by Chris Rogers
Marcus Trescothick has had a wonderful career but even now I see him wanting to try new things and he is in his forties. Ricky Ponting is one of the best batsmen to walk the planet and a freakish talent, but the stories of his work ethic are legendary. It was clear at the end of his career he was trying to adapt his footwork to combat being dismissed lbw.
Davey Warner in the 2015 Ashes on UK soil realised England had tactics for him and he immediately went about adapting his game in the conditions to combat them – this from a player who is thought to be completely instinctive. Steve Smith decided to emulate how AB de Villiers moved a long away across his crease to the offside and found it worked for him.
If it’s good enough for these guys to tinker, then why aren’t we challenging the techniques of the younger players more? The best players constantly evolve, even if change does not always bring immediate success.
CONSISTENCY
I’ve played with a number of players who can make batting look easy when they are in form. Fine, but the problem comes when judges see one innings and immediately proclaim them as the next world-beater. Cricket is about being consistent – there is no point being brilliant one day and rubbish the next three or four. No doubt there is a place for match-winners, but consistency is what helps cricket sides.
Michael Hussey would often talk to me when we were opening the batting together about ‘batting time’, so we were doing a job for the next batsmen to come in. The longer a team’s innings goes, the more tired bowlers get – and then batting gets easier. Huss’s motto was to bat for time every chance he got and do a job for the team. That was why he became a superstar and so valuable to every side he played in.
Often I hear coaches saying when a batsman gets in to go ‘big’. This new term of ‘daddy hundreds’ grates with me – it is a stupid term, like ‘going forward’. (Is it people trying to sound knowledgeable when they aren’t?) It’s great to have one player get a big score, but why should so much pressure be put on one or two players? For me, if everyone contributes regularly then the team will perform.
Shaun Marsh was the most talented junior I saw and his hundred as a 19-year-old at Newcastle, against a full-strength NSW with Steve Waugh at the helm, was incredible. Good enough for Waugh to claim it was one of the best innings he’d seen by a young player for a long time. Immediately Shaun was fast-tracked, but his performances were anything but consistent and it took him a number of years before he did find consistency.
The same was the case with Usman Khawaja, who had sublime gifts as a youngster and was in the Australian side early, but wasn’t quite ready. His game wasn’t yet three-dimensional and he didn’t yet have the skills to be consistent.
As a selector, consistency would be a major factor for me. Look at the overall, not merely the evidence of the eyes on a given day.
GOOD SIDES CELEBRATE WITH EACH OTHER
In a day and age where professionalism is greater than ever in sport, with cricket no exception, finding opportunities to enjoy each other’s success and to celebrate victories is still essential.
Cricket is a team game played out through individual battles. Yes, batting partners can help each other in rotating the strike or taking the majority of certain bowlers for each other, and bowlers need fielders to take catches for them, but in general it’s about delivering your own personal skill. Yet it’s a team game and sides succeed only if they have a common goal. Teammates don’t have to get on, but they should be heading in the same direction and be prepared to be happy for each other.
The best sides I’ve been a part of loved playing with each other and would fight for each other. When I first played for Middlesex we had a lot of initial success in winning the second division of the County championship and finishing third the following year in the first division. Often after games all the players and partners would convene in a pub and have a fantastic time.
Durham always seem to over-perform and the fact they are the most remote side doesn’t surprise me. There is a certain ‘us against them’ mentality that carries them through the inevitable tough times. While the Victoria side I joined had rather large divisions, there was still the same kind of adversarial attitude that had come from those guys sticking together through thick and thin – most noticeably the passing of David Hookes – and of a culture where each player was pushing others to attain higher honours.
ENJOY YOURSELF
Perhaps I over-indulged in this theory as a youngster, but I worked out quickly that if I wasn’t enjoying it, a career as a professional was never going to eventuate. As touched on elsewhere, the game can become overbearing, and the pressure too much. I never once considered cricket to be work. Yes, it paid the bills, but I never said to family or friends that I was going to ‘work’ that day. It was always about going to ‘play’.
The life of a professional cricketer can arguably be one of the best of all sports. International travel plus being a part of a team isn’t that common, at least for the amount of time cricketers do it. These opportunities are unlikely to come around again and while I’d like to think I gave everything when I trained and played, I made sure I had a lot of fun doing it and it was never a hardship.
Murray Goodwin taught me this and I am grateful he was one of my early influences. In the end cricket is just a game and should be treated as such. His catchphrase ‘just enjoy chum’ is one I’ve never tired of using.
CHAPTER 19
FINAL THOUGHTS IN THE MIDDLE
AT ONE STAGE writing this book I spoke to my co-author Daniel Brettig about not wanting to sound like I was a party boy who didn’t care about my cricket – I did. Cricket is a unique game in that it can last four or five days with long periods of idleness where you are left alone with your thoughts. It can often be these thoughts that define us.
