It was a brilliant batting pitch and there wasn’t much spin, pace or bounce. For their bowlers, there wasn’t much to rattle Dizzy’s simple plan. We batted together for most of the third day, and when he got to 100 in the last overs nobody could believe it. In the middle, he said, ‘I can’t wait to hear what my mates at home say about this.’
On the fourth morning, he showed no sign of flagging. What kept him going was, he began ticking off the highest scores of some great Test batsmen. He hit a single to fine leg and said, ‘That’s Mark Waugh.’ Then, with a cover drive for a single, he said, ‘That’s Damien Martyn, got him covered.’ I don’t think he was motivated to take his score to 200 because of that milestone. It was that he kept saying, ‘I desperately want to go past Steve Waugh.’ Steve’s Test highest was 200.
My innings was more or less forgotten by most people. From the beginning I was pretty nervous, and punched a few off the spinners. The outfield was flying, like lightning. The longer you were there, eventually you could only get yourself out. On the fourth day I got tired, and we were close to declaring. I had a few slogs and got caught on the boundary – the type of thing you’d expect a bowler to do. 182 was my highest Test score at the time, but I probably threw away the opportunity to make a double century.
Not Dizzy. He got to 183, and I thought, Far out, he’s got me covered too! Ricky showed what a big man he was by allowing Dizzy to get past the 200 mark, which was the icing on the cake. Dizzy was over the moon, as we all were for him. He knew he was coming to the end of his Test career. After every day’s play, he sat in the team room and had a few beers and chatted with the boys, soaking it all up. He just wanted to enjoy his last series. He said he knew his time was done. He just thought he would casually score a double-hundred and be the man of the series to sign off from Test cricket!
After a well-earned rest in the winter of 2006, I was gearing up for my first Ashes series. For me, it was simply thrilling to find myself in this position. For the players who had been in England in 2005, there was a hunger for revenge.
In August, we were given sketchy details about flying to Brisbane for some kind of ‘camp’. All we were told to bring was the bare minimum: underpants, socks, a couple of T-shirts. We would find out more when we arrived.
So I was a bit nervous about it. We took a bus to a big shed somewhere outside Brisbane. The boys were in good spirits to see each other, but there was a bit of apprehension. What did they have in store for us?
There were 30-odd of us, including the full training squad and support staff. An army guy had us line up and strip down to our underpants. On the floor in front of us there was a backpack with supplies. Everyone was too scared to say something, in case we got a spray from the warrant officer running the show.
We were told that we could put down on the floor any medications. I put down my asthma spray. My asthma had started in a bizarre manner, during adulthood. David had asthma badly as a child and had to go to hospital once or twice, but I’d had nothing. Then, when I was 17 and playing A grade, I did a lap with the team one day and got really wheezy. I said to a teammate, ‘Can I borrow your puffer?’ The Ventolin worked straight away. I saw a doctor and he said, ‘You’ve got a case of exercise-induced asthma.’ Every time I did vigorous exercise, I got tight in the chest and needed the puffer, which opened my chest up. It never really restricted me, as the Ventolin cured it.
For his ‘medication’, Warnie put down a few packets of cigarettes. The boss guy said he couldn’t have them, but Warnie, standing there in his Playboy underpants, managed to persuade them that he was addicted to cigarettes and they were his medication.
We were sorted into five or six groups. Ours had Brett Lee, Gilly, Michael Clarke and Richard McGuinness, our analyst. They put us on another bus, got us out at the bottom of a mountain in the bush, and yelled, ‘Get in your formation!’ our task was to cart jerry cans of water up the mountain, staying in a line, precisely 10 metres from the next group. If anyone strayed, we all had to go down for ten push-ups. It was really tough, plus the physicality of going up this bloody great mountain. Sure enough, we had to do push-ups regularly. Three-quarters of the way up, I was asking myself seriously if I could make it. One thing that kept me going was seeing how guys like John Buchanan, Brute Bernard, our media officer Philip Pope and the fielding coach Mike Young, some of them in their fifties, none a professional athlete, were doing it too. I thought, If they’re doing it I’ve got to keep going.
