I walked up to the non-striker’s end, hoping Mal would block Murali out so I wouldn’t have to face him. Next ball, Mal came steaming halfway down the pitch and smashed the ball into the members’ pavilion. Okay, I thought, I guess that kept Murali out. Then Mal he hit three more sixes – he absolutely destroyed the greatest off-spinner in the history of cricket when we were trying to survive until lunch.
We had a good group of solid English pros, including the all-rounder Tony Penberthy, a great competitor who absolutely loved his cricket, Darren Cousins, who whinged a bit but then forgot it all and gave his heart and soul to the team once he crossed the white line, and Jason Brown, a beautiful off-spinner who was actually our number-one choice ahead of Swanny. In the background was a young Indian slow left-armer called Monty Panesar. Monty just wanted to bowl, all day, every day. That suited me fine, because I wanted to bat all day, every day. The boys gave us stick, calling us ‘the perfect couple’. After training, Monty and I would go off to do one-on-one sessions for a couple of hours. Nick Cook, the assistant coach, often had to come over to tear Monty out of the nets, to stop him wearing himself out by bowling fifty overs to me all afternoon. As far as I was concerned, Monty was the best cricket playmate I’d had since my brother, and unlike Dave, Monty wouldn’t chase me around the yard trying to belt me if I didn’t give him a bat.
The team was led by David Ripley, the wicketkeeper, a conservative guy in his last season. I really liked Rips. We joked a bit about his very serious team talks about keeping up over-rates so as to avoid fines, but he had an old-school mentality and really cared for the players and the club.
I heard people voicing that long-held Australian belief that playing professional, low-intensity cricket dulled your game. But Matty Hayden and other Australians had been improved by it, and I had a healthy respect for English players. The competition was sound and strong. I loved the idea that you could play six days a week in different conditions, first-class and one-day cricket, against varying opposition, travelling from match to match with a great bunch of blokes. I only saw positives. I loved Bob Carter and he was very generous with the time he gave me. My game was getting better. So my experiences were only positive.
Playing for Northants in 2001 and leaving the field with Adrian Rollins, a huge West Indian opening batsman who made me look like a ten-year-old.
Because the perception was that county cricket was inferior, you had to score triple-hundreds to attract attention from Australia. In 2001, Steve Waugh was leading the Test team on a victorious Ashes tour, so perhaps people were showing a bit more interest than usual in the county scene. Against Essex in late July, it all came together for me and I made 329 not out. My appetite for runs by then was insatiable. Bizarrely, during my net session in the morning before the match I got out at least eight times, which didn’t fill me with much confidence. It’s amazing how the game works sometimes. Our home pitch was good, and if you were switched on and hungry, you could fill your boots. When I got in, I tried to go as big as I possibly could. I didn’t throw it away. The grounds were getting so hard underfoot that my usual fear of being stranded at the wicket, unable to get the ball through the infield, went away. Even if I blocked it, if it went into a gap it ran off for four.
A couple of days later, Amy and I were driving to a game and my phone rang. It was Steve Waugh, calling to congratulate me on the 300. I nearly drove off the motorway. I pulled over and chatted to him for five minutes. He said, ‘Keep trying to improve yourself, you’re doing a good job.’ When I hung up, Amy asked who it was. She couldn’t believe it when I told her it was the Australian captain. To me, not that I was playing county cricket for Australian eyes, it was an added benefit to feel that someone of Steve’s stature was taking note.
After such a strong season with Northants, I couldn’t really kick on when I came home. In another moderate summer for me and the Warriors, I only made one century and averaged 35. Late in the season, I was caught up in a minor controversy over a promotional gimmick in the domestic one-day cup. The sponsors set up ‘targets’ around the ground, and you could win a jackpot if you hit them. Sure enough, I got a ball in my leg-side hitting zone and managed to strike the sign.
