By lunchtime we were in enormous trouble. Damien Fleming, David Saker and Paul Reiffel had ripped out me, Ryan Campbell, Damien Martyn, Tom Moody and Adam Gilchrist. Simon Katich and Robbie Baker were in, two young players against the snarling Victorians on their home patch. Kato and Bakes were copping a fair bit of stick and the Victorians were appealing for everything, putting pressure on the umpires. But Simon and Rob lasted together for nearly four hours, until well after tea, and we thought we could pull it off. But then they both got out, and it was down to BJ and the tail. In the last over, we looked safe. David Saker needed a hat-trick off the last three balls. On the first of those balls, he had our fast bowler Mark Atkinson caught behind. Jo Angel came out.
The Victorians knew he’d expect a yorker, so they got into a huddle and devised a plan. If Saker bowled a yorker, Jo would be ready for it and would jam down on it. So they decided Saker would run right through the crease, bowl a deliberate no-ball, pitch it short and aim at Joey’s head. They figured that would shake him up and stop him from playing forward. Then, on the next legitimate ball, Saker would go for the yorker.
So Saker ran in, bowled a big no-ball, and Jo ducked the bouncer.
Then it all went wrong for them. Darryl Harper, the umpire, didn’t call the no-ball. To this day, I am not sure if he missed it or not. The Victorians were in a state of disbelief.
But we were on our way to Brisbane for the final. You should have heard the yelling coming out of our viewing area. We were so excited, we probably went a little over the top in letting the Vics know about it.
We went up to Brisbane, and our bowlers did a super job, delivering us an innings win. Kato made a century while BJ, who was inspired in every final, delivered with bat and ball. He always seemed laconic and casual, but in those big matches he invariably put in a huge performance. A great athlete, he did everything easily, whether it was throwing or kicking a football or all the cricket skills. It made you feel taller yourself when you had big guys like him and Tom Moody taking the lead in the finals. Gilly, Marto and JL were on the cusp of long careers with the Test team, while Tom, BJ and Joey Angel played a couple more seasons. When they retired, a team that had been settled for about five years was broken up. Unfortunately, to this day Western Australia haven’t won another Sheffield Shield.
For me, yet again my season was tailing off. I scored 17 and 9 in that match in Melbourne, and only 4 in the final. I’d made a big hundred against Tasmania only three matches earlier, but a question was bubbling up in my mind about the type of player I was. Mark Taylor retired from Test cricket at the end of that season, and his place was taken by Matthew Elliott, the player of the year in Sheffield Shield. Michael Slater was hitting barnstorming Test centuries, and Elliott was a free-flowing, classy left-hander. Not only did I think he was better than me, but Justin Langer and Matthew Hayden were also my superiors, and they couldn’t even get in. Now that Tubby had retired, it seemed that the next generation of Test players were more aggressive, looking at dominating the bowling and scoring more freely. JL was in the process of reinventing himself from a defensive kind of opener into a bit of a dasher at number three. He’d clearly seen that that was the way back into the Test team. If I wanted to stand a chance, did I have to do the same?
Going to Britain for the first time in 1998 was a tremendous experience, but it didn’t exactly clarify matters for me. I’d spent a long winter in the UK – another reason for my tiredness at the end of the 1998–99 domestic season.
It started when I decided I’d like to play league cricket in England. Just about every leading Australian player did it at some stage in his life, and for me the time was right. I left my run too late to find a club, but there was still an option to play in Scotland. It wasn’t what I’d planned, but I thought I’d do it anyway.
My club was Ferguslie, near the town of Paisley outside of Glasgow. I had a one-bedroom flat within walking distance of the ground, and the club looked after me really well, giving me a Rover Metro (albeit with a leaking so-called ‘sunroof’) and not asking too much of me, just to do some occasional school clinics, go to training, and play on weekends. The rest of my time was my own.
