Underneath the Southern Cross

by Michael Hussey

  Having watched those games the previous year, I knew the rule about how you earned the Whitfords baggy sky-blue cap, which to me was even more of a prize than the baggy green. You had to get 5 wickets or 50 runs in an innings. It was a big ask, but that only enhanced the value of the baggy blue.

  In the first game, I actually made 50, only to be told that this had been a practice game and didn’t count. Going into the first competition game, I was desperate to get this cap. We fielded first and a guy I went to school with named Michael Windle got 6 wickets for 4 runs. He was awarded his cap. The next week, I managed to get 50, and this time it was for real. The presentation of my baggy blue was – seriously – just about the proudest day of my life.

  Receiving my Baggy Blue cap for scoring 50 for Whitfords Junior Cricket Club when I was ten.

  A taste for baggy caps, of whatever colour, wasn’t the only habit I developed at Whitfords. Mum was very conscientious about sunscreen and stopping us getting burnt. Even when we went to school, we had to rub sunscreen into our faces. At cricket, she was resolute about the white zinc cream going on our noses and lips. It was non-negotiable. So I became a zinc cream wearer from a very early age!

  Our coach was Bob Mitchell, and he was terrific. Seeing how small I was, he encouraged me to work on my defence and my technique. ‘As you grow older,’ he said, ‘that defensive foundation will hold you in good stead against the better bowlers.’ In hindsight, it proved to be great advice. There were other guys who could slog but soon perished, while I was able to hang in longer. I was given a couple of cricket skills books, showing how to play the cover drive or bowl the leg-spinner. I studied them religiously and practised them in the back yard. I knocked a ball in a sock hanging off the pergola for hours at a time. When I had to go to the mailbox, I played top-hand straight drives all the way down and all the way back. I developed what became a lifelong love of cricket technique, believing that success wasn’t just about instinct or flair, but about the mechanics of playing the correct way.

  My batting game was all about hanging in there. I couldn’t hit the ball over the top or score quickly, getting my runs instead through flicks and deflections. I wished I could hit it harder, and was desperately envious of the bigger kids. I certainly never thought about going far in the game, because I assumed that you had to be a dominant batsman at this level to go on to the next. I was always in survival mode against big, quick bowlers. I’d say to my partner, ‘Let’s get through him and get our runs against the other guy.’ I have a vivid memory of a bowler from Wanneroo called Sean Coffey, who actually swung the ball. He was better than anyone I’d ever seen, and got me out cheaply. But in general, even though I was small and not dominant, I could hang in there and be competitive.

  What helped was my hunger to always be in the game. I hated sitting and watching, so I would try to keep my wicket to avoid that. Then, when we were in the field, I was dead keen to get the ball in my hand and bowl leg spin. Then I took up wicket keeping. Anything to be involved!

  I was so enthusiastic in those first years, I didn’t get teary too often about getting out (that came later). Nor was I very affected by nerves (that did too). I heard coaches and Dad say things like nerves were a good thing and you could use them to your advantage because they helped you concentrate and react quickly, but I didn’t understand any of that yet. I had an uncomplicated, positive approach to the game. I didn’t see myself as being that good at cricket, and I don’t remember our teams winning premierships. It was just the pure fun of it that drew me in and kept me there. Playing for fun tended to clear the mind, and I managed to score runs consistently. Even though it took me a while to get them, I was making enough runs to get picked in some representative teams.

  But there were always hurdles. Our coach sent me to the Wanneroo District Cricket Club to try out for their under-15s even though I was still only thirteen. It was a winter trial, and there were only a couple of openings for kids in the younger age bracket. I was shattered when I didn’t get picked. I cried all the way home. Dad said, ‘Don’t worry, they’re all older than you, enjoy your year with your mates at Whitfords.’ My disappointment only lasted a few days and I made the under-15s the next year, but it was a first taste of the bitterness of rejection. It showed me that I was beginning to take this game much more seriously.

