Bucking the Trend

by Chris Rogers

  For a long time I felt that the best thing I could do as a captain was let players work things out for themselves, setting fields and bowling in the way they knew best to succeed. But in the case of Crooky I realised in conversation with our team psychologist Steve Sylvester that he needed a different approach.

  ‘You should tell him,’ Steve said once, ‘exactly what field he should have and tell him every ball what he should do.’

  ‘How is he going to learn to think for himself then?’

  ‘Because he’ll be listening to everything you say and start to develop his own patterns.’

  That made a lot of sense, and influenced how I worked with others too.

  From winning promotion in 2011, we contended for the Championship for much of 2012, before slipping back towards the end. We had the bye in the last round, and in our last game we played a relegation-threatened Lancashire, who needed to win outright. While I knew they would go for anything, I was also aware our bowlers were cooked at the end of a long season. This sparked a debate with the coach Richard Scott over our potential finishing position. If we drew the match we would finish fifth in our promotion year: not bad. If we lost, we could finish as low as seventh: not so good. But if we won we could finish as high as second, with the top four teams all winning prize money. I was saying ‘let’s declare’, while the coaching staff preferred not to risk it. To that I replied ‘I don’t care, it’s the last day of the season’. We agreed ultimately that I’d put it to the bowlers and make a call from there.

  Crooky was adamant we should go for it; Corey and Toby Roland-Jones said they were exhausted but would give it a go. I got to Gareth Berg, our plain-speaking South African all-rounder, who was less than enchanted with the idea. In the end I walked out on to the Lord’s balcony to declare, setting Lancashire a target of 294 from 40 overs. At that moment the coaching staff threw their heads back in dismay, thinking I’d let Lancs back into the game. When they got to 2–107 after 16 overs I shared some of their trepidation, but Crooky came through with a brilliant spell of reverse swing, and the left-arm spinner Ravi Patel was equally good. ‘Bergy’ took the last catch, and we carried on like Championship winners.

  That day brought about a good discussion with Richard and the rest of the support staff about who was responsible for what. I always believed a declaration was my decision, and the chat we had afterwards clarified that it always would be. During the last round, we all followed the scores to see where we would finish. Nottinghamshire did us a favour by holding out against Warwickshire for a draw to leave us third. Not only was that a great achievement by a promoted team, it was a handy extra pay day for all of us – including Bergy, who even texted me to let me know how much he would be taxed on his bonus! Bergy was a latecomer to professional cricket, starting at the ripe old age of 27, and has since gone on to 10 years of first-class cricket despite being told his career was over after a serious shoulder injury. He defied medical assessment and has proved his worth over and over at new club Hampshire.

  Just as things were working out to my satisfaction in England, the landscape shifted in Australia.

  My second year with the Bushrangers, 2009–10, had seen the introduction of the Futures League, which compelled states to play as few as three players over the age of 23 in the second XI competition, Not surprisingly, this had drastically thinned out the stocks of mature players. Pressure was exerted by Cricket Australia to have states looking for youth, most obviously in 2010–11 when a network of state talent managers were recruited, all reporting back to the national talent manager Greg Chappell, a big advocate for flushing older players out of the system in the name of finding young players for the Test side.

  Victoria’s talent manager was Andrew Lynch, and he was eager to do something similar with the Bushrangers. As you know, in 2010–11 I had brought a knee injury home from Derbyshire that limited my availability in the Sheffield Shield – and my contract had expired at the end of the season. Rob Quiney had emerged as a run-maker at the top of the order, and with Andrew McDonald, Cameron White and Dave Hussey all settled, there was a move on to open up a spot in the team. As the oldest of these guys, a non-Victorian and a player who was thought to be out of Test calculations, I soon discovered I was getting pretty close to having an ‘expendable’ sign on my forehead.

