My Family's Keeper

by Brad Haddin

  Mickey is not a bad person by any means; in my view it was simply that the job had got away from him. He’d lost the change room. At every level of the game, the coach has a huge influence on the players. Go down to your local park on a Saturday morning where kids play a team sport — watching their faces for five minutes will tell you everything you need to know about what their coach is like, whether calm and encouraging, well-meaning but disorganised, an overbearing loudmouth or anything in between. You might think that at the elite level all that falls away, and athletes at the very top are so highly trained and motivated they don’t need external guidance or reinforcement, but that’s not true at all. Whether it’s the Gundagai Tigers’ Under-7s or the Australian Test cricket team, the influence of the coach in bringing out the best in each person and binding the whole team together is huge.

  India won that Delhi Test, just as they’d won the previous three matches. The statisticians had to go back to 1979 after the destabilisation caused by the World Series departures to find the last time Australia had lost so many matches in a Test series. The nervy, uncomfortable atmosphere in the change room was shackling the team on the field and the poor performances in the game were making players further doubt themselves and each other, creating even more tension off the field. It was a snowball that didn’t look like stopping anytime soon.

  Michael Clarke was heading home to get treatment for his back, and he and I were on a flight together. We talked for many hours about how things stood and how far away they were from the Australian cricket team spirit we both knew and loved. Michael had a very good relationship with Mickey and backed him all the way. (Even when he looked back much later, after Mickey said he regretted the way things unfolded during the ‘Homeworkgate’ period and would do it differently given the chance, Michael stood by Mickey’s choices.) But he too was feeling the pressure and with the Ashes less than three months away he was determined to find a way to change the team mentality. It was clear he appreciated the chance to talk things through freely and constructively with someone who’d been away long enough to have a fresh perspective and didn’t have a particular barrow to push.

  Back in Australia, I didn’t have time to think much more about cricket. Mia was still in and out of hospital. Karina had found a supposedly professional nanny, only to have her walk out without notice a week later saying it was all too hard — even though, unlike Karina or our mothers, she was being paid to do the job. I had only a week at home to help out before I had to depart for India again, on 31 March, this time for Kolkata for the IPL.

  Karina and I spoke daily and I’d only been away three or four days when Mia started having some very worrying symptoms. The Westmead team monitored her, but she worsened to the point where she was producing black vomit and screaming in pain. She was admitted through the Emergency Department with gastritis, a painful inflammation of the lining of the stomach. The boys stayed down in Queanbeyan and Karina split shifts with her mother at the hospital over the next few days until Mia was well enough to come home.

  Life didn’t slow down waiting for us to catch up. On 20 April, Shane Watson announced he was standing down as vice-captain of the Australian cricket team in order to concentrate on playing and four days later I got a call from Pat Howard to tell me that I was in the team for the Ashes campaign in England and that I was the new vice-captain. He said, ‘We need to get back to where we used to be: playing tough cricket and starting to win games again.’

  I was thrilled to be back in the team that I was so passionate about and tremendously honoured to be asked to play a leadership role, in conjunction with Michael Clarke. I wanted to be accountable for making the team better. My parents, who’d been there every step of the way over the past 13 months, were so proud when I called to share the news. But things still felt very unsettled on the home front and, even though Karina and I had talked a lot about my return to cricket, this was completely different. I could not pull out of another tour the way I had previously: I couldn’t do it to the team. If I had to leave again there would be no going back; it would mean retiring on the spot. I told Trevor Bayliss that I wouldn’t be able to play out the remaining month in the IPL. He understood completely and gave me his blessing to head back to Sydney.

  I’d been home hardly any time at all when we had a terrifying incident that saw Mia once again hovering between life and death. Even though she was now eating some solid food, it was nowhere near enough to sustain her, so she still needed TPN through her central line. To allow for freedom of movement during the day, the nutritionists had put us on an overnight schedule, whereby the liquid feed was slowly going into her digestive system over a 12-hour period from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.

  Karina took care of all of this. It was a very demanding process that took half an hour to set up and get started and another half an hour to remove and pack up. Mia’s room, the one Dad and Peter had built for us, was set up like a home version of her hospital room, with a special table for the syringes, gloves, wipes, covers and all the other equipment needed. Karina followed strict hand-washing and sterile handling techniques to connect the feed tube to Mia’s central line. She then entered the details into the machine that controlled the flow and sent warning beeps if the line became blocked.

  On this particular day, Mia had attended clinic, as she did many days, and the nurses had taken a blood sample via her central line — a totally standard procedure. In the middle of the night, Mia was unsettled, which she was very often for one reason or another. Karina went in and, unable to settle her, moved her from the cot into the bed in the room and lay down with her. Mia’s temperature was up, but she eventually settled and the two of them fell back asleep. At 5.30 a.m. Karina was woken by Mia’s entire body shaking. She had rigors, which is when a fever makes the sufferer feel freezing cold, rather than hot, and they shiver violently. Her temperature reading was only 38°C, but she looked unbelievably sick. Within five minutes we had her bundled up and in the car. Karina drove her to hospital and her mother rushed over to mind the boys so I could follow. By the time Mia reached the Emergency Department at Westmead her temperature was up to 41°C. It was purely the speed with which the admissions team recognised that she had sepsis and started pumping antibiotics into her that saved her life.

