My Family's Keeper

by Brad Haddin

  Two months later, at the end of May 2003 I went to Kumagaya, Japan, to watch Karina and her team attempt to defend their Touch Football World Champions title (the tournaments are held every four years). There were 10 nations participating overall and five in the women’s division, with New Zealand being Australia’s greatest threat. Karina had trained really hard, fitting in the sessions around her full-time job as a radiographer. She played in the middle, having a significant effect on the flow of the game. She loved playing and enjoyed winning, but we had almost diametrically opposed attitudes to competition. I felt the nerves when I was about to play on a big stage but I relished the feeling of going up against an opposition knowing no quarter would be given and none asked. Karina would genuinely have been happier playing in a local Sydney comp with her good friends, rather than being in a national team who were drawn from around the country and didn’t know each other very well.

  Even as a defending world champion, she had to convince herself she could get through the game and that she was just as good as the opposition. On the other hand, she thrived having loved ones around when she was competing. Her parents had also come to watch and she was much more relaxed having the three of us around, whereas I discovered over the next few years that I usually preferred to give single-minded attention to the job at hand. Anyway, it was really nice to be there for her and watch as in a hard-fought final against the Kiwis the Aussies held on to the title. (Karina was such a talented touch player that only a broken collarbone copped at a training camp prevented her from making a third World Cup appearance four years later in South Africa.)

  In the lead-up to the 2003–04 season, I moved clubs from Northern Districts to Eastern Suburbs. I was still young, just 26, but many on the team were even younger and Northern Districts wanted me to take on the captaincy. However, that meant also becoming a selector for the first-grade team and I didn’t want that pressure taking my focus away from the continuation of my own progress. Easts, on the other hand, had older players, including Mark Patterson, Adrian Tucker and Jason Swift (as well as rising young talents including 15-year-old David Warner). The running of the team was in capable hands and all they required of me was that I play, which suited me down to the ground. (Northern Districts had been so good to me I always knew I would go back there eventually, and I did so after 10 enjoyable and successful years with Easts.)

  I missed a couple of Blues games in the first half of the season, first after straining my quad in one of the first grade games of the year with my new side, then in December when I had surgery to clear an infection out of the nail bed of one of my fingers (something keepers have to deal with from time to time). It was the last season before retirement for Steve and Mark Waugh. It would have been perfect if we’d been able to ride the wave of our previous triumphs and send them out on another set of victories in the domestic competition, but our ING Cup performance was not good enough to get us to the finals, with five wins against four losses and a tie. Our Sheffield Shield results were even worse. We started with a win against WA then couldn’t replicate that result for the next seven games.

  Even so, the selectors appreciated the work I was putting in and called me back to the international arena, first of all in the Australia A team against Zimbabwe on New Year’s Day 2004 in Perth, where the Zimbabweans squeaked home by eight runs, then six days later in Adelaide where we smashed out 327 (including my 45) to beat them by 119 runs. Following this I was selected for the Australian ODI team for two games to give Adam Gilchrist a chance to rest his sore knees. Those games were also against Zimbabwe, in Adelaide on Australia Day and Melbourne three days later. We edged them out by 13 runs in Adelaide and reached a reasonable 263 in Melbourne, although unfortunately the match was rained out. My contributions had been noticed and in February I got a call telling me I was in the Australian one-day squad for the upcoming six-week-long one-day and Test tour of Sri Lanka (Wade Seccombe went as the back-up keeper for the Test squad).

  A game in Colombo was the only one I played on the tour. Gilly was serving as acting captain as well as keeping and brought me in to give me some batting experience in these unfamiliar conditions. He and I opened but, unfortunately, less than seven overs later, I was out for nine after I mistimed a straight drive off seam bowler Nuwan Zoysa. Gilly became his second scalp, going lbw for 34 in a game that the home team won by three wickets. But the tour was a great experience and I relished the chance to work and train with Gilly, which we did throughout the whole tour.