What they couldn’t organise was the weather. It rained a lot and we missed half our matches. My teammates did their best to lead me astray, and we went out as a group for drinks at the cricket club or in Paisley or Glasgow. Fortunately Amy came over for her first overseas trip. As she was only nineteen years old, it was a huge leap of faith for her to come to Scotland. We went on day trips all over the country and indulged my love of castles, and had a great spell consolidating our relationship and confirming that we were in love.
When Ferguslie got onto the field, I struggled with the gluggy wickets and the expectation of scoring runs as the resident overseas professional, and didn’t do too well. By August, an Australia A team was coming over, coached by Allan Border, and I would be in it. The funny part was, one of the early games would be a one-dayer against Scotland in Glasgow. The pitch, at the Hamilton Road ground, was much better than the seaming decks I’d been struggling on for Ferguslie, and I managed to score 136 not out. A few of my clubmates were there, yelling good-humoured abuse at me.
‘You’ve never done this for Ferguslie!’
It was all very embarrassing.
We had a fantastic team. With people like Hayden, Symonds, Julian, Miller, Gillespie and Martyn on board, we were going to have a successful time on and off the field. A few of the games were rained out, so we needed to make our own fun. Ironically, as soon as we got to Dublin, the sun broke out brilliantly but the ground we were playing on had the pitch set up facing east-west, and the umpire couldn’t see. We didn’t play the second half of the day because there was too much sun. That could only happen in Ireland. My main recollection of the match is not so much the hundred I scored as the fact that Steve Waugh, who was guesting for Ireland, decided to bowl six bouncers in an over to Ryan Campbell, and Cambo hit him for four fours. I didn’t know if Steve was doing it because he didn’t like him, or had a plan. It turned out not to be the right place to bowl.
I’d had a lot of laughs with Ferguslie, and my year ended on a suitably comical note. I told them I wouldn’t be coming back, and they said they really wanted a fast bowler. On my recommendation they signed up Mark Atkinson, the big-bowling all-rounder from WA.
At the start of the next season, a Ferguslie club official turned up to meet Mark Atkinson at Glasgow airport. Out strolled not the towering fast bowler they were expecting, but the four-foot-two Tasmanian wicketkeeper, with all his cricket gear. They’d got the wrong Mark Atkinson! He ended up staying for the year, played well, scored more runs than I had, and even did a fair bit of bowling.
It had been very encouraging for me to get picked in the Australia A team, but I still thought I was one of the last names chosen. I was behind a long list of players, to whom I could now add Di Venuto and Hills. What did I need to do to jump the queue? I approached Allan Border, who of course was my childhood idol and the inspiration for me to bat left-handed – not that I told him any of that. He was a great guy to talk to about cricket, and very unassuming for such a great of the game, but he sowed the seed for a really embarrassing moment.
We were training in Edinburgh. The bowlers were resting after ten or fifteen balls and the batsmen were batting for short sessions, to be fresh for the match the following day. AB, being very old school, looked on disapprovingly.
‘What are you guys doing? How do you expect to bowl fifteen overs tomorrow when you only bowl fifteen balls in the nets? And you batsmen, how do you expect to bat all day when you’re only batting for ten or fifteen minutes? You have to learn to bat all day.’
I began to think about this. When I went back to Australia, during the early part of the season my club team had a bye, which I wasn’t happy about of course. I got hold of Ian Kevan and said, ‘Right, Allan Border told me you’ve got to learn how to bat six hours. I want to bat all day.’
We started at eleven o’clock, doing drills and bowling machine work. We stopped at one o’clock for a forty-minute lunch break. Then I batted from 1.40pm to 3.40pm, more drills and throws and the machine. Then we had a tea break, and finally I batted for another two hours until the end of the day.
I was absolutely exhausted. Against a bowling machine you don’t have time between balls – it’s ball after ball after ball. But those were Allan Border’s words, and I took him literally. It all started from that training session in Scotland.
Over the next couple of years, though, I ran out of patience, and suffered my first big career crisis.
