Bucking the Trend Read online

  On weekends I was often on the tennis court at Blue Gum Park club, which has 14 natural grass and eight plexipave courts. As a little kid who could barely see over the net, I made a bit of a name for myself as I could out-rally the adults. I even made a state squad coaching group between the ages of 12 to 14, and my folks thought tennis might be my career. There are pictures of me as the undersized kid in junior tennis clobber, no doubt in between chasing down balls in my very own Lleyton Hewitt phase, which also featured a couple of tantrums and broken racquets. But there was something about the individual nature of tennis that I couldn’t get my head around, summed up by a match at Sorrento Tennis Club.

  My opponent had the backing of a small but parochial club crowd, and on one occasion served an ace that to my eye was clearly wide of the mark. I called it out, but to play up to his gallery he replied ‘no that’s in, that’s in’, and walked over to the other side of the court while I waited for a second serve. After a bit of a delay I eventually put my hand up and said ‘look you can have the point, I don’t care anymore’. That was really the moment where I decided to play cricket, because the selfish, individual focus of the sport wasn’t for me. I enjoyed the sense of a team sport more than anything, and so finished up my tennis days. Besides, my opponents were growing bigger and more powerful and I wasn’t.

  My cricket was nothing special at that stage – I could hardly hit the ball off the square. Then at 15, playing for South Perth in the WACA Under 17 Saturday morning comp, I scored my first century. I’m not sure I even had a 50 before that. Dad remembers watching me grind my way to 80 before a flurry of boundaries took me to three figures, and 124 not out in the end – he reckons it was the first time he started to believe I might be a good cricketer. From there I made the WA Under 17 team and then the Under 19 team, and after a 99 against New South Wales, I found myself as one of two WA boys chosen in the Australian Under 19 team – David Hussey being the other. The humorous side of being picked in the state Under 17 side was that Huss was chosen as the off-spinner batting nine and me the leg-spinner batting 10. I bowled about 22 overs in the first game but then the wheels came off and I couldn’t land them. By the end of the tournament I was batting four and not bowling.

  It was then that I started to realise I was growing up and had to figure out what to do with my future. Without any real desire to find a profession I did what a lot of my friends did and what Dad thought I should do and enrolled in Commerce at UWA. Failing two subjects in my first semester and then scraping through with marks of 50, 52, 54 and 57 percentiles in second semester, I realised I wasn’t cut out for sitting behind a desk dealing with numbers all day. Working in a restaurant washing dishes and having a limited social life around uni was not exactly how I envisioned life as an 18-year-old.

  By this time I was playing senior cricket at Melville Cricket Club, which was being captain-coached by the ex-Hampshire and England cricketer Paul Terry. He asked if I would like to play cricket in the UK, in a remote corner of North Devon called Instow. There wasn’t much of a decision to make. Keep studying something I didn’t like or defer and go play cricket for another six months? More or less as he was asking the question, I was packed and ready to go.

  CHAPTER 3

  INTO, AND OUT OF, THE PATHWAY

  Perth, Country NSW, North Devon

  A YOUNG MAN starting to think seriously about playing cricket in Australia in the mid-1990s did so at a time when things were starting to get a little more complicated. The time-honoured pathway – from club cricket, state colts and second XI to Sheffield Shield competition and the Test team – had sprouted other subdivisions and elite identification streams.

  Talented juniors were now pitted against one another in Under 17s and Under 19s at national and international levels, while the influence of the Australian Institute of Sport had helped encourage the foundation and growth of the Cricket Academy, run by Rod Marsh in Adelaide. The academy ‘scholars’ were often identified out of under-age competition and then had something like priority access to state squads and beyond: not a summer in the 1990s went by without numerous stories spruiking the strength of this system, particularly when lined up against the struggles of the English game. As if to underline the point, an Academy side beat Michael Atherton’s England touring team twice in as many days at North Sydney Oval in late 1994. Before the summer was out, Atherton would be on the losing side against another group of up and comers: the Australia A side that tipped England out of the limited-overs World Series finals to leave a supposedly international tournament contested between teams led by Mark Taylor and Damien Martyn.

