In that Trans-Tasman series, which we won 2–0, Simon Katich, my best man, and I played our fiftieth Test match in the same game in Hamilton. It gave me a moment of reflection. Having got to thirty years of age without playing a Test, it was a real milestone to get to fifty. We had a few photos together, and Amy came over. Kato and I had a bit of a chuckle together about how far we’d come, and what a nice coincidence it was to be reaching this mark together. We looked forward to playing together for several more years. Sadly, it wasn’t to turn out that way.
Once World Cups came in, Australia started to take international Twenty20 cricket more seriously. After the New Zealand tour in 2010, I went to India for a handful of IPL games with Chennai Super Kings, and then flew to join the boys in the West Indies for the third T20 World Cup.
We weren’t among the favourites, which gave us an element of surprise. We had dangerous batsmen such as Warner and Watson, pace in Dirk Nannes and Shaun Tait, and pretty good players all down the list. And the nature of T20 cricket makes each contest a bit of a lottery – one player can win a game on any given day. We certainly had the tools to beat some of the good teams.
My role was to come in when we were in trouble. I liked that role, feeling I had nothing to lose. I could save the day and be a hero, or if I got out, we could say that everyone above me should have done the job.
Personally, the highlight was the semi-final in St Lucia, against Pakistan, the title-holders. They amassed 191, and we needed 90 to win off 45 balls when I came in at fifth wicket down. Cameron White was going well at the other end. I can’t smack my first ball out of the park like a Warner or a Gayle. My plan was to get busy, assess the pitch and the pace, get the senior partner on strike, and then go for it. Cameron hit a couple of sixes but then got out. I thought, That’s it, the game’s pretty much over. Steve Smith came and went, and then Mitchell Johnson came out. We needed 50 runs off the last three overs. The pressure was right off. As far as I was concerned, the game was gone. So Mitch and I just said, ‘Stuff it, let’s have a go.’
A couple went for four, but I still thought it was impossible to get 50 off three overs. In the second-last over we got a four early, and I got some ones and twos and a four off the last ball. That left 18 to win off the last over, to be bowled by the off-spinner Saeed Ajmal, one of the best T20 bowlers in the world.
I said to Mitch, ‘I think he’s going to fire in fast yorkers.’ Mitch got a pad on the first one and we took a leg bye. Seventeen needed off five balls.
My tactic was to go back deep into my crease and hope Ajmal would miss his length, so I could get underneath it and hoist it over the top. To my amazement, his next ball was a slow half-tracker. For the left-hander, the boundary was short on the leg-side, with a strong wind carrying that way. I pulled this long-hop and it went for six. Behind me, Kamran screamed at Ajmal in Urdu, I assumed something like What the heck are you doing?
Eleven off four. I expected the fast yorker now, and, going back, got underneath it. It went for six as well. We only needed five runs off three balls. Shivers! Could we win this? That’s when the fears and nervousness came back – it was the first time I thought we could win. What do I do now? What’s he going to bowl? My mind was whirring.
Ajmal bowled another slow one, wide of off stump, quite a clever ball. I tried to slice it behind point where it might spin off for four. I didn’t quite get it right and it flew off the edge. Better than the planned shot, it ran away to the boundary.
Now we needed one run off two balls. I thought, What if I get out? A new batsman will need one off one. Pakistan brought the field in and I just thought, Hit it in the middle, wherever it goes we’ll run. He bowled a good ball and I swung, and it came out of the middle, sailing high for another six. We’d got those 50 runs, and hadn’t even needed the full three overs. I’d got 60 off 24 balls, with 48 of my runs coming in sixes and fours. So much for my belief that I was a nicker and nudger!