Having played against England’s Nick Compton and seen how good he is at County level, it came as a surprise when he wasn’t quite as successful as he should have been in Test matches. By no means is he on his own though. Mark Ramprakash was widely regarded as the best batsman of his generation in the UK, but he couldn’t achieve consistent success at the highest level that his talent demanded.
After playing for so long I suspect I know why. Cricketers, like golfers, play the game between their ears. The new formats (one-day matches and Twenty20) call for more instinctive play, but often the longer version is a battle of the mind, particularly for batsmen. Make one mistake and you can be out and under pressure the next time you go out to bat.
The players who are most successful find a mental state and approach that works for them. Sitting in a hotel room contemplating whether one more low score can mean the end of an international career, and therefore failure in the eyes of family and friends, can be soul-destroying.
I worked out quickly that if I lived and breathed cricket it got the better of me, and failure followed. I needed to be a free spirit and enjoy myself. Averaging 50 wherever I went seemed to justify this, but when people said to me I could have averaged 60 if I was more driven and more professional, I thought ‘Bullshit!’ More likely the average would have dropped to 40 or 35 or lower. That approach was tried and tested and it left me feeling empty, bored and frustrated.
I wish I’d been a lot smarter about how I went about things when younger, and been less influential on others who couldn’t operate the same way I did. But equally I needed an outlet – it gave me balance. Balance to train hard and to enjoy myself. When I played for Australia at 35 I went against my method and started hitting more balls than ever. It had the opposite effect to the one intended. My game and swing became too rigid and I was gripping the handle as if trying to choke the life out of it – a sure path to failure.
That’s not to say I didn’t work hard on my game. The days of hitting for an hour every day down the local nets or in the backyard with Dad, and the constant deep inner desire to get better, were imperative in my development. Darren Lehmann is an example of someone who succeeded through a similar approac
h, and even now I look at Glenn Maxwell and his need to be doing other things, not just sitting in his room thinking about the game.
Of course there are numerous examples of guys who have dedicated themselves completely, like Justin Langer – while we had the same approach on the field, we were vastly different characters off it.
Often pre-game meetings would fill me with terror as I was shown clips of opposition bowlers taking wickets; thoughts of inferiority would take over. My best skill was problem-solving and often I could walk out without a lot of preparation, quickly sum up conditions and bowling styles, and go about my batting. That enabled me to spend less of my time away from the game thinking about it. Spending time with family friends was often far more helpful than sitting at home alone, contemplating what was to take place the next day.
That being said, I’d like to think I’ve grown and matured. Even at 30 when I debuted for Australia, there was a lot of naivety. I see how driven younger players are these days and can only admire them. To watch how Steve Smith, Davey Warner, Josh Hazlewood, Peter Handscomb, Marcus Stoinis and numerous others (Phillip Hughes was definitely in this group) chase their dreams is incredible.
But then the opportunities offered to these guys are so much more than were about when I was their age. There was no Twenty20, I wasn’t getting into the national one-day side and the Australian Test side at the time was arguably the best team that will ever walk the planet. Opportunities were scarce.
Being a professional cricketer travelling from Australia to the UK every six months was a wonderful life and the chances to enjoy myself were fantastic. Often I look at other players and question whether they will get to the end of their careers and look back and wonder whether they actually enjoyed it. A lot of players put far too much pressure on themselves; others seemed to blame everything else but themselves and were inherently bitter.
I look back and think yes, I could have done so many things better and might have played more for Australia, but I loved the career I had, and to be someone else just to please others didn’t sit well with me. To have a brief but very enjoyable stint with Australia right at the end and to go out on my own terms was such a great feeling.
Any feelings of bitterness have long disappeared and the friendships I have made over nearly a 20-year career in cricket are among the strongest relationships I have.
Apart from my best mate Shaun Doherty, whose wedding I was best man at, just about all my closest friends have been met though cricket one way or another. Guys like Darren Wates, Chas Keogh, Sam Robson, Tom Scollay, Ben Chapman, Phil Watkinson among others have cricket backgrounds, and while I’ve looked to further my horizons since finishing with the Australian and Victoria teams, it’s not surprising, seeing as my life has never been too far away from a cricket pitch.
As mentioned elsewhere, going to a new team always provided at least 10 friends. Perhaps my greatest bit of fortune was coming across such a great bunch of blokes at Prahran Cricket Club in Melbourne – they looked after me and made my time there as good as any I can remember. Paul Sealey, a diminutive opening bowler with a gigantic heart, and Adam Bull, a fellow opening batsman albeit with a very different style, even took the time to do a stocktake of my apartment when I belatedly decided to rent it out for a period I was in the UK. Those two, along with Chris Williamson, Sam Coates, Steven De Bolfo, James Wild and a host more from Prahran showed me just how good Melbourne could be, particularly Saturday nights on Chapel Street and Sunday afternoons at the College Lawn Hotel.
This wouldn’t have happened if I had been too blinkered in my approach to realise that friendships were more important than the cricket.
