My Family's Keeper

by Brad Haddin

  There were some absolute class players on the Indian side — Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid among them — but there were also a couple of guys with big mouths and hot heads who ended up drawing attention to that tour for all the wrong reasons. They were the bowlers Shanth Sreesanth, a newcomer, and Harbhajan Singh, who I’d watched help India win at Eden Park in 2001. We won the toss in that first game and chose to bat and when I walked out to the wicket Sreesanth was having a good day, having already dispatched Matthew Hayden, Brad Hodge and Andrew Symonds for a combined total of 41 (Gilly had also gone, for 12). He greeted me by bowling a beamer, though he did apologise for it. Michael Clarke and I turned things around with a 144-run partnership, with Pup’s 130 and my 69 helping our side to a 307 total. Indian captain MS Dhoni blamed a batting-friendly pitch for his team’s inability to pull us back, although the rain that washed the match out meant he didn’t have to put that to the test.

  The second game, three days later, was in Kochi, which just happened to be Sreesanth’s hometown. He went all out to be noticed and he succeeded. India won the toss and decided to field. Once again we found ourselves on the back foot early, at 3 for 66, but once again we fought back and this time there was no poor weather to leave any room for doubt. Haydos dug in for 75 and Andrew Symonds and I both reached a score of 87 (mine not out) to contribute to a total of 306. They had no answer to our bowlers, with Brad Hogg and Pup leading the charge, and were all out for 222. I had the interesting experience of fielding on the boundary and getting to interact with the passionate Indian fans, which was fun. At game’s end I was thrilled to be named Player of the Match.

  But unfortunately, if understandably, it wasn’t determination or achievement that everyone was interested in talking about at the end of the game, it was the rancour and aggro that had run through it, centring on a particularly stupid piece of behaviour from Sreesanth. At one point during my partnership with Symo I’d gone for one of Sreesanth’s deliveries and missed. He’d been doing his best to get under our skins the whole time but I’d heard it all before and from better than him. Symo, however, wanted to give me an encouraging word, so as Sreesanth picked up the ball he started to walk down to my end, at which point Sreesanth pulled the bails off his stump and yelled out, ‘Howzat, run out!’ Now, I have happily claimed the wicket of batsmen who were out of their ground during play, but that’s not what this was. Even Dhoni initially thought Sreesanth’s ridiculous move was just a poor attempt at a joke. It was downright embarrassing, but Sreesanth didn’t pull his head in; if anything, he got worse.

  The tension kept building and Harbhajan had already got himself in a lather when he came out to bat. He kept saying to Gilly, ‘Do you want a fight? Do you want a fight?’ Gilly, who, with Punter still out of action, was acting captain, just kept his cool. But, after being stumped for four off a Michael Clarke ball, Harbhajan made a show of standing out in the middle pointing his bat around the place. Then he complained afterwards that he was the one who had been hard done by, having been subjected to ‘vulgar’ abuse. What he and the more sensible members of the Indian team had been subjected to was an 84-run loss.

  Punter was back in the team for the third game, in Hyderabad, and either Brad Hodge or I had to go to make room. This time it was me who sat it out, and I was totally comfortable with that. I understood that I was on the tour as a spare batsman. My time would come. We won by 47 runs, in a game where the umpire kept a tight lid on things to prevent any more on-field blow-ups. I sat out game four as well, as did Sreesanth, although even as 12th man he still managed to make trouble, getting in Symo’s face as he went out to bat and again when he returned to the pavilion. India scraped out an eight-run win, their first of the series.

  In the next match, in Vadodara in the northwestern state of Gujarat, the problem wasn’t on the field, it was with the crowd. As Mitchell Johnson and Adam Gilchrist tore through India, with Johnno getting his first international five-for and Gilly notching up a record fifth instance of six dismissals in a one-day innings, Symo, who is of Afro–Caribbean descent, was fielding on the boundary. A section of the crowd started making monkey noises. It seemed like a clear-cut instance of racism, but the local authorities claimed that the spectators hadn’t been making monkey sounds: they’d been doing a religious chant in response to their team’s heavy loss.

