My Family's Keeper

by Brad Haddin

  I went from feeling that the game was in safe hands to taking my pads off deep in the Gabba change rooms sure that our collapse was going to cost us the win. I quickly made my way to the viewing room so I was at least there to share the pain of the loss. Queensland were also sure at that point that they had it won, but in one of the most exciting finishes I’ve ever been part of, our tail-enders Bracks and Stuart MacGill found 20 of the 22 runs we needed. Then in near darkness Nathan sent an Andy Bichel ball off to the right of the keeper. Wade had his glove to the ball and it was all over for us . . . except he dropped it and suddenly we were back in with a chance. The tension was almost unbearable. I found myself dry retching over a bucket, my nerves were so bad. But Magilla kept his cool and swatted a Joe Dawes ball off his hip to take the final two runs needed to claim the match and the Shield. Trevor Bayliss very rarely showed emotion — it was one of his strengths as a coach — but even he jumped up and embraced everyone around him.

  It was the perfect end to a perfect season, which still ranks right up there as one of the most enjoyable and rewarding I have ever played. Sometimes lightning strikes and you come across a group of players who just click, working together with the same level of passion for the same cause. That’s how it was with the Blues that year. There’s a saying that a champion team beats a team of champions, and we were living proof.

  I finished the summer with an average of almost 70 in Shield games and 45 in the domestic one-dayers. I not only played again for Australia A, I captained the team as we won one game against Pakistan and lost another by just 13 runs (though I was satisfied I’d given it everything, reaching 129 off 124 balls). That led to the opportunity to return to Australia’s one-day team for three games over a 10-day period, when Adam Gilchrist had to withdraw because of a knee injury. All three were wins for Australia — two over Pakistan and one over the West Indies. I’d taken the field for my country before, but now I could see that I hadn’t understood the difference between playing for Australia and being an Australian cricketer in the deepest sense. After that incredible summer I really got it. When the selectors named me as part of the squad for the upcoming Ashes tour of England, I was ready.

  CHAPTER 11

  LEARNING FROM THE BEST

  PEOPLE WHO ARE OUTSIDE the sport have asked me if being part of the squad for the 2005 Ashes was frustrating since, as expected, I didn’t play in the series. I know where they were coming from . . . sort of. They were imagining it was like being a kid with your face pressed up against the window of a closed lolly shop. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to me in cricket up to that point, and I’d been capped 10 times for Australia’s one-day team.

  As a kid growing up in the sport, your dreams follow a hierarchy — playing for your state, then above that being selected for your country, and above that earning the Baggy Green cap of a Test cricketer, and above that the holy grail: playing in an Ashes series. It’s the pinnacle in cricket and I would argue it is up there with the best any sport has to offer. The rivalry between Australia and England has such a rich history, full of stories of heroes and villains, great courage and larger-than-life characters, wins against the odds and devastating losses. Coming up through the game you hang on stories about Don Bradman’s 1948 Invincibles; Ian Chappell’s so-called ‘Ugly Australians’ changing the game in 1974–75; Allan Border leading what the British media dubbed ‘the worst side to ever tour England’ in 1989 and showing the Poms how it was done 4–0; Michael Slater in 1993 getting a half-century on debut and a brilliant century in the following Test; and Mark Taylor turning his career around in the 1997 series.

  The theatre behind the Ashes is like nothing else — everything is heightened to the nth degree. It feels like everyone in both countries is glued to the action and has an opinion to share. The scrutiny is unbelievable. Where you might get five or 10 journalists at a media conference after some Test matches, you’ll get 50 at the end of a day of Ashes competition. As for the players, you can see how much it means to each and every one to go into an Ashes campaign. Now I was part of that tradition, having earned my place fair and square with big performances over a massive summer. I was part of the squad alongside Ricky Ponting, Justin Langer, Matthew Hayden, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath. What a buzz!

