Underneath the Southern Cross

by Michael Hussey

  Ricky Ponting and I take more runs on the third day of the first Test match between Australia and India at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 28 December 2011. (Photo William West/AFP/Getty Images)

  India had 292 to win in plenty of time, not out of reach for a batting order of Sehwag, Gambhir, Dravid, Tendulkar, Laxman, Virat Kohli and Dhoni. Sachin was batting particularly well. What excited me was how well our bowlers bowled to them. Granted, some of the Indians weren’t comfortable on the bouncy wicket, but Craig McDermott, our bowling coach, had encouraged the guys to pitch the ball up and find the nicks. Our guys executed it ball after ball. James Pattinson sustained the pressure, bowling with enormous heart, charging in all day. He looked like the finished article already. It was great to watch all the bowlers dismantle the world’s most prolific batting order.

  More wickets fell on the first day in Sydney, continuing the pattern. India fell for 191, and we were 3/37 when Pup joined Ricky. They got through to stumps, but it was the second day when they put on a show. I was overjoyed for Ricky, to see him silence his critics. People were speaking absolute rubbish about him. At the other end, the way Michael was playing, I’ve never seen better. How hard was he hitting the ball off his pads! It was super for him as captain, at his home ground, to bat like this, and great for the public to see he was a serious player and could pile up huge scores as captain of Australia.

  The bad thing was, I couldn’t sit back and enjoy it. It’s quite a roller-coaster when you’re the next man in, watching a partnership like that unfold. I went through different stages – sleeping, buzzing around, comfortable, really nervous … I would have had twenty or thirty toilet breaks. I got so nervous, Mickey said, ‘Do you want to have a break and take your pads off for twenty minutes? We’ll send Hadds in next.’ No way was I going to let that happen. It’s part of the game. I was just trying to relax and not live every single ball that was happening out there.

  When Ricky finally got out for 134, after a partnership of 288, I was out there. The applause for Ricky was tumultuous. As I approached the wicket, Virat Kohli walked past me and said, ‘It always happens, after a long partnership a quick wicket always falls.’ I gave him a little smile, but inside I was saying, Bugger off.

  My first ball, from Ishant Sharma, was the same kind of wide full one that Morne Morkel had bowled me at Cape Town. I went for it, and instead of nicking it to third slip I got it in the middle and it went for four. Pup came up and said, ‘That’s a great start, Huss!’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s a shocking shot, it’s the ball I nicked in Cape Town.’

  He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, follow your instincts, back yourself.’

  There was something imperious about him. He was supremely confident, with a kind of glow. I always enjoyed batting with him. Normally, this was because we were similarly nervous early in our innings. We were on the same wavelength. Usually, when Pup came to the crease he was a very nervous starter. I would try to calm him down, but he’d just look at me and say, ‘Just back up and get ready to run.’ He wanted to get off the mark that desperately.

  Observers would say how in control we looked during our partnerships. Looking back, that’s hilarious. It was the opposite! Our conversations were so insecure: ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get a run off this guy.’ ‘I feel like I’m going to get out every ball.’ ‘What are we going to do now? It’s reverse swinging!’ ‘Now they’re putting this guy on; I hate facing him!’ our conversations were so negative and tense. People outside had no idea.

  But this time, in Sydney against India, there was a serenity about him, and a degree of determination I’d never seen. ‘I don’t want to give these guys anything,’ he was saying. ‘I want to keep grinding them. Don’t give them a thing.’ He wanted to grind them into the dirt.

  I had the best seat in the house. Those shots coming off his pads, I’ll never forget the sound of bat on ball. And I love the Sydney Test match. It’s a good pitch because it has some grass but comes onto the bat, you get full value from the outfield, the crowds like that they’re very close to you, and there’s the historic feel of the old grandstands. The players’ dressing rooms make it feel like a historic occasion every time you play there.

  All this added up to one of my favourite cricketing moments. We put on 334 by the time Pup declared. He kindly waited for me to make my 150, but he didn’t care about setting records himself, finishing on 329.

  The match was far from over. We knew their batting order was going to fight hard. Sachin was still batting well, but there was so much talk about his hundredth international hundred. He was batting brilliantly in Sydney in both innings, but then you could almost see him start to think about it. As the pressure built up, he went into his shell, after dominating our attack. He was starting to protect what he’d done and just edge towards the milestone. In the second innings, when Sachin was 80, Michael Clarke got him, an edge onto Brad Haddin’s pad that ballooned to me. It changed the momentum of their whole innings and put it into its terminal phase.

  Having gone 2–0 up in the series, we still had to take back the Border-Gavaskar Trophy which India had won in 2010. They’d beaten us in Perth in 2007–08, so we weren’t making any assumptions about the third Test. It ended up being quite an extraordinary scorecard, with the bowlers having total ascendancy in the game except for a two-and-a-half-hour period when David Warner and Ed Cowan batted. The WACA wicket was as foreign to India as you can imagine, with lots of seam and swing, but even when we bowled them out for 161 I thought it was going to be really hard work to get a lead. Very often in Perth, whatever the team batting first has scored, the team batting second is bowled out cheaper.

