For all my thoughts about how to lead, my first serious challenge is a rolled ankle the day before we’re due to leave for Bangladesh. The morning of the flight out of Sydney, I can’t even put on my shoe. In normal circumstances, I shouldn’t be going. When I get to the Qantas Club I am sitting with one foot in a black shoe and the other in a black sock.
I get Alex Kountouris’s attention.
A couple of days before, I rang our team physio to tell him I’d hurt my ankle but it would be all right. Since then, it’s only got worse. Now, in the Qantas Club, I whisper, ‘Lexy, I’ve f—ed my ankle, it’s really bad now.’
‘What do you mean?’
I lift up my trouser cuff and show him. My ankle looks like it’s swallowed a volleyball.
He’s got a look of total horror. ‘What the f— happened?’
‘I was running round my house trying to get to my fridge,’ I say. ‘I was barefoot, and I rolled my ankle.’
‘You can barely even stand,’ he says.
‘I’ll be fine, mate. I’m going.’ I am full-time captain of Australia for the first time. No way am I not going.
In Bangladesh, I tape my ankle for the four games in Fatullah and Mirpur, and we win them all. I manage a hundred in my first game as full-time captain, Watto follows up with a record 185 not out off 96 balls in the second match, and Huss makes a century in the third. In our clean sweep, we play some fantastic cricket.
I feel like the players back me. I say to Tim Nielsen, ‘If we keep doing the same things, we’ll keep getting the same results. Let’s change a few things up. For starters, I’d like to be involved in all the decisions that affect the team.’ To the players, I make it clear what our goals are, and that we’re going to chase them hard, starting in this series.
I don’t feel any different as a player, except I am free to do tactically on the field what I couldn’t do before. I hope that I can get more out of these players on the field, including Ricky. I never feel any problem with our former captain being in the room, and don’t buy into the criticism that his very presence can undermine me. True to his character, Ricky is a brilliant teammate in Bangladesh and contributes some handy runs.
Through the winter, there is more time to think. We’re starting off a low base. There is a lot of talk about getting more young players in and around the squad, which I don’t necessarily think is the best thing for our team. We’ve had enough turnover for the moment. Our captain for my whole career has just stood down. The transition since the 2006–07 Ashes, when we lost so many senior players, has given us a hit. The public, the media and possibly the players all thought we would roll on, and in their last years took guys like Damien Martyn, Justin Langer and Jason Gillespie, the support cast around the superstars, for granted. We had bad luck with the next generation. Guys we thought would be there for years, such as Simon Katich, Phil Jaques, Andrew Symonds, Stuey MacGill and Brett Lee, aren’t there anymore. None has been easy to replace.
Off the field, the structures around the team are about to go through a revamp: Tim’s job is going to be readvertised, and the selection panel headed by Andrew Hilditch is going to be dumped. The Argus Review will restructure our team along the lines of the England team that has just beaten us, creating a position of performance manager which will be held by former Wallaby Pat Howard, who comes across from rugby, where he was general manager of the Australian Rugby Union’s high performance unit. There’s a lot ahead of us. But I stress to the players that it will be up to us, and we have to clear all that other noise from our heads.
The other thing I will not shirk is the tough and direct conversations, which are going to be all the more important now I am a selector. I am black or white, never grey. I won’t sugar-coat things. This is partly my personality and partly a result of experience. I hate when people say nice things to my face but I later find out they have been dogging me behind my back. One of the reasons I trust cricketers like Warney and Hughesy and my closest friends is that they will tell me things straight. Some others . . . I thought they were my mates, but they weren’t.
That said, your greatest strength is always the source of your greatest weakness. My direct way of speaking has got me into trouble ever since I was a chirpy kid in the classroom, and it continues to do so while I’m captain. Regularly I walk away from conversations thinking, ‘Okay, that went well’, when the other person is still reeling because I’ve been too direct with them. Dad has always said to me, ‘It’s not what you’re saying to your mother, it’s how you’re saying it, it’s your tone.’ I’ve found it a hard thing to manage – being straight without hurting people’s feelings. But I feel, from the start, that I have the CA board’s full support and knowledge of the way I am. Chairman Jack Clarke and his successor Wally Edwards know what I’m like, they know it isn’t going to be a walk in the park. I’ll voice my feelings and drive the team hard.