It was certainly a shock to the system, having to do this straight-up. We were exhausted at the top. Philip Pope was dry-retching over the side of the mountain, and other guys were lying in agony. And this was just the beginning.
We were sent off in different directions to do exercises in teams, putting the jerry cans on stretchers and transporting them to another location an indeterminate distance away. We rotated the load and held on with different arms, taking turns to have a break, but the boys were very tired. We were only allowed to eat army rations, and it was one activity after another – the next was pushing a four-wheel drive vehicle 4 or 5 kilometres up a dirt track. Then, we just walked and walked, for hours, until sunset on a dirt track. Our army guide said, ‘We’ll stop here for the night.’ I thought, Stop where? There was only the dirt track and forest. Our ‘camp’ was in the forest itself.
Brett Lee, fastidious as always, hung all his clothes on trees to dry them out. We were sitting around and eating dinner: a tin of soup and a loaf of bread to share. We were hungry enough to eat five loaves each. When the sun went down, we crashed quickly. Not far away, Warnie’s group had set up, and we could hear Shane complaining about the ‘mozzie grand prix’.
I fell into a deep sleep for what seemed like minutes, pitch black, and suddenly: Boom! Boom!!!
The guide was packing up his stuff. ‘We have ten minutes to get on the road,’ he said. ‘It’s not safe here.’ Half-asleep, having been woken by two bomb blasts, it was pitch black, we were scared and desperately trying to roll up our sleeping bags and stuff them into the tiny bags. I couldn’t jam mine in, and Pup was having awful trouble. Brett Lee was running around trying to find his clothes hanging on the trees, calling out, ‘I can’t find my shirt! I can’t find my pants!’
We eventually found his clothes and got Pup’s sleeping bag into its sack. The guide told us we were twenty minutes too slow getting going, and had to take off at double speed.
There were more exercises that night, but lower intensity than during the day, when they’d really tried to break us down. The focus became more mental than physical. A goal of the camp was to put guys under pressure and and take them out of their comfort zone and see how they’d react when tired and hungry. Would they come together or pull apart? Buchanan had a clear goal, which was to see who would work as a team when things got tough, and who would show the negative side of their character.
The army guys also taught us about the chain of command. Each team had a leader and a 2IC, who you had to go to first if you wanted something from the leader. You had to go through that chain. On this walk, in the middle of the night, I was the 2IC. We took off, not knowing how far we were going. Michael Clarke came up, waddling. ‘Huss, I’ve got that bad chafe, I don’t know if I can make it.’ I said to the leader, ‘Pup’s really struggling, he’s got bad chafe.’ Chafe is a bit like getting hit in the nuts in cricket. Everyone else thinks it’s funny, but the guy who’s suffering is suffering badly. So we spent a long time with the guide getting some ointment, which finally got passed down to Pup. He reacted like his saviour had come. As he rubbed it on, it was the best day of his life. ‘Thanks, Huss, thanks so much!’ And I was just the 2IC!
That night, we had to do an orienteering course through a paddock with glow-lights. Our team was racing about, losing members, and having a bit of a disaster. We found our way to a road, and by the side of it Stuart MacGill was on the ground, screaming.
We were saying, ‘Are you all right, Magilla?’
He was swearin
g and cursing everyone in sight.
He’d hurt his knee, and absolutely done his block.
The guide told us to keep going to our rendezvous point, but the whispers were going around about Magilla. We were really worried that he might have injured his knee seriously.
By now, for the rest of us, the fatigue was setting in. Walking for hours and hours, the sleep deprivation, the hunger. The guides told us we could stop and camp for the night as a group on another trail. It was so uncomfortable, there were tyre tracks with a hump in the middle, it was cold, and we were exhausted. We were all worried about getting woken up and having to walk again in the night.