  Sepsis (also known as blood poisoning or septicaemia) is what happens when an infection rages out of control. From the original site where the bacteria attacked, it spreads throughout the entire body, and there is a very narrow window to treat it before septic shock sets in, leading to multisystem organ failure and death. We’d got Mia to the hospital just in the nick of time. Even so, it was touch and go for the first two of the four days she spent in PICU, and she needed another six days in the Camperdown ward after that before she was well enough to come home on 13 May 2013.

  I’d been supposed to go to Queensland for the pre-Ashes camp, but there was no way I could leave until Mia was home safely again. Karina gave herself a terribly hard time, fearing that it was her handling of the tube for the evening feed that had allowed the infection in, even though she’d done everything exactly the same as every other time and the line had been accessed hours before that at the hospital. The medical staff assured her it wasn’t her fault and pointed out that it could and did happen to the best of them and that Mia had experienced several infections in the line during her many months as an inpatient. The only difference was that in the hospital she was being monitored so closely that immediate antibiotics had prevented sepsis developing.

  We were so thankful for the work of the doctors and nurses who had saved Mia yet again that we were happy to agree to the hospital PR department’s request that we do some media interviews to increase awareness of sepsis and the importance of urgent treatment. (In a similar vein, Karina had been delighted to take up Dr Lord’s suggestion that she write a letter to the Sargents Pies company, whose charitable arm had funded the multi-milliondollar equipment he’d used to save Mia’s life.)

  Once Mia was safely out of
the woods, Karina and I had a very intense discussion about whether we could really make things work with me rejoining the Australian team, leaving so much weight on her shoulders. The conversation started very tensely, as they often did when we were under so much strain. However, we stuck with it and listened to each other and found a resolution. What we’d been through, and were still going through, would test any couple, but we had a bedrock of love and respect that kept us tightly bonded. I was in awe of Karina’s ability to cope with so much and be such a wonderful mother to all three children. And I was deeply touched by her encouragement and belief in me.

  Together we decided that we could handle anything that was thrown at us, and so at the end of May I said goodbye to her and the kids, knowing I wouldn’t see them again in person for more than three months. Soon after I left, Karina found a really wonderful nanny called Natalie Dekker, who stayed with us for the next two years and was a brilliant help. Then in mid-June she phoned to tell me that Mia’s first regular post-treatment scan had come back absolutely clear. The relief was indescribable and afterwards I was able to really focus my mind on the Ashes campaign.

  Meanwhile, I took every opportunity I could to sound out cricketers like Matthew Hayden and Ricky Ponting as well as younger players like Steve Smith, Nathan Lyon, Ryan Harris, Peter Siddle and Mitchell Johnson about where things stood and the way they should be, and spoke in depth with Michael Clarke about how I could support him in turning things around and bringing the best out of the players. Mickey Arthur’s coaching contract ran until 2015, and the changes we were hoping to bring about were in the context of working closely with him.

  As a warm-up for the Ashes, I went on a short Australia A tour of Scotland, Northern Ireland and England in a team that included Moises Henriques, Peter Siddle, James Pattinson, Steve Smith and Ashton Agar and was coached by Darren Lehmann (known to us as Boof). I played my natural game, starting with a first-day 113 against Scotland in Edinburgh, part of a 118 sixth-wicket partnership with Sidds, who got his first first-class century. The whole team was having a good time; we were really enjoying our cricket, and it showed in our unbeaten results. Unfortunately, the Australian team wasn’t having the same experience, making headlines for a nightclub altercation between David Warner and Joe Root rather than their achievements on the field, after being knocked out in the first stage of the ICC Champions Trophy. The word we were hearing was that there was a lot of uncertainty about things, such as who was actually going to play in the Ashes. It was hard to know exactly how things stood without being in the same room, but it didn’t sound very good.

  The two teams met up in Gloucester, where I had my third and final memorable-for-all-the-wrong-reasons conversation with Mickey Arthur within six months. We sat down together and he asked me what I thought the best line-up was for the First Test, a very common conversation for a coach to have with a vice-captain. I’d opened my mouth to answer when he spoke again, saying, ‘And just assume that you’re in the team.’ It’s true that Matthew Wade was on the tour and was keeping for the one-dayers and T20Is that would follow the Test series, but that was a completely bizarre thing to say when everyone from John Inverarity down had repeatedly made it plain in public and in private that I was the Australian team’s Test wicketkeeper. Not to mention the fact that I was vice-captain! I had no idea what he was trying to get at, but once again I didn’t have the time or interest to figure it out. I said, ‘Mate, I can’t deal with this,’ and left him to it.

