by Chris Rogers
Add to this the physical toll of it all, whether it be keeping your body at the right pitch for training, or facing up to a quartet of fast and furious pacemen in the nets day after day – it all starts to wear. It is easy to underestimate the stress involved in going in to face Mitchell Johnson, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood or James Pattinson every week, merely as a preparatory exercise. Particularly after Hughesy, it was hard to avoid the sensation that you’re one hit in the head away from serious injury or worse. So by the time of the fifth Test in Sydney in January 2015, a strong run of scores behind me, I set myself to have the best Ashes series possible, then call stumps.
We arrived in England with confidence as high as could be. This was summed up by Steve Smith’s statement: ‘If we continue to play the same way we’ve played over the last 12 to 18 months, I don’t think they’ll come close to us, to be honest.’ The sense among a lot of the guys was exactly the same: that whatever the conditions or the opposition, we had more than enough firepower to knock England over. Given there was no Graeme Swann anymore, our fast bowlers were eager to bowl on the seaming pitches we expected, and the batsmen felt there was no challenge that could not be met with decisive stroke play and aggression. It was easy to get caught up in it all.
That being said, I had played enough in England to know that it could be a completely different ball game. The surfaces in 2013 had been dry and yet we still had our moments against the moving ball. Smudger was blooming into an absolute batting superstar, but I had no illusions about how difficult it might turn out to be, particularly against the new ball. I expected slow seamers that had the dual effect of not giving our quicks the pace and bounce they wanted, while at the same time helping the likes of James Anderson and Stuart Broad to pose very tough questions for our top six.
Another sign that things wouldn’t be quite so straightforward for us came during our warm-up matches against Kent and Essex. During those games our bowlers were taking wickets, but we were going for four and five an over most of the time. The two Mitches were bowling so quick that a lot of the time you just needed to get a little bit of bat on ball and four runs were added on these smaller grounds and quick outfields. Daniel Bell-Drummond got a rapid hundred for Kent, and Tom Westley did similar for Essex. While captaining in England I’ve always felt that the key to bowling is to keep the runs under control. The Dukes ball and English pitches invariably have enough in them to create enough chances, but the question is whether you can prevent the scoreboard from getting out of hand until they arrive.
Our approach differed from this, but I was prepared to trust Michael and Darren, particularly given Darren’s vast knowledge from his Yorkshire days. To an extent I suppose we were pushing the gamble button, because in Johnson and Starc we had two guys both capable of bowling a team out in the space of a session if they got it right. Our ‘Plan A’ was to be tossed out the window anyway when Rhino’s battered right knee finally gave out in Essex, leading to a tearful retirement announcement during the game. To lose his skill and discipline before the series started was a massive blow, yet at the same time we didn’t help ourselves through an apparent hesitance about playing Sidds. He was tough to face in the nets at Cardiff before the first Test, but never seemed to be in genuine contention.
The toss went Alastair Cook’s way, setting us up for a hard task to win on a pitch that was somewhat dry but also two-paced. A lot was made of Hadds dropping Joe Root on the first morning, but the greater failure was our collective inability to go on from a bunch of starts when we batted. Compared to some of the pitches we played on in the latter part of the series, Cardiff was not difficult. And the wickets we lost as guys tried to dominate Moeen Ali’s off-spin will always sit uncomfortably with Michael. We had entered the series with the attitude that we’d take him down and bring the quicks back, when in fact we should have been working him around and taking advantage of the loose balls he would invariably bowl. We corrected this approach for Lord’s, but by then it had already played a large part in costing us the first Test.
Moeen’s wickets were taken either side of my own dismissal, one that I still kick myself about. I’d played well to get into the 90s, but the speed of my scoring meant I almost got there before I realised. I have to admit that I simply got nervous, my heart rate went up and my demons came out. I remember Michael’s obvious frustration at the non-striker’s end; he knew an opportunity had got away from us on a sunny Welsh afternoon.
