My Family's Keeper

by Brad Haddin

  I hadn’t had a lot of sleep the few nights before the big day and I was riding a huge wave of emotion by the time the game got underway. We won the toss and Punter opted to bat. I was on the sheet at number eight, so I just sat there vibrating with tension. Simon Katich was making his return to the side two and a half years after his last Test. He and Phil Jaques opened and unfortunately Fidel Edwards got them both before the seventh over was done. But Punter hit his stride and had notched up 158 by the time he was caught just before stumps. Even though I hadn’t caught or hit a ball I was exhausted at the end of my first day as a Test cricketer, so worn out with nervous energy I actually got some sleep that night. With Mike Hussey, Brad Hodge and Andrew Symonds all getting over the half-century mark, we were 6 for 350 when I went in late morning on Day 2. I spent the first few overs getting a feel for the wicket and the bowling of Dwayne Bravo and Darren Sammy. Nine overs in, having picked up ones and twos and survived a couple of appeals, I felt like I was getting the measure of things as I pulled a Bravo ball over wide mid-on for four. But, unfortunately, in the following over, sitting on 11, I was caught by my rival wicketkeeper Denesh Ramdin when I went for the pull again, this time on a ball from Sammy that I should really have left alone.

  We finished our first innings after lunch on 431 and Brett Lee and Mitchell Johnson opened the bowling for us. I was excited to be finally getting to work as a Test keeper. I was moving well, jumping around, feeling good. In the 11th over, Johnno was bowling to Devon Smith. It was great keeping to Johnno because of the pace and the fear he put into batsmen, but the flip side was that sometimes there were days when you could not tell where the ball was going. He sprayed it wide down the leg side and I dived to get it. It wasn’t a catch; I was just trying to stop the ball. If it had been later in the game I wouldn’t have dived for it, but I was full of beans and away I went. The ball hit the tip of my right ring finger and I knew instantly I’d broken it.

  I wouldn’t have minded a few minutes to feel sorry for myself and kick some cans around, but that wasn’t going to happen. I straightened up and took a couple of breaths, trying to get on top of the pain and the fact that I’d broken my bloody finger in my debut Test. In the grandstand, Dad was watching closely, slightly apart from the rest of the group as usual. He turned to them and said, ‘Brad’s just broken his finger.’ He says he can always tell from my posture. Apparently I have a ‘tell’ that appears to everyone else as though I’m simply stretching: I bend my head a bit and push my hands into my hips. When I didn’t leave the field, Karina’s folks and our friends said, ‘No, surely not. If he had he’d be coming off.’ Dad said, ‘No, he’ll keep going; he won’t say a thing.’

  He was right. Well, almost right. I did turn to Mike Hussey, fielding at gully, and say quietly, ‘You wouldn’t believe it, I’ve just broken my finger.’ In most workplaces your colleague might ask if you were okay or see how they could help you. A cricket field full of players competing at the elite level is not most workplaces. Huss was just as aware as I was that there was no back-up wicketkeeper on the tour. The cleaned-up version of what he said is, ‘Don’t even think about going off; I’ll have to wicketkeep.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.’ There was nothing for it but to grit my teeth and get on with it. Seven overs later, I got my first Test dismissal, when Ramnaresh Sarwan attempted a cut on a ball from Stuart Clark and instead got an edge, sending it up high to my right. I jumped for it and got it. Broken finger or not, I wasn’t letting that one slip. It was the first of four catches I took that innings, as we got the Windies out for 312.

  I didn’t say anything to anyone, just played through the pain and did better in our second innings than I had in the first, contributing 23 before falling to an impressive catch from Runako Morton off a Bravo ball. The Windies kept us to 167 and seemed to have it all over us — a surprise to some since Australia were world number one at that point, while the West Indies had sunk to number eight. But the two Stuarts, Clark and MacGill, were on fire and we ended up winning the match by 95 runs.