So that’s the initial landscape. My first major assignments come later in 2011, when we tour Sri Lanka and South Africa for combined Test and one-day series. We go without a coach, as Tim Nielsen has not reapplied for his position. The tours are a microcosm of my whole four years in the job: a roller coaster. We mix some fantastic cricket with some of the worst days in Australian Test history.
In Sri Lanka, Huss has the series of his life and some of the less experienced guys really make waves – Shaun Marsh and Phillip Hughes with hundreds, Nathan Lyon with five wickets in his first innings as a Test bowler, Trent Copeland hitting paydirt with a wicket in his first over, and Ryan Harris leading the overall wicket-taking. One of the first major decisions I make is having Shaun bat at number three with Ricky at number four, for the Third Test match in Colombo. It’s in the best interests of the team, with Shaun having made a century at number three as Ricky’s replacement in the Second Test at Kandy. In my opinion, he is a specialist top-order batsman and a future long-term number three for Australia, with Ricky playing more of a senior mentoring role below him. In a couple of conversations, I talk to Ricky about it, and he is very supportive and more than happy to do what is best for the team. We win the Test series and also the one-dayers, where I’m the leading run-scorer and Punter isn’t far behind.
In South Africa, we come into the Tests on a roll after winning the one-day series there, and Graeme Smith asks me to have a bat on a wicket that will suit fast bowling.
THE INNINGS
151 versus South Africa, Cape Town, 2011
By the time I am Australian captain, I am more or less self-coaching with my batting. In 2008, Neil D’Costa moved to India to take up a position with the Vidarbha Cricket Association, so our meetings aren’t so frequent. He and I still have occasional chats about batting, and Dad is still around once he’s recovered from his cancer treatment, always making himself available to feed the bowling machine. In some ways he is still my main coach, reminding me of things I used to do. ‘You’re jumping back instead of cruising back.’ ‘You’re not getting close enough to the ball.’ Just little things.
Within the Australian team set-up, Justin Langer has been batting coach since 2009. Justin speaks to Neil about what to look for in my batting, and that is helpful. Justin is an outstanding batting coach, very dedicated to helping all the players in the team, and his attitude and commitment are the same as a coach as when he played. His efforts go a long way to taking us back to number one in the world. I use Justin and Vinnie Nielsen a lot, and will later use Michael Di Venuto when he replaces Justin in 2012. But I don’t have a coach in the way I had Neil when I was growing up.
When you encounter conditions such as we get on the first morning of the Cape Town Test match of November 2011, you need to know your own game. You can have the best coaching in the world, but when the pitch has been sweating for two hours under the covers and then, when it is uncovered, it is hit by a rain shower, and you’re facing an attack of Dale Steyn, Morne Morkel and Vernon Philander – then you have nothing but your own resources to rely on.
I come onto New
lands at three for 40. Little do we know what mayhem waits for both teams on this pitch, but we know it’s favouring the bowlers. Shane Watson, Phillip Hughes and Ricky Ponting have got out early, and I have trouble laying bat on ball with Steyn swinging it late and fast.
As soon as I get out there, Graeme Smith brings on Morkel to replace Philander. Like Andrew Flintoff and Steve Harmison, Morkel’s height makes him particularly awkward to face. Steyn is the best exponent of swing in the world – both conventional and reverse – but Morkel gets such bounce, every ball feels like it’s hitting the splice of the bat and I can’t get forward. The sky is overcast, the ball is keeping its shine, and batting is a nightmare.
