After a 170-run win, we went to Sydney where the pitch was very green and on a gloomy morning the floodlights were on. When Ricky went out to toss, I said in the dressing room, ‘Is he going to bat or bowl?’
Someone said, ‘Surely he’s going to bowl first.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He batted first in Johannesburg on a pitch like plasticine. I don’t think he’s ever bowled since Edgbaston in 2005.’
Sure enough, he won the toss and batted first. I thought, Oh, hell.
Pakistan had a very good bowling attack with Umar Gul, Mohammad Sami, Mohammad Asif and Danish Kaneria. They could even afford to leave out the quick left-armed teenager, Mohammad Aamer. They all gave me an awful amount of trouble. Throughout my career, I struggled against all sorts of bowlers, often not the predictable ones. I’ve had plenty of bowlers come on and thought, Oh no, I hate facing this guy. For some reason, there are a lot of Pakistanis on that list: Gul, Asif, Aamer, Sohail Tanvir, Shoaib Akhtar. I’m glad I didn’t play in the eras of Wasim Akram or Imran Khan!
They knocked us over for 127 and we hoped to do the same to them, but the pitch steadily improved and they led by 206. It should have been a lot more, but when they had us on toast we took some late wickets. But we had a mountain to climb; you’re not often going to win a Test match when you’re 200 behind on the first innings.
We batted a bit better, but kept losing wickets at the wrong time. Watto made another score in the nineties. Danish Kaneria was getting it to turn a lot and got a run of middle-order wickets, and the game looked gone. When Peter Siddle came out to join me at 8/257, we were all but dead in the water.
Pete was a good number ten, though, and showed a lot of character. He said, ‘Come on, let’s get stuck in and see how we go.’ He got us through that night, and the next morning we enjoyed our batting. Our chat was reasonably relaxed: ‘Just keep going, you never know.’ Sidds was more relaxed than me – my ‘reasonably relaxed’ is probably mega-intense for anyone else.
Mohammad Yousuf was playing the cat-and-mouse game with us, moving the field in and out depending on whether Sids or I was on strike. Sids became more determined to survive his two balls per over, and each time he did, his confidence grew.
Pakistan put down some catches. The wicketkeeper, Kamran Akmal, put me down twice and Sids once. But I didn’t see how they could be intentional, as was later insinuated. The ones I nicked were off the spinner Kaneria, and those either go in or they don’t. I don’t think there’s enough time, for a keeper standing up to the stumps, to deliberately drop nicks that go into his gloves. I’ve spoken to wicketkeepers who’ve supported that reasoning, and said that if he did it on purpose, he’s a bloody good actor.
When Yousuf didn’t change his tactics, leaving the field well back for me, I felt it was a little bit strange, but no more than that. Their tactics were passive, but I couldn’t sense anything more sinister than that. The bowlers were still coming in hard. Umar Gul was charging in trying to knock us over, and Kaneria was ripping it. It was a good battle.
By the end, I made my first home century in two years – the first since that notorious India Test at the SCG. It felt like a great weight off my shoulders, though I would have loved to score a hundred earlier in the season too. We led by 175, which exceeded our expectations by a mile. It was a pretty good batting pitch, but you never know.
Pakistan got off to a positive, confident start, but we got a lucky wicket when Yousuf, their best batsman, absolutely creamed a drive down the wicket and it nearly took Nathan Hauritz with it, but he held onto the caught-and-bowled. Haury then spun us to victory. I was really proud to be part of a win and to score a hundred in a winning cause. I sometimes got frustrated by scoring runs in a losing cause. Some of my best innings were in losses, and it’s a horrible feeling. In this game, I felt extremely happy and proud because of that partnership with Peter Siddle contributing to yet another amazing Sydney Test match win. It was a stab back at my critics too. They’d been on my back all summer. I hoped, in vain, that they’d admit they’d been wrong.
When we were celebrating, no-one even thought about the legality of the match or the genuineness of Pakistan’s efforts. It never came up until the next year, when Asif, Aamer and Salman Butt were caught match-fixing, and there were claims that that Sydney Test match was named as being fixed. That was the first time we went over it and thought about it. Having been in the middle in the contentious period, I honestly didn’t suspect anything. As I’ve said, Kamran’s dropped catches and Yousuf’s tactics appeared to me to be just part of the game. In the fourth innings, the Pakistan batsman appeared to be doing everything possible to win, but it didn’t come off for them. I would still take convincing that there was anything corrupt about that Test match.
That said, it was incredibly disappointing to hear what Asif, Aamer and Butt did. Spot-fixing clearly does happen, and like anyone else I’m distressed to hear these stories and agree with the strongest sanctions against players found guilty. It’s the worst kind of attack on our game.
