by Brad Haddin
CHAPTER 15
RENEWAL IN THE AIR
WE SAW OUT 2012 on a roller-coaster of emotions. Having Mia home after five continuous months in hospital was a huge high, even though the number of things that could go wrong was still nerve-racking. We knew that she’d barely be home before she had to go in again, but the release was enormous, particularly for Karina. That made the crash all the worse when it was time to take her back, on 9 December. Karina tried to stay strong for Mia but she told me that just walking back into the Camperdown ward made her feel sick. She shed a lot of tears that day.
Mia was back in hospital to undergo immunotherapy, a new technique designed to ‘train’ her immune system to recognise and destroy neuroblastoma cells. It relies on some pretty amazing medical science. First, researchers isolate a particular substance that appears on the surface of many neuroblastoma cells; they then artificially create an antibody (the protein the immune system sends out to seek and destroy harmful invaders) that specifically targets this substance. As an extra boost, the patient also gets immune-system hormones. It’s the medical equivalent of putting up a wanted poster, offering a reward, creating a posse and then supplying them each with a weapon custom-made to eliminate that particular bad guy.
The process wasn’t quick, though. She would receive it in five courses, each part of a month-long cycle. If everything went right (we weren’t holding our breath on that one) she would be able to come home between cycles, and her treatment would finish in early May. There were a lot of potential side-effects and, true to form, Mia got them all at one time or another: nerve pain so severe she had to go back on heavy-duty pain relief; fluid build-up; allergic reactions; fever; raised heart rate; low blood pressure; vomiting; diarrhoea; low platelets; fatigue; flu-like achiness; and constipation.
Feeding continued to be an issue, but there was progress. Mia was still on tube feeding, which was an involved, time-consuming procedure, and fluid still had to be manually removed from her stomach. Karina continued to look after all of this as well as caring for the boys and even with the family’s help it was a very challenging time. But Mia’s digestion had finally started working again — at one-quarter the speed it should have been. She was getting her feeds in three single lots, called boluses, spread across the waking hours to help her system get back to a three-meals-a-day routine. The idea was to get the body back to a normal wake/sleep eating cycle, rather than the round-the-clock one she had been on. So, as her tolerance of the day feeds very gradually built up, the 12-hourly TPN night feeds were decreased accordingly. She was often moody and irritable during this time, which we thought was a fairly natural response to everything she’d been through and simply being a two-year-old. But, looking back, we think perhaps we hadn’t got the feeding balance right. Perhaps she was simply hungry.
She started nibbling on real food, and developed fixations on certain foods, one at a time. The first was devon. The dieticians had talked a lot about getting her to try a broad spectrum of healthy food, so we were a bit concerned when she started craving sandwich meat, of all things. But as usual Dr Luce had the most helpful perspective. He said, ‘If she’s interested in food, let’s encourage her. We can fix up her diet along the track; the most important thing is to get her actually eating.’ So if she wanted devon, she got devon. Once or twice she asked for it at 10 at night (her sleeping habits were still all over the place) when we were due to go shopping the next day and had run out. But I got in the car and went and found an all-night supermarket. When she moved on to a strawberry craze, we didn’t go anywhere without taking carefully washed strawberries.
Even in the periods during the immunotherapy cycle when Mia was an outpatient, many days were spent at the hospital in clinic and if she had a temperature above 38°C she was admitted on the spot. We did get to have her home for the night on Christmas Eve, although she had to return to Westmead as scheduled the following day. It was lovely to see the effort the staff made to try to give the kids in there a special day. It was also surprising how many thoughtful strangers brought presents to be distributed in the ward. Some of them were just kind people with no connection to the hospital, but some knew first-hand what it was like to be in there at Christmas, including a 17-year-old boy we met who was delivering presents to the ward where he’d been treated as a pre-schooler.