  Stuart Clark was a very deserving Player of the Match, with a brilliant second innings 5 for 32. But Shivnarine Chanderpaul would have been the local fans’ choice. He’d been on 86 in the first innings when he tried to duck from a Brett Lee bouncer but copped the ball hard on the back of his helmet. He crashed to the ground and didn’t move for several long, sickening moments. Brett and I and his batting partner, Fidel Edwards, rushed to him, closely followed by the rest of the Australian team. The West Indies team doctor and physio raced out with a stretcher. Even though he was responding to our questions and was able to have a drink of water, everyone expected Chanderpaul to be carried off. But to the enormous relief of every single person present, none more so than our shaken bowler, he gathered himself, got to his feet, reassured the medical staff he was fit to continue, and batted on to 118, almost single-handedly dragging his team back into the game. (Precautionary scans after the game confirmed he was fine, thankfully.)

  At the end of the match I got the debutant’s privilege of having my family come to the terrace outside our change rooms for a celebratory drink. It’s great to share very special moments with the loved ones who have helped you get there, although in recent years it’s become common to have families around the team at all sorts of times, which I think can be distracting.

  The second Test was in Antigua. While a doctor had travelled with the team in India the previous year, we didn’t have one with us on this tour; we only had a team physiotherapist, Alex Kountouris. Following the flight from Jamaica to Antigua, Alex didn’t feel right. It turned out he was suffering from deep vein thrombosis, which is of course a potentially very dangerous condition and required his hospitalisation. With Alex out of the picture, any medical matters, including the injection of anaesthetic blocks, had to be treated by local doctors. Cricket Australia found someone they thought suitable to needle my finger and take care of the various other things that players needed.

  Sometimes I had to go to this doctor’s house overlooking the Caribbean; sometimes he came to the ground. The finger looked pretty gruesome by this point, nicely purple and swollen — unsurprising, since the bone had actually been broken in four places. One morning we were at the ground in the small room assigned to medical procedures. I had my finger out on the table as the doctor prepared the hypodermic when I heard Andrew Symonds yelling, ‘Someone find my camera, quick.’ I thought, I know where this is going, and sure enough, next minute Symo’s in the room calling out for the other players to join him: ‘C’mon, you’ve gotta get a load of this!’ The doctor was saying to me, ‘Now I’m about to inject it, so make sure your hand is stable there,’ while Symo jostled around trying to get the best angle for his shot. If you were ever in any kind of real trouble, your teammates would be there like a shot, doing anything they possibly could to help. But if they knew you were suffering but basically fine, they seized on the humour of the situation and made the most of it. I was exactly the same.

  Unfortunately, the finger got worse. I guess for some reason it didn’t like being stuffed in a sweaty glove for eight hours a day and slammed by 140kph balls. A day or two later I was at the doctor’s house, waiting for him to do the injection, when he suddenly leaned forward with a pair of surgical scissors and pulled my nail off. I couldn’t believe it. Not only did it hurt like hell, the whole top of the finger dropped down as soon as I lifted my hand. The nail had been the only thing holding it all in place. He said, ‘Oh, it’s broken.’ What?! How could he have been treating me for days and only be saying that now? He’d been sent the x-rays; he’d been briefed, hadn’t he? I said, ‘What the . . .’ He said, ‘I thought it would relieve the pressure. I should have left it.’

  Up to this point, the swelling had come from the impact, but within 24 hours of the nail bed being exposed it had developed an infection. If you think having an unprotected nail bed is agonising, you should try having an infected one, though I hope you never do. But I had waited
so long for this chance to play Test cricket I simply could not give it up now.

  Punter was hoping for a win from the match, but failing that would play for a draw, since he was determined not to lose the Frank Worrell Trophy. We won the toss and went in to bat. Kat was in brilliant form, getting his century on the first day, with Pup emulating him on Day 2. Punter and Binga both got their half-centuries and I got to 33 as part of our 479 total — the Windies feeling the lack of a spinner on the slow wicket after Chris Gayle had dropped out injured.