  That was certainly the message I got in mid-2011, when the selection chairman John McWhirter visited London and invited me out for breakfast. Amid the eggs and coffee he dropped this bomb: ‘Mate, we’re not going to be able to offer you a contract. We know you’re still doing a good job, but there’s a lot of pressure on us to get the young guys coming through and we feel this is the way to go.’ I left that meal in a state of shock, wondering how on earth I’d gone from a top state contract to losing it altogether.

  Over the next few weeks I made serious efforts to look at playing elsewhere in the Australian summer. John Morris, my Derbyshire coach, called up and said there was interest from Dolphins in South Africa, and I also made some enquiries about New Zealand. In Australia, Rick Olarenshaw had been looking around the states too, and told me that Tasmania may be able to table an offer. In the midst of the search, Victoria got back to me and said they would be able to offer me a spot after all – a one-year minimum contract. Compensation for not being part of the inaugural Big Bash League, I also received an additional $10,000 from the Australian Cricketers Association.

  The downgrade left me feeling fairly sore about it all, and the feeling of disconnection came out after I made a hundred at the SCG against New South Wales. After play I gave a pretty outspoken interview about my treatment from Andrew Hilditch’s Australian selection panel. ‘The last time I rang somebody he never called me back, so that was pretty disappointing,’ I said. ‘I topped the first-class aggregate in the world for the next two years but still didn’t hear much from them. I think they probably didn’t see me in their plans, but I think you want to know where you stand.’ To add to the sense of injustice, Simon Katich followed up the next day with his own hundred and some choice words about his omission from the CA contracts list for the summer.

  To an extent my own concerns about a state contract had allowed the wider events of the year to pass me by. After losing the Ashes at home in 2010–11, CA had set up Don Argus to review the national team’s performance, and as part of his findings the selection panel had been dismantled and replaced by a completely new set-up. Among the new selectors was Rod Marsh, who had sought me out for South Australia a few years before. The chairman was John Inverarity, who had seen me bat as far back as junior days in Western Australia, and also when he was a successful coach of Warwickshire. At the moment when I felt about as far from calculations as possible, my stocks were actually on the rise: in Middlesex and, unbeknown to me, in Australia too.

  CHAPTER 9

  TWENTY20 HINDSIGHT

  Sydney

  WHILE THE ARGUS Review was changing Australia cricket off the field, a major change was taking place on it. It started as far back as 12 January 2005, when Western Australia played Victoria in the first domestic Twenty20 match played on Australian soil. Two things of significance about the early-evening encounter: the match attracted a sell-out crowd of 20,071, unheard of in Sheffield Shield or 50-over cricket – and Chris did not make the WA squad for the night.

  The gates had been shut half an hour after play began, with the squeeze so tight that one woman, trying to return to the ground and her family after parking her car, was denied entry. WA won, scoring at the then astonishing rate of 11 an over. Within a couple of days, another crowd of similar dimensions had watched Australia A play Pakistan at Adelaide Oval.

  T20 was first glimpsed in England, taking hold through its simplicity and canny advertising where other ‘third generation’ formats like Sixes, Super Eights and Martin Crowe’s Cricket Max had not. It was first coined as a professional venture in 2001 by Stuart Robertson, then head of marketing of England’s cricket board, and was first played by the counties t
wo years later. As Robertson explained to the Daily Mail:

  ‘I commissioned massive consumer research into what we should do. We spent £200,000, which was considered to be a lot of money for something like this. We tried to identify who was coming to cricket matches but, more importantly, who wasn’t and why. There was a significant decline in attendances across the board and we had to do something about it. We came up with something that we hoped would appeal to people who were cash-rich but time-poor.’

  Initially, T20 was used as Robertson had first intended, as a value-add for cash-strapped domestic teams in England and then Australia. Though matches were competitive, there was an element of vaudeville to it all: Australia and New Zealand donned retro kits for the first T20 international, at Auckland’s Eden Park in 2005, while NSW signed up rugby league’s Andrew Johns as a celebrity member of the state T20 team.