The team cheers me on to score the winning run at the end of the ICC World Twenty20 second semi-final match between Australia and Pakistan at the Beausejour Cricket Ground in St Lucia on 14 May 2010. Australia won by 3 wickets with one ball remaining to qualify for the final. (Photo by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images)
There’s been a lot of talk about how changes in bat-making have transformed players’ ability to hit sixes. I don’t agree. Cricket bats didn’t improve all that much while I played top-level cricket. Manufacturers played around with the shape and took the moisture out, which expanded the size of the bats. Older bats were denser, but were still good wood. Bat quality may have improved a little bit, but they’re still the same pieces of wood coming out of the same forests.
Where the increased size of the bats made a difference was in your head. When you’re wielding what looks like a great big club, you believe you can hit the ball further. And this occurred alongside changes in practice – what I really think caused the bigger hitting.
When I first played Shield cricket, my whole game was based around defence: batting for time, letting balls go. I learnt that from Geoff Marsh, Graeme Wood, Mike Veletta, Justin Langer, the top players in the game. Six-hitting batsmen like Damien Martyn and Adam Gilchrist, just coming through, were rarities. We certainly didn’t practise smashing sixes, and those guys did it because they were naturals.
Once Twenty20 arrived, all of us would start practising six-hitting every single day. Reverse-sweeps, paddles, ramp shots – crazy shots we’d never have dreamt of before, we were now practising routinely. So our intent as batsmen became to hit sixes all the time. Obviously, once you’re thinking that way, and practising it constantly, you do it in the middle. So I think it’s more the players’ confidence that has changed, rather than the bats we use.
While I’m on the subject of bats, I can’t resist going into one of my favourite subjects.
As a young first-class player, I’d been sponsored by Gray-Nicolls, but as I was one of their lesser lights, I eventually received bats of dubious quality, the rejects from the other players, so I signed with Kookaburra, who remained my bat sponsor for the rest of my career. The first couple of years, frankly the bats were pretty ordinary. Again, I was at the low end of their list. But Ricky, who was sponsored by them, was instrumental in talking with their bat makers about changing the shapes. He developed some fantastic bats with them.
In my opinion a good bat for Australian conditions will have the middle quite high. In India, by contrast, bats need to be bottom-heavy. In Australia you want it higher because of the bounce. It balances the bat out really well. Ricky did a lot of work and they began developing darned good bats.
I was always specific on my bat weights – embarrassingly so. I used a 2lb 8oz or 2lb 9oz. I used the Kookaburra bat with the graphite backing briefly – that was when I hit the roof at the Dome in Melbourne – but they were banned. Those bats were a bit heavier, so for a while my bats went up to 2lb 10oz. I’m a player who likes to control the blade, work the ball into gaps rather than going for pure power, however, and eventually I felt the bats were a bit heavy. I couldn’t control my cross-bat shots. So I brought the weight back down to 2lb 8oz or a fraction more. I was that anal about weight, I carried a set of scales with me and weighed it. If it was too heavy, I took off some string or changed the grip to bring its weight down. People say it’s more about the pickup than the weight, but it got in my head that I needed the weight to be exact.
At the start of each summer, Kookaburra sent me six bats. I went through them and picked out the one I really liked. I kept two or three match bats and two or three practice bats on the go. Once I got a good match bat in my hand, I used it until it broke. I’ve had some magic bats. Sometimes you know the first time you tap it down. Every now and then, every few seasons, you just know it’s perfect for you. I had a couple of bats that scored three Test centuries each, and I wished they could have gone forever. I’ve kept all my Test century bats, and written who they scored hundreds against. That’s about the only thing I
keep as memorabilia – a cabinet with my Test century bats. It was a sad day when I had to retire one of my best bats. Sometimes they got bat-old: the middle started to go, and their performance died. Sometimes I re-handled them to extend their life.
When I didn’t like them, or had a bad run with them, I gave them away. Who to? There were always bowlers floating around the batsmen looking for bats.
In St Lucia, after I took 22 runs off those last four balls, my teammates were so excited, they burst out of the bunker and charged onto the field. Seeing the looks on their faces, I shared their ecstasy. It was a great buzz, to prove that we could contend under pressure in Twenty20, but the euphoria also clouded the fact that we hadn’t played well in that semi-final and were probably coming off the boil. In the final at Bridgetown, England didn’t allow us to play anywhere near our best and were deserving winners.