The first cracks showed in one-day cricket. I was growing increasingly frustrated with my inability to bat like Sanath Jayasuriya or Adam Gilchrist at the top of the order. The team probably wanted an opener in the Geoff Marsh mould, who could bat through the 50 overs and be a steady pillar around whom the strokeplayers built a total. But in my view, that era had passed, and if I wanted to get ahead in the game I had to be more attacking. Of course, the harder I tried, the worse I went.
The selectors finally dropped me in November 1999 for a one-day match in Brisbane. But I soon got a lucky reprieve. The next one-dayer followed a Shield match in Melbourne, in which I scored a stodgy half-century. Simon Katich was sick and Damien Martyn hurt his back, so I was called in as a late replacement, not as an opener, but slotted into the middle order at number five.
As it turned out, we lost early wickets and I was batting in the 14th over. Considering myself lucky to get a game, I played more freely. It helped that I had as my partner Brad Hogg, with whom I’d shared many good partnerships. Sure enough, I managed to get a hundred, bringing up the milestone on the last ball of our innings. We got a reasonable score and won the match. Nobody had thought of me as a middle-order batsman, playing that Michael Bevan role of hustling between wickets, working the ball, and finishing the innings off. (Incidentally, I also captured three wickets in that match, which I’m very proud of. I’d say I was bowling express pace, but most others would call it slow-medium.)
My one-day game was transformed by that innings, which set me on the path that would culminate with national selection. But that was still six years away; and at any rate, changing roles within the one-day team didn’t solve my bigger quandary, which was how to propel myself up the list of openers-in-waiting in five-day cricket.
In 2000–01, I committed myself to changing my game. I tried to play more shots and score more freely. I trained harder than ever off the field, doing a lot of fitness and strength work, but no matter how much I did I pushed myself to do more. I thought that if all else failed, I could will myself to succeed.
All it did was place undue pressure on me, and the work, combined with the impatience to score runs more freely, had a detrimental effect on my game. I had by far my worst season with Western Australia, scoring only one century, which came in the last game, and barely averaging 30. Matty Hayden had stepped up into the Australian team – after being in and out of it for seven years – and this time he was there for good, having transformed himself into a standover man, bullying bowlers out of the game.
Unwittingly, though, he did me a favour that would ultimately turn me around.
The previous season, Hayden had been the overseas player for Northamptonshire in the English county championship. Now that he was playing regularly for Australia, Northants needed a replacement. Their coach, Bob Carter, was in Adelaide for the Test match in 2001–02, and my name was put forward by Haydos and also Justin Langer.
A short time later, I was sitting at home and out of the blue got a phone call from Dean Jones. I didn’t know Deano personally. The only words he’d ever spoken to me were a huge spray in a Shield match.
‘I’ve heard you want to go and play county cricket,’ he said. ‘Is it true?’
I said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to.’
Deano said he would arrange for a player agent called David Manasseh to phone me that night. Twenty minutes later, David called and said he’d arrange everything for me. ‘What do you want?’ he said.
I said, ‘I’ll come for free! I just want to play.’
‘No, no. You’ve got to ask for more than that.’
Hesitantly, I thought for a bit and said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind somewhere I can comfortably stay with my girlfriend.’
David wasn’t satisfied with that. He said he’d get me a retainer, two cars, business-class tickets and a whole lot more.
I squeaked, ‘Are you serious? Don’t jeopardise it by asking for too much!’
‘Don’t worry, I deal with the counties all the time, it’s fine.’
I put down the phone and thought I’d just stuffed up my chance of playing county cricket. But to his credit David was brilliant, brokering the deal, and getting us everything we needed.
When I got to Northampton, I didn’t know a soul. The town was in transition from its heritage as an industrial, textiles and bootmaking centre – Doc Martens started there – to a commuter-belt satellite of London. Some factories were still going, but there were a lot of city people living in the area. Their most successful sport was rugby, in which Northampton had won European Cups. The Cobblers, the soccer team, were lower league. And the cricket club had been through a good previous decade, Curtly Ambrose and Anil Kumble having played there, and had earned respect among the bigger counties.
