Eventually, he said that I needed more professional management, and I went to Chris, a great guy for whom I have great affection and respect. He was like a second father to me. I was with him for five years before I moved to SEL (Sports & Entertainment Limited), a firm with greater international reach, run by James Erskine, before eventually coming around to Rod Marsh’s initial view, which was that nobody could ever be as protective of you as you are of yourself, and at 31 years old I became self-managed. This was all part of growing up, becoming an adult, while I was learning to play cricket and being captain of Australia.
I don’t regret not doing my HSC, because I was chasing my dream. If I was reliving my life, I would do the same. But I hate failing to complete something I have started, and when I’m talking to youngsters now I encourage them to finish their education. Finishing secondary school may or may not change the direction of your life – it wouldn’t have put me in a different place – but a formal education is something you appreciate more and more when you don’t have one.
Instead of school, I spend what would have been year 11 at the Australian Cricket Academy in Adelaide.
My initial entry into the academy is, as so often happens, a matter of good fortune. I am playing an under-17s game in Adelaide when Rod Marsh and Wayne Phillips, the two top coaches at the academy, come to watch another batsman. It turns out that this other boy gets injured, and I’m moved up the order. The boy they wanted to see doesn’t get to bat that day, but I play through until stumps. The next morning, Rod and Wayne come back for another chance to watch the other boy, who, having recovered from his injury, ends up batting but missing out. I bat on through the morning. Rod stays to watch me, and the outcome is an invitation to spend a two-week stint at the academy, which leads to my getting a full scholarship for the next year.
Leaving Liverpool is tough. I’m so gutted about leaving my family and friends, and anxious about flying. But I get used to travelling. The year I’m meant to do my HSC, I go with an Australian under-19s side to England. My teammates include Adam Voges, Mitchell Johnson, Nathan Hauritz and Michael Klinger, and at Chester-le-Street I get into a big partnership with the future Tasmanian Sheffield Shield player Sean Clingeleffer.
It’s the lead-in to a breakthrough season back home when I’m 18 years old. I score three hundreds in a row against state Second XI sides, and get picked for New South Wales. My first game is against the touring Indian team, and I manage to put on nearly 50 as the junior partner in the first innings with Brad Haddin. A week later, my first Sheffield Shield innings is a disappointment – bowled by Damien Wright for six against Tasmania at the SCG – but I atone with a half-century in the second innings, the first of four fifties in that season, batting at number six or seven.
I shuttle back and forward to the Australian under-19s, going to Sri Lanka for the under-19s World Cup (along with future Test teammates Mitch Johnson, Shane Watson, Shaun Marsh, Nathan Hauritz, Andrew McDonald and Ed Cowan), but I’m itching to get back into Shield cricket.
Throughout my first years at New South Wales, my family are always behind me. Leanne, though she doesn’t have much patience for sitting and watching cricket, tries to come and watch when she can, and every game, whether she’s there or not, she sends a message with her love and support. That will continue without fail until the end of my career. Mum and Dad attend as often as their work will allow. Dad, of course, loves all cricket, but it’s more of a challenge for Mum and Leanne. At one of my early Shield games, they’re sitting in the SCG Members Stand waiting for me to bat. Michael Bevan is playing a customary big innings, and one of my family says, a little too loudly, ‘I wish Bevan would get out so that we can see Michael.’ Someone hears, the comment gets back to me, and I have to come out to the family and tell them that it’s not the right thing to hope our most productive batsman gets out just so they can see me. They might think it, but they can’t say it!
My heart is in my mouth to be playing alongside international representatives such as Bevo, Steve and Mark Waugh, Brett and Shane Lee, Stuart MacGill, Glenn McGrath and Gavin Robertson. My idol growing up was always Michael Slater, and it’s amazing to be in a team with him. Graciously, he doesn’t mind having this 18-year-old following him around watching everything he does, and he is always brilliant to me. Steve ‘Stumper’ Rixon is a hard but fair head coach, a terrific old-school mentor who gives my skills a great boost. I always like being around Stumper, even when he’s showing his tough side. One day, I’m doing slips catching practice with Steve and Mark Waugh. Stumper nicks 20 or 30 balls and the twins wander off, happy with the way they’re catching it. I, of course, tag along after them.