The controversy arose over what to do with the money. There were no set protocols, so I called the Australian Cricketers’ Association to ask what other players had done in the same situation. Steve Waugh and Shane Lee, playing for New South Wales, had hit the sign, and had taken a lion’s share of the money before splitting the rest with their teammates. I decided to follow their lead. Some of my teammates complained that I hadn’t split the whole lot evenly. When their opinions became public, it caused me some angst, and in hindsight I wish I had done an even split with the whole team and got it over with.
I did well enough in my new middle-order role in the one-day team to get a couple of games with Australia A, but I only had to look around the dressing room to see the calibre of players who couldn’t crack the Australian team, be it in limited-overs or Test cricket. It was a tough club to get into, and for me it had just grown tougher, with Justin Langer’s final ascent to the opener’s position, which he would occupy alongside Matthew Hayden for the foreseeable future. The pressure was growing. I was twenty-six now, and just getting the first inklings of that worrying sense that my best years were slipping away.
What do you do in that situation? Get married! I’d been certain I wanted to spend my life with Amy almost from the day we’d met, and we set the date at 6 April 2002, after the Australian season and before I was to leave for another stint at Northampton.
The night before the wedding, we had a rehearsal. Simon Katich was my best man, and Robbie Baker and my brother were the groomsmen. I was ready and excited when the big day came around.
We were married at Christ Church School chapel in Perth, a beautiful setting overlooking the river. As soon as I saw Amy walking down the aisle I began to get emotional and had terrible problems getting my vows out. I couldn’t even stammer through my own name without bursting into tears. I’d look at Amy, who was beautiful beyond words, and break down again.
I pulled it together after the ceremony. We had some photos taken and then enjoyed a great night with our friends and family at the South of Perth Yacht Club. Dad, Kato and I made speeches, which we tried to keep short. In our family we didn’t show our emotions easily. My breakdown during the wedding had caught my parents by surprise, and Dad speculated about where I’d got that gene. He traced it back to a third-generation auntie!
For our honeymoon, we went to Maui for five or six days. We had a relaxing time, and arrived at Northampton as a newly married couple.
We were shown to our new house, a two-storey place in a different part of town from where we’d lived in 2001. Amy’s older sister soon came to visit us, and on her first night, jetlagged, Trudy went downstairs and realised we’d been burgled. She raced upstairs and woke us. The whole house had been cleared out. The windows and doors were held open with knives. They’d filled our cars and taken off with them too. They’d gone through our wedding photos and scattered them all over the table, which was somehow the creepiest part of it all. Amy was so scared to be left in the house alone, she said she wanted to go home to Australia.
Eventually we moved back to where we’d been the previous year, inside a golf complex. We felt safer and more comfortable there, and it turned into another enjoyable year for us off the field.
At the cricket club, things were more complicated. Although I’d scored some runs, the team had finished in the bottom three in the first division and were now straight back down to division two. David Ripley retired, and I was put in as replacement captain. I didn’t think I was ready for it, having been at the club for only one year and not having had much captaincy experience. But Bob was adamant that I take the leadership to help raise standards.
We had a poor year. My captaincy inexperience told, as I wanted to be mates with the guys more than taking a disciplinarian’s role. My on-field
tactics often didn’t work, and rather than stick with them I wanted to listen to everyone and take in all ideas. In addition, we had a major off-field incident that divided the team, where one of my teammates had an affair with another’s fiancee. When it came to light, as these things inevitably do, it had a huge effect on the team. We would be playing a game somewhere, the team would meet for a drink before dinner, and one or two players would be at one end of the bar while everyone else was at the other end. I tried to pull everyone together, and one of the boys said, ‘What if it was Amy?’ Fair point.
We knew what we had to do. The player who was doing the wrong thing, who was a key batsman for the team, was moved to the second XI and the following year had to move to another club. The 2002 year, when they were both still there, was a challenging season and I learned a lot about leadership, both on and off the field.