It was the first time in five years we hadn’t been in Melbourne with the other cricketing families ahead of the Boxing Day Test. But between the Sheffield Shield, the Ryobi Cup (as the domestic one-day comp was called after another sponsorship change) and the Big Bash League, there was plenty of other cricket for me and I continued to bat and wicketkeep with confidence and purpose. My results were noticed and 2013 started with the news that I was in the Australian ODI team to play two games against Sri Lanka in place of Matthew Wade, who was being rested. Going into the first game, at the MCG on 11 January, there was plenty of talk in the media about how we were a ‘B-team’ because Michael Clarke, Shane Watson and Michael Hussey were all out, and four players, including Phillip Hughes, were making their one-day debuts. Talk is cheap, results count; and the result was we won by 107 runs in a cracker of a game. Phil made his mark with a century and among my three catches was a one-handed blinder when Dinesh Chandimal got a thick outside edge on a Clint McKay ball.
I was really comfortable with my game and it felt fantastic to be back out there on the international arena, both in Melbourne and going into the next game two days later in Adelaide. We batted first and were struggling at 6 for 83, but I was able to change the momentum of the game with a nice quick half-century. Unfortunately, I felt pain in my hamstring running between the wickets towards the end of it. By the 19th over of Sri Lanka’s innings, I had to do something I’d never done before and retire injured, handing the gloves to Phil Hughes. Sri Lanka won the match this time round.
There was a strange encounter with Mickey Arthur after the game. He’d come in as coach such a short time before Mia got sick that I hadn’t worked with him long enough to form too strong an opinion of him — although he had made a bit of an odd first impression. The team happened to be in South Africa in November 2011 when his appointment was announced. We’d just finished the Jo’burg Test and were at the bar in the hotel having a drink with the Proteas when the news came through. Naturally enough, since he’d coached the South African team from 2005 to 2010, we asked what they thought of the choice. The general response was, ‘Well, he’s a lovely person. It’ll be interesting to see what you think of him in the job.’
We had our first team meeting with him a few weeks later. He was the first non-Australian coach to ever hold the position and he made the unusual choice of starting the meeting by talking about what Australia should be doing better and what he wanted to change about the way we played. Any new coach is going to come into a side with ideas about the direction they want the team to go in; however, it created an uncomfortable feeling in the room when he chose to lead with that instead of getting to know us and working up to it. For all I knew, however, that had been an initial bump and everything had gone really smoothly for him from then on.
Ian Healy had come out in the media around the time of the Adelaide one-dayer criticising the standard of Matthew Wade’s wicketkeeping. Going through the airport on the way home after the game Mickey said to me, ‘Did you see Heals’s comments about Wadey?’ I nodded and left it at that. He said, ‘I wish he wouldn’t do it.’ I started to make a general comment about how all the players realised that kind of scrutiny was part of the deal and we learned to handle it and so on, but Mickey broke in with, ‘We all know, Brad, you’re the best wicketkeeper-batsman in the country.’ That was a pretty weird thing for a person on the selection panel to say to someone who wasn’t in the team, but I did not have the time or mental energy to figure out where he was going with it. I wasn’t going to touch it. I said, ‘I’m just here to do my best for the team,’ and continued on my way.
What I thought was a hamstring injury turned
out to be a nerve problem, which physio Patrick Farhart (Danny Redrup’s clinic partner) treated quickly and effectively. So I was all set to play a week later when I was included in the team for the ODI against the West Indies at the MCG on 10 February, in place of Matthew Wade who was in India preparing for a four-Test series that was about to start. The Windies, who had everything to prove after losing the previous four one-dayers in the series, made a strong start against us (our openers went in the first two overs) and looked like having it all their way until Adam Voges and I put on a 111-run fifth-wicket partnership that turned things around. (Adam went on to make his first international century.)
I was firing on all fronts: in March, with the domestic season wrapping up, I had an average of 42 in the Ryobi Cup, was one of the top run-scorers in the Sheffield Shield with an average of 52, had made three centuries across the two formats, and had kept well all summer. As I was about to fly back to Sydney from Melbourne early on a Sunday morning after a Blues’ victory in our second-last Shield game of the season, I got a call from John Inverarity to say that I was on standby to go to India. Matthew Wade had rolled his ankle playing a bit of muck-around basketball a few days before the Third Test. I was to pack a bag as soon as I got home because if scans showed that his injury was serious, I’d be on a plane to India the following morning — and that’s exactly what happened. By 1 p.m. on Monday, 11 March, I was in the air on my way to Delhi.
