by Chris Rogers
The fact I was also hitting hundreds of balls every day with Dad and at training trying desperately to improve because of my competitive spirit didn’t seem to matter. The stigma was I didn’t take cricket seriously enough. To be fair to Wayne Clark, during his second stint of coaching WA, he actively supported what I brought to the group. He liked people enjoying themselves but fighting with everything they had out on the field.
One of my best attributes as a cricketer is that I can pick up quite quickly when things aren’t working for me. The consistency I’ve enjoyed over years in first-class cricket comes from not being afraid to tinker and change if I feel out of sync. That extended to times when I knew I had to pull back on socialising to focus on what was ahead of me. Even moments when I needed to get away and let my hair down during times when cricket was getting the better of me and I was trying too hard. But what I saw with numerous younger players was that they struggled to see the moment at which their cricket was suffering. Instead of saying ‘I’ve got to do things differently now’, they would keep doing the same things until they found themselves out of the picture.
This is not to say that cricket teams perform at their best when there is a puritanical vibe running through the room – far from it. I still maintain that the best sides are those who socialise together, because it helps build an amazing sense of closeness that you take out onto the field.
All of these issues were in the background in 2006 when I was playing in Northamptonshire. Halfway through the season I was called home to play for the Australia A side in the Northern Territory. At the time I had lost some enjoyment in cricket and was playing very poorly. After joining up with the A team I was immediately told by the chairman of selectors, Andrew Hilditch, I wouldn’t be playing in any of the white-ball cricket but instead only the two four-day games. This hit me hard and straight away I was annoyed. I wasn’t enjoying Northampton hugely but I’d seen signs I was coming out of my trot and I desperately wanted to prove to Kepler Wessels, the coach there, that I could play. I’d been forced to pay for my own airfare back to Australia only to play eight days of cricket basically against kids as both India and Pakistan had sent very youthful teams. In Northampton I would’ve been playing at least twice that amount of very competitive cricket.
There was definitely a hierarchy system in the A side as well. Some players were closer to national selection than others and they took centre stage. I remember waiting at the end of a net for my turn to face the invited net bowlers, but a couple of batsmen stayed in for so long that when my turn came the bowlers were exhausted. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve called close to a net before I wanted to as another batsman is waiting patiently for his turn. It’s what you do in a team but to see a couple of players completely ignore their teammates for their own purpose once again reaffirmed my belief that I wasn’t ruthless enough for an Australian spot.
Ben Hilfenhaus and I were both surplus to requirements during the short-form cricket so we took the chance to enjoy ourselves in what seemed very friendly cities of Darwin and Cairns. Cricket wasn’t overly enjoyable and it was a chance to relax. I was still frustrated at the lack of game time. It came back to haunt me though when I was required to field due to an injury and put down a couple of catches.
I wasn’t hungover – Ben and I weren’t silly enough to do anything stupid – and just made a couple of fielding errors, but it was enough for a few of the more senior players to accuse me of enjoying myself too much. Tim Nielsen was the coach at the time and I have no doubt he shared the view as this was what he was led to believe about me so I don’t blame him. Equally I don’t regret it. Everyone has their off switch and I needed to breathe again, to start enjoying cricket and life once more.
Eventually the four-day games came along and in the first game I struggled. Also I was privately aghast at some of the players telling our bowlers to ‘hit him in the head’ and ‘kill ’em’ when we were fielding. When Phil Jaques and I went out to open the innings we had irate opposition running at us and swearing at us and we both kept repeating it wasn’t us saying these ridiculous things.
Before the second game arrived, I decided to seek out David Boon who had replaced Hilditch as selector on duty for the second leg and told him how difficult I was finding cricket. I’ll never forget his answer. He told me the selectors saw me as a batsman who batted all day. How simple it seems, but it completely changed my outlook. Out of form, I had almost been trying to get runs too quickly, thinking I’ll get the bowlers before they got me.