‘Eh! Where do you think you’re going?’ Stumper’s still there with his bat in hand, glowering at me.
‘Um, I thought we were finished?’
‘Those two are finished. You’re staying on for more.’
In those circumstances, you gravitate towards other players who are your age and experience. My closest friends in the team initially are Mark Higgs and the new wicketkeeper from Queanbeyan, Brad Haddin, who is stepping into the big shoes left by former state captain and 11-year New South Wales incumbent Phil Emery.
Hadds, a couple of years older than me, is my next ‘big brother’ figure in cricket. We train together in our fitness work, our families get on well, with his father being as much of a cricket nut as my dad, and when the team goes out at night, Hadds looks after me by making sure I can come home to the house in Abbotsford, in the inner west, that he shares with Higgsy and opening batsman Greg Mail, rather than me going all the way to Liverpool or Chipping Norton late at night. Where I really click with Hadds is in how serious and ambitious we both are about our cricket. He is meticulous about planning the steps in his career. He has moved from the Australian Capital Territory to New South Wales to capitalise on Emery’s retirement, and, being a wicketkeeper, competing with a lot of other class players for one spot in a team, he knows he has to be strategic. Adam Gilchrist has just stepped up into the Australian Test team this season, replacing Ian Healy, so Hadds knows that he might have a long wait to get to the top. But he has a clear plan to entrench himself for New South Wales and be the next cab off the rank when Gilly gets hurt or retires.
Compared with Hadds, I’m pretty simple. I don’t strategise or analyse it. I want to play for Australia, and I want to do it yesterday.
4
THE BAGGY GREEN
While I still think that the toughest transition in my cricket life was from playing against boys to playing against men, that’s not to say that any step up was easy. In my first two seasons for New South Wales, I averaged less than 30 and made one hundred in 22 innings. I was lucky to be a teenager; the selectors wouldn’t have been so patient with that kind of output from an older player. I grew more comfortable at that level over the next two seasons, and my 2004 winter with Hampshire was a great finishing school for my technique and professionalism.
But I was not a dominant first-class cricketer when I was selected for the Australian tour of India in 2004. My batting average was still in the 30s. It was commented, probably correctly, that I was a beneficiary of the fact that the Test team had a lot of mature and veteran players heading towards the last phase of their careers, and there was not a glut of batsmen in their early twenties making big scores in the Sheffield Shield. I was picked not on weight of runs, but because I was young enough to offer scope for long-term development.
Ever since I had made under-age rep teams and seen others, more talented than me, fall by the wayside, I had often wondered what the main difference was between those who made it to higher levels and those who didn’t. Sometimes the latter group didn’t really want to, sometimes they found it hard to cope with the travel, sometimes the psychological toughness of serious cricket got too much, sometimes there were family reasons.
In fact, there was a different set of reasons for every person, but if I had to boil down what made me different, I would say it was my al
l-consuming love of the game. I loved it more than the guy who wanted to have coffee with his girlfriend. I loved it more than the guy who had a late night out and backed himself to be right by the morning. I always put cricket first. If I could have played cricket 24/7, I would have. I just wanted to win, score runs, take wickets, get a run-out.
I loved the social side of being in a cricket team. Whenever I joined a new team going up through the levels, my teammates became my best mates, and whoever was on a tour with me, they were my best mates at that time. Nothing – nothing – was as much fun as playing cricket.
From the time of my first tour with Australia, to the West Indies in 2003, I came into that group with the same attitude as if it was a schoolboys tour, an under-19s tour, or a New South Wales tour. As an excited kid, I was a sponge to all the influences around me. I got my chance to go to the Caribbean in early 2003 because Damien Martyn had broken his thumb in the World Cup in South Africa, which the boys won. The Test component would be Steve Waugh’s last overseas tour as captain, and it was an honour to be part of that.
