Underneath the Southern Cross

by Michael Hussey

  We were upset, but still had forty minutes to go. So then there were thirty-five minutes, and then thirty, and then twenty-five to go. We were still very positive, thinking, Surely we’ll get another chance.

  But as the minutes ticked away, the momentum changed. McIntyre and George were gaining confidence from every ball they survived. The scoreboard was showing how many balls to go. South Australians were pouring into the ground from the city. They went nuts after every ball. Then it came to the last over. Six, five, four, three, two, one … And we couldn’t get them. We walked off pretty dejected while the South Australians were celebrating like crazy. It was their first win for a long time.

  I felt sorry for the boys, but, being young, thought, There’s always next year, we’ll win it. I said to one of the others, ‘We’ll get it next year, don’t worry.’ It would have been fantastic to have won, but at the start of my career, to have had the breakthrough season I’d had, I was just happy to be part of it.

  After my year off at the Academy, I was back into my uni course at Curtin, trying to chip away at my subjects. It helped that they tolerated me doing a couple of units per semester and handing in assignments late. A lady who worked for the dean of education offered to type up my assignments for me because she was a cricket fan, but I couldn’t accept her generous invitation.

  In May I celebrated my twenty-first birthday by organising a big party for family, and cricket and school friends at Wanneroo District Cricket Club. It was a great night, though I had to do the traditional yard glass. Not being a very good drinker, I couldn’t get it down in one go in front of everyone. Instead, embarrassingly, I took forty-five minutes, carrying it around and sipping on it. A lot of other people were having a go, and even some of the mums were showing me up.

  Among my uni courses was one called Personal Health for Teachers, which seemed an easy way of picking up some credit points. Each week, a student had to give a tutorial on a topic assigned to them. In my first week, this attractive first-year girl was giving the tutorial, and her topic was premenstrual tension. She was very good-looking, but was making some kind of statement by wearing extremely ugly, baggy denim overalls.

  Listening to her talk, I was shifting in my seat. A mature-age student and I were the only guys in the class, and I have to confess I knew absolutely nothing about PMT. Even though I had two sisters, they were much younger than me and I hadn’t spent much time with girls.

  Finally, she opened the floor to questions. I was keeping my mouth shut. She decided she wanted to ask the guys in the room a few questions. The mature-age guy spoke up about this and that, and then everyone looked at me.

  ‘Er, yeah, I find it helps to steer clear, and, yeah, er, just give them some space …’

  It was transparent that I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was talking about.

  After the class, downstairs at the education library, I saw her and said, ‘That was an interesting talk, I didn’t know much about that stuff.’

  She looked straight at me and said, ‘Just another uneducated male, are you?’

  Set back on my heels, I thought, Yeah, obviously I am.

  I was pretty attracted to Amy from the start, even with the overalls. I was quite inexperienced with girls. My big crush in primary school had been my year three teacher, Miss Santorelli. Through high school, I’d had a couple of girlfriends and liked the idea, but because I was so undeveloped, the girls I really liked were going out with guys much older than me. The ones I’d have wanted to ask out would never take me seriously and I never got close. I never gave the girls I did go out with the time they deserved, because cricket and schoolwork were my priorities.

  But I was pretty determined to get to know Amy. A bloke I was studying with, another mature-age student, was doing some work for the university. Too scared to ask Amy for her phone number, I asked him to get onto the uni database for me.

  It was pretty much my first serious date. I booked a restaurant, dressed up in a beautiful white linen shirt and drove to her house at the other end of Perth, in the south, with flowers and chocolates. I guess I’ve never been accused, over anything in life, of not trying hard enough.

  I knocked on the door. Amy had told me that she had an identical twin sister, Kate. Their whole lives, people were mixing them up with each other, always asking, ‘Are you Amy or Kate?’ It drove them crazy. So I was standing there, and the girl who opened the door was wearing tracksuit pants, clearly not going out.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘So you must be the other one?’

  That’s possibly the worst thing in the world to say to an identical twin, and I’d just said it. Kate walked off and said to Amy, ‘Not a very good start.’

