Bucking the Trend

by Chris Rogers

  ‘Mate, don’t give me that shit that you’re all excited and stuff like that. You’re scared about how this is going to go, aren’t you?’

  ‘I can’t believe you just said that. That’s exactly what I said to Dad a few hours ago.’

  ‘That’s ok. Everyone would be scared. That’s the right reaction.’

  ‘So how are we going to deal with this?’

  ‘You’ve got to go into this series thinking you’re going to get a duck every innings.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. What’s the worst that can happen? You make a duck every innings. So be it. Anything above that is a bonus.’

  This might not sound like it makes a heap of sense, but that was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. I desperately needed to take the pressure off myself – and setting a low standard for what I expected served the purpose of doing that. We ended up doing about three laps of this freezing oval as I tried to soak up this new attitude from Steve.

  What he helped me realise was that because I’d played County cricket in England and Sheffield Shield in Australia for so many years, I’d got myself into a position where I knew I was good enough. If you have that sense it doesn’t necessarily matter if you fail in one or two innings, because you know it will come around. Added to that I hadn’t faced a run of outs for a long time, and I wasn’t really getting nervous at the crease. But all of a sudden all these new feelings had emerged to shake me out of that comfort zone. To hear that was how I was meant to feel was a great help.

  From there on with Middlesex I tried to get myself keyed up for my innings, revving myself up to feel edgier at the batting crease. For one thing, I’d learnt early in my career not to drink coffee before I batted, as it lifted my heart rate, which caused me to play rash, instinctive shots rather than in the calm, methodical manner I preferred to bat (Dean Jones avoided sugar apparently for the same reason). But here I was sculling coffee as I tried to get the adrenaline going before I batted. That was my mindset when the Australian players arrived in England, in three groups, as there was an Australia A tour going on in addition to the ODI Champions Trophy going on at the same time.

  So six or seven of us had training sessions at Hampstead Cricket Club, coincidentally about 200 metres from my Middlesex home. The group included Michael Clarke, Shane Watson, Davey Warner, Mitchell Starc, Phillip Hughes and James Faulkner. A lot of these guys didn’t know me particularly well, and so it was a bit of an exercise in getting a little more familiar. A little like my first Test, I was still staying at home rather than in the team hotel at Kensington, and so I still felt somewhat on the outer.

  At one session I batted next to Davey and could sense him struggling with the conditions. On my side I was much more comfortable, dealing well with a challenging practice wicket. When I emerged from the nets Mickey Arthur came up to me and said, ‘Do you know your back swing goes down towards fine leg?’ I was a bit puzzled at this and so asked him, ‘Where is it when the bowler is in delivery stride?’ to which he replied it had straightened up by then. The impression I got was that he wasn’t overly familiar with how I batted, which was intriguing given he was a selector.

  However from there we developed quite a good rapport, to the extent that a few days later he told me I would be opening in the first Test. Mickey went on to say that when the team got down to Taunton, in Somerset, for the first tour game, ‘I’ll take you out to dinner and pick your brains about England, really enjoy talking to you.’ That felt good to hear from the coach. Mickey had said it a few days before the team was due to assemble in Bristol before heading to Somerset. So imagine my surprise when I started to hear rumours that he was about to be sacked. The rumours turned out to be accurate.

  Just my luck, I thought. Finally in an Australian squad, getting along well with the coach and they’ve fired him. For a while I thought I was back to square one. Mickey’s replacement was Darren Lehmann, and I had no real sense of how he viewed me. For all I knew, he would think I was surplus to requirements and keep me on the fringes once more.

  These were strange hours and days, as the team and Cricket Australia seemed extremely tense about what lay ahead. On the bus from London to Bristol, a senior Cricket Australia figure delivered a speech I couldn’t make much sense of. In explaining Mickey’s sacking he said CA felt they had to ‘move forward’. He then offered this: ‘To be honest, we don’t expect you guys to win this series. If we could keep it to a draw that would be fantastic, and then we’ll get them in Australia.’ It felt strange that a CA representative was basically giving up the series before it had even been played.

