Ian Young at Scotch Oakburn College, and more than any of my mates from school were earning. More than once on that Windies tour I heard team-mates comparing how much we were paid to the huge sums being earned by stars from other sports, how poorly Shield cricketers were being treated and the restrictive nature of the Board’s player contracts, but I hardly stopped to listen. The Australian Cricketers’ Association was formed after the tour, with Tim May, whose Test career had come to an end, getting the gig as our union boss. Over the next two years Maysie tried to get the idea of payments for Test and Shield players to be tied to the Board’s revenue, but the Board wouldn’t have a bar of that. It wouldn’t even discuss the concept. You’d think people would have learned their lesson. Back in the early 1970s Bill Lawry and then Ian Chappell had stood up to the Board (in those days the Board was really just one man, Sir Don Bradman). Bill lost the captaincy after demanding a fair go for his exhausted players and when Ian had no more luck in demanding fair compensation Kerry Packer leveraged the situation to split cricket in half by offering proper pay to anyone who joined World Series Cricket. Here we were fighting the battle again. Late in the 1997 Ashes tour, between the fifth and sixth Tests, the ACA organised a get-together in a conference room at our hotel at Canterbury. The thing that stands out most clearly for me about that meeting is how stuffy the hotel was because of a lack of air-conditioning. James Erskine, a high-profile sports businessman, was brought on board to negotiate with the ACB on the players’ behalf, and he was introduced to us at the meeting. The Board had been stonewalling, but Erskine was willing to bring not just his negotiating skills but also his considerable financial clout into the battle, on the basis that on top of the commission the ACA would pay him, he could also win a piece of the marketing pie when a settlement was finally reached. If Maysie said hiring Erskine was a good idea, then that seemed like a fair deal to me. The ironic thing about this situation was the same Graham Halbish had left the Board on bad terms and was now working with us. It was a stroke of genius by Tim May. He told us there was plenty of money in the bank and any nonsense the Board told us about it being put away for a rainy day was rubbish, as the revenue streams were pretty good. When Tim stressed that we had to stick together, it just seemed to be a natural thing to do. You don’t need to tell a working-class Tasmanian how these things work. When he explained that part of this was necessary because of Australia’s industrial laws, saying how we needed to get the Board to recognise that the ACA was entitled to negotiate on the players’ behalf, it went straight over my head. Maysie told us it was inevitable the Board would use the old ‘divide-and-conquer’ trick by painting our tactics in an unfavourable light, saying the ACA was being unreasonable, that a players’ union was bad for the game and by making subtle approaches to individual cricketers who they thought might not be totally committed to our cause. By the time I returned to Australia a story was out that Denis Rogers, in his capacity as Tasmanian Cricket Association (TCA)chairman (he was also the chairman of the ACB), had told a few guys from the Tassie Shield team that the TCA and the ACB would only negotiate with individual players. Under these circumstances, you would suspect that Denis might have made contact with me, perhaps to offer me a special deal or to argue that my allegiances should be with him, a fellow Tasmanian, rather than with my Test team-mates. He knew I respected the way he had climbed the ladder to become the first Tasmanian to chair the Board, and how I was grateful for the things he had done for Tasmanian cricket, and I was also aware of the work he had done for the Clarence footy club. But the truth is I don’t recall Denis ever trying to get me to break away from the ACA. I reckon that was simply because he knew me well. One time early in my first-class career, he drove me home from Hobart to Launceston, partly because I needed a lift and partly, I’m sure, because he wanted to get to know me better. He knew I would stick solid with my mates. Denis has always been good to me and for me. I have made sure, whenever I’ve been back to Tassie, that I’ve always caught up with him and spent time with him, because I enjoy his company, am grateful for the support he has shown me and recognise the remarkable job he has done for Tasmanian sport. Many of the developments we’ve seen at Bellerive Oval, for example, have been because of his efforts. He is a very smart and generous man, and if Denis was guilty of anything during the ACA dispute it was that he was too concerned with protecting the Board’s interests, but that was his job. During all the public debates that took place in the early part of the 1997–98 season, Denis and his fellow Board members, along with Board CEO Malcolm Speed, regularly painted us players as being greedy and selfish. They even released the amount top players were being paid, knowing the public would think we were greedy. At the same time they never revealed just how much money was in their bank account. Money they earned from marketing our talents. For a while, with the help of a largely compliant cricket media, it appeared they were winning the public relations war, but at the same time their refusal to come to the negotiating table was stiffening our resolve. The turning point came in the third week of November, during the second Test against New Zealand in Perth, when