  As we drove to the restaurant, Amy said, ‘So what’s your last name?’

  I was nervous about this. I knew Amy wouldn’t follow state cricket, but in my mind, it might look like big-noting if I said, ‘I’m Mike Hussey.’ Like, Haven’t you heard of me? I didn’t know if she’d heard of me or not. And did it look even more big-headed if I expected her to know my name? I’d just got myself into a complete twist over it, second-guessing every option in the hope of making a good impression, and ended up with the worst of all outcomes.

  ‘I don’t want to tell you.’

  Oh, gee. I could sense Amy starting to panic. Who’s this strange guy driving me off without telling me his name? She probably wanted me to turn around and take her home. I was trying to dig my way out of my mess, but only made it worse. Eventually she made me tell her. She hadn’t heard of me, which was a relief. I don’t know what I was on about.

  We went to an Italian restaurant, and I ordered my favourite, spaghetti marinara. I ended up with red spots from the tomato sauce all over my beautiful white shirt, but all in all the date went well. We had a lot to talk about; it helped me relax that she had some interest in cricket, at least she didn’t hate it, but she didn’t want to talk about the game.

  The more I got to know Amy, the more I respected who she was and where she came from, and the more we found we had in common. Her grandmother, who had been married to an English military man, had flown to Perth from the UK on the 10-pound scheme. Amy’s dad was a knockabout guy, an accountant who played footy locally. He and Amy’s mother got married and had children very young: four daughters, including the twins, within three years. Amy’s parents worked incredibly hard so they could send the four girls to private schools and the girls grew up with great personalities and strong values.

  Amy was three years younger than me, but I was taking so long to do my course, we ended up graduating with our Bachelor of Education degrees on the same day. Amy did it in four years, while I did it in eight. She went straight into a Catholic primary school in Middle Swan, and absolutely loved it. It was quite a tough school, a challenge for her, but she was a brilliant teacher and made good friends among her colleagues. It suited me that she was working hard while I was also occupied. From the start, because my cricket commitments were heavy and getting more so, our time together was limited, but because we didn’t have a lot of it we made the most of what we had.

  A couple of months after that first date, I was into a new season, facing Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh on the WACA. I was going along fine, thinking they weren’t as fast or hostile as their reputations, and then Walsh let one fly out of nowhere. It was short, and it hit me in the glove before I had time to move. I looked at him with fear in my eyes. He gave me a little nod to say, I know you think you can handle me, young fella, but we’re a lot quicker than this. From that one ball, I realised how much more they had than they were letting on.

  I made my one-day state debut against the West Indians, and played the whole domestic limited-overs season, a surprise considering the type of player I was. I opened the batting, and there was a lot of talk, after the Sri Lankans won the World Cup a few months earlier, about how the top order had to really go after the bowling in the first 15 overs while only two fielders were allowed outside the restrictive circle. I
put a lot of pressure on myself to up the ante, and didn’t really do enough to warrant being chosen.

  In my first domestic one-day game, I had my first brush with Shane Warne. I remember the day clearly. We had dismissed them for 143, but Warnie was at the peak of his powers and took the ball when it was only a couple of overs old to try to change the course of the match. Our senior guys had been saying, ‘He doesn’t like batsmen using their feet to come down the wicket. He also doesn’t like left-handers sweeping him and putting the pressure on him.’ Later that day, I recall Gilly hitting him way over midwicket, using a strong wind blowing in that direction.

  One of the first balls he bowled to me just floated up juicily out of his hand. Full of positive attitude, I thought, Yep, that’s going over mid-wicket. I skipped down the track to get it on the full. But as I got close, it seemed to want to avoid me. I could hear it whirring in the air, buzzing like a blowfly with the amount of revs he’d put on it. The nearer I got, the faster it dipped down. Suddenly, after thinking I was going to tonk it on the full, it pitched before I could get to it and spun through the gate. Darren Berry stumped me gleefully. Warnie ran past me.

  ‘Ha, ha, see ya, idiot.’

  It was an eye-opener, that’s for sure. He did me all ends up. I had no chance whatsoever.