  These words were still ringing in my ears when the group got together in Bristol, so for the first time I found myself speaking up in an Australian team meeting. ‘I don’t want to be going into this series,’ I said, ‘with an attitude that we can’t win this, because we can.’ I got a sense of a few eye-rolls and blokes thinking ‘who does he think he is’, but it was an important moment for me because I felt I couldn’t just be a junior member of the side. So in amongst a team that I could tell was still feeling uneasy and split into a couple of camps, here I was trying to assert myself. We had an awful long way to go.

  Next we were told that Mickey was still at the hotel, in a room waiting to say goodbye to us. Not all the players went to see him, which said a lot about where the group was at. I followed the guys who did, shook Mickey’s hand and offered him my best wishes. It was quite a raw meeting, as some members of the team were clearly very shaken by what had happened, and there was a tear or two shed. That was the last time we saw Mickey before jumping on the bus to Somerset with the new man, Darren ‘Boof’ Lehmann.

  Our hotel in Somerset was The Castle, and I had been assigned a room on the top floor. Out of habit I opened up my bags and threw a bunch of gear on the bed in preparation for hanging it up. That moment I got a knock on the door: it was Boof. Preparing myself for the worst, I welcomed him in amid my partly unpacked bags. For whatever reason we had never really spoken much in Shield or County cricket. That distance led me to think that he didn’t have much time for me as a cricketer or a bloke, and his first words didn’t help.

  ‘So you’re messy are you?’

  ‘Sometimes, not usually.’

  ‘Ok, I just want to speak to you for a bit.’

  At this point my heart sank – he was about to tell me that Mickey’s assurance about opening the batting no longer applied. He continued: ‘You’re not going to play in the first tour game at Taunton …’ That only enhanced my feelings of dread. For a few seconds.

  ‘… but you’re going to open at Trent Bridge.’ Gobsmacked doesn’t do my feelings justice. I was in! Through all that drama, all the change at the top and the turmoil around the team, I was going to be in the Test side. The look on my face must have been something else, because even now Darren still talks about it. Recently he sent me a card that read: ‘To Bucky, still one of my best moments I’ve had in coaching was in that room in Taunton to say you weren’t playing in the tour game but you were playing in the Test. Your face was priceless!’

  An hour or so later we had another team meeting, Darren’s first as coach. The first thing he said to us was, ‘No meeting of mine will ever go for more than half an hour, and if it does you can walk out.’ He then laid out in fairly basic terms what he wanted and expected from us, before asking how much time was left. At a reply of ‘three minutes’, he looked straight at Davey and said, ‘This is your last chance. Don’t fuck up again.’ Everyone looked at Davey – who had got himself into trouble via a bar-room altercation with England’s Joe Root – and he replied with a simple ‘ok’, and that was that. There had been a lot of talk about lines in the sand in India, but this was the one for us and Darren. There was no bullshit, no complexity, just a simple instruction. Everyone took that on board, because it was just so clear.

  With that, Darren said, ‘All right boys, we’re going over the road to the pub, and it’s the captain’s
buy.’ We walked to the pub directly opposite the hotel in some kind of a daze. I’ll never forget it. I had come from so many cricket environments where having a drink together was second nature. But these guys were having a beer and looking suspiciously at each other like they didn’t know how to behave. Their faces seemed to say: ‘What’s going on here, is this a test?’ At the same time I was looking at them thinking how bizarre this all was, how far removed from regular cricket reality the team culture had become. As I’ve said and shown, drinking can be a problem, but socialising is necessary, which Boof believed too.

  Things improved quickly, even while we were in Taunton. The team doctor Peter Brukner ran a quiz night one evening, won by the unlikely pair – though they might have disagreed – of Michael Clarke and Phillip Hughes. It was a really laid back, funny night, where guys were relaxed and enjoyed each other’s company. You could sense they were starting to come out of their shells for the first time in quite a while. We won the tour match, too. That night we arrived in Worcester, and the team ventured together to a club called Bushwackers, perhaps the best-known night spot in County cricket circles. Another great evening was had by all; another step towards togetherness.

