by Brad Haddin
I was away in India for almost three months. The tour was not a great one for Australia. With two losses and two draws, India claimed the Border–Gavaskar Trophy. Over the previous couple of years, the once invincible Australian side had said goodbye to Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Justin Langer, Damien Martyn and Adam Gilchrist. Ricky Ponting is the best captain I ever played under, a wonderful leader of men who inspired the people around him to want to be better. But, although for the most part he did an excellent job of hiding it, he was struggling on that tour, coming under relentless criticism from Indian and Australian commentators alike, which I thought was unwarranted.
The mood on the field was often tense. In the second innings of the First Test in Bangalore Shane Watson and I fought hard to bring the game back our way with a batting partnership in which I got 35 not out. But much more attention was given to my run-in with Zaheer Khan, who decided to wave his bat at my head after we had a difference of opinion about the level of precipitation and whether it required stopping play. Harbhajan Singh was once again pushing far over the line from gamesmanship to provocation. It felt to me as though the previous summer had shown him the power India’s financial impact on cricket gave it and he was taking full advantage. The Indian players often seemed to be a law unto themselves, and we just had to cop it. In the Second Test at Mohali, India beat us by 320 runs, their largest victory margin ever. My 37 runs in that game was my highest score in all four matches, but in the circumstances it represented a stubborn fight as the wickets fell around me.
I kept wicket pretty well throughout the tour, standing up to the stumps on unpredictable pitches. I got criticised in the newspapers at home, including in a column by Dean Jones, for the number of byes I let through (23 in the first innings at Bangalore and 16 in the second — a record in Australia–India Tests that I could have done without). But there are good byes and bad byes. If you’re missing balls you should be taking, then yes, you’re falling down on the job. But in India, in particular, you can be doing everything right and a ball will kick out of the rough and go square a metre and you can’t do a thing about it. Ian Healy said a keeper should never worry about byes in those circumstances, because when you’re working the way you should, the ones that get through don’t mean too much and if you’re not careful they can mess with your head.
There were only two weeks between the fourth and final Test in India and the first of the two Tests against New Zealand in the Trans-Tasman Trophy, at the Gabba. Even though Karina had been fantastic about texting me lots of photos and keeping me up to date with Zac’s development, it was a strange experience to leave a seven-day-old newborn and come home to a two-and-a-half-month-old boy. All cricketers’ wives know the exasperation of having someone come home from tour and take a couple of days to remember they’re not living in a hotel anymore, but it’s much sharper once you have children. It’s great to be home and it’s lovely for your partner and kids to have you there, but you have to be mindful of the fact that you’re lobbing into an environment where everyone has their routines and that’s what’s kept it all going while you’ve been away. As with any first-time parents, there was a lot of figuring out how the pieces fitted together.
The rumblings of criticism about my performance in India became full-throated shouts after the first game against the Kiwis, despite the fact that we won it handily. I had a bit of a shocker, it’s true. In our first innings I was caught by Jamie How on just six after being tempted by a Jesse Ryder delivery that bounced a bit more than I was expecting. Then in New Zealand’s first innings I only took one catch — Jesse Ryder for 30 off a Shane Watson ball. The problem was that I had already dropped Ryder when he was on 11, diving to get a ball that every man and his dog said afterwards was obviously headed straight for Haydos at first slip. I could have left it, except as a wicketkeeper it’s your responsibility to catch any ball you can. If you think you can get it you have to go for it. They don’t all stick but you have to try, and then you have to live with the consequences.
When I went out to bat for the second time, Daniel Vettori got the most out of the Gabba wicket, bowling me for 19 with a straight ball. I’d made the mistake of trying to play cautiously rather than trying to change the game. I walked off thinking, I don’t get out like that: I played the bowler not the ball. The newspapers were full of reports about how I was struggling, was under serious threat of losing my position and was ‘running out of chances’. Steve Rixon, Ian Healy and Adam Gilchrist were all approached for comment and all said much the same thing: that I had the goods but was yet to find my feet. Heals said that the mental pressure of being in the Test side had led to some technical flaws getting into my game and that I wasn’t clearing my mind to concentrate on my technique.