Shaun Marsh is battling away and doing well at the other end. Warney’s words come back to my mind: the better the bowling, the more positive you have to be. After half an hour, I get in behind one from Steyn and drive it back past the stumps for four. That’s a Ponting-like shot. As captain, I have seen Punter lead from the front so often, I’m craving my chance to play an innings that salutes him. This has got to be it, today.
Jacques Kallis comes on to bowl before lunch. Grateful to have survived Steyn, I go on the attack. This looks like one of those days when you have to get them before they get you, and, if Kallis overpitches, I’m hopping into it. Then I go after Morkel as well. As an innings, this is much more like the way I played in my Test debut seven years ago. See the ball, hit the ball. Poke around and you’re just waiting for the good one to get you out.
I have a lot of luck, too. Edges fly past fielders and when I miss, I miss by a fair way. It’s a cavalier kind of innings, but it has to be, as the wickets are falling fast at the other end. At one point, I have hit 20 runs off 20 balls from Steyn; his figures to the other batsmen are 58 balls, four wickets for nine runs. A cover-driven four off Kallis brings up my hundred, and after play reporters are asking if it’s the best I’ve played. I’m not in a position to judge, but it’s probably the best Test hundred I’ve made on the worst pitch.
On the second day, I start at 107 not out, and end up with 151 in our first innings, almost at a run a ball, before I get out slogging at Morkel.
How much the captaincy has changed me is clear in how little joy I get out of this innings. I appreciate that for others it ranks highly. But today, not for me.
What happens next defies belief. It still feels like a dream – a nightmare. I start the day batting in my first innings, and by stumps I’ve batted in my second, we’re all out, and the South Africans are in . . . again! Twenty-three wickets in one day. Nobody has seen anything like it.
The highest highs and the lowest lows. I know, from batting on that strip, how tough it is. South Africa have no answer for Ryan Harris and Shane Watson, and we take fewer than 25 overs to bowl them out for 96. We’re jubilant when we come off before tea, nearly 200 runs ahead. It’s just a matter of keeping our foot on their throat.
Watto is lbw to Steyn on the third ball of our innings, and then the horror begins. Punter and Hughesy follow, and I’m only in for a quarter of an hour before Philander traps me. Huss goes next. While I’m still taking my gear off, Hadds follows his plan to whack the first ball out of the ground, but it doesn’t come off.
I feel like I want to press PAUSE, but there is no button. An unstoppable momentum is dragging us along, like we’re pinned down under a runaway truck. The changing room is stunned. Dead silent. Devastated. People are coming and going like the walking dead, padding up and unpadding. We are all out for 47, Australia’s lowest score in more than 100 years. Our first innings is overshadowed by the humiliation of our second, and our loss of the match from what seemed an unbeatable position.
By the time we go back into the field, we’re still unable to accept what’s happening. We go through the motions, but the stuffing has been knocked out of us. The next day, it doesn’t take Hashim Amla and Graeme Smith long to knock up the 236 runs South Africa need to win. We look like a cricket team, but we are eleven ghosts, unable to believe this reality.
Life smacks us between the eyes between the Test matches, when cricket writer Peter Roebuck dies. I knew him personally, but Ricky and Huss had a lot more to do with him and express their sorrows to the travelling press. We are all in a state of shock over what happened on the field at Newlands, and Roebuck’s death adds to the sense that we are in some kind of alternative universe.
But what I love about our team is their ability to recover when they have been counted out. In the Second Test, at Johannesburg, we limit South Africa to 266 in their first innings before Watto and Hughesy put on a brilliant counter-attacking opening partnership. Pat Cummins, a teenager playing his first Test match, rattled through the South African second innings with six wickets just when they looked like they were getting away from us, and we are left with a target of 310. Punter, Usman Khawaja, Mike Hussey and Brad Haddin lay the foundation, and then Mitch Johnson, who is playing with a broken toe, and Pat Cummins bring it home. I have contributed a grand total of 13 runs, but I’m stoked. Talk about a roller coaster: all out 47 one week, winning with a record run-chase the next. I don’t know if my nerves will stand it.