  Something else Darren decided was to allow families to join the players as soon as possible – by the end of the week many had convened from the houses they had been staying in around the UK. Among the values he had outlined to us in that very first meeting, ‘family’ was right at the top of the list. Once again, this helped to put players at ease, because Darren was stripping back a whole range of rules and regulations. In their place was simple common sense, trust and enjoyment: exactly as it should be.

  After deciding on having me open the batting, Boof had also settled on moving Shane Watson up the order to accompany me. He was a player I needed to get to know, having only spent time with him briefly with Australia A in 2006 when, as mentioned earlier, I didn’t do myself too many favours. As well I’d heard that Shane had become a bit of a closed book to a lot of people, not trusting the advice of many and further alienated from others by the Homeworkgate events of India earlier in the year. When other players or coaches tried to speak to him, his walls would go up.

  We first walked out together in the tour game at Worcester, and soon Shane was pinging boundaries everywhere. For the most part the pitch was flat and easy-paced, but it had distinctive corrugated lines running down its length. Most of Shane’s runs were coming through cover drives or forcing shots through point, and he was accelerating all the time. Towards the end of the morning session a hundred before lunch looked possible, and I walked down the wicket to him to say ‘you’re playing so well here, but just look out for the pull shot – I reckon the odd ball might pop off this wicket’. At that moment he looked at me defensively, as if to say ‘why are you saying this to me?’

  The very next ball was short – it stopped in the wicket and popped up higher than expected. Shaping first to play the pull shot, Shane dropped his hands and swayed out of the way. Walking back down the pitch between balls, he looked up at me with wide eyes and a smile on his face. Next came a small nod of acknowledgement. It was a great example of the trust that could be built up between batsmen in the space of a single ball. It was a pivotal moment, as from then on we got along well; Shane felt that he now had a partner who could offer him some guidance along the way. For all his prodigious talent, Shane benefited greatly from having someone at the other end who could help with little cues like that, in-game knowledge and tips to keep him mentally sharp. Once he opened up to me, others noticed the forming of a relationship that few had been able to cultivate.

  There were still a few reasons for tension, related largely to the balance of a squad and support staff that Darren hadn’t been involved in selecting. Between Shane, myself, David Warner, Ed Cowan, ‘Hughesy’ and even Usman Khawaja, there were an awful lot of squad members happiest at the top of the order. Ed only got one Test match before he was out of the side, and hasn’t had another opportunity since. Hughesy was shuffled down to No.6 then dropped after the second Test, at Lord’s, despite playing one of his very best innings in the first Test at Trent Bridge. Usman got two Tests before also losing his place, and Davey, who started the series suspended after the Joe Root incident, came into the middle order and was opening with me by the end of the series.

  Darren’s tactical sense was that the line-up contained too many left-handers for off-spinner Graeme Swann to target, and by the time of the return Ashes series in Australia, a top six with potentially as many as five lefties, had been cut back to two – Davey and me. The biggest winner out of all this was actually Steve Smith, included in the squad at the last minute after an Australia A tour, then straight into the batting order as a right-hander who could handle spin. He’s barely looked back, and Darren’s call was ultimately proven right, despite the differences of opinion several squad members had at the time.

  Overall though, the majority feeling was that we were now heading in the right direction, and Boof was the right man to lead us. He spoke to us with so much conviction abut the way he wanted us to play, and how it linked back to how the great Australian sides had done it, that it was hard to disagree. Particularly given there was so little time before the series itself (and the home series that followed immediately), that sort of clarity and direction was extremely welcome.

  One prominent figure around the Australian rooms that series was Shane Warne. He would become a part of the support staff in South Africa the following year, but for the moment he looked to be there as a useful link between Darren and Michael Clarke. It’s so important to have your coach and captain on the same page, and I could see Boof making their mutual friend welcome to try to bring the best out of ‘Pup’. It was fascinating to watch Michael in action on and off the field, and I have to say we got along well.