  I played again in the sixth game, in Nagpur, and was out in the middle with Symo as he channelled his feelings about everything that had happened on the tour so far into a match- and series-winning stand. Our 75-run partnership was a crucial part of Australia’s 18-run win. There was extra satisfaction in the knowledge that Symo’s eventual 107 not out came after Sreesanth was unable to hold the ball he top-edged off Harbhajan when he was on just two. Moments like that are great little victories within the wider game.

  In Mumbai for the final game I got my own second chance when I was dropped at deep midwicket, but moments later Murali Kartik got me lbw with an arm ball. Kartik claimed five other wickets and then was half of a tail-end partnership that won India the game. But once again there were ‘monkey’ taunts from the crowd and, even worse, Harbhajan said it directly to Symo on the field, as Symo told us after the game. As a team, we discussed what to do about it. Symo’s choice was to go and see Harbhajan in India’s change room, where Harbhajan apologised and said it wouldn’t happen again and offered a handshake — although he later denied the conversation had ever taken place and famously resorted to vile name-calling again on India’s tour of Australia just a few months later.

  The tour finished with a T20I. India had won the World Twenty20 comp in South Africa the previous month after knocking us out in the semi-final; both the team and their home crowds regarded as a huge deal, whereas to us Twenty20 was the hit-and-giggle format. They thrashed us in the tour-ending T20I in Mumbai on 20 October, three days before my 30th birthday. To our bemusement they seemed to feel that it made up for losing the ODI series. Our attitude was, ‘Whatever you say, fellas.’ In fact, the Indian players were keenly aware of the new Indian Premier League (IPL), which offered huge contracts to players for the Twenty20 format. Australian players would eventually realise the opportunities there too, but at the time we still viewed Twenty20 as a novelty.

  The tour was a big experience for me and the intensity really was a shock to the system. Senior players talked about coming back from India completely wiped out, mentally drained, and that’s exactly how I found myself. I could do little other than sleep for a week until the batteries recharged.

  I’d missed the first game of the 2007–08 Sheffield Shield tournament, but I was back for the second, in late October. At the end of the previous season I’d told the NSW board that I wanted to step down from the captaincy role in order to be able to concentrate fully on my game. Captaincy is a privileged position, not something you should ever put your hand up or lobby for. I’d been honoured to have been asked to do it for NSW and I was pleased to have had success in the role, but it wasn’t something I’d ever wanted to do long term. In my view it’s too hard for a wicketkeeper to captain over an extended period. While we keepers have (literally) the best view of the game, we have too much else going on. I think keepers make good vice-captains. To last in the role of keeper, fundamentally you need to be a good bloke. There’s only one of us in the team; we have to get along with everyone. The parts of captaincy I enjoyed most were related to that: knowing how to get the best out of people and bring a team together. But those are things you can contribute as vice-captain without having to deal with the other demands of captaincy, including selection.

  So, going up against Queensland at the SCG, I could leave all the captaincy issues to Simon Katich and pour everything into my performance. It was a batsman’s paradise out there. The Bulls won the toss and, to no-one’s surprise, chose to bat. Matthew Hayden hit a massive 179 and we were 316 behind by stumps on the second day, but the game was a long, long way from over. Kat was already on 88 when I went out at number six
. We proceeded to put on a 62-over 334 partnership, before Ashley Noffke got me lbw on 123. Kat amassed 306 before Noffke eventually got him too. We’d answered Queensland’s 467 with 601 of our own. Jimmy Maher declared at 7 for 398 in their second innings, and we batted for eight overs to make the draw official.

  We had two more Shield draws and didn’t lose a match the entire season (unlike the Ford Ranger Cup, where we finished last), with scorecards reading, ‘NSW won by an innings and 35 runs’, ‘NSW won by 9 wickets’, ‘NSW won by an innings and 162 runs’ and so on. We won the final against Victoria in equally emphatic style, taking it by 258 runs, and I finished the season with three centuries and one half-century in the seven games I’d played.