  The following day Pat Howard took a number of players aside and asked them for their assessment of where the team was, with the Ashes almost upon us. The day after that we were informed that Mickey had been sacked and was to be replaced by Darren Lehmann. It was as much a shock to us as it was to the public, but it wasn’t a surprise. It’s a bold move — to replace a coach less than three weeks before the start of such an important tournament — but I thought it was the right choice, one that had to be made. Boof was exactly the right bloke to oversee the rebuilding of a team that had lost its way. He was great to talk cricket with because he understood the game so well. But he was also gifted at bringing out the best in people. He’d been involved in a lot of successful Australian teams and he played cricket the right way. By this I mean he trained the squad hard and he played to win, but he also recognised and celebrated achievements and gave players time away from the game to relax and regroup.

  There was a feeling of relief in the team at the idea that someone was there to pull everyone out of the quicksand. It could have been a difficult time for Michael, who’d worked on making his relationship with Mickey a good one, but Darren helped take the pressure off him and you could feel the anxiety level drop across the whole change room. Players for whom cricket at the top level had become a chore, rather than an incredible privilege and joy, started to feel they could enjoy it again. There was no uncertainty because everyone knew where they stood with Darren. Following the nightclub incident, David Warner had been barred from training with the team for a certain amount of time. Boof put an immediate end to that, saying, ‘If you’re here, you’re a part of us. But, mate, if you stuff up again, you’re out, sacked, and you won’t play for Australia again.’

  I cherished the opportunity to play my part in changing the team culture. Michael (who at his own request had stepped down as a selector) had his strengths and I had mine. I had no desire to be Australian captain, but one of the things I could do effectively was bring a team together and get them working for the same goal while really enjoying each other’s company. With me there, Michael didn’t have to worry about his message being misunderstood; I could communicate equally well with him and with the other guys.

  Very quickly we could all feel the change as the respect for the Baggy Green returned and the team started to enjoy the game again in the way I’d learned to do from the likes of Justin Langer, Glenn McGrath, Ricky Ponting and the Waughs. The simplest things made a big difference. Our first tour game was against Somerset. Tour games are about getting used to the local conditions, finding your feet. We wanted to win it and we did. Afterwards, when we jumped on the bus for the trip to the next spot, there were cold beers waiting for us. The mood was relaxed, no-one was looking over their shoulders; we had a laugh and we started to feel we were regaining our purpose.

  The approach to training changed. Previously it had often felt like going through the motions, with overly long sessions just for the sake of it. Boof made sure everything had a point and he upped the intensity so sessions could be both shorter and much more effective. The changes took time to consistently show up on the field, but gradually we started to once again play the way Australia is famous for playing. Guys stopped being scared to make mistakes and began to bounce back from losses.

  If you made the same mistake twice Darren was going to tell you pretty bluntly. But the emphasis was on learning your game and moving forward. It was an important part of my role as vice-captain to say to the young guys, ‘Okay, today we lost this situation and this is the reason. Mistakes are going to happen but don’t go back into your shell because of it; learn from it. The next time you get into this situation, don’t get scared, hold your nerve and play the way you want to play.’ I made sure to tell them my door was always open. There were lots of coffees and lots of conversations about great memories of playing for Australia.

  Even when things weren’t going our way on the field, I cherished every moment of that tour. I felt so incredibly grateful that everything had come together to allow me to play again and I didn’t take a second of it for granted.

  The First Test, starting at Trent Bridge on 10 July, was my 45th, and it turned out to be a huge trial of my ability to keep my head in the game no matter what. Mum and Dad had come over to travel around and watch the series and it was really nice to have them there and see them relaxing after the massive effort they’d put in to help us over the past 15 months. The match started well. England won the toss and went in to bat and we were effective in keeping t
heir score low, getting them all out for 215. Unfortunately, they also kept our first innings total down, and by the time we started our second innings, before lunch on the fourth day, we were chasing 311 runs. When I came in near the end of the day we were 5 for 161, then Phil Hughes went lbw for a duck.

  That night Karina phoned me. Mia had been a bit miserable with a cold for a couple of days and when it had got worse and her temperature had gone up over 38°C Karina had followed the protocol and taken her to the Emergency Department at Westmead. There Mia had been given a dose of medication to help her and been admitted overnight just for observation, no drama. Except, as Karina was now ringing to tell me, the following day the doctors had found that she had been given a massive overdose of the medication. Instead of getting 30mg she had been given 30mg per kilo of body weight — 10 times the correct dose. It was simple human error; someone had misread the chart. They thought she’d be fine. And if she wasn’t? The worst case scenario was that her single kidney would not be able to clear the extra toxins from her body, which would lead to kidney failure, dialysis and perhaps even death. The only way they would know which outcome it was going to be was to sit back and watch and wait over the next 48 hours.