Bucking the Trend

by Chris Rogers

  All that was left was a final match at The Oval, which we wanted to win to farewell Michael, and also to give a far better account of ourselves than we had at Nottingham. England again had a grassy pitch prepared, and Pup lost the toss, but the combination of some smarter batting and a little less movement for the bowlers allowed Davey and I to get through the initial period that had so damaged us in the previous two Tests. The message to everyone had been to get out there and fight – a bit like a Justin Langer address – and I think that helped alter our mindset enough to do better. It didn’t matter that we only had 19 on the board after the first 14 overs, the runs would come later, and they did.

  My final innings had a few fitting aspects to it. I made 43, near enough to my Test average. I passed 2000 runs in Tests, ending on 2015, the year I retired. And I faced exactly 100 balls, a mark I always liked to reach as an opening batsman, because it meant that you’d done your job of seeing off the new ball and easing the path for the guys behind you. A last stand of 110 with Davey allowed Smudger and Vogesy to take advantage, and we rolled on to an innings victory, hollow as it inevitably felt for us. I wasn’t keen for any sort of fanfare around my retirement, particularly next to Michael given the length of his career relative to mine, and was happy for him to get the full farewell treatment from England while I hung back.

  For so much of our careers we were in vastly different orbits. One year I remember Victoria receiving a presentation from the Australian Cricketers Association, and among the ‘wins’ they spoke to us about was that the Australian captain’s salary would go up by a significant amount as a result of him becoming a selector. I was at that stage on a minimum contract with the Bushrangers, and Michael’s increase was about 10 times my entire salary from state cricket. As a bit of a joke I put up my hand and said, ‘I’ll be happy to be a selector for that money!’ to laughter all round.

  Michael was another person I had had little to do with until 2013. When I joined the side I could see that Michael, having led a very young side to obliteration in India, realised he needed some more senior players around him, to share the burdens of performance and leadership. Not only would this ease the pressure on him, but it would also give the younger guys in the squad a few more examples to follow. Anyone who has spent time playing alongside Michael has seen the intensity of his focus and his enormous capacity for hard work. It’s not for everyone, and I think Michael and the side were feeling it by the time I arrived.

  It had to help that I was arriving more or less free of any agendas, merely having the desire to do well. I hadn’t been in India when things got so out of hand, and I also hadn’t played for any length of time under Michael’s predecessor, Ricky Ponting. Equally at my age I had absolutely no captaincy ambitions and was happy to help the team out in whatever way I could. This isn’t to say I wasn’t trying to assess how good he was up close, as I did with most guys I played under. Tactically I believe he was the best captain I had, particularly in terms of knowing how to win in Australia, and how to drive a game forward once you’d made a solid start. If I thought at times he over-attacked away from home, I could also see he was trying to push the team forward, and that’s no bad thing.

  Having said that, captains will also be aware that at times it is possible to feel a bit lost in it all. You can bluff your way through some of these passages – what did Richie Benaud say about captaincy being 90 per cent luck and 10 per cent skill? – but you might actually be hoping privately for someone to come up and offer a suggestion or two. I certainly got the sense that he was grateful for what I could offer. Michael joined us for the night out in at Bushwackers in Worcester and we enjoyed each other’s company there, and over the course of the series he was happy to use quite a few of my suggestions for fields and other things. On one level that was surprising for such a tactical master, but it was a hallmark that in the middle he was always open to suggestions to pose a different question to the batsmen

  A couple of times in 2013 he waked out to join me in a cricket cauldron. When Steven Finn was on a hat-trick at Trent Bridge then beat Pup’s outside edge and off stump by a whisker, the roar was the loudest noise I’d ever heard. We walked down the wicket to each other with big smiles on our faces along the lines of ‘welcome to the Ashes’. In Manchester, he came out after Usman’s terrible caught behind decision and was clearly in a bit of shock at events. I had been batting in my happy zone, scoring freely, but I could see how distracted he was, looking at the umpires even as he was talking to me. All I could do was say ‘Michael, look, we’ve got to get through this and get to lunch’. He snapped out of it and went on to make a terrific hundred, but at times we all need someone in our corner like that.