But this is my personal story, and in my experience I saw nothing of it. I was never, ever approached by anyone. A curious part of me would like to be, to see what they do! But I never was. No offers of gifts by mysterious gentlemen, no phone calls about weather and team information, no inducements or invitations of any kind. Later in 2010, Watto and Hadds said they’d received phone calls in England, which they reported immediately. Each season we were given education sessions where we were told what to expect – a guy will ring up and say he’s a huge fan and wants to offer a business opportunity and meet you for a drink, or knock on your hotel room door. We were simply told to report any approach to the team manager straight away. If you didn’t report the approach, you could be in strife as well.
Maybe I’m a bit Pollyanna about this, but I like to think Australian players are not seen as good targets for bookmakers; our culture isn’t mixed up in that sort of stuff. For myself, I find the game so hard as it is, without having this added complication! Just playing international cricket is challenging enough. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on something like having to get out between 20 and 30. I’d be petrified about getting out for 16. I don’t know how they do it. For the bowlers it may be easier, but I still don’t know how they handle the stress.
It came up in the 2013 IPL season too, where there were allegations made against three players, and also against an owner of my own team, the Chennai Super Kings. Again, I knew nothing about this and at the date of writing no information has been made public to suggest that there is anything to it. I’ll wait and watch with great interest.
What perplexes a lot of us is, how can you do this when you are playing for your country? How can you undermine everything you believe in? How can you betray the trust of supporters, teammates, your family? I can only speculate, but in the case of the Pakistan players, they were not paid well, and perhaps the guilty ones were trying to make up for that. In the case of well-paid players like Shantha Sreesanth, who was suspended from the IPL for alleged match-fixing, I can only wonder if they were being blackmailed by someone threatening to destroy them or their family if they didn’t cooperate. I can’t see any player being willing to do things against the spirit of the game. Being threatened is the only reasonable motivation I can think of, but as I say, I’m only guessing.
In Australia, as well as being constantly educated on anticorruption issues, we are also well paid, which should take out the greed factor. There will always be greedy people out there who want more, though, and whenever I hear about corruption I feel really sad for those involved. I believe that when you do the wrong thing, it will come out eventually. And then your name will be ruined forever.
We completed a clean sweep of Pakistan in the third Test in Hobart. For the first time in my experience, Ricky hadn’t been making a massive contribution to the team with his bat, and the talk – outside the team, never inside – was growing that he wasn’t up to it. He never showed any s
ign of anxiety to the team, but I knew from talking to Justin Langer, who had become our batting coach, that Ricky was really beating himself up over it. JL was saying to him, ‘Mate, don’t worry, you’ll be fine.’ But Ricky kept fretting about it.
Before he’d made a run in Hobart, he top-edged a hook to fine leg. If he’d been caught, it would have been interesting to see what would have happened next and how he’d have handled going through a summer without any big scores. But Aamer bungled it, Ricky scored 200 and everyone said it was back to normal. One catch going down was the difference between a lot of mental anguish and talk in the public, and the resumption of normal service. It’s a knife-edge.
Amy knew what a fine line it was. She saw how, the night before a Test match, I went into a weird state, with her but not with her. She saw me become a different person on that night. I would be robotic in my responses, polite but not interested or engaged. That was how I was before every Test match, but when things weren’t going well for me, it was exponentially magnified. Sometimes she had to pull me aside and say, ‘I know it’s the night before a Test, but you’re too stressed, you’ve got to find a way of relaxing.’ She was good at identifying when I was so tense I wouldn’t be able to perform. Beneath it all, I knew that I could only control so much, and luck would play a decisive role in whether I made a duck or a big score. It’s a hard thing to live with.
And it was getting harder. When Molly was a year old, we’d discovered that she had a mild case of cerebral palsy. Because of her premature birth, she had been subjected to regular testing for developmental stages, and after about a year they detected some tightness in her legs. She wasn’t as flexible as normal. It was at that stage a mild case, so she could still functcion well. But the treatment involved is regular, extensive and often invasive, which she doesn’t enjoy. Cerebral palsy is not curable, but if you work hard in the formative years you can manage it as best as you can.
It was a constant source of wonder to me, how Amy handled all of this while I was away ten months of the year, hardly ever uttering a word of complaint. She had the responsibility of getting Jasmin and William ready for school every day, plus running the household, shopping and paying the bills and everything else. Her family was very helpful, but most of the time she did it by herself. What she missed most was being able to sit down at the end of the day and offload it all to her husband. It’s a lonely life, not being able to have those daily adult conversations, and it takes a very special character to do without that basic need.
I was not a fully functioning family member. On tour, it was often difficult to speak at the right time for both partners. When she really wanted to talk with me about her day, the time difference might mean I was out on the cricket field or sleeping. In the middle of tours, when we did speak, I often didn’t have a lot to contribute: just cricket, which couldn’t interest her all that much when she had domestic concerns pressing on her all the time. It was hard to find a common ground until, in the last phase of a tour, we could get excited about planning what we’d do when I got home.
But even then, once I was back, there was always a transitional period. I came back home and messed up all the routines that Amy had set. Because I only had a short stint with the kids, I wanted to squeeze too much in. The kids would get home from school and I’d be wanting to take them to the river, the beach or the park. Amy would say, ’Well, first they have to do their homework and other normal parts of their routine, and maybe then they can do what you want.’