  And so it was. Most of us failed with the bat. But for a little space on the first afternoon and the second morning, Davie and Eddie got on a roll. Davie’s 180, off 159 balls, reminded me of Gilly’s ton in the 2006–07 Ashes, hitting the opening bowlers over their head and into the crowd. Eddie was the rock beside him, and once they’d put on 214 in 38 overs we could see the Indians drop their heads.

  A Test match that finished in two and a half days was not what the WACA needed. But we were happy to take it. Ben Hilfenhaus had one of his best matches, taking eight wickets, as part of the career-best season he was having.

  There was a great feeling in the team. As a new captain, Pup was big on maintaining our intensity through the series, and we had the exuberance of youth in players such as Warner, Cowan, Pattinson, Starc, Harris and Siddle, who were so keen to play. When something’s new, you go as hard as you can all the time. Our bowlers certainly were. Ricky and I were motivated by the desire to show we still had a place out there. It was all going beautifully.

  We carried it through to Adelaide, where Ricky and Pup again played massive innings and Nathan Lyon, brought back into the team after missing the Perth Test match, bowled us to a win on the last day. It didn’t matter to me how many wickets he took – what impressed me was that he knew his art well for a young player. I knew there would be challenges along the way, but that didn’t bother me because I knew he was a man of great character. His wickets were a bonus, but I saw him as a long-term investment, more than twenty or thirty Tests, before he reached full maturity.

  As songmaster I wanted to give the younger guys a special experience, so they could go away and say, ‘I was part of the Australian Test team song, what a thrill.’ In Adelaide, we walked to the southern end of the ground and sang the song inside the scoreboard. James Pattinson had missed the last two Tests with injury, but we got him on the phone. I wanted him to be part of it. We quite often did that. We went into the team huddle and he was in Melbourne, on the video link, dressed up in his whites and his baggy green cap.

  Eighteen months later, after Australia beat India 4–0 in Australia, India returned the favour, 4–0 in India. People wonder how this can be so. But if you play Test cricket, you know that experience in foreign conditions is crucial. As a batsman, you need to figure out where you’ll score runs.
In Australia, for instance, I scored mainly through cover and with my pull shot, whereas in India I had to learn more about deflections and playing with the spin. Australia also has a great home ground advantage partly because of the vast differences between Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart. It takes an adjustment in each place. We’ve had a great advantage, historically, due to that diversity. But I know how hard it is both ways, and if teams are very even in talent, experience in the conditions can make the 5 per cent difference that results in a 4–0 scoreline. I didn’t watch the Australian tour of India in 2013 with any sense that I’d have been able to make a difference. I empathised greatly with the Australian players and, having retired, I was rather glad that I wasn’t having to fight my way out from that suffocating pressure. There were comments about ‘Bringing back Hussey’, but I never felt that I would have made a difference to the result.

  Celebrating 150 runs during the third day of the second Test match between Australia and India at the Sydney Cricket Ground on 5 January 2012. (Photo by Mark Nolan/Getty Images)

  Playing for the Chennai Super Kings against Kolkata Knight Riders during the Indian Premier League (IPL) T20 final at the M A Chidambaram Stadium on 27 May 2012 in Chennai, India. (Photo by Santosh Harhare/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

  During that Adelaide Test match, for the first time I put my growing unease into words and started questioning whether I wanted to keep playing. I had a chat with the team psychologist, saying, ‘I’m not sure if I want to keep playing. I’ve written down the pros and cons.’ The main pro was that I still loved the game itself, was satisfied with my batting, and having waited so long to play for Australia I didn’t want to give it up in a hurry. The main con was the amount of time I was away from home. Life was severely out of balance. The kids and Amy were finding it increasingly hard, and the whole family was under strain.

  A view of the scoreboard shows the score for Michael Clarke and me, near the end of play, during the first day of the second Test match between Australia and South Africa at Adelaide Oval on 22 November 2012. (Photo by Morne de Klerk/Getty Images)

  The psychologist was quite taken aback and gave me the impression that it would be the wrong thing to do to walk away now.

  But during the one-day series following the Tests, I started to detect more warning signs about the team environment. I felt relaxed about my game after making some runs, but I felt that all the structures being built up around coaching, managing and selecting the team were so new, it would take time to build up the trust in those structures that is essential to getting yourself into the right frame of mind to play Test cricket.

  One of the first of those warning signs was after we put in a dominant performance against India in the first one-dayer in Melbourne. Before the second game, Mickey Arthur said to the team, ‘We’re going to reward you guys by not making any changes.’

  I thought, Reward? Does that mean if we don’t play so well we’ll be punished, and dropped? What was going on? I believed in sticking with players who’ve done well, giving them a chance to deliver. We’d played a near-perfect game and were being ‘rewarded’ with another game. It sent a bad message to the team – no-one is safe. We already know that. Nobody has a right to his place. What we needed from our coach was a degree of backing and help with our games, not a veiled threat that if we didn’t keep playing outstanding games, our heads were on the block.

  We got through the one-day series with a narrow win over Sri Lanka in the finals, and a week later, after a huge summer in Australia following two intense spring tours to Sri Lanka and South Africa, we were in St Vincent, starting a marathon series against the West Indies.