  Over the years Michael has had more than his share of critics, and many have pointed to him being a selector as the wrong thing for Australian cricket. Some months after the series I heard from one quarter that he had wanted Hughesy to replace me for the 2014–15 India series, with the undertone that ‘this guy doesn’t want you in the side’. Many guys may have been wary upon hearing that, but after some thinking time I actually concluded I didn’t have a problem with it. As long as a captain treats me well when I’m in the side, I can’t have a problem if he has thoughts about going another way outside matches. Whenever we played together, he was nothing short of excellent to me.

  While we weren’t going to be taking the Ashes home, I was proud to be given Australia’s player of the series award, chosen by England’s coach Trevor Bayliss. It was an honour walking up onto the presentation dais to accept the award and say a few words. England had long been a second home for me and I wanted to show my appreciation. The crowd gave me a warm round of applause, and once again it seemed as if they were happy for me to be the only Australian to do well – so long as England won.

  I had set myself for a big series, pretty much knowing it was going to be my last one, and to play as well as I had in any of my other Test encounters was a source of some satisfaction. This meant I was leaving the international game with a sense that I had got the best out of myself, even if 25 Tests was nothing next to the likes of Michael, Hadds, Watto, Rhino or Mitch, who were all retired, retiring or soon to do so.

  The actual moment when I let the team know the end had come was a few days before The Oval Test, when I met them at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington after they got back from Northampton. The first guy I spoke to was Darren, who had been with me the whole of the way from his appointment two years before. We met across the road at The Goat pub for a beer, and I kicked things off with the words, ‘Mate that’s it for me, I’m done.’ I was interested in what Boof’s response would be, wondering whether he would say that because we were losing so many guys I might like to hang around. My mind was made up, but I was still curious. He just smiled and said, ‘Well done mate.’ Fair enough too.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE TECHNICAL GAME

  MORE THAN ANY other bowler, Graeme Swann was Chris Rogers’ nemesis. A method honed to deal with the new ball had something of a blind spot when it came to spin bowling. Partly, this was due to an upbringing on the hard, spin-impervious pitches of Western Australia, but even after a stint at Northamptonshire, Chris’s commitment to solid defence while sweating on the bad ball met the stiffest challenge from Swann. By the time they met in the 2013 Ashes series, Swann was established as the world’s preeminent spin bowler, combining sharp spin, canny variation and relentless accuracy. He tells how he went about tackling Chris:

  ‘How it worked for us was that it was mainly the seamers who get plied with stats on how and where to bowl, where he normally gets out, if you bowl here this is how he plays. For me I’d just be asked “what do you want”, and I used to look for three things. Whether a guy swept, whether a guy used his feet, and whether a guy looked to play you through straight midwicket. They were the ones I looked for. As soon as I know that, then I sit down and think “right, how am I going to bowl at him”. But with Buck it wasn’t until we were actually playing in
the [2013] Tests that I was learning on the go, because I certainly hadn’t played against him when I was at a level when I knew where the ball was going all the time. I’d played against him years before when it was pot luck. I was always trying to get him to play across his front pad, because he defended, defended, defended. I’d bowl from wide of the stumps and drift it in, and like at Lord’s either pitch just outside the stumps and come in on the inside edge for an lbw, or turn and go to slip. Otherwise I’d go slightly fuller and try to get him to hit to straight midwicket, which is a very hard shot to play on a turning pitch as they all were. He missed a straight one at Old Trafford, but he was a dogged bastard to bowl at.’

  Chris endured the indignity of missing a high Swann full-toss at Lord’s to be lbw, and in the second innings left an off-break that ran down the hill to hit off stump. Swann reckoned these to be mental, not technical, lapses.