  At home, Dad had come up with a new idea. Because the four of us kids were going off and doing different things and Mum and Dad were so busy, we never had a lot of time together, aside from eating dinner. Dad came up with the suggestion that we hold regular family meetings. Being someone who worked for the government and wanting to do things the correct way, he insisted that we have a secretary and an agenda and someone leading the meeting. He genuinely wanted us to learn what meetings were like as a life skill.

  Dave and I dreaded them. They were held every fortnight and were a bit serious in tone for us. They did have some useful outcomes. When Mum was pregnant for the fourth time, one agenda item was to choose names for boys and girls. We came up with Robert for a boy, but she had a girl, so Gemma it was.

  It was at a family meeting that I could also make a big announcement. When I was sixteen, I was number three the state in squash for my age group and was also in junior cricket development squads at the WACA. At a meeting, I announced to the family that I was going to dedicate myself to cricket. I wanted to chase the dream of playing for Western Australia. I expected a good reaction, but everyone sat in stunned silence. I went to bed wondering what I’d done.

  I still enjoyed school. At Prendiville Catholic College, Joondalup, where I’d been going since year eight, they had young, keen teachers – it was only three years old when I started. I liked maths and chemistry, and also physics, but though I tried very hard I wasn’t naturally very good at it. But the main thing was, I enjoyed it and tried my best and didn’t want to drop out. Sport as a professional career seemed way beyond my capabilities, and of course Mum and Dad would encourage me to finish school and go to university. So I didn’t think that dropping squash to concentrate on cricket was such a radical move.

  When I finally made the Wanneroo under-15s, I was extremely happy. The Wanneroo District Cricket Club was an interesting club. The newest in the WACA competition, the club was a northern outpost that had been developed over a long period to get to this point. Because it was isolated, it had a huge, strong catchment of juniors. It was only a matter of time before that strength filtered through to the senior club, which hadn’t been successful yet. I came in during that transitional phase.

  Wanneroo’s home ground was Kingsway Reserve, a huge sporting complex of cricket ovals, netball courts, and fields for Aussie rules, soccer and rugby, all dumped in the middle of a big market-garden area. The club was criticised for the amount of flies and the smell of manure that strayed into the viewing area. It was better in the middle. Now it’s a beautiful area and a great club, but back then it was just tin sheds and flies. The pitch had been so treacherous that guys had T-shirts saying, ‘I batted on Kingsway Reserve and survived’, but it had settled down by the time I came along.

  While I was playing for the under-15s, after our games I tended the scoreboard for A-grade. I put my hand up for that job every single week. The payment was two free hot dogs and Cokes all day. Life couldn’t get any better.

  But there was a special reason to watch A-grade, and that was Damien Martyn. To put it simply, I was blown away by how he played. He was four years older than me, but might as well have been in a different universe. From the first ball, he would walk down the pitch and smack the opening bowler over his head or over cover, just teeing off, charging A-grade opening bowlers and smashing them into the trees. Later, I realised he didn’t take grade cricket all that seriously, and he’d get out. He had his eyes set on higher honours, and was only two years away from representing Australia. But the one or two days of the season when he tore attacks apart were what stuck in the memory.

  I came into contact with more of these gun
players when I was picked in my first representative team, a city side playing in a statewide under-15 carnival in Bunbury, south of Perth. From that carnival they selected a group of players to try out for the West Australian under-17 team the following year. I was captain of one of the teams, opened the batting and bowled leggies. I only got one decent score in that carnival, but gradually worked my way into the state under-age teams.

  Our reputation in the carnivals was as a pretty boring team, bowling to a plan wide of off stump, setting defensive fields, and making the batsmen get themselves out. We were disciplined and patient and a bit negative, but our strength was in our batting.

  The two stand-out batsmen in my age group were Simon Katich, who looked a class above everyone else, and Robbie Baker, who would captain the Australian under-19 team and play Sheffield Shield for Western Australia. Robbie eventually got ill with a chronic fatigue-type syndrome which debilitated him and was a roadblock to his career. But back in the junior carnivals, he was the gun – a dominant, classical batsman who scored well off the front and back foot.

