Now it is different. Darren Lehmann is coming from a system in Queensland where the coach runs the show. And that is what he demands when he takes the Australian job. Boof, who had no enmity with Mickey and feels bad to be taking the job in those circumstances, has stipulated that if he is to become head coach, he wants the power to shake things up and run the team his way.
This means a further scaling down of the captain’s role. From here on, the coach is going to run team meetings. The coach will decide who presents a cap to a debut player. The coach will make key staff appointments. The coach will remain a selector. There are a million and one things they have taken away from the captain so that I can focus on what happens on the field, but I want those things! I was not expecting to be moved down the food chain, halfway through my captaincy. I feel that the captain’s role is not something that stops at the boundary line, as the things you do off the field flow directly into the things you do on it.
None of my grievance is personal. I always liked Boof. When I started in the Australian team, he was a senior player I looked up to, and I was always grateful for his positive comments about me as a batsman in my first year. As shattered as I am for Mickey, I look forward to working with Boof. We have a good honest relationship with each other, and even though we will have some tough conversations in late 2014, I have unwavering respect for him as a person and a cricketer.
But in 2013, it is late in my life to accept such a sweeping change to the system. The hierarchy now has a pyramid of James Sutherland, Pat Howard, John Inverarity and Boof all above me, telling me to get the best out of my players. Pat Howard comes from rugby, where the coach runs everything, so he doesn’t see a problem. In rugby, the captain is the boss on the field, and the coach is the boss off the field. Simple.
But that’s not the way I see the game. Cricket is different from other sports. You spend five days on the field with your teammates – it’s not a 90-minute game with the coach controlling the moves. In football, the coach has a bird’s eye view of the whole game and can see it from a commander’s perspective. In cricket, the captain is on the field and has the advantage of a close-up perspective and better feel for the game. There are little moments and changes in the dynamics of the game that you can only perceive if you’re out there. You can see things developing before they happen. In cricket, you can sense momentum shifts and changes in behaviour, from bowlers and batsmen, that can’t be sensed from afar. For example, on the last afternoon of the decisive Test match in Cape Town in 2014, the game that could take us to world number one if we win, I choose to go to Ryan Harris for the final overs. From afar, the coaching staff in an air-conditioned box might have been looking at Rhino and thinking he was busted, his knee was gone, he couldn’t bowl another over. I go up to Rhino and say, ‘How are you going?’
‘How do you reckon?’ he says.
‘I know you’re rooted, like everyone on the field,’ I say, ‘but we’ve got two choices here. Either you bowl now, or I do.’
He grabs the ball out of my hand and bowls the decisive over, dismissing Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel to take us to number one.
It confirms my certainty that there are things on the field that only a captain can know. Cricket is not football, and a coach can’t pull the strings in our game.
On the 2013 England tour, Boof and Gavin Dovey try really hard to inform me what is going on, and include me in the loop, but I want to be accountable and so I want input. Mickey didn’t make a decision without asking me. That is what I am used to. But it’s different now. I still struggle to accept it. How can you employ your support staff without the captain’s input?
How can you not select Steve Smith – as happens in Zimbabwe in 2014 – when he is one of the first players the captain would choose? The non-selection of Smithy is the only time my public mask really slips, and I give the selectors a serve. It wins me no friends at Cricket Australia, and that friction is about to get a lot worse with my physical problems in late 2014.
It isn’t about personalities. Halfway through my captaincy, the system around me changes. One thing is for sure: I am no longer driving the bus.
17
THE ARTS AND CRAFTS OF CAPTAINCY
One of the most important things Neil D’Costa told me about cricket was, ‘Don’t just watch the batter bat and the bowler bowl. Watch the whole game of cricket. Why is the game drifting? What could you do?’ As a kid, I learnt to watch the whole canvas. There’s so much more to the game than the batsman and the bowler, and when I became Australian captain I got the chance to develop and express my ideas about how to influence matches.
Winning was always my prime concern. As I grew up watching sport, I liked how there had to be a winner and a loser, and I was not afraid to risk losing if it increased our chances of winning. If that meant a surprise declaration or some ultra-aggressive batting in a second innings to set up a run chase, I was happy to take the gamble.
One example is the first match of a three-Test series against the West Indies in Barbados in 2012, where bad weather affects the first and third days of play. The West Indies take two days to score 449 in their first innings and we are five wickets down and 200 runs behind at the end of the third day. With so much at stake, the safe option would be to shut things down and let the game peter out over the final two days. Our tail does better than expected, with Ryan Harris and Nathan Lyon adding 77 runs for the last wicket. But it is a slow grind, and just before tea on the fourth afternoon, we are still 43 runs from overhauling the West Indies’ total.
I see an opportunity. With large, slow-moving first innings taking up the first four days, I think it’s worth the risk to declare while behind. I call in Ryan and Nathan just before tea. Nobody expects it. In 14 balls before the break, Ben Hilfenhaus dismisses the West Indian top three, and the match is suddenly alive. We get them out for 148 by lunch on the fifth day, and then Mike Hussey and Shane Watson bat very positively – yes, risking a loss in order to win – and we reach the target of 192 with three wickets to spare. It’s a memorable win, and sets the tone for a series victory. More conventional decision-making, accepting an apparently inevitable draw, would have left us at risk of losing the series, but instead, we end up walking out of Barbados with a lead.