  I was back home for the final Sheffield Shield game of the season, against Queensland at the SCG, the site of so many unforgettable stands by the Waughs. We went into Day 4 chasing 277 — not out of the question by any means. But we got off to a very shaky start when Greg Mail and Phil Jaques went for a combined 11. Bevo and Pup brought things back on track with a 50-run partnership, but they were also out not long afterwards, as was our captain, Tugga, gone for just nine in the final innings of his career. (He’d had a more fitting farewell eight weeks earlier in his final Test match, also at the SCG, with an impressive second innings 80 against India.)

  At 5 for 92, things were a bit grim, but Junior and I dug in and produced a game-changing 115 runs in just 12 overs. Junior went for 72, caught and bowled by Andy Bichel. I stayed out there as our last four batsmen came and went and reached 62 not out. In the end we fell just 37 runs short — not the send-off we would like to have given our departing legends but a gritty effort considering the way things had looked for a while there.

  We would go into the following summer without some of our most experienced figures: Steve and Mark Waugh; Michael Bevan, who had joined Tasmania; Michael Slater, who had retired after developing a very painful form of inflammatory arthritis in the spine; and Steve Rixon, who had gone to coach the English county side Surrey. We didn’t capitalise on our previous Shield victory. In fact, we only managed two wins in the whole tournament, against six losses and two draws, leaving us second-last on the ladder. We needed to shake things up, big time. It had been wonderful to play with cricketers as talented as the Waughs and those other big names, but it was time for a group of us still with the team to take on some of the responsibility we craved and carve out our own chapters within NSW cricket. As it turned out, being thrown into the deep end was exactly what the Blues needed and it proved the making of many of us, including me.

  In the off-season, with Adam Gilchrist home for the birth of one of his children, I travelled to Europe with the Australian one-day team for a couple of games against India and Pakistan intended to serve as preparation for an upcoming Champions Trophy tournament. Back at home, Trevor Bayliss, who had been assistant to Steve Rixon, took over the NSW coaching role. I’d known TB since he had coached the Colts squad I’d been part of in 1998–99. He had been pretty handy as a player back in his day, but as a coach he proved to be exceptional. He came in at just the right time — we had a clean slate and his style was perfect for the group.

  It was also the beginning of a new era for me. I probably wouldn’t have been ready to learn from TB the way I did any earlier in my career, but a decade after I’d made my first-grade debut I was primed to make a quantum leap, and he recognised that even when others couldn’t. One of his first decisions was to appoint me to serve as captain of the team when Simon Katich was away on international duty, which was a lot at that point. The board of Cricket NSW disagreed with his choice, feeling I was too inexperienced. But TB lobbied hard, saying that I was the one who would get the best out of the young squad. Eventually the board approved the appointment, though some of them remained deeply sceptical.

  TB really understood potential. In the same way that he’d seen something inside me and knew how to help me bring it out, he could see where the team needed to be and how we could get there. His expectations for us were high, but he knew that in order to meet them we needed to develop as individuals and as a group. The crucial word was accountability. A lot of us thought we understood accountability by this point. O
ver the previous couple of years, Steve Rixon and Steve Waugh had emphasised its importance countless times. Superficially we got it, but the inconsistency of our results revealed the truth: despite everything, we had still looked to our Test players to carry the load. When they’d been playing with us the mentality was, ‘Oh Bevo or the Waughs will get the runs,’ and by overly relying on them when they were on the scene we’d left ourselves with nothing to fall back on when they weren’t.

  There was a group of us young blokes, including Stuart Clark, Phil Jaques, Dom Thornely, Nathan Bracken, Michael Clarke and myself, who regarded ourselves as professionals but were in fact still playing with a carefree approach that we couldn’t afford now there was no senior group to lean on. I’d started out so strongly in my first year with NSW, but, if I was truthful, five years in I was selling myself short. I had the skills and I regarded myself as mentally tough. In many ways I was, but something was missing.