  At the international level, Australia had plateaued in the early 1990s following the surprise World Cup victory of 1987 and the drought-breaking Ashes triumph of 1989. There was a sense that under the leadership duo of Allan Border and the coach Bob Simpson, earlier gains had been sacrificed through a lack of ambition and aggression. Marsh and others rejoiced when Mark Taylor brought a more daring streak to the team in 1994–95 following Border’s retirement, and it was that as much as the emergence of Shane Warne credited for delivering the Frank Worrell Trophy to Australia in the Caribbean in 1995. The future seemed tailored towards the aggressor over the accumulator.

  Marsh made that much clear when he spoke to Kerry O’Keeffe for a piece in the 1995 Wide World of Sports Cricket Yearbook: ‘Often Rod Marsh’s cricketing mind is as bristling as his famous moustache. He imagines that down the line there will be no place in the game of cricket for the “sheet-anchor” batsman, those who have built their reputations on rock-like reliability.’

  Marsh was right. Within a decade, a Test batting order of Matthew Hayden, Justin Langer, Ricky Ponting, Mark Waugh, Steve Waugh, Damien Martyn and Adam Gilchrist would indeed be capable of sustained acceleration unimaginable just a few short years prior. Batsmen of a more deliberate bearing – batsmen such as Chris Rogers – would indeed appear less prevalent in Australian sides. Those who did emerge, such as Simon Katich and Michael Hussey – had to face intermittent criticism for not ‘getting on with it’.

  Back in 1995–96, when Chris Rogers was first chosen for Australian Under 19 duty, his batting heroes just happened to be those of the kind Marsh thought to be on the way out. David Boon, Geoff Marsh, Taylor and Border had been Australia’s batting engine room, and these were the men from whom he drew inspiration as an undersized youth who made up for a lack of obvious power with rare tenacity and a method weathered against the theoretical and technical testing of his father John.

  In terms of size, approach and pessimism, there was an unmistakable similarity to the early cricketing forays of another left-hander, Michael Hussey. Two years older than Chris, and a graduate of the Cricket Academy, Hussey recalled in his autobiography Underneath the Southern Cross: ‘My batting game was all about hanging in there.’

  Hussey, of course, went on to a very fine career, and from solid defensive foundations he built arguably the most versatile batting method yet seen in the game. But his teenaged sense of inferiority was understandable given the Australian cricket climate of the time. It was no easy thing to be a nicker and nudger at a moment when the national team had just become the world’s best. Chris’ path was to prove a difficult one, leading him not to the Academy finishing school but to a more modest cricket destination on the other side of the globe.

  AT 18 YEARS of age it would be fair to say I was pretty wet behind the ears. I’d only lived at home, had a couple of jobs that weren’t very taxing and played a bit of cricket and rugby. Going to an all-boys school didn’t help with my social life. I think I might have only kissed one girl, and that was only after dragging her down about half a dozen times on the local ice rink. Not surprisingly she didn’t fancy a second date!

  I had begun to play senior cricket at Melville Cricket Club, starting out in the second team but quickly progressing to the firsts after an 80 against Fremantle. My first-grade debut pitted me against England bowler Alan Mullally and I stood up and made 55. My
second game wasn’t quite so auspicious, as I had my off bail broken for two by the Western Australia bowler Craig Coulson, who was a genius at grade level.

  My third game for the firsts was the one that stood out. Playing against a full-strength Midland Guildford team, I batted for nearly two sessions in making 77. Midland Guildford had a host of Australia players in their XI – Tom Moody, Brendon Julian, Jo Angel, Simon Katich and Tim Zoehrer, plus one or two other state players. I look back now and think that was a big moment in my career, although at the time I still didn’t believe I would make it as a professional cricketer.