As the spare batsman for the first-class and Test segment, I was hoping to be picked in the one-dayers that would follow. Accordingly, I wasn’t at my fittest when we flew into Guyana for the lead-up to the first Test match; the Blues had won the Pura Milk Cup (the Sheffield Shield), and my preparation had consisted of two weeks of celebrating. I wasn’t expecting to play more than one tour game for my first three weeks or so in the Caribbean.
Having just landed from Australia, I was walking with a driver towards the car waiting at the terminal in Georgetown. As I got in, a familiar face came up. ‘Are you heading to the team hotel? Can I have a lift?’
I was tongue-tied. Here, talking to me, was one of the two heroes I’d had on the posters on my bedroom wall growing up: it was Brian Lara.
It turned out that Brian thought I was a journalist travelling with the Australian team. I told him I was a player, and that was the start of our friendship.
Brian had always been my favourite player. He could perform in any conditions, any country, and he led by example in West Indies cricket when they were struggling. When I was 18, he had almost single-handedly taken the Frank Worrell Trophy from Australia, winning Test matches with his 213 in Jamaica and 153 not out in Barbados before blitzing another hundred in Antigua. If I had a choice as a cricket fan, I would have liked to see Australia win but Brian make runs. I loved his one-of-a-kind style and his ability to find success anywhere in the world, no matter how difficult the conditions.
He was so friendly to me in that taxi, talking to me candidly, as if we were equals. Before we left Guyana, he invited me to come to his house when the tour moved on to his home country of Trinidad. I don’t know why he was so welcoming to this excitable kid, but we just hit it off.
It was a tour I really enjoyed. After being a spectator during our team’s exciting Test series win, I got my chance in 50-over cricket and remained not out in my first three games, all of which we won. My first dismissal in one-day international cricket was in Port-of-Spain, off Merv Dillon – caught by Brian Lara. Off the field, I went to Brian’s home and met his young daughter Sydney, named after the ground where he made his first Test century, his epic 277 which I had watched on TV when I was 11 years old.
The nightlife was fun at a time before the routines of recovery took over cricket. It was a culture of post-game celebration: drink at the ground, go to the hotel and change, go out to a bar or restaurant. Every one-dayer, the grounds were packed. There were blow-up pools, and crowds drinking all day and making it very clear they wanted and expected the West Indies to win. I liked the West Indies people, got on with their players, and learnt how to accept that things would happen in their own time and there was no point getting stressed. The older guys told me that if I let my natural impatience get the best of me, I would have a bad tour, so their example helped me settle down.
The education I was getting from the senior players was as diverse as their personalities. With Damien Martyn, the West Australian number four batsman who was as laconic off the field as he was stylish on it, one of my first deep cricket conversations was about how nervous I got while waiting to bat. I got so worried about it, I said to Marto, ‘Will it get better?’ Always one to defuse the tension with his unique dry humour, Marto said, ‘No, it’ll get worse and worse. When you’re past 30, the media will be onto you every time you fail, saying you’re under pressure and will get dropped. So don’t look forward to it getting any better.’
Fast bowler Jason Gillespie was another with humorous advice. In India, as we battled the routine outbreaks of ‘Delhi belly’, Dizzy stated with complete assurance that the only medication that worked was six ‘Sters’ (cans of Fosters) a night. Nothing else worked, according to him. But Dizzy had his own approach to cricket, and the centre of which was not to get too worked up about anything.
Others gave me most through their example. Justin Langer and Ricky Ponting were batting nerds and workaholics. No detail was too small for either of them. Whenever Justin wanted to work on a mental problem, he would attack it with a boxing or other kind of fitness session. Lang showed me how physical fitness really mattered for batting. Ricky showed me more on the skills side. He hit more balls than any other player, and after his net sessions would go to have dozens of throwdowns to iron out a particular bug in his batting system.
These top-order batting greats were all at their peak when I came into the Australian team, and I wanted to soak up everything I could learn from them. In their own ways, they were all obsessive technicians of the game.