After a short break, we went to England for a collection of T20, one-day and Test matches against Pakistan. Having been to Pakistan as a kid, I was very disappointed not to play Test cricket there. The political situation obviously made it hard to tour in the early 2000s, and then the attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers in Lahore in 2009 put the country off-limits. I hope international cricket will soon resume there, both for the sake of the Pakistanis, one of the most fervent cricket nations on earth, and for players from other countries, who I’m sure would love to sample the hospitality and cricket conditions in that great country.
That said, we were delighted to get the chance to play a Test again at Lord’s. I got a fifty and a first-ball duck and we won the Test match when Marcus North took six wickets, but as usual there was weird stuff going on in the Pakistan team. Shahid Afridi, who had been made captain, was trying to clear the fence in a Test match every ball. I couldn’t understand what on earth was going on. Obviously his mind wasn’t working well. Inevitably, he skied one, and then resigned as Pakistan captain.
But nothing is as certain as their unpredictability, and at Headingley they bowled us out for 88. It was terrible to go down for less than three figures, but the ball was moving around a hell of a lot after the wicket had been covered for several days and Asif, Aamer and Gul were fantastic bowlers in those conditions. Ricky won the toss and batted, again. There wasn’t much we could do. Watto got us back into the match with six wickets in their first innings, and we tried to get them under some pressure when they had to chase 180 in the fourth innings. They made a strange decision, though, on the third night of the match. They were 3/140 and had us on toast. Azhar Ali, the tall young right-hander, was belting us. We were gone, and they could have won it that night, but decided not to take the extra half-hour. It seemed like a mistake, and the next morning the mood had changed. They wanted the win badly and didn’t know how to go about doing it, and batted so nervously, with such tension, after being so free the night before, that they very nearly did not get there. In the end, they fell over the line with three wickets to spare. But that was the last of the joy for them. They stayed on to play a series with England, and the scandal broke about the three players involved in spot-fixing. After they’d played so well against us, Pakistan cricket was again in a dark place.
Since the beginning of the IPL, and with the spread of Twenty20 cricket more generally, many in the cricket community were worried about its potential to harm Test cricket. I will talk about some of these aspects later. But initially, the fear was that players would choose the big money in IPL in preference to playing for their country. For me, that was never an issue: my Chennai Super Kings commitments would always play second fiddle to national duties. I would never have signed with CSK if I thought there would be any conflict. Yet against my wishes, in late 2010 I was dragged into exactly that situation, though in a most bizarre way.
In September that year, I had to go to South Africa to play with CSK in the Champions League, the competition between the top T20 domestic teams from India, Australia, South Africa, the West Indies, Sri Lanka and New Zealand. Even though I had also played for the Western Warriors, the Australian champions who had qualified for the Champions League, my prior commitment was to CSK.
But when it came to clashes with the Australian team, my CSK contract was crystal-clear. Any Australian national commitments took priority over IPL commitments. In my view, when the Australian team took off for India, a few days after my first Champions League game in South Africa, that’s when the Test tour started and that’s when I was due to be in India. I talked to Cricket Australia to arrange to fly out and meet the team as soon as they got to India.
This didn’t go down well. Cricket Australia said, ‘No, you can’t leave.’
I said, ‘What do you mean? I have a Test series.’
For two weeks, I had a running argument with Michael Brown and James Sutherland at Cricket Australia. They said, ‘It’s okay, finish the Champions League and then join the team, you’ll be in India a couple of days before the first Test.’
I said, ‘No, this is horrendous preparation, I need time to be over there before the series. I need to get over there.’
But they stood firm and said, ‘No, you’re not going.’
This was completely upside down. The conflict I’d expected was for Cricket Australia to be on my side, arguing to the Chennai Super Kings that they had to let me go to play for my country.