word got out that a player strike was a real possibility unless the Board got fair dinkum about talking to the ACA. By this time, Channel Nine, Australian cricket’s TV network, had become concerned that the players might even be planning to form a rebel competition, but there was nothing in that scuttlebutt and the players who worked for Nine — Tubby, Warnie, Tugga and Heals — were able to set the TV bosses straight. Further, Warnie was allowed to go on Nine’s coverage of the Test the next day to explain the ACA’s position, and he did it so well there was immediately a massive change in the public’s perception of who was right and who was not. At the same time, however, Tubby sat down with Denis and the pair came up with a possible compromise, a surprise development because by working one-on-one with the Board our captain was going against the wishes of the ACA. Thinking about it now I have no problem with Tubby making that move, because when the players are dealing with the Board, the captain should always have the right to talk to the Board chairman. At the time, though, it did cause some angst within our group. After stumps on day two Tubby presented the playing group with the results of his meeting with Denis. Our reaction was lukewarm at best. There is no doubt our skipper was motivated solely by his desire to see the impasse solved and as always he was persuasive in his arguments, but by this stage the rest of us were determined to stick with Maysie and see the battle through. Tubby went back to Denis the following morning and then returned with yet another proposal that the two of them hoped would do the trick, but our determination was stronger than ever and when Matthew Elliott asked why we were now negotiating in this way rather than via the ACA it was decided to stop the dilly-dallying, and to put things to a ballot. Twelve pieces of paper were handed out, with each of us asked to write down ‘yes’ for strike or ‘no’ for no strike. A few ODIs in December had been targeted. Quickly, each of the voting slips was placed in a baggy green cap (the symbolism was lost on no one), and Blewey was given the job of returning officer. The result was dramatically decisive: 11 to 1. The boys were serious. We were going to strike. The irony was that when Tugga rang Maysie to tell him of our decision, the reply was succinct: ‘Don’t do it! The momentum is swinging our way.’ I have no idea what clinched the deal, but my guess is that the powerbrokers at Nine asked the Board to fix the impasse. Or maybe the administrators saw that public opinion was swinging our way. Or was it because Tubby had been rebuffed? Perhaps commonsense prevailed. Whatever the reason, we were relieved, nobody really wanted to strike. In the following few days, the ACA announced it was postponing the threat of strike action and the Board finally decided to talk to the ACA. This proved to be the starting point for some spirited but constructive negotiations. It would be many months before the first memorandum of understanding between the Board and the ACA was agreed to, one which in part gave players 20 per cent of the first $60 million of consolidated ‘Australian Cricket Revenue’ and a quarter of every dollar thereafter: 57.5 per cent of that pool was to be allocated to Test and ODI players, the rest to those who performed at interstate level. The top Test players actually took a hair cut on this so extra money could be fed into the Sheffield Shield payment pool. Since then players have always received what I think is a fair slice of the cricket pie, and our incomes increased significantly as overall revenues continued to rise. As someone whose career was largely post-1997 I have benefited as much as anyone from this, so I will never forget the actions of Tim May and his comrades at the ACA. Furthermore, because of the ACA’s persistence, productive dialogue between Australian players and Australian officials finally became a feature of the cricket landscape, and more often than not it felt like we were working together, rather than being from opposite sides of the same fence. BACK IN THE 1990s, it was rare for an inexperienced member of the Australian cricket team to think about anything that wasn’t directly related to how his cricket was going. Even things like team tactics were not that important to me, other than how they impinged on my role in the side. At this stage of my cricket life I wasn’t going to be standing up at the next team meeting to tell senior blokes how to play. I knew my place. There were a number of significant things that happened in my first two or three years in the Australian team — Mark Taylor’s form slump, Ian Healy losing the vice-captaincy, the ACA conflict, the match-fixing controversy — and I was aware of all of them and saw how they affected the guys involved. However, I never stopped to think too much about them because they didn’t impact directly on what I had to do. I don’t think this makes me callous or naive or different to the other young guys. My priority was performing to a high standard because that would keep me in the side. Staying in the side was all I really wanted. With the benefit of time and seniority I realise a few of those things were big issues, in some cases momentous, but at the time, to a large degree, they passed me by. Later in my career I came to have a different appreciation of these events as I went through similar things. At the start of the 1997–98 season Mark Taylor had the one-day captaincy taken away from him when he was still Test skipper. I didn’t see it as a big deal — Tubby hadn’t been scoring a million runs in the one-dayers, the team’s ODI form in the previous 12 months had been mediocre, the selectors made the call, let’s move on. That’s how I was thinking. Now, having been Australian captain for a number of years, I realise it was a massive thing to happen to him and that a decision of that magnitude had enormous consequences for the team. In the years since Tubby retired I have been asked many times, ‘How good a captain was he?’ When I was Test skipper from 2004 to 2010 the bloke I was most unfavourably compared to was Tubby. ‘He’s no Mark Taylor,’ the critics would say of me. When I first came into the Australian team it was hard for me not to think of Tubby as a special captain because, compared to the skippers I’d previously played under at club and state level, almost everything we did at the international level was a step-up in class, intensity and professionalism. The amount of thinking that went into training and the analysis the leadership group put into an international match in those days compared to what we did at state level was chalk and cheese. Yet it is also true that the all-round preparation teams put in today is a million miles ahead of what we did back in the mid-1990s. The biggest change is how inclusive it is. The young players of today are involved in everything the team does and everything the team hierarchy talks about when it comes to planning and meetings. Their input is encouraged, as it is vital everyone is on the ‘same page’. In contrast, when I first made it into the side, tactics were the realm of the coach, the captain and the vice-captain, and maybe one or two other senior guys. Most times, we’d only talk about a few specifics in a team meeting that lasted for 15 minutes or half an hour. Then we went out to play. The most telling example I can give of how it often was back then occurred at the 1996 World Cup, before the quarter-final against New Zealand, when we were discussing the Kiwi batting line-up. After a brief discussion about guys like Nathan Astle and Stephen Fleming, we got to Chris Harris. ‘He’s hopeless,’ said one of the senior players. It could have been Steve Waugh, or it might have been Mark. ‘Let’s not waste our time talking about him.’ Harris, of course, promptly went out and made 130 from 124 balls. In most meetings involving the whole group, we’d breezed through opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, devoting no more than an average of 30 seconds for each player. And then the team meeting was done. See you at the bar at six. Inevitably, there’d be more talk of tactics over a feed or a couple of beers, but unless a formal team dinner had been organised, only a few — usually the senior blokes — would be heavily involved in these informal discussions. On the field, Tubby was a chatty captain, but these conversations were usually with the bowler or the guys in the slips cordon. If I was fielding at cover or deep point I could only guess as to why a change was made. Maybe, because of what we’d discussed in a pre-game meeting, I might have had a clue to the tactics behind a move, but otherwise I was just a soldier following orders. So when people asked me about his leadership how could I know if a captain was a wizard or just lucky? Tubby certainly had a bit of awe about him and under his leadership we usually felt things were going to turn out right. More than once — the semi-final at the 1996 World Cup and the third Ashes Test of 1997 are two examples — he made decisions at the toss that many questioned but they worked out fine in the end so he looked like a genius. The way he nurtured Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath — helped turn them into champions — was fantastic. Yet it’s amazing how little memory I have of Tubby’s captaincy style or things he did or advice he gave that made me a better cricketer or person. Perhaps that’s more an indictment on me as a young cricketer than it is on him as a mentor of young cricketers. Or perhaps it’s just a reflection of the times. (#ulink_082fe9d5-fe5d-5c30-9cc3-f30bd19d245d) WE PLAY CRICKET almost all the time now. It’s difficult to believe that in the past there were years when no international side toured Australia, a time when we weren’t rushing from one tournament to another. There were times late in my career when I was lucky to spend two months at home in a year — and they were often comprised of weeks grabbed here and there. The schedule is full because cricket earns big money from television networks and players are (now) well compensated for their time. There was a time when we complained there was too much cricket, then the Indian Premier League (IPL) came along and almost anybody who could ran to that honey pot and the money ensured we stopped complaining. That said, at times, there is still too much cricket and you can tell when it’s getting to us because that’s when things happen on the field. Sometimes, in the swirl of airports and buses and hotel rooms and long hot days in the sun the cracks finally open up and what comes spilling out is not always pretty. I guess that might have been part of the reason I found myself being dragged out of a Kolkata (then, Calcutta) nightclub in 1998, but it is too easy an excuse. In truth I still had a lot to learn and when my Aussie rules team, North Melbourne, beat Warnie’s St Kilda I think I might have got a little too excited. And, as I was about to learn, when you are growing up in the public eye your mistakes become very public. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/ricky-ponting/at-the-close-of-play/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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