Northants finished seventh in the nine-team First Division. At that time the bottom three teams in the First Division were relegated to the Second Division and the top three in the Second Division were promoted. So we were heading back down after just one season in the top flight. A difference between divisions one and two in county cricket was the quality of the pitches. In the First Division, where the aim is to stay up, clubs prepare good pitches to get their batting bonus points and not lose matches. A good draw can keep you above water. If you lose games, on bad pitches, you’re staring at relegation. In the Second Division, on the other hand, it’s about winning games. We had spinners so we’d prepare fairly substandard spinning wickets, to win games and get promoted. But that made it very much harder for batting when you were in the Second Division than in the first. I’d gone well, boosting my average into the 70s with an unbeaten 310 in my last county game of the season, against Gloucestershire in Bristol.
Once I left, for an Australia A tour to South Africa, Matthew Inness, a left-arm fast bowler from Victoria, replaced me and did a good job. I hoped we could pick ourselves up again for the 2003 season, but was knocked about by an episode at the end of 2002.
There were plenty of reasons for our ordinary showing, but the club decided to make a scapegoat of Bob Carter. They knew I had a good relationship with Bob, so, rather than consult with the captain, they talked to some disgruntled players who had an axe to grind with Bob. I was completely blindsided. When management called me to a meeting and said they were sacking Bob, I was irate. I tried to get them to change their minds, but had no effect. I was very disappointed with the club, sacking a man who had had so much positive impact on many players, not just me.
Bob and I continued to stay in touch, as we do to this day. He was married to a New Zealander, and he moved there. He is now part of the national coaching set-up. He was sad about his removal from Northants, and saw New Zealand as a fresh start, a good place to bring up his children.
All this stress was not a great preparation for the Australian season. Since 2000, in contrast to my good results in England, my home performances had been slumping. I still thought the national selectors wanted me to be a more aggressive opener, and as a result I performed very inconsistently.
My horizons had changed. Just playing for Western Australia was no longer my dream. I started measuring up against Australian players and candidates. I’d received my first Cricket Australia contract around 2000 and thought the selectors must be thinking of me for the future. As it turned out, I’d lost my contract, got it back, and lost it again. It reflected an inconsistent time of being on the fringe and just off it.
One of the memorable moments of that summer was playing New South Wales at Newcastle. I’d seen Michael Clarke play in a one-day match at Coffs Harbour, where we’d bowled New South Wales out cheaply, but here in Newcastle he was so confident, so positive, charging down to the spinners, I thought he looked a bit cocky – but maybe that was my age and insecurity speaking. I was becoming a senior player, therefore wary of kids coming through. He batted well in the Shield game, looking the part alongside the Waughs and other big guns. We did drop a sitter off him, and some of our senior guys got into him because he was so brash with the bleached hair and the earring, a prime target for our bowlers. But he gave as good as he got.
Within the West Australian team, which was struggling for success, my role was more fluid than I would have liked. When Justin Langer, the nominal captain, was playing Test cricket, I was opening the batting with Chris Rogers and captaining the side. But when Justin came back after the New Year, not being in the national one-day side, he took over the captaincy and the opening position, they shifted me down to number four, I assumed because they felt I’d shown my adaptability in the one-day format. To me, this was only more confusing, as I saw myself as an opener. My results reflected this state of mind, and I had easily my worst-yet summer. In first-class cricket my scores were 0, 14, 48, 9, 56, 33, 0, 62, 90, 19, 5 not out, and, in a game we lost to New South Wales in Perth, 14 and 12.
We were having a sad beer in the dressing room after that match when Ryan Campbell came in and belted his locker with his bat. He said he’d been dropped. I’d had my phone switched off, and when I switched it on again I saw that I had a voicemail message.
When I listened to it, my heart sank. It was Wayne Hill, one of the selectors, asking me to call him back.