  I was a little overawed going into those groups. A couple of them were sponsored. Kato got his gear at his club, Midland-Guildford, through the Slater-Gartrell sports store, which was connected with the famous bat makers Millichamp and Hall. When we got to carnivals and we saw sponsored guys from other states, it was a bit intimidating. The New South Wales boys were always very confident, their batsmen strutting around with blond tips, earrings and pristine sponsored gear. Meanwhile, I dreamt of getting Velcro pads – if I got them, I thought I would have made the big time. When I was younger, I even cut up pieces of Velcro and tried to stick them onto my pad buckles, but it didn’t work.

  That was typical of my experience in those rep carnivals: feeling out of my depth. The main reason for this, still, was my size. When we went to Canberra for the national under-17 championships, I became very self-conscious. When we had our shirts off in the changing rooms, everyone else was muscly with hair under their arms. I didn’t have any of that and my voice hadn’t broken so I was very shy and uncomfortable about showering at the end of the day. It was an apprehensive time of my life.

  The Western Australia Under-17 team. Manager of the tour, Ian Kevan, is third from left. I am fifth from left and the smallest in the team.

  Being pre-pubescent set back my self-confidence off the field, but being so small had a major impact on it. When we played New South Wales, all of their bowlers looked like fully grown men. The truth was, I found every bowler hard. I didn’t have ‘scoring zones’. Being an opener, I was able to aim to drive through cover, which was always left open. Bowlers wanted to tempt me, and were happy for me to have a go with my cover-drive. So that was the origin of what eventually became probably my best-known shot: cover was the only gap in the field, and I had to be pretty good at the cover-drive to get away with it. Otherwise, I was never someone who played a lot of shots. Mostly, I was blocking the living daylights out of it. When the ball started swinging, I had a reasonable defence to keep the good ones out. Overall, my game was to bat for a long period, and try not to panic about not scoring fast enough. I pushed singles, defended solidly and tried to stay busy. I didn’t know any other way. It was my physique, more than the conditions or the coaching or any other factor, that ultimately determined the type of batsman I became.

  All those years of being outsized also conditioned my mentality. The stigma of being small and weak never left me. In my teens, if I was going to score a hundred, it would take me an entire day, whereas someone like Damien Martyn or Simon Katich would do it in not much more than an hour. It seemed so much easier for them! For me, the fielders seemed huge, covering every gap. Every bowler towered over me. I loved batting so I wanted to stay in the middle, and I applied the lessons I’d learnt about keeping the ball on the ground, never giving my wicket away, and never giving the opposition anything. But the truth in my mind was, I didn’t know where I was going to get my next run from.

  I dreamt of playing for Australia, but at that age never really believed it was going to happen. When I saw all those brilliant, fluent batsmen at national carnivals, I thought that I wasn’t quite good enough. I could practise all the time and try my hardest, but deep down felt there were better players out there than me. I was never even one of the better players in any team I played in.

  What changed? The shocking truth is that I don’t think anything changed. I never cast off that stigma. I felt under pressure for my whole career, even when I got to play for Australia and started to do well. It didn’t matter what happened; that childhood legacy never left me. People would eventually point out that I could score fast and hit sixes, but I didn’t see that, and I still don’t. I see myself as a nicker and nudger, someone who works the ball and runs hard between wickets, more of a defensive player. In spite of all the evidence, in my mind I am still the boy I was.

  By my late teens, pretty much every day in summer was filled with cricket. We didn’t have family holidays, because Dave and I had matches to go to. He was coming up through the Wanneroo District system, just behind me, appearing to find it a lot easier with his superior natural talent.

  There wasn’t much outside cricket. Schoolwork began to stretch me in the last two years at Prendiville, probably because this period coincided with my increased attention on cricket. Even my leisure interests were narrowing. The posters on my wall were cricket only. I loved movies, but wasn’t into music – I struggled to understand it. Mum tried to get us to do a musical instrument but I didn’t last three weeks. I had to play the recorder at school and was hopeless. It was just cricket for me.