  True mental toughness gives you clarity under pressure, so that when the squeeze is put on in a game you don’t second-guess what you’re doing, you just continue to perform. Trevor’s message about accountability really hit home to me: it’s not about the runs you score or the wickets you take, it’s about the ability to get them under pressure and make them count. It should never be about getting a pretty 40 that you think looks good for a selector and will get you picked for the next game. It should be about turning that 40 into 80 and winning the game for your team. You can only really do that if you’re secure in your position, not looking over your shoulder the whole time worrying you’re going to be dropped, and TB gave us that security. He took the long view and his support didn’t waver, which gave us the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them.

  Our first Shield match of the 2004–05 season was against Queensland at the Gabba, where the wicket was completely different to the spin-friendly SCG. We’d lost there so often we expected to do so, putting us at a psychological disadvantage before play even started. We couldn’t operate that way anymore.

  As part of our preparation for the game, I talked to the team about paying respect to the past while taking responsibility for the future. We had the huge honour of representing a team that had included some of the all-time greats (including Keith Miller, who had died days earlier) but we couldn’t rest on that history. It was time to write our own story. That would begin with a new attitude to playing the Bulls. I said, ‘We’ve got to find a way to win here. Traditionally, we fluff around for a couple of days; they intimidate us a bit and get the best of us on the green wicket. But we’ve got to find a way to combat that. We’ve got to move the game forward and play the attacking brand of cricket NSW is known for.’

  We got off to a good start. But 1 for 89 turned into 2 for 89, then 3 for 89, then 4 for 89 as Andy Bichel tore through us, with Joe Dawes hot on his heels. I dug in for 66 and we were all out for 203. Then it was our bowlers’ turn to go to town, led by Matthew Nicholson and Nathan Bracken. Queensland went into their second innings chasing 240 for the win and we got them to 7 for 197 before their tail-enders, Bichel and Ashley Noffke, secured the win with two wickets and 22 balls to spare.

  Cricket NSW had originally arranged it so that we would fly home immediately after the game, but Trevor and I had been insistent about changing that and allowing the team to stay over. We had a plan in mind. At the end of the match I said to our young bowlers, ‘Well done. That was a really good effort.’ They looked a bit confused, replying, ‘But we lost.’ I said, ‘Yeah, we did. They were better than us today. Now we’re going to grab a beer and take it over to their rooms and talk to them.’ They said, ‘We can’t do that. We lost!’ I said, ‘Of course we can. I want you to talk to Andy Bichel and Jimmy Maher and spend a bit of time with them off the field.’ We went over and had a drink and a laugh and everyone relaxed.

  At our first training session back at the SCG we talked about what had happened after the game, how when you spend time with opposition players and have a beer with them you get to see they’re exactly the same as your side. They have their insecurities, they have good days and bad days, and the only way they can intimidate you is if you let them. It was a real revelation to the younger players, just as TB and I had hoped, and it marked a turning point for NSW. We didn’t take a backward step after that, losing only one more Shield game the entire season and winning six. Even when we drew, it was because we’d made a strategic decision to do so in order not to lose, after a win moved out of our reach.

  The ING Cup was a different story: we lost more than we won and finished last on the table. But those losses didn’t affect the incredible team dynamic we built over the course of that season. Seemingly small changes made a huge difference. One of the things I did straight away was encourage everyone to recognise and enjoy good performances in their teammates. Not by making a song and dance about it in team meetings, but in the natural way that happens when you relax together. Instead of picking up the kitbag and walking out at the end of a game, we started sitting down together just enjoying what we’d done.

  We were all going to have days when everything came together perfectly and days when nothing did. But if we could genuinely celebrate each other’s good days, my view was that our own bad days wouldn’t bog us down. I wanted the guy who’d got a ton or a five-for to leave feeling, ‘I did do something special today and my teammates recognised it.’ The following week if he got two ducks and someone else got 100, he’d be able to genuinely celebrate that. By the end of that season we would sit there for hours after a game, revelling in the camaraderie.