It was a great opportunity and I welcomed the chance to help the Australian team in its hour of need, but having to leave so suddenly was tough on the family. With Mia still spending significant periods in hospital, my mother and Karina’s were continuing, between them, to provide full-time support. (Karina’s sister, Danielle, was also helping out a lot.) They’d been doing it for an entire year — an incredible effort but one that couldn’t continue indefinitely, even though they never complained. I was already travelling a lot again within Australia and I’d signed up for two months playing Twenty20 in the Indian Premier League season, in April and May. (It was, in theory, my third season with the Kolkata Knight Riders. I first joined them in 2011 but was out for the rest of the season after only one game thanks to the finger injury I’d got in Bangladesh. Then 12 months later, with Trevor Bayliss newly installed as KKR coach, I’d signed on for the 2012 season, but obviously Mia’s diagnosis meant that didn’t happen.) Karina and I had decided to employ a nanny, but she’d only just begun to look for suitable candidates when I got on the plane for India. I didn’t want to leave her in the lurch, but she assured me everything would be fine.
Things were definitely not fine with the Australian team. Despite winning the toss both times, they’d lost the first two Tests. The eight-wicket loss in the First Test in Chennai stung, but it was the Second Test thrashing in Hyderabad that really hurt. It was the first time in Test history a side had declared in the first innings then gone on to lose by an innings (and 135 runs). While I was in the air between Sydney and Delhi, the consequences of this loss were unfolding in a way that would have a dramatic effect on the team for months to come.
With the support of captain Michael Clarke, Mickey Arthur had asked each player in the squad to reflect on the result and hand in a sheet identifying three areas where there was room for improvement. Apparently it was the kind of thing that had worked well for him during his time coaching South Africa, but at best it left most of the Australian players scratching their heads. Four of them — vice-captain Shane Watson and James Pattinson, who had played in the match, and Mitchell Johnson and Usman Khawaja, who hadn’t — didn’t hand in their sheets by the deadline. I think all of Australia, and most of the rest of the cricketing world, knows what happened next: Mickey Arthur punished them by suspending them from the Third Test. It was huge news, with the media quickly dubbing the incident ‘Homeworkgate’ and everyone from Mark Waugh to Freddie Flintoff commenting on what a bizarre move it was. As Mark put it in his typically blunt way, ‘I’ve never heard anything so stupid in all my life. It’s not Under-6s; this is Test cricket.’
Michael Clarke held the line, maintaining that the missing forms weren’t the whole story, just ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’, but that didn’t really change any minds about what had taken place. Shane Watson was due to go home a bit later in the tour to be there for the birth of his first child, but after being suspended he headed back early, saying that what had happened was ‘very harsh’ and made him question his future in the game.
I got on the plane before the story broke. Landing early in the morning in Delhi, where I was to catch a flight on to Mohali, I turned on my phone to find a bunch of messages letting me know what had gone down and warning me there might be media in the airport. I took a discreet look ahead as we came through the terminal and, indeed, there were media everywhere. I succeeded in getting to my gate unnoticed, then sat there waiting for my connecting flight wondering what on earth I was walking into.
I arrived at the hotel in Mohali, put my things in my room, got changed, picked up my bag and went to join the rest of the team at training. I walked in and exchanged greetings with the guys, then sat down for a pre-training talk from staff. Team manager Gavin Dovey said a few things about what we needed to do going up against this strong Indian team two days later, then he called everyone’s attention to me, saying, ‘And another thing: this is what playing for Australia is all about. Did you see what Brad did? He got here, checked in, got himself ready and he’s here, ready to go.’ I was thinking to myself, Riiight, and this is worth mentioning why?