If you’re going to play to win, you need to take your players with you. A captain who takes risks without the backing of his teammates is headed for disaster. I am fortunate to lead a team in which every player is ready to put his personal success on the line if it is going to help us win.
In the Ashes Test match in Adelaide in 2013–14, we are in a commanding position at stumps on the third day. We lead by a massive 530 runs. David Warner is 83 not out and charging towards his second hundred of the series. But I’m worried about the weather forecast. As we leave that afternoon, the groundsman says to me, ‘There’s some rain around.’
‘How bad – next two days?’
He says yes, and the next morning the clouds are closing in. He tells me there is plenty of rain on its way.
The circumstances press on me. Three months ago, we lost our third straight Ashes series, and are absolutely sick of it. We’ve just won the first Test match in Brisbane, and a devastating Mitchell Johnson spell has put us well on top here. When you are as hungry to win matches as we are, it tears your guts out to let one slip by. From the position we’re in, to not win this game would be as morale- and momentum-destroying as a loss.
But there’s the matter of taking a personal achievement away from David Warner. Since his arrival in the team, he has brought just the kind of positive intent I want to see at the top of the order. From the first ball of the day, he and Chris Rogers have formed a partnership where they are constantly looking to score runs. There is no target run rate we have in mind, no set job to ‘see off the new ball’, just an overriding understanding that the batsmen’s aim is to score, not just survive. David has been right on board with that, and so has Chris who, coming into the team at the age of 37, has shown incred
ible courage to adapt his game to be a more fluent scorer when we need it. His strike rate has been higher in his return to Test cricket than it was in first-class cricket. There have been several examples of him going out of his comfort zone in second innings when we’ve needed to accelerate. It’s not his natural instinct, but he’ll do it for the team. My task is getting him to share in my belief that he can do it. I say, ‘If I didn’t think you could do it, I’d bat you at number seven. But you’re good enough to play for Australia, and that means you’re good enough to do more than just take the shine off the ball.’ Helping to bring out this new capability in a senior batsman is one of my greatest satisfactions as a captain.
Davey, on the other hand, needs no encouragement to score runs, but I’ve had lots of chats with him where the public facade of his immense self-belief has cracked. It happens to all of us. The outside world thinks you’re a Test cricketer and you’re always super-confident, but it’s not so. I’ve had many a night when I’ve lost my self-belief, and a pep talk from Shane Warne – ‘What are you talking about, you’re playing brilliantly, you’re one of the best batsmen in the world!’ – brings it all back.
There’s a time with David Warner when we’re practising to play South Africa in Australia in 2012–13. In the nets, he’s wearing a chest guard and an elbow guard in preparation to face Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel. I go up to him and say, ‘What are you wearing those for? You never miss a ball! Get them off!’ He does, and the removal of the protection seems to remind him that he is good enough to not need it.
I try to play the confidence-building role that Shane Warne has played for me for that whole generation of younger players coming through, the guys that haven’t played as much international cricket, because I know what it’s like to feel shaky inside and be less than willing to let it show.
On this morning in Adelaide, it’s not a matter of pumping up Davey’s confidence, but of getting him to buy in to the team objective even if it means sacrificing what should be the straightforward completion of a Test century.
‘If we don’t declare,’ I say to him, ‘you get another hundred, and that’s great, you deserve that. But the weather forecast is really bad and we need all the time we can get to bowl England out.’
It doesn’t surprise me when his response is immediate. ‘If you think that’s what’s best for the team, then declare. I’m all for it.’ I appreciate the trust he has in me to make the right decision, and I also have enhanced trust in him. As it turns out, we win the match with two sessions to spare. But it does rain through those sessions, and if we’d kept batting for Davey’s personal milestone, events might have unfolded quite differently.
Trust between players and captain is essential, especially if the captain is to make decisions in a spirit of adventure. Steve Smith is a cricketer who is in and out of the Australian team for three years from 2010 to 2013, and many outsiders say disparaging things about his potential as a Test cricketer. For the group of young players that I see as the long-term future of Australian batting, my job as captain is to transmit my belief in them, so that they believe in themselves. That kind of mentoring was the greatest gift I received from the Australian team I entered in 2003 and 2004, and one of my key aims as I become a senior player is to pass that on. I can see something unique in Smithy. He is as good a player of spin as anybody we have, he’s a brilliant fielder, and he bowls more than handy leg-spin. We have to keep faith in players who are so talented in all three facets of the game. That’s why I get so angry when Smithy is not picked in the one-day team in Zimbabwe in late 2014, and unleash publicly on the selectors for the only time. If you stuff young guys around, you can set them back years. Fortunately, the selectors’ commitment to Smithy in the Test team remains firm in those years, and he turns into one of the best batsmen in the world by 2015. And when he goes out at Lord’s in the second Test of the 2015 Ashes series to belt a quick fifty to set up a declaration, I’m proud to see another batsman in our team willing to risk personal failure if it’s going to help the team win.