The final game I scored two 60s while Phil scored two centuries. He pulled ahead in our private battle, but I was happy for him and for me. I felt something had clicked and returned to Northampton reinvigorated for the second half of the season. It was in this period that I made the two highest scores of my life – 319 for Northamptonshire against Gloucestershire and later 279 for WA against a Victorian side that included Shane Warne. In both matches the pitch favoured the batsmen, but it was still an extraordinary feeling to get into that kind of a batting groove, where everything seems so simple.
The score against Warney was exceptionally satisfying. I’d first came up against him in 2004 playing for Derby when he was captaining Hampshire. He dismissed me early and almost didn’t celebrate because it had been too easy for him. In the second innings in Arctic-like conditions I managed to get around 80 and managed his unbelievable skill a bit better in tough conditions for him.
Then in the first Shield game of the 2006–07 season it was known he was going to play and Victoria would have a very good bowling side featuring Shane Harwood, Mick Lewis, Gerard Denton, Andrew McDonald and of course Warney. After learning so much on the spinning wicket of Wantage Road and Northampton, I was desperate to see off the quicks and test myself against the best.
It was a desperately batter-friendly wicket and quickly we had the upper hand. Eventually Marcus North was to join me and we put on a record 459, together eclipsing record after record. We weren’t told that the highest ever first-class partnership in Australia is 464 by the Waugh twins. I was duly caught on the boundary rope and missed the chance of a lifetime – but it was the battle with Warne that I loved. He kept attacking me all day and even had no fielders on the boundary to entice a sweep but I held firm and instead kept picking him off and waiting for the bad ball.
After the innings and in the lunch room Warne approached me to say how well I batted and I asked if I could talk to him about playing spin after the game, to which he agreed. Following the match, which was a draw, the WA players relocated into the Victorian change room for a chat and a well-deserved drink. Speaking to Dave Hussey, I suddenly heard Warney calling my name, saying he was talking to ‘Northy’ about playing spin if I was interested. After venturing over, he was brilliant and exceptionally giving in his advice, which was fantastic.
I kept up the standard for most of the rest of the season, and finished the 2006–07 Shield season with 1202 runs at the end of a summer in which Justin Langer, Damien Martyn, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath had all retired from the Test side. There was a genuine opening there, something I joked about with Adam Voges via the catchphrase ‘1202, get in the queue’ – for a while it was my number, a bit like Jason Gillespie will always have his 201! That season earned me a spot in the Australia A team to tour Pakistan later in 2007, and it was widely felt that I was duelling with Phil Jaques for the Test opener’s spot opposite Matthew Hayden. I had Kookaburra in my corner at least, as they signed me up to a major contract over four years in expectation that I’d be the man for the job.
The Pakistan tour was the last time an Australian side ventured to the country. I can remember our security advice was all based on the idea that we would be safe on the premise that extremist groups would not attack a cricket side because the outrage would cause them to lose a lot of their support. That was the thinking we followed, sadly to be disproved when the Sri Lanka team and match officials buses were attacked in Lahore in early 2009. Our security
measures looked impressive on paper, but I can remember the cordon around the team bus being quite porous, and also that our convoy had to stop at traffic lights.
It was a transitional group, featuring the likes of Jason Gillespie and Stuart MacGill, both very near the end of their careers, but also the young spin bowlers Dan Cullen and Cullen Bailey. I was rooming with James Hopes, and we worked our way through several seasons of Entourage together. The cricket was high scoring: Pakistan A won the three limited-overs games chasing down totals each time, before we won the first ‘Test’ by an innings and then fought out a draw in the second. I made a hundred in the third limited-overs match, scoring at a good rate without smashing the ball all over the place. I had to laugh when the wicketkeeper Sarfraz Ahmed remarked from behind the stumps ‘well batted, but no sixes!’