There was definitely a weird vibe among the team. I’d toured India before, I’d played Test cricket there; I knew how much it could wear down players and teams and expose any weaknesses. But that’s not what this was. They’d only been there a month and played two tour games and two Test matches. Yet they seemed a bit . . . lost. Not only the younger guys, either; experienced cricketers like Johnno and Peter Siddle too. It just did not feel like an Australian cricket team change room.
The first day of the Test was rained out, so we spent it sitting in a room with a leadership coach Mickey Arthur had brought in. We had started a similar process just before I’d left the West Indies when Mia got sick and apparently it was still going on 12 months later. The leadership coach started going round the room asking people to say one by one what they stood for. It wasn’t just a bit like what had been happening a year earlier — it was exactly the same! She got round to me and I answered the question by saying I was there to make a difference by doing whatever would help the team.
Then she asked me what I thought of the process itself. I didn’t have time to waste and I didn’t have any interest in dancing around things. I said, ‘Well, I’ve been out of the team for 12 months but the changes you’re talking about now are exactly the ones that were being talked about back then. I don’t think the message is coming across. I don’t think it’s working.’ She continued round the group and everyone was on eggshells, afraid to come out and say what they thought in a straightforward, positive manner. I recalled the openness and honesty and trust that the team had been built on previously and I couldn’t believe how much things had changed.
When play finally got underway, I performed well with both gloves and bat and, with Watto absent, served as acting captain on the field when Pup had to go off to get treatment for his sore back. Unfortunately, however, the game had got too far away from us for my partnership with Phillip Hughes and that of tail-enders Mitchell Starc and Xavier Doherty to be able to pull it back within our reach. Steve Rixon was on the tour as senior assistant coach and when it was all over I said to him, ‘Let’s go get a beer at the hotel bar.’ Pretty normal stuff, I’d have thought, but a couple of the boys saw us heading down and asked what we were doing. We told them, adding that they were welcome to join us. Stumper and I went down and had a catch-up about where Mia was at, then relaxed into our usual post-game wind-down. Matt Hayden, who was there as a commentator, arrived, then a couple of the other guys appear
ed and joined us, then a couple more and a couple more. At one point one of them leaned over to me and said, ‘I miss this.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Sitting here like this with the guys, having a chat, talking about the game, talking about life, taking the piss out of each other. I really miss it.’ All I could do was shake my head.
We went on to Delhi for the final Test. Shane Watson was back and he served as captain when Pup’s back injury prevented him playing. Matthew Wade’s ankle was looking like it would be fine for him to play, but I was there just in case. The day before the game started I was walking out onto the field for training when Mickey Arthur said to me, ‘Oh, you’re not playing in this Test match.’ I said, ‘I know, I’m going out to hit some balls with Wadey.’ He said, ‘You know what I mean.’ I said, ‘I was just here as a replacement, I understand.’ He looked at me and said, significantly, ‘But the Ashes will be different.’ I didn’t have the patience for head games. Looking back on it now, I think he was perhaps feeling insecure, having come under attack from pretty much everyone for the past 10 days. I said, ‘Mate, what are you talking about?’ He said, ‘The Ashes, they’ll be different. You’ll be there. Everyone knows you’re the best wicketkeeper-batsman in Australia.’
I’d let it go when he said that in Adelaide but this time it was hard to cop. For a start, it sounded to me as though he was suggesting the game coming up, a Test match, didn’t matter. Second, no-one understood the way things were better than me. I’d walked away from the game to be with my family; now I had to earn my way back in. Matthew Wade, who had been named vice-captain for the game, would be doing the very best he could in an effort to retain his spot. It was up to the selectors to decide who had the most to offer, but him talking about it in this way seemed to me to be disrespectful to both of us. Third, nothing in the sport was more important to me, and to every Australian cricket fan, than the Ashes. You don’t play games with that stuff. I said, ‘Mate, you’re kidding. I’ve had enough of this. You’ve just told me again that I’m the best player in my position and you’re not picking me for a Test match. You’ve got this all wrong. I’m out. Leave me alone.’ I walked away from him past Nathan Lyon, who’d been within earshot of the whole exchange. He said a quiet, ‘Good work, Hadds,’ as I went by.