My fitness wasn’t an issue; I’d continued to work with Christian Marchegiani and was confident I was as fit as, or fitter than, anyone in the team. Nor was willingness: I was hungry for success. Part of it was the trap of falling into mental quicksand. The solution was to simplify. You could arrest a slide that started during a game by putting absolute concentration on the most fundamental elements of the game: foot position and watching the ball. If you’ve done all the training and drills you can focus on those basics and trust your reactions when it counts. It sounds easy, but it takes a lot of mental strength. It works, though, and it was among the useful feedback I got from Heals and Stumper, whose opinions I respected.
I did, however, think there was also something else going on in the way people were reacting to me: I was being judged in comparison to Adam Gilchrist. In a very literal sense people were criticising me for not being Gilly — and specifically for not being him at the height of his Test career, despite the fact that I was just at the start of mine. The same thing happened with perfectly capable spinners after Shane Warne retired.
Mike Hussey and I had to do an appearance together around this time and it turned out to be a very helpful thing for me. Huss had made his debut a couple of years before me and we were able to have a really good conversation about the kind of pressure you find yourself under when you first join the team and how you can find your way through it and free your mind.
I’d walked across the Gabba on my way back to the pavilion thinking, I’m not doing this again. I’m going to get out there and play my natural game. And that’s just what I did in the Second Test at Adelaide Oval, where it all came together for me. New Zealand won the toss and chose to bat. No chances were escaping my gloves this time round, and I took three solid catches as we kept them to 270 on the fairly flat wicket. It was Matthew Hayden’s 100th Test and it would have been great to see him get a ton, but it wasn’t to be — he went for 24 and his opening partner Simon Katich for one less than that. Punter and Huss both got half-centuries and kept going into the 70s. Pup was on 48 when I came out, at 5 for 247. He and I had batted together a lot and understood each other’s games so well that I felt relaxed and comfortable out there. I could see the gaps; I knew exactly where I wanted the ball to go and how to get it there. It was one of those rare days in life when everything you touch turns to gold. I reached 70 quickly, putting the partnership on 100, but I wasn’t done yet, not by a long shot. My ton came with a Tim Southee ball I sent sailing past midwicket for four.
It was an incredibly emotional moment for me. Here was vindication that I deserved to be there and a demonstration of exactly what I had to give for my team and my country. I got a standing ovation from the crowd. Thirty-three overs later, I was inches away from yet another boundary when Peter Fulton scooped the catch. My score of 169 included 24 fours and two sixes. Not only was it my first Test century, it was the highest Test score by an Australian in two years and the highest score by an Australian keeper on home soil ever. I was walking on air.
I’d helped the team to a 535 total, which the Kiwis showed no chance of catching, and we won by an innings and 62 runs. The score was big enough and the stand gutsy enough to silence even the most negative critics. Wayne Phillips, a South Aus
tralian wicketkeeper who’d played 27 Tests in the 1980s, was one of those who had said publicly I wasn’t up to the job; he thought another South Australian, Graham Manou, should be in the side instead. He was entitled to his opinion, although I wondered if he still held it as I passed him in the stand on my way to be awarded Player of the Match.
On 17 December, the three Test series against South Africa began, to be followed by a couple of T20I games and five ODIs. The Proteas, coached by Mickey Arthur, were talking a big game before they arrived. They had some justification: having started 2007 ranked number eight in the world, they were approaching the end of 2008 having risen to number two. Their batsmen had hit a purple patch, with captain Graeme Smith, Hashim Amla and Neil McKenzie already having passed 1000 Test runs for the year, and Ashwell Prince and AB de Villiers rapidly closing in on that marker. But we were still number one and we had not lost a Test series at home since ceding a hard-fought five-game series to Richie Richardson’s West Indies team in 1992–93. No-one expected us to lose, but lose we did.