A few people have spoken to me about my career being a story of resilience. I’m not truly sure about that. Perhaps resilience is a by-product of something else. When I was being overlooked for the Australia opening position for others who often had inferior domestic records, I was naturally disappointed, but never had thoughts of ‘if I continued to score more runs than anyone else they’d have to pick me’. In fact it was probably the opposite. Many times I confided in family that I was never going to be picked and for them to give up hope, like I had.
What I did have though was a competitive spirit. Breaking tennis racquets as a 12-year-old showed how much I hated to lose and while I fine-tuned that trait, it was what kept pushing me – I just wanted to do as well as I could every time I went out to play. That seems cliched but I’ve witnessed many batsmen who have opted out when the conditions got tough and saved their efforts for when it was easier.
Often it’s actually the fear of failure that drives us. Looking back over these pages, it’s as if I was on the verge of throwing in the towel myself every time the going got tough playing for Australia. Living in the bubble of an international cricket side can do that to you. You ride a rollercoaster not experienced before. The best moments like, the Ashes wins in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Lord’s, and the Cape Town victory to decide that series, are moments that will stay with me forever. So will the moments of supreme loneliness and failure and those feelings that it was all too much.
After retiring and commentating, it is so much easier to have perspective. It’s just a game that goes on and on and new players emerge and new matches are played. But when you’re in the midst of it and living and breathing cricket at grounds and hotels, it’s easy to get lost in the supposed importance of it all. For the most part I felt I dealt with it well, but I think I would’ve enjoyed it all the more if I’d accepted the possibility of failure, as psychologist Steven Sylvester taught.
The players I’ve come to admire the most are those who have had long international careers, like Ricky Ponting, Steve Waugh, Allan Border, Michael Clarke and a number of others. To constantly put themselves out there and to fight every time on centre stage over years and years is an incredible achievement. Often it’s why these guys have no difficulty in later life as their constant desire to be the best pushes them.
Captaining Somerset has been an eye-opener. I thought I would have more perspective and enjoy it more, but the pressure of captaincy and to avoid being the first Somerset captain to have them relegated has meant I’ve been lost in the moment too often. The constant pressure has been building. Sometimes I yearn for an easy life under the radar, away from the spotlight and the possibility of being critiqued by Joe Bloggs, but then I realise it probably wouldn’t satisfy. Whether this is unhealthy I’m yet to fully comprehend, but it will be interesting to embark upon life after playing and find out where that leaves me.
In my mind I was never the most gifted player, with flaws in my game and my personality. But I look back and remember the naive, tiny, impressionable kid who started out playing for Western Australia and find it hard to believe what he was able to achieve. The stuff of his dreams.
Tennis probably wasn’t destined to be my favourite sport, as this shot of my racquet flying away shows. But sport was a big part of growing up.
The Australian Under 19 team at the 1996 Youth Series v New Zealand
BACK ROW: David Hussey, Lance Kahler, Don Nash, Matthew Innes, Nathan Bracken, Matthew Pascoe, Matthew Anderson, Bradley Haddin, Chris Rogers.
FRONT ROW: Christopher Davies, Paul Sutherland, Richard Done (Coach), Clinton Peake (Captain), Brian Taber (Manager), Matthew Bradley (Vice-Captain), Simon Dart.
A newspaper report showing Shaun Marsh, Scott Meuleman and me, all from Wesley, and all in the West Australian team in 2002, after I scored 101 for WA in March 2002.
Getting one away against Andy Craddick of England in a WA v England tour match, at the WACA in October 2002.
Hit at short leg playing for the WA Warriors in a match against the New South Wales Blues at Newcastle Oval in 2003. (GETTY IMAGES)
Celebrating another ton on day 3 of a Pura Cup match between the Victorian Bushrangers and the Western Warriors at the Junction Oval in December 2004. (GETTY IMAGES)
Playing for Leicestershire, and on the attack against Australia, on day 3 of a
Tour match in Leicester, July 2005. (GETTY IMAGES)
Later the same day, a handshake from Michael Clarke upon reaching 200 against the Australians. (GETTY IMAGES)
Celebrating scoring a double hundred against Shane Warne in a Pura Cup match between WA and Victoria in October 2006. (GETTY IMAGES)
With the trophy for State Player of the Year, presented at the Allan Border Medal night in February 2007. Big suit and all. (GETTY IMAGES)
Daily Telegraph front page news on 16 January 2008.
Putting on my Baggy Green cap after it was presented to me by Justin Langer on 16 January 2008. (GETTY IMAGES)
Getting used to the Australian set-up as I hit the nets for a training session in Perth, January 2008. (GETTY IMAGES)
Changing states led to a successful stint playing for Victoria in the Sheffield Shield. Here in a match against Queensland in February 2010. (GETTY IMAGES)
Getting into a good stride for Derbyshire with the ball going to the boundary during a warm-up match between Derbyshire and Australia at the County Ground in July 2010. (GETTY IMAGES)
INSET: Celebrating the second division title after the LV County Championship match between Leicestershire and Middlesex at Grace Road in September 2011. (GETTY IMAGES)