  I’d missed the other games because of being called away to four ODIs where, in recognition of the performances I was now consistently delivering, I’d been selected as a batsman, playing alongside Adam Gilchrist as I’d done in India. I did, however, end up wicketkeeping in his stead when he was rested in the final Chappell–Hadlee Trophy game, which it was our turn to host. (One of the games was washed out, but we won both the others, reclaiming the trophy after the previous year’s drubbing.) Another of the ODIs was a loss to Sri Lanka (I was out for seven) and the remaining two were against India (one was washed out and in the other I was stumped by Dhoni off a ball from Harbhajan Singh on five).

  But in much of the coverage the results in the Australia vs India games in both Test and ODI formats took second place to the tensions on the field. As has been well documented elsewhere, Harbhajan Singh in particular triggered some ugly moments, bringing back the spectre of racial abuse that Andrew Symonds had faced in India. Commentators, including Peter Roebuck, reacted by heaping criticism on the Australian team and painting the Indian side as innocent victims. The Australian cricket authorities had the chance to step in and make things right but seemed to be more concerned about the business implications. It was sickening to watch all this unfold from a distance, knowing these guys personally. Symo was as good a team man as I’d ever played with. He lived and breathed the team and always put it first. That made it all the harder to see him and Ricky Ponting left hanging. Ricky has said Symo was never the same player after that summer, and it’s hard to argue with him.

  As the season unfolded, speculation about Adam Gilchrist’s retirement reached fever pitch. It seemed to be all anyone other than those closest to me wanted to talk to me about or, more accurately, talk at me about. Out at the pub, at a barbecue, at a grade match, people kept on offering their opinions and I kept closing the conversations down as politely as possible (despite my desire just to tell them to shut the hell up). I’d try to palm them off with generic statements like, ‘Well, who knows what will happen.’ If that didn’t work I’d attempt to change the subject. If they just kept on, as many did, I’d lie and say, ‘Look, I’m too old now anyway.’ That usually did it.

  Only Gilly himself had the right to say when it was time to go, and during the Adelaide Test against India at the end of January 2008 he came to his decision. When I reached for my ringing phone on the Test’s third day and saw Gilly’s name displayed, I knew my world was about to change.

  CHAPTER 12

  A CHARACTER-BUILDING YEAR

  ADAM GILCHRIST HAD BEEN going back and forth in his mind about retiring for a long period, as he revealed later. When the Adelaide Test started on Thursday, 24 January 2008, he was expecting to play for at least another 10 months and said so publicly. But by the end of the second day he had decided it was time to go. He broke the news to Ricky Ponting that night, and the following day, after telling his teammates and other key people, he made the thoughtful gesture of phoning me to let me know of his decision before going public. I congratulated him on a wonderful career and said, ‘You’ve changed the way wicketkeepers are perceived around the world. You should be very proud of that. He replied, ‘Well, it’s your turn now. Get ready to be the next Australian wicketkeeper.’

  It was true that the consistency of my performance had put me in the box seat. All the effort I’d put in over the past five years to make myself the obvious choice to succeed Gilly had come to fruition. But the selectors would make up their own minds and they were bound to weigh up all the possible options, including Ryan Campbell, Wade Seccombe and Darren Berry. I just needed to hang tight and not get ahead of myself.

  It had been unfolding as a huge week even before Gilly’s call, with Karina confirming two days earlier that she was pregnant with our first child. There was another cause for celebration in the family, with my brother Michael’s engagement party set to start just a couple of hours after Gilly’s call. Walking into the party, only Karina and I, my parents, my brothers and their partners knew what had happened; Gilly had not yet started his media conference in Adelaide. I had my phone switched off and most of the guests had muted theirs, but we knew as soon as the news broke: people all around the room were checking the phones that had been vibrating in their pockets or bags, then looking over at me. I didn’t respond. This was Michael and Amy’s night.