  The combination of a first World T20 tournament, played in South Africa in 2007, a surprise victory by India in the final, and the entrepreneurial bent of then BCCI vice-president Lalit Modi – who had first toyed with a franchise-based Indian limited-overs competition a decade before – pushed T20 into more serious commercial territory. Once the subcontinent woke up to its virtues, so too did broadcasters, and within a year Sony and ESPNStar had paid near enough to US$2 billion for rights to the Indian Premier League and its multi-national Champions League offshoot.

  Where the possibility of a more accessible game had first swayed fans, now this flood of money served to shift the priorities of players, administrators and sponsors. The IPL offered the chance to swell the wages of players yet to play for their country beyond all imaginable boundaries, while the Champions League T20 offered prize money to dwarf anything on offer in Australia. By 2010, when Cricket Australia announced the launch of its own club-based T20 competition, the Big Bash League, for 2011–12, all players were grappling with this change to their livelihoods.

  Ironically, given its origins, T20 grew more in India and Australia than it did in England, due to the move from traditional teams to new T20-only entities, marketed to new audiences. The BBL provided CA with a second major television-rights revenue stream, while drawing a growing and increasingly diverse set of fans to the game. Robertson had long since left the ECB, who were mired in battles with the Counties over launching a city-based competition featuring fewer teams.

  DAY ONE OF the first Test between South Africa and Australia at Centurion in 2014 was also the day of that year’s IPL auction. We batted that first day, and the sense of two competing forces in the game was illustrated pretty bluntly. I was out early, and spent most of the day in the viewing area and dressing rooms watching guys wandering around as they tried to keep up to date with what was going on at the auction in Bangalore.

  Mitchell Johnson was sold to Kings XI Punjab for $1 million, David Warner to Sunrisers Hyderabad for a little less than that, Shane Watson was already at Rajasthan Royals for a similar amount, and Steve Smith went to the same team for near enough to $700,000. We were in the middle of a Test match – which we won handsomely, I might add – but I couldn’t forget how bizarre it felt to have these parallel worlds going on. How could these guys concentrate I wondered, as they processed the news they’d been purchased for such amounts? Maybe it helped in the case of Mitch, because I’d never seen him bowl faster than he did that week. The money and the hype were very different to the cricket I knew.

  Twenty20 is a part of the game I’ve been at the fringes of throughout, with the exception of one season in which I was thrown into the deep end. The game first cropped up in England in 2003, and I played my first match with Leicestershire in 2005. Instinctively almost, selectors both there and in Australia decided I wasn’t really suited to the format, and so my appearances were fleeting. In 2009 Victoria called me into the team for my first T20 as a Bushranger in the Big Bash final, against NSW at Sydney Olympic Stadium. I have to say my display was of the sort many feared, scraping together four off eight balls and not being able to make head or tail of slower balls delivered by Aaron Bird. That little contribution didn’t look too good when Ben Rohrer belted the Blues to victory off the last ball.

  In England there were a couple of better days, and even the occasional six, but for the most part I watched the way the game unfolded with a combination of awe and puzzlement. The intensity of the thing, from batting to fielding, really stretched me, and I was never able to get my head around the concept of doing anything other than selling my wicket dearly. Luke Wright, an English teammate, once said that batting in T20 is all about taking calculated gambles, being prepared to fail, and accepting the fact when you do because there will be another innings around the corner. I simply hated getting out, and that held me back from the sort of freedom the game demands. As it was, my fringe status in T20 teams meant ‘another innings’ wasn’t always around the corner anyway. At Northamptonshire I was used almost as a ‘pinch-blocker’, sent in if early wickets fell but otherwise sliding right down the order.