  ‘It was a massive Test match and we were playing some brilliant cricket at the time, and it was a ground I love bowling at, especially to lefties with that Nursery End, because one will run down the hill that you don’t even expect to, and one will turn. I loved bowling at left-handers anyway because I always felt I’d get them out, and with that slope especially, I’d bowl there all year if they let me. Weirdly, that full toss I got him with at Lord’s is still the worst bit of cricket that’s ever been witnessed in the Ashes, going back to 1880 or whenever – I mean it’s horrific, dreadful ball, dreadful shot, dreadful decision, dreadful decision not to review, everything. That ball felt perfect out of my hand [but] I started getting trouble with feeling in my fingers, and during that game I got five in the first innings and genuinely say I was lucky.’

  Even after that pair of dismissals, there was no sense among England’s bowlers that they had Chris worked out. Fluent runs in the third Test at Old Trafford heightened the feeling, and led to a memorable duel over two innings in the next encounter at Durham.

  ‘We had such good seamers in Jimmy and Broady with the new ball that every plan we had for all the Aussie batsmen was working an absolute charm. We knew exactly where to bowl early on, or after 40 overs with reverse we were getting them out. But with Buck our plans weren’t working. So it was “Swanny you go after him, you go well against lefties, you go”. It was a real battle. He was good for me as a bowler because he knew his limitations, you knew his limitations, but he wouldn’t stray from it … He was so dogmatic in his approach and how he batted. He was a bloody hard bugger to shift.

  ‘One thing that stands out to me from that whole Ashes was the Durham Test. Our bog standard plan [for the seamers] wasn’t working because he was leaving the ball so well, and if he did nick it he plays with such good soft hands that it was going down. You can either say “God how lucky’s this guy”, which bowlers do, but when it’s happening time and time again “well actually he knows what he’s doing here”.

  ‘If you bowled 10 good balls to one of the other guys they’d try to come down the wicket or go at one hard. Whereas Buck wouldn’t do that, he’d just sit and be patient. At Durham I was trying to get him to sweep it, and I kept saying “why don’t you just sweep it, I’ve got no one out” because I knew he wasn’t comfortable sweeping, and in the end he did. He just thought “sod this I’m going to do it” and he crunched it for four [to bring up his maiden Test century]. I remember thinking through gritted teeth “why did I say that for”…

  ‘Because he was that bit older, and he hasn’t got that arrogance or punchiness about him, just a good bloke who plays cricket, I really loved battling against him. He almost felt like one of ours because he’d played so much in England.

  ‘In a weird way, you want to win the game, but you think if any of them are going to do it, I hope it’s him rather than that other left-hander … When he was batting you never begrudged him scoring runs. You wanted him to get out and you wanted England to be doing well, but it didn’t hurt quite so much when he was doing well as opposed to some of the others, put it that way. To me he was the standout player in those Ashes series.’

  I FACED SHAUN Tait in his first game for South Australia and I was his first wicket. He was fast and terrifying, with a muscular, awkward action that gave you a late sight of the ball. For a while I really struggled to face him, and he got me out six times in a row. But Shaun was a good lesson in terms of persistence and also problem-solving – once I figured out how to deal with him, he never dismissed me again.

  The key to dealing with Shaun was to know that he basically only had three balls: one sliding across you on a length, a bouncer and an inswinging yorker. It was thus vital to be watching for the yorker, and to almost play French cricket so your front pad didn’t get in the way of your bat. In response to Shaun’s three balls, I had three shots: a square cut, a whip off the pads through square and a defensive block. He would bowl so quickly that sometimes the block was an effective scoring shot down the ground, but it definitely wasn’t a drive.