  In the finals in Adelaide, I had Bob Carter over from New Zealand. We had a long heart-to-heart in which I told him I’d been thinking about retiring. Bob, who knows me as a cricketer as well as anyone, said I should keep playing for as long as I could. He thought I would regret it if I retired before my time, and in his opinion I was still before my time.

  But it was hard to take, having come through such an emotional summer, starting with the highs of Sri Lanka and the lows of South Africa, but ultimately battling my way through, being on a plane to the West Indies the day after it all finished. I’d been away for five months, and now I was looking at another three and a half, including another commitment to a season in the IPL. For the first time, my mind was clouded with doubt over how much cricket I was prepared to take on.

  The cricket in the West Indies, one-day and Test, was tough and gruelling. In 50-over cricket, the wickets were so slow and uneven, 200 was a good score. I didn’t actually mind that too much. For the younger guys who’d been playing first-class cricket, to find international cricket a struggle was a good thing. For people like David Warner, Matthew Wade, Ed Cowan and James Pattinson to experience how tough it was around the world, it was a great education for them personally, but also they would then take that message back to their peers in first-class cricket.

  Having hurt his hamstring in Australia, Pup didn’t come for the one-day matches, handing Watto the reins. I thought he did a brilliant job as captain. His philosophy was about being confident, putting pressure on the opposition, backing his players, making you feel like he valued you personally.

  Pup was back for the Tests, and our win in the first match in Barbados was a testament to the skill and persistence of Ryan Harris and Ben Hilfenhaus, who did it with the ball and then, maybe surprisingly, with the bat in the first innings. When he didn’t have problems with his left knee, Hilfy was a tremendous bowler, very accurate and smart, always thinking about batsmen and scheming how to get them out. When his knee was sore, though, he couldn’t quite get over his front leg and get his arm high enough to swing the ball, and this began to affect him the next season in Australia when he lost his place in the team.

  While I wasn’t making any big scores, I felt like I was contributing well and was a valued member of the team. It had taken me so long to get an opportunity to play for Australia, I didn’t want to wish it away. As Bob Carter had said, if I pulled the pin, I didn’t want to regret it two or three years down the track. But on the other side of the coin, it was an increasing strain for the family. I felt as though I wasn’t part of the family in any useful sense. I was missing so many things, and was unable to contribute to them. And what could I say to Amy about my days? Training, hotel, beach, dinner with the boys – it’s a good life for a young guy, but when your heart is back home, it can feel a bit empty emotionally. By the time I was ready to go home, complete exhaustion had set in for Amy.

  While in the West Indies, I became concerned at a deeper level about how much I was enjoying being in the team.

  My view was always that in cricket you have to be genuinely happy for your teammates’ success. If it wasn’t happening, was it a team culture, or just a few players? I was a bit nervous about that, and organised a meeting with Mickey. I sat down with him and got all my concerns out in the open. ‘We need to foster a culture that makes them want to think about other people and play for the team,’ I said. ‘Get them out of insular thinking and bring in team activities. It’s about caring for each other. There’s too much insular thinking, about number one only.’

  Was I overreacting? I did question myself. Perhaps I was just an old guy pining for the good old days. This was a new team and it takes time for a new culture to develop. I shouldn’t be comparing them to a former group that had developed friendships over a long time. It will take time for these guys to feel comfortable about their place in the team.

  Did Mickey see it as something that could be improved?

  In our chat, I don’t think anything I said went in. Mickey definitely listened, but he was in tunnel vision mode too. He had specific things he wanted to focus on, and anything from left field didn’t register.

  I walked away from the meeting thinking I was glad to have got it off my chest, but it didn’t go anywhere.

  It was understandable how Mickey had his s
pecific plans, and Michael too. But for me it was a big early warning sign that this team had problems ahead of it. We were fostering an environment where guys only cared about their own positions and didn’t think about the team.

  The dressing room became just as stressful and tense as out in the middle. It should be a sanctuary, where you can let go and have a joke with your teammates. Our dressing room wasn’t relaxed or calm, or conducive to good play. I didn’t enjoy that tension and I’m sure some of the guys weren’t enjoying it. It was a far cry from having people like Gilly and McGrath and Simmo and Haydos. New guys, of course, wanted to keep their heads down and do the right thing. So maybe over time the friendships and trust will develop. But I began to sense that if this happened, it would have to happen after my time.

  After another IPL stint, I finally got home in late May. Our baby wasn’t due until September, and we went to Margaret River for a family holiday and had a fantastic five or six days. On the last day, we were about to come back to Perth and Amy said she wasn’t feeling right. As we drove back, she wasn’t getting better, and went straight to bed when we got home. That was unusual for her, and I was alarmed. She was in pain all night, and first thing the next morning she said, ‘I feel like I’m having contractions.’

  My stomach flipped. Was it happening again? I said, ‘You can’t be, that’s ridiculous,’ knowing it wasn’t ridiculous at all. We had to rush to the hospital again, and sure enough, oscar was coming out. That was another massive shock. Having been through a premature birth with Molly I knew what to expect, but was very scared about complications affecting both oscar and Amy.