  As with any cricket-mad kid, I never thought I was sacrificing anything. I didn’t care if my schoolmates were going to the beach or the movies and I couldn’t go because of a match. I didn’t want to be anywhere but cricket. I never went out on a Friday night, or a Saturday if we were playing on Sunday. Guys from school would party on Friday nights, but I didn’t socialise with them on those nights. They didn’t mind, as they knew how dedicated I was to cricket.

  My mates at the club were in the same boat. As a result, my friendships began to grow through the Wanneroo District club. Once I was eighteen, I went to pubs and nightclubs with my teammates. It was a great time in my life: training hard, playing on the weekend, then going to the pub together on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning going to the beach and telling each other stories about what we’d got up to the night before. That was my life and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  In the off-season, Dad devised a training program for Dave and me. He believed he could prepare us physically, and then turn us over to the coaches to work on our skills. I was trying to break into A-grade at Wanneroo, but was still not quite there. We started with two 4- or 5-kilometre beach runs a week. Then he had an 800-metre track marked in the sand hills, and the first week we had to do three circuits. Each week we added on another circuit, all the way up to ten. Dad timed everything, and we built up an incredible amount of fitness. The last part, leading into spring, was back on the grass ovals doing sprint work.

  When I look back now, I think it was brilliant training. Dad had a lot of expertise in the area. I enjoyed the training, knowing I was doing it for a purpose. A couple of mates from the club came and did it with us; as always, Dad was keen to coach anyone who was willing to put in the work.

  By the time summer came, I was physically ready. I’d done everything I could to make up for my small size. Now it was time to put the runs on the board. I was in 2nd grade now, and early in the season there was a day when the turf nets at Kingsway were wet and we had to train on some Astroturf wickets. They were shocking, with tree roots growing underneath the artificial grass and making it ridge up like corrugated iron, but more irregular. To make it an absolute horror-show, Peter Clough was bowling.

  When I’d started at Wanneroo, as a kid in the 4th grade team, Cloughy was my captain. He was in the veteran class by then, but he had opened the bowling for
Tasmania and Western Australia over a six-year period in the 1980s, taking 139 first-class wickets. Physically, he was an absolute man-mountain. I barely came up to his navel. He was very gentlemanly, never speaking ill of anyone, but when he had the ball in his hand he would steam in and terrorise poor 4th-grade batsmen.

  This dark, damp, overcast day, he was coming in at me off his full run-up and the ball was flying everywhere off the tree roots. I was absolutely petrified, and don’t think I hit a ball in the middle.

  After I came out, the club coach, Ian Kevan, came up to me while I was unpadding. I got the shock of my life when he said that he and Damien Martyn wanted me in A-grade. I thought, He can’t have seen my net session!

  I’ll never forget the boost in confidence I got from being spotted by Ian and Marto. They identified me before a lot of other people did. I was still very small, but they saw enough to want to develop me. I was in awe of Marto, and he didn’t say much to me, but that didn’t matter. You always feel you owe a debt to the people who give you your first big chance. I was very nervous in my first A-grade game against Claremont-Nedlands and as usual didn’t know where I was going to score a run, but I hung in there well and scored 17 on debut. Although I was very disappointed to get out, I was ecstatic to get the opportunity to play in the top team at the Roos and gained a lot of motivation to train harder and improve my game.

  Playing with Damien in A-grade was a double-edged sword, though, as far as my further ambitions were concerned. He was in the West Australian team, and was just breaking into the Australian team, in one-day cricket and then in Test cricket. That meant I was only one step from playing state cricket – and two steps from the very top! But on the other hand, I thought, if you wanted to play for Australia you had to be as good as Damien. That pretty much put an end to it for me, because I was never going to be in the same league as him. For me, it was enough to dream that I might, perhaps, if I was lucky, one day get a game for Western Australia. That would be out of this world. It was my goal. I felt miles away, but if I went well, that would be the next step.