We won the toss in the first game at the WACA and chose to bat. Thirty minutes into the game we were 3 for 15, with Huss and Punter both gone for a duck, Punter on his first ball. That was a shock to the system all right. But Simon Katich, back on his original home ground, and Michael Clarke turned the game around with a 149 partnership, with Kat finally falling for 83. Symo and I put together another 93, and we finished our first innings on a respectable 375. Mitchell Johnson had a blinder in the Proteas’ first innings, taking 8 for 61, and with South Africa all out for 281 we were looking great.
Our second innings could have gone quickly south when we were 6 for 157 (one of those wickets was Haydos’, given out caught and bowled off his pad in a decision for which umpire Aleem Dar later apologised), but I had an enjoyable time at the crease. I got 94 off 136 balls. I was flying, controlling the game; I felt bulletproof. I could almost taste my next century and I knew just how I would get the six that I needed — I’d pop one into the stands. But it was a classic case of getting caught up in the emotion. I missed and Boucher stumped me. Damn.
With 319 that innings, we should have been out of reach, leaving them chasing 414 in under 120 overs. But impossible turned into unlikely and then likely and then certain, with de Villiers contributing 106 after we missed chances to run him out on 18 and catch him on 67. South Africa claimed the game by succeeding in the second-biggest run chase in the entire history of Test cricket. I was glad to have batted well and taken six dismissals in the match, but it was a hard loss for us to swallow.
The Melbourne Boxing Day Test was next. Because the team has to be there on Christmas Day, preparing for the match, this is always a real family time. Wives and children are put up in the team hotel and, after training on Christmas morning, the players quickly come back, get dressed and walk with their families down to a big lunch, which includes a visit from Santa for the kids. Karina flew down with three-month-old Zac and, while we wouldn’t have wanted to be apart, it wasn’t exactly a relaxing time for either of us. My parents were also there and they got to see the game, but I think Karina spent most of those days wheeling Zac around the ground in his pram, trying to get him to sleep. Meanwhile, like the rest of the team, I was feeling the intense pressure from our first loss.
The MCG pitch was slower than usual and once again we should have had the game. But South Africa rampaged through us, despite Punter’s 101 in the first innings and 99 in the second and good support from Pup and Kat. They took the match by nine wickets and claimed the series with a game still to go. Punter came under relentless attack from all quarters and to read the papers you’d have thought the loss was a national disaster. One tabloid newspaper’s front page was a gravestone reading ‘RIP Australian Cricket’, with contributing causes of death listed as ‘incompetent selectors, inept batting, impotent bowling, dreadful catching, poor captaincy’. It was rough stuff, but, if you want the ticker-tape parades when you win, you have to bear that kind of no-holds-barred attack when you lose. It goes with the territory and we all understood that, but even so it was sometimes hard to take.
The 2009 New Year’s Test in Sydney was a dead rubber, but neither side treated it that way. South Africa needed the win to propel them to world number one and we needed it to restore some semblance of pride. We fought all the way to the end and won with five minutes and 10 balls left to play. Peter Siddle, playing in just his fourth Test, claimed eight wickets and constantly lifted the energy of the team and was a well-deserved Player of the Match.
That game was Matthew Hayden’s last Test and he took the opportunity to teach Sidds and I a great insiders’ SCG tradition. We were sitting in the change room drinking beers when he told us to stomp on the floor. He’s a legend of the game and we weren’t about to say no. Nothing happened and we asked why we were doing it. He told us to wait and see. A bit later we did it again and this time there was an answering whack from below: it was the staff down in the cellar signalling that they were ready for players to come down and celebrate the finish of the Test series with some fine wine or whisky.