About the club, pretty much all I knew was that Matty Hayden had done extremely well the previous year, which they wasted no time telling me about. I was ushered into a meet-and-greet with the coach, players and officials. It seemed as though everyone was saying, ‘oh, Matthew Hayden this, Matthew Hayden that, you’ve got big shoes to fill.’ I thought, Oh no.
Sure enough, I struggled with that expectation and pressure early in the season. I thought I had to take responsibility for scoring all the runs, and battled on the English pitches. I wasn’t the first Australian to battle on springtime pitches in England, but, coming on top of my poor season at home and memories of how badly I’d done for Ferguslie, I was being circled by the demons. In my first three first-class innings, I scored 18, 21 and 3. I made 5 in the first one-day match, and after trudging off, out for 4, in another one-dayer at Bristol in early May, I plonked myself down next to Bob.
‘Mate, I’m really sorry. You must think I’m the worst overseas player ever. I’m trying my best, I don’t know what’s wrong, but it’s just not happening.’
Bob said, ‘Huss. The next game is against Warwickshire. I just want you to go out there and look to hit the ball. Don’t worry about getting out. Just relax and play your game. Forget the consequences.’
I sat there grumpily. Meanwhile Bob went off and found Amy in the stands. It was freezing cold, and he got her a beanie and some gloves and sat with her for a while. Bob was interested in making sure your life was settled off the field. We were having problems with our accommodation but hadn’t said anything because we were so grateful to be there. When Bob asked her if she was okay, Amy burst into tears and poured it all out.
‘We haven’t got any cutlery, our vacuum doesn’t work, the house is falling down.’ And there was a whole lot more.
Bob went and got it all sorted out. I don’t know if it was that or the talk he’d given me, but he had brought about a turning point in my county career. In the next one-day match I made 93, and my next six county scores in the following fortnight were 75, 67, 22, 17, 70 and 82. I felt I’d proven to Bob and my teammates that I wasn’t a dud. We were more comfortable at home, and I relaxed and started to amass some good scores.
It wasn’t until the end of June that I scored my first first-class hundred for Northants, but it just clicked from there. We were playing in the First Division, which was quite a coup for Northants, as they weren’t one of the powerhouse counties such as the London clubs, Middlesex and Surrey, or those from the north like Nottinghamshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire. Nor did we have any Test players. But we played well as a team, and had some great pers
onalities.
Graeme Swann, who was still some years from his Test debut, kept everyone amused and was one of those cricketers who had so much talent he didn’t have to try very hard or listen to anyone else. He frustrated me at times because I thought he could be anything. His brother Alec was also very funny, a dour opening batsman who hated fielding; in fact Alec hated everything except batting. ‘The only perfect training session for me,’ he drawled, ‘is where I have my pads on for three hours.’ So I organised a training session just like that, and he was happy. He entertained the rest of us with the abuse he heaped onto himself whenever he got out. Honestly, his self-hating tirades were so funny, I’d sneak back into the dressing room to listen to them.
It was in England that some people started calling me ‘Mr Cricket’. I had a reputation as someone who was always hitting balls in the nets or developing a new shot, or doing weights and fitness work or new mental skills. Anything I could do to get better, I was all over it. I trained three, four, or five times a day all up. People probably thought I was trying to do too much. Alec Swann, among others, claimed credit for starting the nickname, but as far as I know, the player who coined it was Andrew Flintoff, the Lancashire and England all-rounder. As they say, success (and a successful nickname) has a thousand parents!
Mal Loye was my opening partner, and a real mainstay of Northants cricket. He had played for North Perth, so we had that link. He ate, breathed and slept batting, and continually tinkered with his technique. He didn’t play more than a handful of one-day internationals for England, but gee he was talented. One day we were playing Lancashire, who had Muttiah Muralitharan as their overseas professional, on a turning Northampton pitch. Ten minutes before lunch, Mal and I agreed, ‘Let’s just survive Murali till lunch.’
Underneath the Southern Cross Page 8