  Undoubtedly the advent of the game and its financial opportunities brought big changes to the way guys prepared and prioritised. In the first year of the Big Bash League, 2011–12, it felt as though the vast majority of the Victorian guys’ conversations were about T20. All the talk was of the Stars and the Renegades, and even if the banter was friendly, I could feel a definite loss of focus on the Sheffield Shield. Over the next year or so I watched as the changes played out at training. When a spinner would bowl in the nets, most of the Bushrangers batsmen would swing for the fences basically every ball.

  That worried me, because although it was fine for T20, it was no preparation for Shield or Test cricket, scenarios where you needed to defend effectively or rotate the strike. This got to the stage that I saw Shield games in which guys were all at sea trying to defend against spin. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Australia’s struggles in India in 2013 took place after the first two years of the BBL? I brought the issue up in a Bushrangers team meeting, saying I felt the batsmen were letting our preparation get out of balance by trying to slog every ball in training. Things did improve from there, and you now see a more nuanced approach to facing spin bowling even within the confines of a T20 match.

  The other big change I witnessed was among players who, like me for a time, didn’t believe they were in contention to represent Australia. In the first few years after the IPL came in, the Champions League was there and the BBL followed, most players diverted their energy to being as good as possible in T20. Things have swung back a little bit the other way in the last couple of years, as opportunities have opened up to play for the national team. Cricket Australia is fortunate to be able to pay premium contracts that can still outstrip anything earned in the BBL, meaning that apart from the IPL most players are happy to make the Test and national one-day teams their priority.

  In the first year of the BBL I wasn’t in calculations, as much out of my own reticence as that of the eight new teams. But I found during that season the gaping hole in the middle of the summer devoted to the BBL left me thinking I should find a way to get involved. I can remember spending time with other non-BBL guys like Ryan Carters in a real vacuum, with coaching staff employed elsewhere and even our right to train at the MCG affected by the Stars getting priority. So towards the end of the contracting period for 2012–13 I found myself signing on with the Sydney Thunder on near enough to a minimum contract deal. The dollar figure had me thinking I was destined to go along, play one or two games and be around the competition without being right in the thick of it – wrong!

  Around ten days before the tournament I arrived in Sydney for a little pre-tournament camp. One of our exercises was a spot of paintball shooting. Usman Khawaja was an absolute dead-eye shot, which says something about his hand-eye coordination. Another exercise was a ‘get to know you’ session where we were all paired off with guys from different states. In the middle of this I looked around the room and noticed how young everyone was: I felt I’d played more first-clas
s cricket than the rest of the squad combined. Michael Clarke was nominally the captain, but he was only going to be around for one game and in the end pulled out of that too due to back trouble. Our marquee player Chris Gayle, meanwhile, had not yet arrived. Slowly it dawned on me that, shit, I was about to wind up as captain.

  We played a practice match in Sutherland Shire, south of Sydney, and sure enough the coach Shane Duff came up to me and asked if I’d be captain. I made a few runs, Michael pulled out of the first game, and I was captain of the team. The general manager John Dyson was going through some personal problems and was not around the team all that much, so it was mainly Shane and I working together. Shane is a tremendous human being, and gave absolutely everything he had to the job, but he had never managed a major team before, and there were times when neither of us had a handle on tactics. As if to remind us of where we sat, the last event before the tournament was a joint launch with the Sydney Sixers, bristling with talent and fresh from winning the BBL/ Champions League double. With respect to our guys, it felt like they were NSW and we were the second XI.

  That feeling was underlined by a thumping defeat to the Sixers in game one at the SCG, where I quickly felt myself to be out of touch with the format. When I’d first seen T20 it had been viewed largely as a bit of fun, but in the years since the start of the IPL it had already grown quite advanced in its tactics, magnified by the speed of the game that turned every ball into its own chess match. We started out with New Zealander Martin Guptill at the top of the order, because Gayle was yet to arrive, while our other overseas player, Azhar Mahmood, who has represented Pakistan and is now an English citizen, had arrived but was not yet fit to play. Usman partnered Guptill, and I was due in at No.3.