We copped a lot of grief after that match, largely to the effect that we couldn’t play away from home. It was quite a turnabout from a lot that had been written before the series, and stung quite a few of us to want to prove them wrong. I had more motivation when Steve Waugh joined us before Lord’s and told me ‘mate, this is your ground, look forward to seeing you own it today’. Sometimes that sort of thing can add to the pressure you’re already feeling, but this day it turned out to be true.
The lead-in to Lord’s was affected by Hadds’ withdrawal from the team because his daughter Mia was ill, but Michael then won the toss to give us first use of a pristine wicket.
Then came one of the great moments – walking through the Lord’s Pavilion and out onto the ground to open the batting and take strike on the first morning of an Ashes Test at Lord’s. The ground was full to bursting, and the egg-and-bacon ties and jackets were everywhere – the cream of England and the upholders of the game of cricket plus millions more watching prime time TV in Australia were looking on. The atmosphere was so fresh, so expectant, so electric.
One of the curious goals I had set myself but didn’t tell too many people during the series was to not be dismissed while the England crowd sang ‘Jerusalem’. Often this started just before the first ball of the innings and lasted for only a few deliveries. It was my first checkpoint. Lord’s actually doesn’t allow the song to be sung, but my first goal was still just to get through the first few balls.
This day I had a nervous moment as Anderson found excessive swing down the renowned Lord’s slope – nerves took over and I swung wildly at it only to find a thick outside edge. Fortunately, Root and Ian Bell almost left it for each other and the ball flew away for a boundary. Immediately I decided to change my footwork and hang back so as not to go too hard at a full delivery again. Surprisingly though, Jimmy offered up another inviting fullish delivery and I creamed it through extra cover for four. This was among the best few shots I ever played.
Adam Voges told me later the Aussie blokes were in awe of that shot. Almost behind the bowler’s arm, they saw the ball start outside leg stump, swing right across – and then saw me connect outside off stump, right in the middle, sending the ball racing to the boundary when generally most of my drives trickle over it. So that’s 0/8 after the first over … the tone was set.
What followed was one of the best days of my life. Davey squandered a good start, but Steve came to the crease and together we ‘booked in’. This was a chance to make it count, and such chances don’t come along all that often. Eventually we both were to reach triple figures moments apart. The pride of scoring hundreds at Lord’s will last forever.
It took a long time for me to get used to batting at Lord’s, with its slope, its practice wickets and other eccentricities, such as the minimal sightscreen in the Members Pavilion. But once I had gotten used to all these things, it became my favourite place to bat in England. You can work out so much about how the ball is going to behave before it is even delivered. A lot of balls are missing the stumps, the slope creates angles for you to work the ball around, and you can score mountains of runs square of the wicket by playing late. My knowledge and Smudger’s talent made for a nice dynamic in the middle, and we more or less cruised right through the day to set the game up.
We played so well and so dominated the England attack that the English media condemned the Lord’s pitch as far too placid. I can tell you it wasn’t – Stuart Broad bowled a couple of really threatening spells. It was mainly that Steve and I both had a day out. An ex
ample was getting to my hundred. Jimmy Anderson had left a big gap at mid-on, so I’d decided the next time he pitched up I would flat-bat it through there. On the replay my normally vertical bat-swing has quite a tilt in it in order to manoeuvre the ball towards mid-on. That was a four I will always cherish.
Walking off the pitch that evening compared to any moment I’d had in cricket. This time I was looking straight at the Lord’s members, and as I walked up the little rise to the gate, the whole pavilion of orange-and-yellow bedecked members are on their feet clapping. Many of them know me personally from Middlesex, and even though I’m part of the Aussie enemy they treat me as one of their own. And most of them would have remembered my heartbreak of the previous Lord’s Test. As the passageway opened and Smudge and I walked through amidst continued clapping, there was Angus Fraser at the foot of the steps waiting to shake my hand.