  It took a few weeks for the selectors to make their decision, but finally Cricket Australia General Manager Michael Brown called to say yes, they were handing the gloves to me. I was going to become only the 400th person to play for Australia in more than 130 years of Test cricket history. It’s a nice round number, 400, but I wouldn’t have minded if it wasn’t — it’s what those numerals represent that counts. Gilly decided that while Adelaide, his 96th Test, would be his last, he would play out the rest of the summer’s one-dayers in the triangular series featuring India and Sri Lanka. I made the most of the opportunity to talk shop with him as I played alongside him in three of those games and he was generous with his advice and help, as always.

  I would have made my Test debut in Pakistan had the tour gone ahead as planned in March, but it was cancelled amid mounting security concerns that had led the Department of Foreign Affairs to warn Australians against unnecessary travel to the region. But everything was fine for the May tour to the West Indies. Dad had always said that if and when I made my Test debut he would take the whole family to see it. He jokingly grumbled about why I couldn’t debut in Sydney or even Perth . . . no, it had to be all the way over on the other side of the world. In fact, they wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

  I flew over with the team, of course, following our pre-tour camp. Karina, who was 25 weeks’ pregnant, her sister and their parents and my parents and brothers and Amy all came. They made a holiday of it, with stops in the US along the way to Kingston, Jamaica, where the first match would be played.

  The tour consisted of the three Tests in the Frank Worrell Trophy, a T20I, then five ODIs, with a four-day warm-up game against a local ‘Select XI’ the week before our first Test. On the morning of this game it became apparent that everyone was expecting me to wear the Baggy Green cap that had been brought along for me, just as they would be wearing theirs. I didn’t want to be a troublemaker, but no way could I go along with that. The Baggy Green belongs to Test cricketers. I would not be a Test cricketer until I made my Test debut the following week. It was going to be a very special moment and one I had waited a long time for. I couldn’t just chuck on the cap now like it meant nothing, and I said so to Ricky Ponting.

  Punter discussed it with team manager Steve Bernard and, not wanting the team to take the field in an assortment of headgear, decided we’d wear our blue training caps for the first day’s play. The caps carried the logo of the sponsor, VB, which really didn’t register too much with anyone present. But back home some people couldn’t wait to grab the wrong end of the stick and wave it around, fuming in the media about how we’d supposedly disgraced Australia by giving in to the sponsor’s demands to wear their gear. So what if that wasn’t the truth? It was particularly disappointing that some of these commentators were former Test players who should have well understood what it meant to earn the right to wear the Baggy Green. (Wisely, Cricket Australia decided to come up with a solu
tion that would avoid the situation in future, and ever since then players who are awaiting their debut have travelled with the Australia A Baggy Green, which has a different emblem to the real thing.)

  After all that kerfuffle, you’d hope the experience of having the Baggy Green bestowed on me a week later was pretty special — and it was. The first game was at Sabina Park on 22 May 2008. Before the warm-up the team gathered in a circle on the field and Ricky Ponting said a few brief but meaningful words welcoming me to this very special club. It was a profound moment for me, the culmination of all the hard work and sacrifices not just from me but from everyone around me over the past 20 years: every time Dad didn’t collapse on the sofa exhausted at the end of a long day but came out to throw the ball to me instead; every time Mum got up early to drive me to some distant carnival; every time Karina went to family celebrations alone because I was interstate or overseas; every time a teammate or a coach or a trainer went the extra mile for me; and every time I fooled my exhausted body into giving just a little bit more — it all came to fruition then and there.

  That’s why players and ex-players still reminisce about the day they got their Baggy Green cap. For nearly all of us, it’s one of the most treasured possessions we could ever have. It certainly is for me. I’m not big on memorabilia, not one of those guys who want to take stumps or swap shirts at the end of a game. There are only two keepsakes from my career that really matter to me — my Baggy Green and my Baggy Blue, kept in all their unwashed and battered glory in the special bags in which they came, on the outside of which are embroidered the player’s name and number, inextricably linked.