Towards the end of my career, from about 2010, all of this was accumulating bit by bit. If I didn’t still love cricket, I couldn’t have kept performing. But more important than that was the unwavering support I received from Amy and the family. She might have wished I had a normal job, but she never ever put pressure on me by saying she couldn’t manage. She’s a strong believer in taking whatever life throws at her, and getting on top of it. But I would be lying if I said there weren’t times when the sadness of being away got all too much for me.
We won all ten of our one-day internationals that summer, but our crowds were quite low. Evidently the West Indies and Pakistan weren’t as big a drawcard as India or England, but there was another change happening very rapidly. The state-based Twenty20 Big Bash was starting, and there was some talk, for the first time, about how 50-over cricket might be overtaken by T20.
I really wanted the 50-over comp to flourish. Some of my great memories are of playing in Australia before packed crowds in oDIs. I also thought it was important that that form continued to prosper. Australia is hosting the World Cup in 2015 so we need to promote that format.
In 2010, I grew disappointed that there wasn’t as much promotion for the one-day international series as the domestic competition. That became even worse in the years after, when the Big Bash was re-formatted in city-based franchises with a more open recruitment system. As international players, we were disappointed. It seemed they were giving more priority to a domestic competition than to promoting the World Cup, the biggest tournament in the sport. And then, in 2012, they began scheduling Big Bash games at night. The Big Bash should have fitted around the Australian games, but it felt like it was the other way around.
Back to 2010: we went to New Zealand for another successful one-day series, before the Test preparation was overshadowed by Michael Clarke having to go home to sort out his personal issues, namely the breakup of his engagement to Lara Bingle. That was all a bit bizarre and happened very quickly. We didn’t hear anything apart from what was on television, and he was gone before we knew it. When he came back, on Test eve, we had a team meeting where our message to him was, ‘We don’t want to know the details but we’re 100 per cent behind you if you need us.’ Pup was our mate and we saw he was going through a difficult time. It all being in the public domain would have added to the stress. I don’t know what it was like in the old days, but when I was in the Australian team most of the guys had families and there was great understanding for their lives outside cricket. The senior players incorporated family with cricket life. Everyone respected what families went through, and the stress on partners and children. There was a lot of empathy for him.
Then we had to put it aside and get on with our cricket, which wasn’t simple either. Ricky was very agitated because the Test players who hadn’t been in the one-day series were flying over very late. Marcus North was really struggling. He’d gone back to Western Australia for some state cricket, and Ricky was upset that players were getting into horrendous form with their states before coming back into the Australian team. He had to upskill them again for Test cricket. Ricky spent hours with Northy getting his technique back to where it had been.
I knew Marcus very well. We grew up one suburb apart, played a lot of our junior cricket together, and were both at Wanneroo. When I was working my way into the state team, Marcus was the next big thing. He left Wanneroo after a couple of years but we reconnected when we were both in the West Australian team. I really liked Northy and we got on very well. He had the ability to go anywhere, but he was very insecure mentally, and I worried that that would undo him. In his very first Shield game he made 16 and I said, ‘Well done! How do you feel?’ He said, ‘I really want a score, I don’t want to disappoint, I want to feel settled in the team.’ I said, ‘Relax, no-one’s expecting you to cement your place in one game.’ But he seemed very insecure in himself. It’s a perfectly natural thing, as I well know, being insecure too. Yet Northy was a very different person from me in how he addressed his anxiety, as became apparent when he was in the Australian team.
When he got selected for the Test tour of South Africa in 2009, I thought it was a very good choice. He was taking over Simmo’s number six position, and like Simmo was a handy part-time bowler. He was experienced by now, and had a good understanding of his game and of himself as a person. His time had come. Could he get over his personal insecurities?
He seemed destined for great success. He made a century on debut in South Africa, an
other in his first Test in England, and several other good scores. His start couldn’t have been better for his self-confidence. When he had confidence, he was unstoppable. But I knew from Western Australian cricket that he could also have long runs where his confidence absolutely deserted him. His ups and downs were extreme and long-lasting. Some guys smooth out that roller-coaster, but Northy had too much going on in his mind.
By 2009–10, he was still playing well, but all of a sudden he was saying to me, ‘I need some runs or else I’ll be gone.’ I said, ‘Come off it, you’ve made a century just recently, you’re batting really well.’ But Northy was hard to convince. He needed to know everything that was written about him in the press, and was sensitive to every question mark.
So it was going to be intriguing, coming into the first Test in New Zealand, how Northy and Pup, coming out of two very different crises, would bat. Would their off-field problems distract them, or focus and release them? In the event, they both batted out of this world. Pup played as well as I’d ever seen, which is saying something. He put his head down and put all the dramas behind him. He batted like a man just let out of prison. And then Northy went out and absolutely smashed them. I don’t think there was anything quite as satisfying as seeing a teammate rise out of difficult times and prove himself, whether it’s for the first time or after five or ten years in Test cricket.
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