Half an hour later Angus was to find my folks waiting outside, without the necessary tickets to enter the Pavilion. He simply waved them through. Sitting with them in the change rooms later, all my troubles and worries ebbed away – it was the best day of my cricketing life. From there we piled up a huge score, Smudger went on to a double hundred, and England’s batsmen were worried out by the pace of Johnson, Starc and Hazlewood. It was almost as if we were back in Australia.
England, of course, took a tactical turn from there, serving up very grassy wickets and aiming to pick holes in our batting techniques. We had some internal issues around the decision to retain Peter Nevill as wicketkeeper in the third Test and in effect drop Hadds. While you could understand the desire to reward ‘Nev’ for an excellent debut, Hadds had been a central figure in the team for a long time, and to end his international career in slightly foggy circumstances did not sit right with everyone.
The Edgbaston pitch for the third Test was very green on day one, while also having some pace in it. We perhaps read it wrongly. Two days out, Michael said he’d never seen a pitch like it – there was nine millimetres of grass covering it and it had rained consistently for over a week. We were maybe spooked by the fact that all Test matches in England recently had been won by the team batting first.
Coming back from the inner-ear issue, I scratched out a 50 after we lost the toss, in conditions every bit as challenging as those we would face in Nottingham later on. Steven Finn came into England’s team and found the rhythm he can occasionally conjure, bowling quick and moving the ball with bounce. I managed to get one of his deliveries away on the pull shot, before lunch, but after it he steamed in and took the wind out of my sails with a blow to the stomach. As I was gasping for air I thought I heard him exclaim ‘Puss!’ Finny followed up with a couple of searing bouncers, the ones that made it clear the end was near.
We were out for a mere 136, and once again could not control the scoreboard in conditions that were still very helpful for bowlers. Birmingham’s crowd is the most vocal in England, and when we batted again it felt more cauldron than cricket ground when Finn bowled another very hostile spell to dismantle our second innings. They rounded on Mitch Johnson when we came out to defend a meagre target, giving him absolutely no respite throughout. While he smiled and played along for a while, you could tell it was wearing on him, even in the moment when he tried something different by bowling a ball from behind the umpire. I could feel him starting to think about retirement as well.
Broad got me lbw twice in this match from around the wicket, working on what he’d seen in Cardiff. Our battle was getting increasingly desperate for me, because I felt we both knew what the plan was – and that I wasn’t equipped to deal with it. I spent a lot of my time leading into the fourth Test trying to figure out a way to cover his movement from around the wicket, straightening the ball to find or beat my outside edge. As a team our confidence had now taken a couple of blows. Lots of things were mounting up, from our unbalanced bowling attack and malfunctioning top order to the manner of Hadds’ exit.
I twice had dinner with Hadds in Nottingham before the fourth Test. The first night he was very good about it all, saying he accepted they’d gone with Nev; that was the selectors call and that’s fine. He admitted to being a bit frustrated with how it had happened, but stated that he didn’t want to get in the way of the team’s focus on winning the Ashes. When we dined again a couple of nights later, his mood had changed. Mia was again not in the best of health, and he asked what he should do. I just said, ‘Go home, see your family, you know how important they are.’ He went home after the fourth Test, ending an unhappy tour.
The Trent Bridge Test will forever be held up as one of Australia’s worst cricketing disasters. And who started the ball rolling? Yours truly. One factor that is rarely mentioned is that we were playing on a newly laid pitch. A year previously, this particular strip of pitch had produced one of the most boring games of Test cricket ever – hardly a wicket fell over five days. So the decision was made to dig it up. (That strip, I’m told, happens to be the only one that the TV cameras can get right behind on top of the old, quaint and quite tiny Trent Bridge pavilion.) Not only had the pitch never been played on, there was more than seven millimetres of grass left on the pitch, as apparently decreed by the ECB.