I told Chennai, ‘I should be going but am being told I’m not allowed to go.’ Some of the CSK players who would be representing India, such as MS Dhoni and Suresh Raina, were in the same boat, as was Doug Bollinger. It’s possible there was a quid pro quo between the Australian and Indian boards: if Dhoni and Raina had to stay in South Africa and be unprepared for the Test series, then it was somehow evened out by the same rule being applied to Doug and me. Poor Dougie, who had only just broken into the Australian team, was completely confused. He kept saying, ‘What are we doing?’ I said, ‘I’m trying to sort it out.’ He said, ‘okay, I’ll do whatever you do.’ We could have just booked our own flights to India. But I didn’t think there would be any winners if we chose that route.
I was absolutely livid. So, over in India, were Ricky and Tim Neilsen. They knew you had to take time to acclimatise to Indian conditions and were increasingly agitated that they did not have their full squad. For Ricky, it seemed to confirm all his initial reservations about the IPL.
To make matters worse, in the media it was represented that I was greedy and refusing to leave – the exact opposite of the truth. The spokesman for CA, Peter Young, said it was my choice to play IPL and I was doing it for the money.
When I heard this, I was ropable. I wrote a strongly worded letter to James Sutherland, telling him Peter Young had got it completely wrong and they had to issue a retraction. They did, saying it was their decision, not mine, to keep me in South Africa, and acknowledging that I wanted to go and join the team in India. But I felt the damage was done, a suspicion confirmed the next year when Steve Waugh interviewed me for the Argus Review into Australian cricket. I was surprised by how wrong he was on the Champions League issue. He questioned me closely about why I’d stayed in South Africa, and clearly didn’t know that I’d wanted to go to India. It annoyed me that that story, which was completely wrong, was still going around. He said he thought I was staying in South Africa for the money. It was frustrating to still be setting the record straight a year later.
Making the best of what was on offer, I found refuge on the cricket field, and batted quite well for CSK. I got an unbeaten fifty in the final, which we won, against the Warriors from Port Elizabeth. But my mind was definitely on the Test series in India.
The process of getting there was farcical. The Champions League final was in Johannesburg on the night of 26 September. The first Test was starting in Mohali on 1 october. We flew out on 27 September, but, unable to get a direct flight, we had to sit for eight hours in Dubai. From there we flew to Mumbai, then took another flight to Mohali, and had a one-hour drive. It took two days to get there, a week later than I’d wanted. Th
e administrators couldn’t even manage a decent route for us.
When we arrived, Doug and I only had time for one training session. I had a strong feeling that the team were angry at the two of us, and didn’t know what had been going on. They felt we weren’t committed to the Test team. It was only when I explained how hard I’d been fighting to get to them that they understood. I felt that it lingered over things, however, for the next six months.
Ricky won the toss in Mohali, and we made 428, but I felt terrible. It was one of the best batting pitches you could imagine, and the ball was doing nothing, but I took a session to eke out 17 runs. I was blocking ball after ball, my eyes and mind not working properly. MS Dhoni, who’d been in the same predicament as me, dropped two catches that day.
I felt better as the Test wore on, and it evolved into a situation where we had to take six wickets on the last day, while India had to get 176 runs to win. The game was right on the line and Dougie was bowling really well, dismissing Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and Harbhajan Singh. VVS Laxman was holding out with the tail, and just when we needed that final push, Dougie tore his side. I felt that it cost us the Test match, and Ricky was furious. That injury came at the crucial time. Without Doug, we just couldn’t get the final wicket and India won. It’s probably as disappointed as I’ve ever been after a Test match. I thought our preparation had not been enough. I really felt let down by CA.
We regrouped for the second Test in Bangalore, where Northy made another century and Ricky also batted very well. I got a terrible lbw decision, to follow another in the second innings in Mohali. Ian Gould, who gave me out, said in the bar after the game, ‘oh, Huss, I’m so sorry, I’ve given you two shocking decisions, I hope you get another chance, I’d hate your career to end because of my two bad decisions.’
Underneath the Southern Cross Page 26