  Karina and I talked about whether she should come over to England to meet up with me, but we decided against it. We had bought our first home together, in the inner-west suburb of Cabarita, and had invited a good friend of ours, Nick Berry, to come and stay for a while. Nick, a few years younger than me, had moved from Cowra to play cricket at the Eastern Suburbs club and we wanted to help him settle into Sydney life. Besides which, Karina had her work and her own sporting commitments, and I didn’t want anything to distract me. It was important for me to be able to show everyone involved how much it meant to me to be there, how much I appreciated what a special experience this was.

  The tour ran from July to September and despite later media chatter, in my experience there was no ‘us and them’ between the Ashes players and those who were there as back-ups. I felt fully accepted by the team. I knew my place and was respectful of the service the senior players had already given their country, but I had a voice like everyone else. Everyone was encouraged to have a say, in the most constructive way. If I saw something that I thought could help the team I had the confidence to say to Ricky Ponting or his vice-captain, Gilly, or coach John Buchanan, ‘What do you reckon about this?’

  In Australia, you get from game to game in a plane, but the great thing about travelling around England is that you travel together by bus up and down the country. It’s a relaxed time when you build good friendships and enjoy each other’s company. I had a lot of great conversations on those rides, shooting the breeze about life in general but also talking in detail about how to approach certain playing conditions or how key moments had changed the outcome of specific games.

  I was a sponge, soaking it all up: the top players’ work ethic; the way they prepared for a match; how they dealt with pressure within the game and coped with the constant commentary about their performance; and how they handled the big occasions on field and off (including meeting the Queen, as we did on that tour). What struck me was how players of the calibre of Haydos never stopped learning about the game. You’d think they might rest on their laurels, but the greats stayed hungry and welcomed the chance to do things better.

  That tour was also where I got one of the only imaginative nicknames I’ve ever been given. Australian cricket is renowned for some of the best nicknames around. Tugga Waugh is an all-time classic (just say it out loud). Dizzy Gillespie isn’t bad, nor is Bacchus Marsh. Mine were much less interesting: I was always just Hadds or BJ, except to Haydos and the aforementioned Jason/Dizzy who had a liking for a radio comedy character called Guido Hatzis. Somehow ‘Haddin’ reminded them of ‘Hatzis’ and to this day I’m ‘Guido’ to them. But other than that I was plain vanilla all the way, until on that Ashes tour Warnie decided my hairdo resembled Rod Stewart’s and dubbed me Rockin’ Rod. (That nickname didn’t stick beyond the tour, but a decade later I helped give Nathan Lyon one that’s still with him. It came about when he set a new record for most wickets taken by an Australian off-spinner. We knew from the commentators that the record was coming up. When he got it I called out, ‘Well done, Goat!’ — a cry that was promptly taken up by some of the other blokes. Now, Nathan’s one of my best mates but he’s a nervous sort of character. He said, ‘What? Goat?’ I said, ‘Mate, Greatest Of All Time. GOAT.’ It might have died at this point, but young Nathan made a tactical error. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said. Well, it was on then. A bunch of us started using the nickname at every opportunity. It was quickly picked up on the stump mic and from there it was only a matter of time before a columnist with space to fill followed up on it. Sure enough, Nathan fronted a press conference all ready to talk about the day’s play only to be asked, ‘Where does the name “Goat” come
from?’ You’re welcome, mate.)

  Going into the Ashes series, Punter predicted it would be the closest since 1989, when Australia’s most recent winning streak had started, and he was right. England had climbed back from the terrible state they’d been in for so long and developed talented players, including Kevin Pietersen and Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff. They were in for the fight, although we dominated the opening Test at Lord’s. That match gave me a couple of firsts. One was my first taste of the famed Lord’s lunches. Forget the usual ham salad sandwiches; it’s like a restaurant up there, with steak, prawns, an array of desserts and anything else you might desire. No wonder the bowlers love it when it’s a batting day at Lord’s — all the dieticians’ work went out the window during that stop.

  Much more significantly, after we won the match I got my first experience of our revered victory song, ‘Under the Southern Cross I Stand’. The singing was led by Justin Langer, who made it plain just how much it meant. Being part of that song, which the team sings after winning a Test match or claiming an ODI series, is one of the most special moments you have as an Australian cricketer. The emotions are intense and I found the desire to repeat the experience positively addictive.