But there were always lighter moments. The whole squad was lying on this track, all in a line, side by side. The next morning I woke up and looked along the line. Somewhere in the middle was a sleeping bag pulled up over someone’s head with a tiny hole for his mouth. And out of that hole was a cigarette, alight, the smoke puffing out. Warnie. He was completely covered, except for his cigarette. In a day and night of madness and hunger and fatigue, it’s amazing what can make you laugh.
For all the hardship, that camp was awesome, one of my best experiences in the Australian team. We didn’t talk cricket. It was more about discovering each other. The next day was a lot of gruelling walking, and then we were transported to a different place to set up tents.
Magilla and Warnie, who was now struggling physically, were kept aside while we did abseiling and treks up another mountain. Because they’d missed the activities, those two had to give a tutorial to the whole squad on leadership, which was really interesting, because they had a curious dynamic. I think, for all the rivalry, they drove each other on. For Warnie, the greatest of all time, having as good a bowler as MacGill on the scene kept pushing him to prove himself the best. Meanwhile, MacGill wanted to compete with the best and be considered up at that level, so when he had an opportunity he was highly motivated. MacGill was very respectful of Warnie and would be the first to admit Warnie was the best we’ve ever had.
A key activity on the camp was to get in a big circle and, one by one, stand in the centre. When you were there, the others would say things they really liked about you, and things you had to work on. It was confronting being in the middle of your peers, being told things you had to get better at. It was daunting telling guys too, being open enough to say to someone he was a bit selfish. I remember thinking, I don’t know if I’ve got the balls to tell someone they’re a selfish kind of guy.
There were some home truths. I was told I was too intense and that made other guys feel uncomfortable. They said I should relax a bit. On the positive side, they said my work ethic was good.
The funny thing was, when Glenn McGrath got into the middle, Jason Gillespie got up with a straight face and said, ‘Glenn, we think you’re a great team man, down to earth and all that. But you wear your pants way too high.’
We were killing ourselves, but the army bosses weren’t happy. ‘Jason,’ his guide said, ‘you think this is a serious problem, do you?’
Dizzy said, deadpan: ‘Yes. We think it’s a serious problem.’
Truth sessions of this kind didn’t happen very often in the normal team routine. It started happening among the leaders, bringing in outside consultants to get feedback. When a new player came into the team and we were having a stretch or a warm-up, Gilly would ask the player to tell us all five things we didn’t know about him and his family. There were some humorous stories told, like when Mick Lewis joined the team on a one-day tour to New Zealand and described his sister who had some problems with the law. It was a fun exercise and a good way to get to know some of the personal details of guys that we spent so much time with.
Our debriefs stressed that when you get tired and things aren’t going well, that’s when you’ve got to come together and look after each other. At the end of the camp, Ricky gave an incredible speech, inspiring us all, and said, looking forward to the Ashes two months away, ‘It’s up to every individual to get his preparation right. Leave no stone unturned. Make sure you’re 100 per cent prepared.’ We went straight from the boot camp to the Hyatt resort at Coolum for four or five days of luxury. A soft bed and a shower never felt so good. There were several meetings and our media guys educated us in how big the Ashes series would be, including some schooling in tabloid tactics to get people angry, being set up by people in bars and getting photos in the paper, all the worst-case scenarios. I drank it all in, thinking how the Australian team operated on a different level of professionalism from every other organisation I’d been involved in, and probably from every competing international team.
Our first playing assignment was the DLF Cup in Malaysia, a one-day triangular tournament with the West Indies and India in preparation for the ICC Champions Trophy in India. We took a really big squad to Malaysia, which made people jittery. We had four matches but everyone was only going to be playing two. There was competition within the team for places. Matty Hayden was desperately pushing to get an opening place back from Kato. Everyone was on trial for the Champions Trophy. So it wasn’t great for building team spirit. Andrew Symonds was really dirty, saying, ‘These are one-day internationals for Australia, I’m not happy games being given away to guys, and I don’t want someone coming in and doing well and taking my place.’