What we needed at Trent Bridge was to win the toss and bowl, on a morning when a sprinkling of rain just added a bit of extra spice to the wicket in the half hour before play. As the scoreboard shows, we lost, and then just kept on losing! Anderson was out injured, and I faced up to Broad in the first over. For the series I had developed two trigger movements, one forward and one back, to deal with different bowling, often within the same innings. At Edgbaston I’d being going back to Broad and I felt that contributed to my two dismissals, so for Trent Bridge I decided to concentrate on getting forward to try to smother his swing and seam, a bit like covering a spinner’s turn on a helpful pitch. Second ball I moved forward to do just that, and thought I had it covered. To my horror, I didn’t hear the gentle thud of ball onto a defensive bat, but a sharper snick to Cook. I left the crease thinking ‘What the hell happened there?’ That sensation would run through the rest of the team.
There was plenty of analysis afterwards saying we were pushing too hard at the ball, but I can honestly say as someone who’d played a lot in England, I was trying to smother away movement I knew to be there. As Broad had got me lbw with a similar ball at Birmingham, I knew I couldn’t just let these balls go. Sitting back in the dressing room and watching the carnage that followed, it genuinely felt like there was a wicket every ball. I had my head down, but I could hear appeal, after appeal, after appeal. It was extraordinary. If anyone needs reminding, we were out for 60. What’s more, we all knew it meant the end of the series, and a few careers, in the most humiliating circumstances possible.
Broad was simply unplayable. He took five wickets in just 19 balls. Four deliveries went down leg side, there was one inside-edge and two were left outside of off stump. So 12 times our batsman played at his deliveries, seven times safely and five times we got nicks – almost 50 per cent.
In the time since, I’ve tried to figure out why things happened so dramatically, and I tend to think it was through a combination of leaping tennis-ball bounce at a pace where it was impossible to adjust – probably as a result of the extra moisture on the top from that rain. What was noticeable was that all the catches floated to the slips, who had lots of time to see them – even the one Stokes caught diving to his right. Clearly that means the ball had gripped on the pitch, deviated and then popped, to hit higher on the bat than expected. Tough conditions.
More definitive was the way we copped it from all angles afterwards. The worst piece I can remember was one by News Limited columnist Rebecca Wilson, who essentially questioned us as blokes for getting out in that way. Yes, we were humiliated and yes, we could have planned better, but to have our humanity and character called into question – for issues largely of conditions and technique – was a bit much. It’s a bit hard to show fighting spirit when you are never really in – I s
urvived just two balls before being dismissed, Davey Warner one delivery, Steve Smith two, Shaun Marsh and Adam Voges three each. It’s not like missing a mark early on in Aussie rules where you’ve got two hours to go. Or if you are aced in tennis first up, you’ve got a set or more to go. Once out in cricket, you are gone. No amount of fighting spirit or character will make any difference.
When Michael announced his retirement at the end of the game, The Courier Mail ran a front-page headline ‘Loner to Loser’, while having a bit each way on the back page of the same paper with the heading ‘One of Our Greats’. I had to shake my head at that one. One of the effects this had on the guys was to cause them to retreat into their shells, and lose the gregariousness and goodwill that had carried us through a lot of the previous two years. One thing we had to acknowledge was that we had not adjusted well, mentally or technically, to the task in the second half of the series.
The scale of our defeat was shown by a few of the scenes in Northampton, where we had a tour match scheduled before the last Test at The Oval. Darren had told Michael to head straight to London and relax, while Hadds was on his way home to see his family. Josh was told he would be rested for The Oval, and I spent some time with Shaun Marsh after he asked me about finding the right technique for England – not that I felt in total command after Nottingham. Mitch Johnson and I also had some time off in London, but first we were part of a meeting in the middle of the outfield at the Northamptonshire County ground.
Sensing some lingering discontent over what had happened with Hadds, and also the composition of the team for Trent Bridge – Mitchell Marsh dropped for brother Shaun on match morning, Sidds left out again – Darren and Rod Marsh had a heart-to-heart with us. Essentially, Rod’s message was ‘like you guys, we’re doing everything to the best of our ability. If we don’t get it right we apologise, but we’re trying just as hard as you’. In a way that was a good message to hear, because selection is a very difficult job that wins few plaudits from anyone. To hear how hard they were taking the defeat was a useful reminder that these guys weren’t just toying with us.