That innings aside, the Jaques-Rogers duel was a conclusive win for the New South Welshman, and I knew I had to make a strong start to the home 2007–08 summer to be any chance of squeezing into the Test side. We were playing NSW at the WACA in the opening game, and after Phil removed all doubt about the selectors’ order of preference by cracking 167 in the second innings, I found myself waylaid by appendicitis and ending the match in hospital with a two-week recovery plan after surgery that ruled me out of the last Shield game before the Gabba Test. The irony of all this was that Phil’s runs obscured a developing back problem that would force him out of Test cricket within a year – my appendix issue did not harm me for any longer than those two weeks. And it was someone else’s injury – Matthew Hayden’s – that would get me into the Test team. Then I was out. And soon enough out of WA. Feeling like a failure.
CHAPTER 7
THE VICTORIAN AGE
Melbourne
‘DON’T WORRY MATE, this sort of stuff happens all the time in Victoria.’ With those words, Andrew McDonald assured Simon Katich he shouldn’t worry about his infamous confrontation with Michael Clarke in the SCG dressing room in January 2009. In many ways, that sentence also summed up the fractious nature of Victorian cricket, and how a new generation had learned to succeed despite it.
In 1991, on an MCG yet to see the erection of the Great Southern Stand, Victoria won their first Sheffield Shield since 1980. It was a young team, featuring the likes of Darren Berry, Darren Lehmann, Jamie Siddons, Simon O’Donnell, Tony Dodemaide, Paul Reiffel and Damien Fleming. Standing to one side of the team victory photo was a bashful 12th man called James Sutherland, who of course would later head the ACB. Shane Warne had made his debut for the state that season, while Dean Jones and Merv Hughes were away with the national team in the West Indies. Lehmann remarked in his autobiography Worth the Wait that Victoria had more than enough talent to win several more titles quickly. It would be another 13 years until their next one.
Egos and reputations dominated the Victorian dressing room. Jones and O’Donnell duelled frequently, while Berry and Siddons were hardly shrinking violets. The biographies of players who took part in that period invariably include a chapter or two on the internal battles played out at Victoria, and their varying opinions of how the team and the coach, Les Stillman, handled it all.
Under Jones, the newly christened ‘Bushrangers’ captured the domestic limited-overs title in 1995, resplendent in navy shorts. But things deteriorated the following year, amid a dispute that saw Berry briefly replaced as wicketkeeper by Peter Roach. Some years later, Berry wrote in Keeping It Real.
‘There wasn’t one player in that Victorian team who did not respect Jones as a player and the way he prepared himself to play cricket. He was in another league to most of us. What we didn’t like was the way he treated people. He treated us like second-rate citizens sometimes. Jones thought he was a great leader of people but he alienated the players and turned them against him. Deano lost the plot in the summer of 1995–96, with ramifications for all of us. He was starting to talk like a dictator.’
The path towards a more cohesive environment was tracked by the man who replaced Stillman as coach in 1996, John Scholes. Accomplished enough to play in three Shield-winning teams for Victoria, Scholes was also noted as a team man, selfless enough to hold the state record for most appearances as 12th man. Scholes was always keen to instil the game’s traditions and virtues in players, and loved to chat about the game to all-comers. The unity Scholes worked to foster was vital in securing a pair of Shield final appearances for the Bushrangers during his tenure, even if highly talented Queensland combinations stopped them short of claiming the title itself. Scholes stepped down in 2001 for personal reasons, and all of Victorian cricket mourned his death two years later.
By then, a strong group of players was emerging to vie for domestic honours. They were to be guided by David Hookes, the former Test batsman and South Australia captain known for his derring-do with the bat and outspoken opinions off the field. They were well on the way to that elusive Shield title in January 2004, when Hookes died after a punch from a bouncer outside a St Kilda pub caused him to fall and hit his head on the road. Amid their grief and anger at events, the Bushrangers rallied round Cameron White and Hookes’ assistant Greg Shipperd, who would help guide the team to the Shield and so begin a long tenure as head coach. While disputes did occasionally crop up between players during Shipperd’s time, nothing would ever be allowed to bloom into the sorts of scenes witnessed in 1995–96. Nevertheless, a ruthless streak ran through Victorian cricket that could affect relationships between teammates as well as civility with opponents. And this was the place where Chris Rogers came in late 2008 to escape the politics of WA cricket.