But Buchanan and the selectors were adamant. It was great for some of the youngsters, but I was a bit on Simmo’s side. Every game for Australia is important and you should have to earn your place. This divide, between those who were looking at planning and the bigger picture and a ‘squad’ mentality, and those who just thought every game for Australia was sacred, would become bigger and bigger over the next seven years.
But there are swings and roundabouts. Due to the rotation of players, in Malaysia I had the chance to captain Australia for the first time, which made me excited and proud. We were playing the West Indies. I was pumped and made a century, but then Chris Gayle and Brian Lara smashed us around and we lost comfortably. Dan Cullen, the brash young South Australian – an aggressive off-spinner, if there is such a thing – gave us a humorous moment. Dan loved being in the batsman’s face. Lara played a ball and Dan was glaring at him, and said, ‘You cocky p--k.’
The next five balls, Lara hit for six, four four, four and four. At the end of the over he nodded to Dan, as if to say, Mate, pull your head in.
As captain of the Australian team playing against the West Indies at Kannara Oval Stadium during an unbeaten 109 run innings on the fourth one-day of the DLF triangular series in Kuala Lumpur on 18 September 2006. (Photo by Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images)
As an aside on sledging, I didn’t think the Australian team were as bad as they were made out to be. Haydos, Warnie, Justin, McGrath and Ricky were happy to say a few words to a batsman, but I never heard anything that crossed the line and got too personal. I thought the Aussie team were just copping stick because they were too good, and there had to be some way of bringing them down a notch.
Personally, I didn’t sledge. I did it a couple of times early in my career. The first guy I sledged made 150. The second guy I sledged made 100. The third guy I sledged made 150. Something wasn’t working. And it wasn’t really my thing, I have to admit. I didn’t feel right, and was no good at it, so I thought I’d better retire from sledging and let the other guys do it. The funniest sledge I ever heard was in a grade match for Wanneroo. I was at the non-striker’s end, and the wicketkeeper was getting stuck into my teammate.
‘Gee, you’re an ugly player.’
‘How can you be so ugly?’
‘If there was an ugly eleven, you’d be captain.’
My mate turned around and said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen your missus, and she’s batting number three.’
See, I think if you want to sledge, you have to have the knack of quick repartee, something I never had. When someone sledged me, I preferred not to get caught up in it. The Poms sometimes tried to needle me and get a confrontation going, but I just wouldn’
t buy into it. Batting was hard enough without having to think up witty comments as well.
When I was captain of teams, I wouldn’t sledge, but would encourage the bowlers in ways the batsman could hear. Comments like, ‘He’s hanging back here,’ or ‘Don’t be scared to bowl bouncers,’ were more gamesmanship than sledging. If I could plant some doubts in the batsman’s mind, and then set fields to make him think we’d bowl a particular way, that was fair in my book.
If players under my leadership were sledging, I might tell them to rein it in if they’d gone too far, but I like players to express themselves, and if they wanted to play that way, I would back them.
We ended up winning the DLF Cup, beating the West Indies in the final. After the game we had a rare chance to socialise with the West Indians. They were a bit divided on the issue, with some of them wanting to get on the team bus and others preferring to join us for a beer in our dressing room. Chris Gayle was one who came in, and he had the boys in stitches, taking the mickey out of everyone. Leaving the ground that night, my sides were in agony from laughing. It was a nice way to end the tournament.
We got a short break, but just before leaving home for the Champions Trophy, I fell sick with influenza. It was a bad case and I was bed-ridden. I dragged myself up but during the flight I was in a world of pain. The first few days in India were a write-off for me. We also had to take doxycyclin, an antimalaria tablet. I had an allergic reaction to them and got sixteen cold sores: fourteen on my bottom lip and two big ones on my top lip. They were excruciating. At training I couldn’t get the zinc off them, and they looked disgusting.
After about ten days I was grumpy and tired and not eating well. In the hotel, I got in a lift with Gilly.
‘Huss, they’re starting to look a bit better, I think you’re on the mend.’
Underneath the Southern Cross Page 15