  I played in the tour game against Worcestershire that followed the First Test and felt even more reassured that I had earned my place on the tour after I top-scored with 94. The Second Test started three days later and in the pre-match warm-up at Edgbaston, Glenn McGrath went down hard after stepping on a stray cricket ball, resulting in torn ankle ligaments that prevented him from playing. The match turned into an unbelievably hard-fought contest, with England winning by just two runs. Then it was my turn to cop an injury, on my knee.

  Unsurprisingly, given the stance in which we spend so many hours, wicketkeepers are well known for knee problems. They’ve plagued many of the best, including Gilly. I’ve had them too; however, they’ve never been the direct result of keeping. By the time I went to England I’d already had two previous injuries, each requiring surgery. The first one happened in training with the Blues. We were playing soccer and I was trying to stop the ball and turn the motion into a scissor-kick when my knee went from under me and I was carried off the field to the ironic applause of my amused teammates. The second was also a Blues incident, this time at a team-bonding paintball day. Put 20 ultra-competitive athletes together in that environment and things are bound to get a bit hectic. I came up over a rise to find four of the ‘enemy’ coming at me. In the heat of the moment, I took a flying leap sideways, rolling out of range. A couple of days later in a trial match I felt something locking in my knee. The physio took a look and told me I’d torn my meniscus — the cartilage ‘shock absorber’ that sits between the bones. He asked what I could have done to hurt it. I sheepishly mentioned paintball and he just shook his head.

  This time, in Birmingham, I was with a couple of the guys getting dropped back at the hotel in a taxi after a team dinner. I got out and walked behind the car, but the driver accidentally put it into reverse and came back into me just on the side of the knee. I fell down but was able to get back up again. He was extremely apologetic. I said, ‘I’m right,’ and I thought I was when I went up to my room and lay down on the bed to watch a movie. About an hour later when I tried to stand, however, the knee had seized up. I was sent to London to get a scan, which revealed it wasn’t as bad as the paintball tear, though it eventually also needed surgery. (I ended up being too busy playing to get it done for a year. In the meantime I managed with a combination of short-term pain relief and physio followed by intensive conditioning work with trainer Stuart Karppinen, which further built up the supporting muscles in the leg and took the load off the knee.)

  Stakes were high for the Third Test at Old Trafford. It wasn’t looking good for us by Day 3, but Ricky Ponting put in a huge Man of the Match effort to claw back a draw. It was my turn to run drinks at that incredibly suspenseful point in the game but the call went out that none of us were to move, for fear of putting the mockers on. I’m not one for sporting superstitions myself, but quite a few players are and I wasn’t about to upset the apple cart, so I stayed put until Punter’s 156 was done.

  Partway through the tour I became concerned about my match readiness. I’d got on the plane in peak form but I wasn’t getting the catching practice I felt I needed. So I got permission from John Buchanan to go down to Surrey and spend three days working intensively on my keeping with Steve Rixon. That did me a world of good, although it might have left me a bit too relaxed since, for the first and last time in my career, I missed the team bus on the first day of the Fifth Test. That is of course an absolute no-no, but fortunately everyone was so pre-occupied with their preparation that no-one noticed my absence. With a hefty financial inducement my cab driver was able to get me to The Oval players’ entrance just as my teammates were filing in, and I wove myself into the line as if I’d been there all along.

  Still, the work I did with Stumper set me up perfectly for my next challenge — captaining an Australia A team to Pakistan for a mix of longer-form games and one-dayers. Stuart Clark, Brad Hodge and I had to depart London on the second day of that final Test, so we didn’t see the finale of the game, which ended in a draw, giving England the overall Ashes victory 2–1. But we’d seen enough to agree with the fans and sportswriters who declared it an enthralling series that reinvigorated the whole Ashes competition.