FOR MOST OF my time with Western Australia, I didn’t have an agent. My first contract with WA was a one-year deal for $5000 and it rose steadily from there. But the longer I spent in Perth the more conscious I became that doing my own contract negotiations wasn’t necessarily a good thing in terms of relationships with the association. I argued numerous times with the operations manager Rob Langer over terms, and would find myself pushing back when he appealed to my honour at representing the state and brought up the memories of previous generations that played for next to nothing.
I have to admit that sort of talk frustrated me, particularly as my mode of playing was so obviously dedicated towards the long form of the game and doing my best for state and country. The game was changing around us anyway, with the IPL Twenty 20 version about to blast cricket to another financial level that put many a state or county contract in the shade. I’ve always accepted that those riches were never going to be for me, and tried to look at the game’s grassroots for reminders of how lucky I am rather than worrying about how much cash is being pulled in by the T20 stars. I’ve also never seen much point in arguing about a contract once you’ve signed it – a deal is a deal, the time to improve your lot is when it is near to expiring, not before then.
Even so, over time I realised that agents were, for lack of a better term, a necessary evil. Rather than being mercenary, they took you out of the hard negotiations that had so much potential to curdle relationships. Player and cricket association are both aware that the agent is doing his best to get a good deal, and that’s what he’s paid for. So by 2008 I had signed on to be managed by the former Essendon footballer Rick Olarenshaw, who remained my friend even after he left that management firm and was unfortunately no longer my agent.
It was to be a call from him that set me on the path across the continent to a new home in Victoria.
Changing states in Australian cricket is far from a simple decision. Rather than moving around the corner to another company or a couple hours’ drive away to another county, you’re required to uproot yourself totally and move more or less to the other side of the continent. This has historically put the states in a powerful bargaining position.
I came to the realisation it was time to leave WA over the course of a trip to Adelaide late in the summer of 2007–08. It was by then the quietest dressing room I’d ever been in and too reliant on two players – Marcus North and Adam Voges, bo
th fantastic leaders but slightly reserved characters at the time. My relationship with coach Tom Moody had become strained and it quickly became apparent I was becoming surplus to requirements. After we finished a four-day game a day early against South Australia and had to stay for the one-day game, Tom organised a trip to the Barossa Valley, which was a highly enjoyable day where we ended in a bar winding down.
Teammate Ben Edmondson was going through a slight blip in form and was a little down on confidence. I was worried he was becoming too meek and letting people walk over him, so over a beer I told him so. I said words to the effect that if he didn’t stand up for himself, his teammates, his coach, his wife and his friends and family would take advantage of him. Ben and I have a fantastic relationship and he looked like he needed a little help from a friend. We had positioned ourselves away from the group for the deep and meaningful and I then excused myself to go to the toilet. Unbeknown to me Tom noticed, came over to Ben and told him that I shouldn’t be talking to him like that – basically the same thing I was saying to him!
I returned to face an angry Ben who started yelling at me that I had no right to be talking about his wife and family, which was fair enough. I started yelling back that I was only trying to help and tempers flared. Tom quickly came over to ask me what right I had to talk to him like that and I lost it and basically yelled at him to piss off – I’d never spoken to a coach like that before. I stormed out of the pub, completely confused as to what had just taken place. When I left Ben for the toilet he was in complete agreement with me.
Close to tears, I found another establishment to sit by myself to try to comprehend where my life was heading and I finally realised it was time to look elsewhere. My presence in the change room was becoming an issue as I was trying too hard to drive the banter and make it fun, as everyone seemed to be withdrawing into themselves. For years we had ribbed each other affectionately – my red hair providing an easy target for teammates – but it was starting to get too much for some.