  Binga had an even better time with the ball, using the reverse swing to devastating effect and taking 5 for 59, including an amazing 19-ball sequence where he gave away only five runs. Chanderpaul was again the hero for the Windies, with help from Sarwan (who I’d been sure we had out on 92 — Stuart MacGill had found his rhythm and bowled a leg break that drew the batsman out of his crease; I had the bails off before he could blink, but the umpires sent it upstairs for review and it eventually came back as not out). The game ended in a draw.

  Those two Tests would be the only ones I played with Magilla, to my disappointment. The fact that I was in the Australian team was in no small part due to the experience I’d had keeping to him at NSW. He was a world-class spinner, but he was in a similar situation to the one I was in, spending a long time behind a game-dominating great — in his case, Shane Warne. Guys at state level outside NSW had okay spinners to work with, but I was lucky enough to have someone of his rare talent from the get-go. Keepers can be defined by how well they keep up to the stumps to spinners in general. Having to keep to such a quality spinner on a last-day SCG wicket, where the bounce is so inconsistent, is as hard a task as a glove-man can face anywhere. In addition, there is nothing better for a keeper than getting a leg-side stumping, where you can’t see the ball for half its passage and you have to trust that all the work you’ve put in will ensure you’re in the right position, and I had a lot of those off Magilla. What I learned keeping to him gave me the edge on every other aspiring wicketkeeper around the country. I would have liked to have had him around longer for that reason.

  Of course, he could be a very difficult and testy character; there’s no secret about that. He didn’t just challenge me as a keeper; he challenged me as his Blues captain too. I remember one game when we had to take six wickets in the last session to win against Tasmania, and we needed that win to get through to the Sheffield Shield final. Michael Bevan, an ex-NSW man who was now playing for Tasmania, was batting. Approaching a break in play I told a fielder to move in on the batsman’s off side. Magilla said, ‘I don’t want him there.’ I said, ‘We’ll leave him there for this over and try to get the bloke to do something different so we can get a wicket.’ He colourfully expressed the view that he would tell me where he wanted the field. We stepped to one side and had a few words on the field, and then some even more heated ones walking back to the change room at the break. He didn’t say a thing to me after we went back on the field (set the way I wanted), but I wasn’t worried about that even slightly, as long as he took those last six wickets — and he did.

  So he might not be someone I’d want to be trapped with on a desert island, but I’ve always been able to separate the game from my personal feelings. I’ve kept for some very talented bowlers over the years, from Glenn McGrath and Brett Lee to Mitchell Johnson and Ryan Harris, but Stuart MacGill is the one I enjoyed keeping for the most. However, by the time that West Indies tour rolled around he was 37, he’d been struggling with a knee injury and he’d lost his taste for pushing himself the way you have to in order to play at that level.

  I’d heard many players over the years say, ‘You’ll know when you know as far as retirement goes.’ We young blokes would ask, ‘What does that mean?’ They’d say, ‘You just stop wanting to do all those little things you have to do to get better. You lose the taste for it.’ I’d be thinking, That’s ridiculous. I’m never going to feel like that. As long as I can bend my knees to crouch behind the stumps, or curl my hands around a bat, I’m going to want to play. I would eventually find out they were right, of course, but in 2008 I was still as hungry as I could be — in the ways that mattered most, my career had only just started — and I wasn’t about to let a broken finger get in the way of that.

  The final Test was in Barbados. I bound the finger and continued to get the anaesthetic blocks and played on, working hard to compartmentalise the pain. Anaesthetic blocks don’t always work as well as you would hope and they pose their own challenges. At least when you’re wicketkeeping the glove helps the numbed fingers move as one (because the block also affects the fingers on either side of the broken one). However, when you’re batting, trying to put pressure on your grip hand without being able to feel your position is an interesting challenge. You have to continually flick glances down at the bat handle to make sure you’re where you need to be. Even so, I got 32 and 45 not out and took seven catches in all, an effort I would have been happy with whether I was injured or not, and we won the match by 87 runs.

  Unsure if I was going to be able to keep playing, Cricket Australia had dispatched New Zealand-born West Australian Luke Ronchi as a back-up keeper. Luke (who would go on to the unusual feat of representing two countries in international cricket after he moved back to New Zealand) stood in for me in the T20I, but I was back for the first ODI game in St Vincent on 24 June, hitting my half-century and taking three catches as well as a run out as part of our 84-run win.