  All I remember of that day was big Jo yelling at me time after time and even from the boundary rope while I was batting ‘You lucky little bastard!’ This was a great initiation for any young, aspiring batsman and I loved it. Jo became one of my favourite teammates and was always brilliant to me. It was such a privilege to play with him and what he did for his side was as good as I’ve ever seen. The only time I didn’t enjoy him was when I’d purposely put on a bit of Enrique Iglesias music just to annoy him and he’d catch me, hold me down and dead-arm my forearm – his signature move.

  Despite the attention I gained from the way I batted that day, I was still searching for motivation and reason, so when the chance to head overseas to play cricket came up I knew I had to take it.

  At this stage, life as a professional cricketer was still not something I looked upon as a realistic goal. I just had no motivation for anything else and none for a working career. I look at some of the young cricketers coming through the ranks now and their awareness is off the charts. Their single-mindedness to succeed and make a living out of sport blows me away. No doubt it has a lot to do with more opportunity these days compared to when I first started, and the bigger amounts of money on offer, but also I was just too naive. I needed to grow up.

  Around this time a lot of guys I knew were getting invites to go to the Cricket Academy, which at the time was in Adelaide (now Brisbane). I had blown that opportunity. David Hussey and I had been picked to play NZ Under 19s in country NSW and suburban Sydney – pretty low-key stuff, which neither Dave nor I enjoyed too much. We found ourselves competing for a No.6 batting spot much of the time, as the NSW and Victorian boys seemed to get a golden run. Brad Haddin was the wicketkeeper, while Nathan Bracken, Don Nash and Mathew Inness made for a handy bowling attack. In the third and deciding ‘Test’, I finally was selected at No.3 in the batting order (Dave was 12th man) and top-scored as we won the series – and then found myself as the only member of the team not to get an invite to the Cricket Academy, then run by Rod Marsh.

  That was more than likely because I managed to piss off Richard Done, who happened to be Marsh’s understudy at the Academy. Our argument was part of a wider experience that showed me representative cricket for Australia was not always going to be smooth sailing, particularly when a bunch of young men from different and competitive states are thrown together by the selection panel. It was a major eye-opener for a naive kid, and it wasn’t long until I started to feel like I didn’t want to be there.

  After doing well in the preceding state competition for WA and arguably playing the innings of the tournament against NSW, who had Bracken, Nash, Jamie Heath and the off-spinner Paul Sutherland, I had been left out of the first ‘Test’. I was left out with Mathew Inness and we ran drinks. Matty Inness ended up becoming teammates at the Warriors in later years and got every ounce out of himself as he forged an impressive career. After that match we played a one-day game, where I batted No.3, made a painstaking 13 or so and ran out Chris Davies, who would go on to play for South Australia and now holds a senior position at the Port Adelaide Football Club. Not a great start.

  Next up was another one-dayer and I was due to bat No.4. In pursuit of quick runs, my style was not deemed useful and I started to slide down the order until I ended up batting No.9 or 10 in a losing effort. It was at this point I started to feel a little homesick and left out, which wasn’t helped by some pretty shabby treatment from teammates. My low personal confidence and bad hair and skin didn’t help me fit in. Sharing rooms, I was kicked out by one teammate so his girlfriend could spend time with him and when she came out at 3am and saw me asleep in the corridor outside she started to apologise, to which he responded ‘don’t fucking worry about him’.

  However when we turned up to the second ‘Test’ and I was once again left out, I was devastated. When one of the players said he needed something from the change room, I put my hand up to get it for him, but instead sat in the change room for 15 minutes, near tears. I was telling myself, ‘No one likes me here, I’m not getting a chance, what’s the point of being here at all?’ Pretty ordinary behaviour by me, I must admit.

  Later that night I was called in to the coach’s room. Richard Done told me how disappointed he was with my behaviour. My only question to him was ‘Isn’t the team meant to be rotated so everyone gets a go to show what he can do?’ His response was that he was trying to play what he thought was the best side as it was an important series to win. Even now, I’m still not sure what to make of that. In some respects it is fair enough, but I also had a strong desire to call bullshit. No one can remember what happened in that series and it certainly didn’t reflect who made it and who didn’t. I was eventually selected in the third and final ‘Test’ in place of David Hussey – he and I the only two batsmen to play more than 20 first-class games and to represent Australia.