  We beat them that day, and generally had a good record against them, but the Victorians were unpleasant to play against. Teams like New South Wales and Queensland could be arrogant on the field, but nothing was personal and they left it all out there. The Victorians, in my view, sometimes went a bit too far, saying things below the belt. They crossed a line – what they said went beyond the tactic of intimidating a batsman. They were a team I didn’t feel comfortable socialising with off the field. Dean Jones gave me a monumental spray in one of my first games, which I thought was unjustified given I was barely out of short pants, and Warnie and Darren Berry said some very hurtful things to Gilly, just because he’d been picked in the Australian one-day team ahead of Berry and was, that day, belting Warnie over his head.

  Celebrating a Pura Cup win against Victoria at the MCG. I am at the back in the middle with the zinc cream on my nose.

  Sledging was a big part of the Australian first-class game, and I had to learn to cope with it, but it came in all flavours. The Victorians’ abuse had a mean, personal edge. With New South Wales, it varied from the casual contempt of a Mark Waugh to the humorous ranting of Neil Maxwell to the downright bizarreness of what came out of Greg Matthews’s mouth. The South Australians had the confidence that came from being a very good team with Lehmann, Siddons, Nielson and Blewett all working well together, while James Brayshaw managed to lighten things up by being quick-witted and belittling you in quite a comical way. The Tasmanians didn’t sledge so much. It didn’t seem to be in the character of guys like Jamie Cox, Dene Hills and Michael Di Venuto to be aggressively nasty. Mark Ridgway was just funny more than intimidating, and little Mark Atkinson, behind the stumps, would chirp away, but you couldn’t be scared of a four-foot-two wicketkeeper.

  The Queenslanders, on the other hand … Ah, the Queenslanders I had a lot of trouble with.

  That season, we played in both the Shield and the one-day final against Queensland. Because New South Wales players monopolised so many positions in the Australian team, the Shield teams of the other states were very powerful. We had the same squad as the previous season, and finished on top of the Shield table with a record number of points. Queensland had batsmen such as Stuart Law, Matthew Hayden, Martin Love, Andrew Symonds and Jimmy Maher, and their bowlers included Michael Kasprowicz, Adam Dale, Andy Bichel and Scott Muller – all internationals at some stage.

  In the final of the Mercantile Mutual Cup, I batted for 15 balls before being out for a duck. Brendan Creevey bowled the first over. There were about fourteen wides in that over, and one good ball, which I managed to get an edge to. My form was tapering off, as usual in the late part of the season, and to counter it I was training even harder, exhausting myself. I was hanging on by a thread.

  We won the one-day cup, but in the Shield final, which we hosted, Ryan Campbell and I couldn’t make any runs at the top of the order and put our team under pressure from the start. Adam Dale got me both innings. He terrorised the West Australian team for a number of years. He didn’t bowl a loose ball. On the WACA, the ball just wouldn’t go straight. He could make it do anything, in the air and off the pitch.

  And behind my back, the Queenslanders were experts at making me feel I shouldn’t be on the same cricket field as them. Matthew Hayden, at gully for my first game against them, really let me have it and I was taken aback by his hostility. I thought, Gee, this guy really doesn’t like me. Then Stuie Law and Jimmy Maher chimed in, and Wade Seccombe, one of the nicest guys around, started sledging me too. Adam Dale was so skilful, every ball made me feel worthless. It was so hard to lay bat on ball, I got desperate trying to show them I could play.

  Most annoying of all was Andrew Symonds out at point. Simmo had a lot to say. He just folded his arms and stood there ridiculing me. When I’d let balls go, he started counting my dot balls. ‘Twenty-five … Twenty-six … Come on boys, let’s go for thirty dot balls!’

  So I’d get impatient and nick it to slips, and they’d all come in laughing their heads off. I hated playing those guys! Then when they batted, they were so big and strong, they could score at will, like batting was easy. They were the best team in the competition and completely outplayed us in that Shield final.