  There were four ODIs to go and I tried to kid myself I could get through them, but the infection had become so bad that I couldn’t close my hand and the pain was excruciating. I had to make myself go to Ricky Ponting and tell him that I was out for the rest of the tour. It certainly wasn’t the way I’d pictured my first Test tour ending, but Punter reassured me that my 16 dismissals and 151 runs in the three Test matches showed that I was the right man for the job and he looked forward to having me back as soon as I was fit to play again.

  At home in Sydney my hand specialist, Dr Doug Wheen, confirmed that it would have been much, much better to have left the nail on; however, as it was now almost six weeks after the original break there was no point in surgery. We just needed to clear out the infection and let the bone finish healing.

  Regardless of the injury I was always going to be back from the Caribbean in plenty of time for our baby’s birth, although I was going to have to leave again very soon after. The enforced layoff gave me a bit more time with Karina before he arrived, which was nice. I knew the baby was a boy because I’d been with Karina at one of her ultrasound check-ups before I’d left for the West Indies, and when she popped out to use the bathroom I asked the sonographer. I didn’t have a preference either way; I just wanted to know. I’ve never been big on surprises. I’m happy to know what my Christmas presents are in advance; I’ll still be just as pleased on the day. Karina initially said she didn’t want to know the sex, and I had fun joking as she and her friends and family speculated on what she was having, saying one minute it was a boy and the next it was a girl. As the birth approached, Karina decided she wanted to know after all, and we decided on the name Zachary, giving him my middle name, James.

  I thought my finger was healed in time for three ODIs against Bangladesh in Darwin over the course of a week at the beginning of September, although in retrospect I should have left it longer. It was still angry-looking and painful but now that I’d finally made it into the team I wanted to play as much as possible. There wasn’t much of note about the games themselves, all of which we won easily. However, during our time in Darwin, Symo skipped a team meeting to go fishing and in response the leadership group and selectors left him off the tour to India for a four-match Test series due to start on 9 October. His absence would be felt.

  We were to fly out for India in the third week of September. Karina did what so many partners do and rearranged things around the tour schedule, opting to have a scheduled caesarean in order to give me seven days with the baby before I had to go. I was
present for Zac’s 12 September birth, which was joyous and thrilling on a level that cricket couldn’t possibly ever match. It’s been said many times before, but there is no greater privilege than to be part of bringing a new life into the world. I’d never felt prouder than I did holding him for the first time.

  He was a small baby and is still little for his age — just like I was. He’s always had a lovely temperament, but for the first two and a half years that child did not sleep for more than a few hours at a time and he never really wanted to eat. It was very hard on Karina, who was to all intents and purposes a single parent to a brand new baby, although both her mother and mine helped as much as possible.

  In fact, it was often a lot harder than Karina let on, as she tried to shield me from the emotional ups and downs in order to let me focus on performing at the highest level so that I could have a genuine Test cricket career. We knew it wasn’t forever. In most other careers longevity means decades; in professional sport it means years — if you’re lucky. It is a time when a lot has to go by the wayside in single-minded pursuit of a goal. However, all going well, what can be a few very tough years allow you to set up your family for everything that follows.

  There were sacrifices all round, as there are in any professional athlete’s life. My brother Michael and his fiancée, Amy, had set their wedding date for November, before their relocation to the UAE, and wanted me to be a groomsman. After my call-up into the Australian team, Michael talked to me about changing the date to ensure that I could be there. But as Karina and I knew firsthand from trying to organise our own wedding, there isn’t a ‘good time’ — it’s always cricket season somewhere. I told Michael that they had to pick the date that worked best for them, not think about me. If I was at home I wouldn’t miss it for the world, but if I couldn’t be there physically I would be in spirit. Being as close and family-oriented as we are, it was hard not to be there for that wonderful moment in my brother’s life, no question, but that same closeness meant he understood perfectly that I couldn’t be.