To see Pat Cummins hit the winning runs and so many excellent efforts from the boys to square the series shows me that something has changed in my mentality. When I was young, I certainly loved winning, but it was always mixed with how I felt about my own performance. Now, as captain, I feel that I am happier when we win and I don’t care if I fail. If I succeed personally but the team loses, I have a hollow feeling. That Cape Town hundred might have been one of my finest days as a batsman, but ultimately it means nothing to me. The Johannesburg match is one of my favourite memories.
Through those two tours, I gain more confidence in my role as the team leader. Maybe it helps that we don’t have a permanent coach, only our bowling coach Troy Cooley in an acting capacity. I am very clear about where I want to take this team. I think we are a lot better than fifth in the world. The senior players, rather than the staff, take much more ownership of the team, as I work to get their ideas flowing, and I try to make the leadership work more like it did when I made my debut. Ricky has noticed a change in me, with my greater involvement in team discussions and all the ‘little things’ around media and administration that a captain has to do. He is surprised, as I did not show much interest in those matters as vice-captain. But it wasn’t because I was not wanting to help. It was because I didn’t want to be seen as interfering.
Now, with the fetters off, I encourage the players to go about their cricket freely and positively. I try to innovate in my bowling choices and field positions, and tell the players that they are all there to participate – it’s not required that the bowlers bowl and the batsmen bat; I am just as happy for Pat Cummins to hit the winning runs and Shane Watson to take the crucial bag of wickets, if it gets the job done.
In my man-management style, I want to be different from Punter. When we were on tours under his captaincy, he was unbelievably committed: his door was always open to every member of the team. We could always go to see him whenever we wanted, and he would be receptive. But when he went home, he would turn his phone off or not answer your call. I had thought, If I’m captain, I’m not going to do that. Friendship is 24/7 and I’ll always answer my phone when a friend calls. You don’t pick and choose, and when you’re at home you make time to talk or catch up.
Little did I know how busy you are as captain of Australia – when you get home, you want to maximise your time with your family. But I don’t know that yet and, when we are at home in 2011, between tours, I am constantly on the phone to teammates, checking how they are travelling, seeing if they want to catch up. As much as I admire Ricky, I make it clear that my style will be different. Not better, just my own. There’s no right or wrong, but this will be my way.
Off the field, I want to work on team culture. I’m already nostalgic about my early days in the team, how much we used to do as a group. When I arrived in the West Indies to join the Austr
alian team in 2003, the first person I ran into was Stuart MacGill. ‘How are you?’ he said.
‘I’m all right.’
‘The jet lag’s a killer.’
‘I think I’m all right.’
‘You won’t be. Come with me.’
He took me to the swimming pool area, where the boys were jumping in, swimming, having a great time together, and fixed me up with a rum and coke. From feeling nervous about being there, within minutes I didn’t want to leave. And it cured my jet lag.
Team culture is hard to define. Touring overseas is difficult. You have to learn to live out of a suitcase, eat hotel food, go in and out of airports every few days. You miss your basic comforts of home – just going to the fridge and knowing what’s in there seems like a luxury – and you spend a lot of time on your own. Touring the world with teammates brings you out of yourself, but those challenges are even more daunting when you’re a junior member of the squad. As a youngster, I knew I had to be last on the bus, last to take a seat in the changing room, and if I was upgraded to business class on a flight, I had to surrender that upgrade to a senior player. It sounds harsh, but I loved it: it gave me a part to play.
When it came to information from the team manager, in those days Steve Bernard wrote it on a piece of paper and slipped it under your door. The team looked after the team, and the manager organised the logistics.
What I loved most about the Australian team then was that the players were their own coaches. When you walked to the middle, you had spent so much time with your batting partner learning the game, you knew him better as a result. If Darren Lehmann gave me a kick up the arse, or Punter helped with my batting, or Symmo wanted a night out, those were better solutions than any coach could provide for you.
My Story Page 18