  Trent Bridge was a fantastic Test match as it swung to and fro, plus the most amazing debut ever by Ashton Agar and then a quite amazing finish as Brad Haddin and James Pattinson almost won it from nowhere. At the time, people were saying it was one of the best Test matches ever – in fact only the Boxing Day Test got near it in terms of drama over my three Ashes series. So much happened in that first Test in England that it was almost a blur – but what a match.

  A lot was made of Stuart Broad not walking at a key moment in the second innings, but the wider feeling was that we were actually a lot closer to England than many people thought we were. I made a couple of starts, and just as importantly felt I worked out a way of how to deal with James Anderson, even though he got me out in both innings. In fact, at 0–84 in the second innings chasing just over 300, the usually boisterous Nottingham crowd had turned very silent and we had a strong feeling we could run the total down. Unfortunately Shane was dismissed for 46 and then Ed and I departed in quick succession and the momentum swung back to England.

  Next was Lord’s and the significance of it hit me in a few ways, even though I had played there for three years with Middlesex. Whether it was meeting the Queen on the first morning, or seeing all the celebrities who filed through our dressing room over the few days – Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, the guys from Powderfinger, Steve Waugh, Adam Gilchrist, Lucas Neill and former PM (and cricket tragic) John Howard among them. More vivid was the fact that it turned into a horrific match for both the team and myself. To be dismissed by a Swann full-toss that basically hit me on the box was incredibly embarrassing, and it was not much better when I let one go and was bowled in the second innings. Our innings defeat set lots of tongues wagging, and exposed me for the first time to the public savagery of Ashes failure.

  I’d been given a few days off after that match, staying in London rather than venturing south for the team’s next tour game. A former Northamptonshire teammate and friend Stephen Peters was having his benefit year, and held a dinner at the Oval. The dinner panel included Alec Stewart, Alastair Cook and Jeff Thomson, who gave the impression he had no idea who I was. Jeff delivered a few great anecdotes ab
out his shenanigans with Dennis Lillee in the 1970s, before the MC asked each man what the final Ashes scoreline would be. Stewart said ‘5–0’, Cook deflected it as you’d expect, then ‘Thommo’ took his turn. ‘I don’t know, but I’m pretty worried. To be honest, I’m embarrassed about our top order,’ before launching into a fair roasting of the top six. Through this I remember virtually everyone in the room just staring at me, while at the same time not knowing where to look.

  Allan Border had earlier kicked it off after the game by stating the following in a column I read. ‘I could honestly say the nine, 10 and jack [No.11] looked more competent than our one, two and three,’ he wrote. ‘If that was me in the top three I’d be embarrassed.’ Shane and I spoke about it at a training session, and he explained how many former players felt obliged to speak as frankly as that in their roles as paid commentators – I’ve since learned in radio work that this is true. Not long after that I sourced AB’s mobile number and contacted him to express my irritation, but added that if he felt he had any advice I would be happy to have a chat. He let me know he was simply very disappointed with the way the match had panned out, and just urged me to keep fighting it out.

  This was all an eye-opener to me, because you never really cop that sort of criticism in domestic cricket. Having just been through the Lord’s Test and still new to it all, I was pretty sensitive to these attacks. With the benefit of more experience you learn to shrug it off, and to throw out the criticism while hanging onto anything you might find useful. If you’re going to play at that level, and accept all the advantages, financial and otherwise, that arise, you’ve got to be prepared to take on the criticism. Ultimately I was grateful to go through that episode, wiser after a painful few days.

  When rejoining the team for Old Trafford, I was quite unsure whether I’d still be in the side. But the selectors chose to drop Hughesy for the return of Davey down the order, and I went out to bat again with ‘Watto’ alongside me. While it was a sunny morning and the best pitch of the series so far, I had no intention of playing the way I actually did. Some days, despite your own best intentions, you find yourself batting with unexpected momentum, and so it was. The ball was coming onto the bat beautifully, Stuart Broad was having an off day, and while Anderson bowled well initially, his offering of numerous full balls gave me the chance to pierce the off side. In the space of 49 balls I had 50.