As a leg-spinner, Smithy lacks no self-belief. In fact, he often makes the team laugh with his claims that he has dismissed such-and-such an opposing batsman so often, he must bowl to him. During the Ashes in 2013, when Ian Bell is scoring three hundreds against us, Smithy is in my ear. ‘I’ve got Bell out nine times before, he’s my bunny!’ Someone has looked up the stats: Smithy has got Bell out twice before, and once was in a limited-overs slog. But I give him the ball, and he gets Bell out in a critical situation in Adelaide.
Winning Test matches is about taking 20 wickets, and I don’t care who takes them. If it’s Smithy, Mike Hussey or David Warner bowling, a wicket is a wicket and there are any number of ways to skin a cat. I’m different from Punter in this way. He thought, Batters are paid to bat and bowlers are paid to bowl, but I don’t care if it’s the tail-enders who score our runs and the batters take the wickets bowling half-track leg-spinners. The end – winning a Test match – justifies any unorthodox means.
Take us to Hobart, December 2012. Fifth day of a grinding Test match against Sri Lanka, made a battle of attrition by a lifeless wicket. We have left ourselves a day and a bit to bowl them out and take a 1–0 lead in the series, but I let us down late yesterday by dropping Kumar Sangakkara at slip off Nathan Lyon.
All through the morning and afternoon sessions of the fifth day, we have to work our butts off to get even the sniff of a breakthrough. The Sri Lankans know what they have to do, and are taking no risks. Thilan Samaraweera, a tall and solidly-built right-hander with a Test average of 50, starts as a stumbling block but soon begins to look like a huge brick wall.
I remember 2008, when I was bugging Punter to give me a bowl on the last day of that Test match against India at the SCG. He waited until the very end to put me on, and I snared the last three wickets to close out that Test match. I’m unable to do that now due to my back, but I sense that the Sri Lankans are feeling too comfortable. The crowd at Bellerive is small, but can get very vocal when given a little encouragement. Just before tea, I decide to change things up. I turn to our wicketkeeper.
‘Wadey? Next over.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘I’m serious. I’ve faced you in the nets. You’ll get a wicket for sure.’
And I can see Matthew Wade’s face change from surprise to certainty, Yeah, I’ll get a wicket!
Instantly, I have become Santa Claus and given two young men the happiest day in their lives. Wadey has been bowling every day at training, and he fancies himself in the nets with his medium-pacers. There’s a lot of laughter on and off the field. Everyone’s laughing because the keeper is bowling, and the crowd’s loving it because Wadey is a Tassie boy. It changes the pace of the game, which has to stop while Wadey takes the pads off and Phillip Hughes puts them on. Hughesy, who has kept wicket throughout his junior and club career, definitely fancies himself with the pads and gloves.
I’m thinking, If Wadey goes for 20 off this over, we lose nothing. But you never know your luck. It’s worth a try. And, If I was the batsman, just trying to get through one more over to tea, I’d be hating this.
It doesn’t work immediately – Wadey bowls a tidy maiden, Samaraweera blocks every delivery, and Hughesy leaps about but doesn’t get to actually glove one ball – but my aim is just to change the atmospherics in the ground and jolt the batsmen out of their comfort zones. After tea, the wickets begin to fall and we claim the match.
On the field, I captain like a batsman. That is, I’m trying to see the world through the batsman’s eyes and anticipate what is going to disturb his concentration. What does he not want now? What’s his weakness?
Because every batsman is different, and because I study them all, this makes my tactics unorthodox and sometimes eccentric.
Crowd atmospherics and scoreboard pressure are just as important. A team might be two for 250 but if they’re chasing 500, they’re not cruising, they’re still 250 behind. If they’re playing away f
rom home in front of a hostile crowd, there are times when you want to mobilise the pressure that the batsmen will already be feeling.
I love to get the crowd involved. Sometimes, like in that match in Hobart, I’ll turn around and start a conversation with them from the slips cordon. A year later, in Perth, when everything is turning sleepy in the intense heat and Kevin Pietersen has set himself for a big score to save the 2013–14 Ashes for England, I put Mitchell Johnson on and rev up the crowd by motioning for them to start up a slow hand-clap.
To know the opposition, as a captain, is essential. The more information you have about an individual batsman, the better. During the 2013–14 Ashes series, even if a bowler is bowling well, I often give him a rest if I don’t think he is about to take a wicket. My number one goal is getting batsmen out. ‘I want to try someone else for a couple of overs,’ I say, and am blessed as a captain in that the bowlers respect my instincts. If the batsman is terrified of Mitchell Johnson and unable to score runs, he might be more likely to take risks against the bowler at the other end. This is why bowlers working in partnerships is so important: they can create opportunities for the guy bowling at the other end.
As with batting, your captaincy ideas are worth nothing if your players aren’t buying in. The best bowling attack I played with as a young man was Glenn McGrath, Jason Gillespie, Brett Lee and Shane Warne in 2004 to 2006. As a captain, the best bowling attack I had was Mitchell Johnson, Ryan Harris, Peter Siddle, Nathan Lyon and Shane Watson in 2013–14.
My Story Page 23