  How I learned to deal with Shaun was a good example of the way I looked at technique. It wasn’t simply a case of finding your own method and sticking to it through thick and thin – I’ve never liked hearing a guy who gets out cheaply saying ‘I was just playing my natural game’. Instead, I would constantly tinker with the way I batted, factoring in opponents, conditions and my own evolving skills. Equally, I looked closely at how the technical and the mental fed into one another: how guys who could play every shot in the book and look beautifully tight in defence were averaging in the mid-30s while my ugly ‘cut and paste’ method was allied to mental discipline and shot selection.

  My tinkering ways started in the backyard. As a kid, Dad used to coach me by overloading me with information and leaving me to find what worked. To this day, I want to hear feedback from coaches and teammates, running through numerous options for how I could make adjustments here and there. Having listened to all that, I enjoy trying the possibilities and then narrowing it down to what I think will work best. That process didn’t just take place in the nets. I can recall countless times when I would experiment with different methods within matches and innings, usually in an effort to feel comfortable because my previous set-up didn’t sit right on the day.

  As a young batsman, there can be days when you pick up the bat and it feels very natural in your hands. But on others you do the same and you may as well have tried to close your hands around a railway sleeper, so alien it can feel. Those days were always a cue for me to change it up, whether I’d adjust my grip on the bat, open or close my stance, raise my bat or keep it down. Most coaching manuals these days argue against this sort of thing, but I strongly believe that learning from mistakes and getting comfortable with making adjustments here and there are key factors in being a successful batsman. How do you know you have got the best approach unless you’ve exhausted the other options? It wasn’t until I got to Northamptonshire in 2006 that my technique settled down into something resembling what I used in Test matches. That year I struggled badly in the first part of the season, before being called up for Australia A duty in north Queensland and the Northern Territory. While it was a largely frustrating trip because I played very little cricket relative to the time I spent away from England, there was that clarifying conversation with selector David Boon that I mentioned earlier. ‘Buck,’ he told me, ‘we look at you as someone who bats all day.’ After that I made a couple of ugly half centuries for Australia A, but Boon’s words meant I was less concerned with how I looked.

  On my return to Northampton, I spent quite a lot of time with Lance Klusener. For most cricket followers, he’s remembered as the axe-wielding all-rounder who bludgeoned his way to be the man of the tournament at the 1999 World Cup. But later in his career he completely reinvented himself as a thoughtful batsman, and in three years at Northants he made 3359 runs at 61.07, including 10 of his 21 first-class hundreds. A lot of our work together focused on spin, because the pitch at Northampton tended to favour spin, and also due to the fact that like me, Lance was both left-
handed and hesitant about playing the sweep shot.

  His method was all based around finding a defensive technique sturdy enough to wait until a spinner bowled a bad ball, without having to resort to a risky dance down the wicket or slog over the top to release the pressure. That made a lot of sense to me, not only against spin but against any bowler. Particularly as an opener, you’ve got to be able to work through the difficult passages to be there when the bad ball inevitably comes. ‘Buck,’ he said, ‘no point being in the change room.’

  That struck a chord with me and from then on I tried to grind out the spinners and make them get me out, as opposed to me finding a way to give them my wicket. Lance’s release against the off spin going away from the left-hander was to roll the ball two pitches square of the wicket on either side and get off strike with a quick single. That tactic was one I adopted and would frustrate the bowler who wanted to build pressure on me. I have no doubt these lessons helped me enormously in my duels with Graeme Swann in the Ashes series during my Test career. Even though it constantly looked like I was losing the battle, I felt confident enough I had a defence and some sort of game plan against him.

  Swann gave me very little peace in all the times he bowled to me. In part this was due to the fact that I’m neither strong enough nor nimble enough on my feet to dance down the wicket and hit over the top. Against a quality spinner that is vital, because you need to be able to push back fielders to create gaps for singles. Otherwise you can be tied down, because the loose ball isn’t around the corner when a spinner is in command of his game. Swann would bowl good ball after good ball, pitching on the stumps from around the wicket and either hitting them or spinning sharply. That made the sweep shot dangerous, and nor was the cut shot particularly available.