  It is fair to say that until I was recalled to the Australian Test side in 2013, those few weeks had a negative effect on how I perceived the idea of playing for my country. Subsequent times around the national team or Australia didn’t quite feel right, as though I was worried it was going to be a similar experience. There would be times, too, when personal or interstate rivalries and outside distractions would mean the environment was not always very welcoming. Something else that emerged in my thinking as a result was the belief that players can always improve at different speeds – a battler at 17 can grow into a far better player than those he struggles to keep up with in his teens.

  But having not been able to handle that environment, I was left with the distinct impression that I needed to grow up. In hindsight, getting away and living out of home and making new friends was exactly what I needed. I never went to the Academy and I don’t regret it. Some guys need to work on their game and that is a great place to do it. I needed to work on maturing as much as my game. A lot of that would take place in England.

  Boarding a plane from Perth, I was accompanied by Dimitri Mascarenhas, who ended playing a lot for Hampshire and England. He was a club teammate at Melville and Paul Terry had organised for him to go over as well. I’ll never forget getting off the plane to be met by two of North Devon’s senior players. Frank Biederman was the vice-captain and in his late 20s, but probably three stone overweight with bad teeth. The other – Colin Payne – was 44 at the time, the opening bowler, four stone overweight and balding, with a big bushy beard and even worse teeth. I thought … Is this for real?

  Unbeknown to me, they took one look at the athletic, tall, good-looking Dimitri and then the tiny, ugly, ginger, bad-skinned boy next to him and thought ‘Have we got the wrong one?’ It turned out to be a match made in heaven. I didn’t know at the time, but these two were to become two of my closest friends in cricket.

  The drive from Heathrow down the M4, M5 and then Link Road to North Devon takes a bit over three hours on a good day. For me it was like being on Mars. Everything not only looked different, but it felt different. I was dropped off at the Palmer household. Brian was then club secretary and his wife Dorrie was a tiny slip of a woman. They welcomed me into their home and were lovely to me. Aged in their mid-60s, they served up a roast dinner before offering me an aperitif of sherry. I didn’t even know what sherry was and although I accepted that night, I was sure to never again.

  That first month in Instow was quiet. The Palmers were lovely, but I needed to find people more my own age. I’d b
een given a job as groundsman at Grenville College and worked for a Welshman whom I could barely understand, but he looked after me. One of the students, Ben Moore, was 18 at the time and a member of the North Devon Cricket Club. Ben took me under his wing and took me out my first weekend. It was about early May and quite a balmy evening. I returned home around 1am and couldn’t work the door. Not wanting to wake my hosts up I decided to sleep on the bench in the garden. An hour later I woke up completely wet and shivering with cold and knew I had to get inside. After some banging on the door, it was opened to astonished faces. After a brief explanation, they rushed me inside and insisted on a hot shower. They thought sleeping outside was hilarious. I clearly still had some growing up to do. Ben became a good friend as well and even invited me to stay with him and his wife in Dublin about 12 years later.

  I’ll never forget my first game playing for North Devon. It was a warm-up match. Keen as mustard and asked to field, I immediately headed to backward point where I hoped to show off some fielding skills. The captain, Tom Stanton, immediately asked me to head to square leg, but I replied that I was a good fielder. He said, ‘Trust me, that’s where you want to be.’ Colin was opening the bowling and wicketkeeper Mark Overton (father of twins Jamie and Craig, who both represented Somerset) immediately stood up to the stumps. It was a 6–3 leg-side field and no slips but a short leg. I thought ‘What the hell is going on here?’

  Colin’s first ball was delivered at about 90kph, starting well outside off stump before hooping in and striking the batsman on the thigh pad before trickling to me at square leg. I burst into laughter. He would have done the same in that first over about four times. I’d never seen anything like it. He continued to play for the first team until he was into his early 50s, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he held the world record for most deliveries striking the thigh pad.