  The infuriating thing was, they were great blokes off the field. They’d come in for a beer and were all such nice blokes. Simmo, of course, was a great mate of mine, and had a good laugh about getting under my skin. I sort of grinned and bore it. On the field they made you feel like they hated you, that you were a piece of crud. Off it, you couldn’t imagine a friendlier bunch. I guess that was all part of the education of a first-class cricketer. But after losing our second final in a row, I was feeling a bit dirtier than the previous year in Adelaide. We all were. It was time to finish the job off.

  In 1997, my horizons were still limited to my home state. I had performed quite well for WA and wondered if the national selectors had noticed me. Internally, I wasn’t sure if I could play at the next level and was desperate to be part of a winning Sheffield Shield team. The Australian Test side had Mark Taylor and Michael Slater opening the batting, with players like Hayden, Langer, Blewett and Matthew Elliott either in the team or able to step up if an opening position fell vacant. National selection was an unlikely dream.

  Intermediate goals were satisfying me. I scored three centuries for Western Australia that season, helping us top the table and make another final. We enjoyed the immense pleasure of beating Queensland in Brisbane, and would host Tasmania in the decider. Also, during that season I batted against South Africa at the WACA, the best bowlers I’d faced. They put their best team on the park and played hard. I performed all right, though I was petrified of Allan Donald. He hit Gilly before he had the chance to move, smashing his helmet and cutting his face. I found Shaun Pollock just as quick downbreeze. It was very hard work, and I felt like I batted quite well, though I took a long time to score my runs.

  I was building my mental strength, helping my resilience against sledging and my ability to play long innings, with the help of the psychologist at the WACA, Sandy Gordon. He taught us about goal setting, concentration routines, visualisation and other mental skills. I wrote down lists and kept training diaries and gobbled it up. Sandy showed me how to switch off between balls, and how to employ a routine. After each ball, I would switch off until the bowler was at the top of his mark. Then my sequence of thoughts was: check my stance, relax my arms, clear the doubts, then focus on the ball. Some days, when it was working, I would go into this trance-like routine and suddenly I would have faced 150 balls. It became my trusted routine throughout my career, through thick and thin, the mental bedrock of my batting.

  In the Shield final, the Tasmanian
s were understandably desperate to win for the first time. David Boon was the captain. When he won the toss, he said, ‘We’re gunna bat first.’ He said it so adamantly, I thought, Gee, he means business.

  But there was a bit of moisture in the pitch and it was overcast and rainy, and we bowled them out for 285. Luckily the batting conditions improved for our turn. The Tassies had a good attack, with Colin Miller enjoying a record summer with his seam and spin, taking 70 wickets. I made 44, Ryan Campbell and Tom Moody hit hundreds, but when the game was really in the balance, Brendon Julian came to the crease and put the thing beyond doubt. I’d never seen anything like it. He usually teased us with the bat, looking so good and throwing his wicket away, but this day, it all clicked for him. A decent crowd was in, making a lot of noise, and a party atmosphere developed as BJ smashed them with 124 off 105 balls. The pitch flattened out, and with a lead of nearly 300 runs we were never going to lose from there. Michael Di Venuto scored a remarkable 189, belting the ball so hard it was like he had three bats stuck together. But in the end, we only needed to chase 80-odd to win. I was with Tom Moody when he hit the winning runs. It was so exciting to finally get our hands on that Sheffield Shield. Gilly organised cigars and we had a great celebration. It had been six years since Western Australia had won the Shield. Some of the past players came in to share the moment, and I asked Graeme Wood, one of the Test batsmen I used to imitate in the back yard, ‘How many Shields did you win?’

  He said, ‘Eight or nine.’ He didn’t know exactly! I couldn’t believe he’d won so many Sheffield Shields he’d lost count. That blew me away, knowing how hard we’d worked to win just one.

  Unfortunately, Sheffield Shields were about to become a rarity in the west. The next season, 1998–99, would be a last hurrah. We were up and down through the summer and our last match was at the MCG. We needed to draw to qualify for the final, which would be in Brisbane, and Victoria needed an outright win. So it was a full-on game, with Darren Berry running the show from behind the stumps. There was nothing between the teams after the first innings, and on the last day, Victoria declared, leaving themselves 100 overs to bowl us out and make the final. We just needed to survive the day.