  With TB as a valuable sounding board, I found I had a knack for leadership. I’d always responded well to receiving feedback and I could take emotion out of the situation when it came to giving it. Trevor gave me an invaluable tip when he said, ‘When considering your message you have to realise that not everyone will be thinking like you. You might understand what you mean, but unless you put it in a way that’s clear to that person they can take something completely different from it.’ I found I really enjoyed finding the most effective way to communicate with each individual. Some needed a sympathetic ear, others needed tough love. You could only figure out the right approach by getting to know them as people, spending time with them over a meal or a coffee and figuring out what made them tick.

  Clear expectations were an absolute must. You had to set the standard at the start and not compromise; only then could everyone work for the same goal. Taking the emotion out of it helped enormously when I had to tell someone they weren’t performing well enough, but there were still times when it felt awkward. Even so, it had to be done and if it was done right everyone benefited. Dom Thornely was one of my best friends, but I had to take him aside early in the season and say, ‘Mate, I think you need to aim it up a bit. You’re going okay, but you’re missing those tough moments. You’re getting out at crucial times. You need to find a way to get through. It doesn’t mean you’ve got to get 150. It might mean getting a 60 to win a game or finishing the job off with a tail-end batter.’

  It was an uncomfortable conversation, but for the good of the team it needed to be said. In our next game Dom had some trouble with the short ball and got hit a bit, but he struggled through it for 90 and put us in a position where we could win. The following game we got into trouble against South Australia. At 4 for 1, we were gone, until Dom came out and hit 60 not out, winning us the match. Back at the hotel there was a knock on my door. It was Dom, standing there with a six-pack. We sat down and had a beer. In that typically blokey way, he said simply, ‘Thanks,’ and I replied, ‘No worries,’ and a full conversation’s worth of meaning passed between us. Dom went on to have a thousand-run year and get picked for his first Australian A series.

  There were definitely some characters on the team, including bowler Doug Bollinger, known as Bald Eagle. Energetic is an understatement. His class-clown nature could make him a pain in the change room, but he put in when he was on the field. Another part of captaincy was
learning how to deal with umpires, and I found Doug’s personality could be quite a useful tool in that regard. He’d sometimes go a bit too close to the line in attempting to intimidate a batsman, and in one game the umpire said to me, ‘Make sure you calm Doug down, mate, or he’ll get reported.’ If what Doug was saying had come out of the mouth of a more mature player like Stuart Clark, he’d already have been reported, but Bald Eagle’s reputation preceded him and I could use it to my advantage. I said to the umpire, ‘Come on, it’s Doug. We all know what he’s like.’ He said, ‘Yeah, okay, just keep an eye on him.’ I nodded and kept walking. As I passed Doug, I said out of the corner of my mouth, ‘Keep going, mate, you’re doing good.’ You use the weapons you have available.

  By mid-March 2005, heading into the Sheffield Shield final against Queensland, we were a very different team than we had been a year earlier. I was a wiser, tougher, more highly disciplined player, accountable for all my actions and ready to take on any challenge that could be thrown at me. I’d started to understand what made teams great and I knew the mark I wanted to leave.

  The final was at the Gabba and we walked out there feeling the Shield was ours to claim. We won the toss and I sent the Bulls in to bat. Our bowlers were unstoppable, with Nathan Bracken in sensational form, taking 6 for 27 as we kept Queensland to a first-innings total of 102. We had a lot of wickets fall cheaply too, but I was in the groove, reaching an undefeated 68 as part of our 188 total. The Bulls’ second innings total of 268, built around a Martin Love century, left us with an achievable target of 183, but they fought back hard. We were 7 for 158 in our second innings when my wicket fell, and 8 for 161 after keeper Wade Seccombe caught Matthew Nicholson off a Joe Dawes delivery.