He delivered the bad news: I wasn’t going with the boys to Melbourne for the last Shield game of the season. I went home and sat out the back of the house, stunned and quiet and disappointed. I hadn’t been dropped from any first-class team before. There were teams I hadn’t made, but no, I’d never been left out of a team I was in. I was devastated, of course, and when I look at my scores, it confirms my belief at the time that I still deserved my spot. But I guess it came on the back of average performances in the two previous seasons. They weren’t picking me on my Northants form, and nor should they. I still wrestled with the sense of injustice, but when it sank in, I was just sad. Not only was I out of the state team, but my dream of one day playing for Australia was gone.
Everything was eating away at me. One of the things that disappointed me most about being dropped was that I loved going to the MCG to battle Victoria, a team I loved to hate. Throughout my career, I treated every single game with the utmost importance. There was no such thing as a dead rubber. They’re all so precious to me personally. So even though Western Australia were out of the running for the Shield and the selectors might have been looking to blood new players, I felt as wounded as if I had been dropped for a final.
We had a team dinner that night. I really didn’t want to go, but you’ve got to show good character when things aren’t going well, and I put on the happiest face I could. It was miserable. Looking back, I don’t think I was prepared to handle grief. The worst thing that had happened to me was my nanna passing away when I was a kid. But she had been very old. The truth was that I’d been sheltered. No divorces, no tragedies, no big illnesses or injuries. Dad’s bad ankle had stopped him from trialling for the Commonwealth Games – that was about the worst of it. So being dropped from the state team, which I suppose is not a big deal at all in the scheme of things, hit me like a shattering blow because I hadn’t been toughened by the scars that bad news can leave. I supposed that I had to look at it this way: only through overcoming it, and fighting my way back, could I become a better cricketer and a better person.
I had to start somewhere, and the national selectors gave me an unexpected opportunity by choosing me, five weeks after I’d been dropped by my state, to play for Australia A in a series against South Africa A. This was confusing – how could I be good enough to play for Australia A but not for WA? – but I seized the chance, and hit an 80 and a 140. For once, I was finishing off a home summer positively.
So I went back to Northampton with mixed feelings, happy that I had scored a few runs against an excellent South Africa A team but still very hurt by being dropped by Western Australia. Kepler Wessels, the former Australian and South African Test opener, had been appointed coach in place of Bob Carter,
and by the time I arrived he already had the players a bit scared, with his reputation as a disciplinarian. They were training hard and on their best behaviour, which made it smoother for me as captain.
The previous months’ events hadn’t turned me off captaincy – quite the opposite. After the domestic ructions, poor results and Bob’s sacking in 2002, and then the trauma of being dropped by Western Australia, I had a harder edge. I was, paradoxically, a lot more confident in my judgment. I had enormous respect for his playing record, to have scored thousands of Test runs for two countries with a very odd technique. He’d represented South Africa in two sports – lawn bowls and cricket – and was only just short of representing them in archery as well. Every morning at Northants, he was firing arrows at a target across the oval. He still did boxing and martial arts and looked very fit, which all added to the intimidatory aura.
You couldn’t help respecting and even fearing him. At Graeme Swann’s first meeting with him, Kepler said, ‘I hear you’re pretty good at impressions.’
Swanny said, ‘Yeah, I am. Do you want me to do one of you?’
‘You do one of me,’ Kepler said, ‘and I’ll punch your f--ing head in.’ And he walked off.
Swanny would do impressions of Kepler in the changing room, very funny and good ones, but only when Kepler wasn’t around.
Initially I was too intimidated to speak my mind but thankfully our assistant coach, the former England spinner Nick Cook, wasn’t so easily overawed. He didn’t care about telling Kepler what he thought. Kepler was an emotional guy. If we lost a game, he’d be exploding. ‘This guy’s rubbish, get rid of him and him and him.’ He would want eight changes to the team. Then Nick would say, ‘Come on Kepler, that’s rubbish, we don’t need to change the whole team, here’s what we should do.’ I would generally come in after Nick, saying, ‘Yeah, it’s only one loss, keep the faith.’ Kepler would eventually calm down and come around. Then we would win the next game and everything would be fine again.
Underneath the Southern Cross Page 9