It was definitely better to have won than lost in that final Test, but it was poor consolation for the loss of the series. And things became worse when the one-dayers got underway. We could only claim one win to South Africa’s four, which meant they took the ICC number-one ranking from us after all. The first couple of weeks of February brought five Chappell–Hadlee Trophy ODIs against New Zealand. The first game, at the WACA, triggered a blow-up in the media that was the perfect example of how what happens within the game can get distorted outside of it — which is why any public figure who wants to keep their sanity needs to be able to ignore the white noise of constant chatter and uninformed opinion.
What happened was that Neil Broom was on 29 when he was beaten by a Michael Clarke ball that hit the top of off-stump then came up into my gloves. To me it was clearly out and I whipped off the bails. Broom thought otherwise, but he was given out. The controversy came because it was unclear in the video replay whether I was right about the ball, but on close examination it was clear that I’d unintentionally had my gloves slightly forward of the stumps at the time — something that should have resulted in a ‘no ball’ ruling. Broom didn’t look very happy as he walked off, but dismissed batsmen rarely do.
We thought no more about it until after the game (which New Zealand won), when Daniel Vettori said to a journalist that surely I must have known something was wrong at the time and should have said so. He did not accuse me of cheating, but suddenly — boom! — that word was being used next to my name all over the place. Ricky Ponting spoke up strongly in my defence at a media conference. Ignoring the advice of the team’s media liaison officer, I had a comment to make about it too, which was that I’d played a lot against Daniel and he was a great competitor, but if he had a problem with me he should have come and had a conversation about it, not aired it in the media. Dan sent me a text message clarifying that while we would have to agree to disagree about what happened between ball and bail, he never thought I was cheating and that he looked forward to our next game.
Despite that, you’d only have to spend about 10 seconds searching online to find endless blog posts and opinion pieces from people who don’t like the way I played, citing my supposed cheating in that game as prime evidence. That kind of thing is sometimes hard on family and friends, although I think mine have all become pretty good at understanding that it’s not worth engaging with. People aren’t always going to like you in life, and in professional sport that’s amplified. You’re a hero in some people’s eyes, a villain in others’, and rarely anything in between. In the end the only people’s opinions worth paying attention to, in my view, are those of your teammates and those who were there on the spot.
It was a storm in a teacup in the context of the whole five-game series, of which we won two, two went to New Zealand and one was washed out. I worked hard and performed well, with 109 at the SCG and 88 not out at the Gabba. I
also had my first experience of captaining a national side when I led the Twenty20 team to a one-run win against New Zealand at the SCG, a ground I knew as well as anyone after the one-dayers were over.
I couldn’t say my first 12 months as a Test cricketer had been easy, but if it was easy everyone would do it. I reminded myself that wins build confidence, losses build character. Karina and I had brought a child into the world this year. Did we want him to grow up afraid to try for fear he might not succeed, or willing to give up after setbacks? No, of course not. We were going to raise him the way we’d been raised: to try hard every time and keep on trying no matter what. That’s what I was about to do in a few weeks’ time when the Australian team travelled to play South Africa in a return Test series on their home ground. Commentators were prepared to call the results before a ball had been played — clearly, we stood no chance. Oh yeah? I thought, just you wait and see.
CHAPTER 13
PAIN ON AND OFF THE FIELD
I’M GLAD I DIDN’T know in early 2009 the extent to which injury would affect me and keep me off the field over the next three years. I might not have believed it anyway, since I was as fit as a Mallee bull as we headed to South Africa for a three-Test series, two T20I games and five ODIs.
It would have been easy for the team, and Ricky Ponting in particular, to be crushed by the mountain of criticism and condemnation that had been piled on us over the past year. Instead, Punter and coach Tim Nielsen worked out a detailed plan to pull us together and set us on a winning path. It centred on a six-day camp in a place called Potchefstroom, an hour or two’s drive away from Johannesburg, where we would play our first Test starting on 26 February.