  The first Australia A game, a four-dayer in the northern Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, started on the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It was a fairly hairy time to be in that part of the world, with the Americans hunting for Osama Bin Laden, and plenty of local unrest. The tour was a chance for the selectors to assess how far off players were from being able to step up to the national side. Despite big efforts from Phil Jaques, Nathan Bracken and Shane Watson, Pakistan A were just too good for us in the conditions of the first game and we lost by seven wickets. Next up was another four-day match in Rawalpindi; then we were to move to Lahore for three one-dayers. Unfortunately, I broke a finger on the third day of the Rawalpindi game (which ended in a draw).

  I’d stopped counting broken bones by this point; they were just an inconvenient cost of doing business. I spoke to selector Trevor Hohns about it and offered to stay on the trip, telling him I could play with the injury. But he said, ‘It’s fine, you’re not on this tour to prove anything; we already know what you can do. If Gilly gets busted, you’ll play, so just go home and get yourself ready.’ I can’t say I was sorry to leave Pakistan, particularly after my final night with the team, in Lahore, when there were two bomb blasts, one in a spot our bus had just passed.

  Back in Australia, the Blues, as defending Sheffield Shield champions, got off to a good start in the 2005–06 season. We won our first game, in October, and the two that followed, but we couldn’t maintain the momentum. After that came three draws and four consecutive losses, meaning we finished at the bottom of the table. A large part of the problem was that the team wasn’t coping well with the disruption of players coming and going as a number of us were called out to international duty; without consistency from game to game it was too easy for the team to lose its way within a game.

  Yet again it was a very different story in the one-day domestic tournament (its last year under the ING Cup name), which we won for the fourth time in six seasons. The February final against SA was a real nail-biter. We looked to have it all our way after keeping the Redbacks to just 154, but then Shaun Tait cut loose, taking six of our wickets for just 41. Suddenly we were shaky on 9 for 149, with five needed to win. But our tail-enders, Moises Henriques and Stuart MacGill, saved the day, with the winning run coming from Stuart — a leg glance off Darren Lehmann — just as it had the previous year in the Sheffield Shield. It was one of the most memorable games I’ve ever played because there was such a great sense of pride in the fact that such an inexperienced team had been able to come together so effectively. We felt that here, at least, we’d done the Blues proud.


  I was very conscious that the next World Cup was only a year away, in March 2007, and I wanted to put myself in the best possible shape to be considered for inclusion in the squad. I was determined not to lose fitness during the off-season; in fact, I decided to increase my already intensive workout routine. I sought out fitness trainer and boxing specialist Christian Marchegiani and told him I wanted to be pushed to the edge. He was the right bloke for the job. I did endless hours of boxing, skipping, medicine balls and weights. It was hard and it hurt and I loved it. I was so fit I felt like I was made of iron.

  In July 2006, I led an Australian A team that included Shaun Tait, Phil Jaques, Brad Hodge and Shane Watson against India A and Pakistan A in a ‘Top End’ series, in Cairns and Darwin, of four-day matches, one-dayers and the relatively new Twenty20 format — although Australia was far still behind countries like India in understanding what the new format had to offer and how popular it could become.

  Another wonderful opportunity came my way when I was selected for an ODI tour. The previous summer I had filled in for Gilly in a couple of ODIs against Sri Lanka and South Africa. I was always made welcome and it was terrific to get the experience — I certainly never took the privilege of playing for Australia for granted — but at the same time I was very conscious that it was a stand-in arrangement. I’d typically get a call on, say, a Wednesday telling me I was needed in Melbourne on the Friday. I’d fly down, play, and be on an 8 o’clock flight back the next morning to get ready for a state game. However, this time I’d been selected in my own right.

  There had been unhappy rumblings from a number of quarters about how heavily international players’ schedules were being loaded. Gilly was one of those who felt that teams weren’t being given enough rest time and that performances would inevitably suffer, so he was happy to sit out the tri-series against the West Indies and India, which was to be held in Malaysia in an attempt by cricket bodies to create new markets for the game. That gave me the opportunity to be an integral part of the team for the entire tour, and knowing that I had time to prepare properly and would have the whole tour to demonstrate I was good enough to play at the international level meant that I went into it in a much more relaxed state than I had for previous ODIs.