Matthew Hayden taught me about playing straight at the Gabba and WACA where it was so hard to drive early. ‘Play straight or horizontal,’ he said, ‘nothing in between.’
While Lang and Ricky responded to any challenge with the mantra of ‘work harder’, the Queenslander Haydos was more cerebral. When things got tough for me, he pulled me aside and said, ‘If you keep telling yourself you get the bad decisions or the good ball, it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be more positive. What you say out loud generally happens, it becomes self-fulfilling.’ It was great advice.
Adam Gilchrist was the best vice-captain I’ve ever played with, teaching me that you don’t have to be a captain to be a leader around the group. When he got the opportunity to be captain, as he was in my first one-day international and my first Test match, he was also top-class. I enjoyed batting with him, he was so positive, and put on a lot of runs with him. At this stage of his career, he was a legend of the game already, having changed the role of wicketkeeper into a dynamic all-rounder who could win matches with his bat.
The bowlers were all great mentors in their different ways. I got on extremely well with Brett Lee, being a fellow New South Wales boy, and we spent a fair bit of time together off the field. Also Andrew Bichel, who was often twelfth man, but was the ultimate team player, putting aside his disappointment to go the extra mile for the other guys. Glenn McGrath was amazing. I said to Pigeon in those early days, ‘If I can face you, Dizzy and Binga in the nets, then I can face any bowler in the world. Can you do me a favour and bowl to me in the nets exactly as you would in a game?’ Not only did Pigeon do that, but he would talk me through his thought processes of how he was trying to get me out. Funnily enough, his first ball to me was always a bouncer. Sometimes I wouldn’t be in the mood, or I’d be rusty, and he’d send one whistling past my ears. When I looked up, Pigeon would be grinning away.
I was absorbed into the Australian set-up via one-day cricket. Aside from its intrinsic benefits, the one-day game provided a great pathway for someone like me, who was not yet seasoned enough for Test cricket, to become more comfortable in a changing room stacked with superstars of the game. We went on tours to India in the spring of 2003 and Sri Lanka in autumn 2004, on either side of the home summer, when I was a regular in the triangular series against India and Zimbabwe.
I batted down the order, with a brief to chip in some handy
runs late in the innings and supply energy with my fielding and occasional bowling. It was a blast to train with such outstanding fielders as Andrew Symonds and Ricky Ponting. Leaving aside their obvious skills as batsmen, Symmo and Punter were the two best fieldsmen of their generation. We competed against each other in drills, each of us trying to win our little contests, and thanks to fielding coach Mike Young, always raising our standards through those internal battles.
In May 2004, we had a three-match one-day tour to Zimbabwe. The planned Tests had been called off for security reasons, and we spent the entire time in the capital, Harare, where we weren’t allowed to leave our hotel. The dry, wisecracking Queenslander Jimmy Maher made a typically funny quip when our bus was driving down a street called Robert Mugabe Way in Harare. ‘That’d have to be a one-way street, wouldn’t it?’ said Mahbo.
After a year in the middle order, I got my chance to open the batting when Matthew Hayden was rested for the final game. I made my first hundred for Australia, opening with Adam Gilchrist, putting on a big partnership with Symmo, and bringing home the win in a partnership with my Australian under-19s teammate Shane Watson.
The great thing about being in the Australian one-day team was that, even though it was a separate entity from the Test team, who were just about unbeatable at that time, it also had a winning culture. We took a lot of pride in our performance and set out to win every series and produce consistent performances. I couldn’t think of a better apprenticeship before my entry into Test cricket.
THE INNINGS
151 versus India, Bangalore, 2004
I’ve been too busy to think about the magnitude of what’s happening to me. As soon as I found out this week that I am playing my first Test match for Australia, I’ve been organising how to get Mum and Dad, Nan and Pop, and Neil to Bangalore from Sydney. There have been flights, ground transport and hotels to book from here; I’ve been too busy to get overwhelmed by nerves.
My Story Page 5