Bucking the Trend Read online

  ‘Vogesy’ did come to check on me that night and I voiced my concerns to him that perhaps it would be better for the team if I left. He disagreed and tried to talk me out of it, as did a few others, such as Ben and Steve Magoffin, but it was clear to me. Too much water had gone under the bridge at the time and I couldn’t see how Tom and I could mend our fractured relationship, which was a shame because we since have. For a number of years I resented having to leave family and friends, but it was one of the best things that happened to me and I no longer feel any bitterness.

  When it became apparent that I was looking to leave WA, South Australia and Queensland were the first states to get in touch. I flew to Adelaide to meet with Rod Marsh, still a little hesitant about things due to what had happened in my teens. But we hit it off well and I found myself looking at an attractive financial offer that also included the honour of leading South Australia. That was appealing, though I was worried by the fact my arrival would have coincided with the departure of Ryan Harris.

  Having faced him in the summer of 2007–08 I was aware he had gone up a notch in pace and confidence, and was surprised to see the SACA unfussed by his move to Queensland after they failed to match the offer of a three-year contract. As troubling was the fact I was told they would be replacing Harris with Grant Lambert, a steady all-rounder from NSW who was not of the same class as a bowler – as ‘Rhino’s’ subsequent Test career would underline! From my time captaining Derbyshire in England I realised that a captain is only as good as his bowlers. You can set a field all you want, but if your bowlers don’t put the ball in the right areas you will be made to look a poor captain. In the end neither Lambert nor myself joined the Redbacks, and Graham Manou became captain.

  Those issues were still in the back of my mind when I flew up to Brisbane and met with the late Graham Dixon, then chief executive of Queensland Cricket. Our conversation went well enough, and it was followed up with an evening’s drinks with numerous members of the squad. I already knew James Hopes and Chris Hartley quite well, and had a lot of respect for the Bulls as a team. That being said, I had serious reservations about playing half my season as an opening batsman at the Gabba. The WACA’s pitch had already started to get lively again, a surging Tasmania were leaving plenty of grass on the wicket at Bellerive and even the SCG had changed character. But nowhere was more testing than a seaming pitch in Brisbane, with the extra bounce and pace on offer – very rarely did domestic surfaces resemble the relatively benign Test strip.

  As I pondered that possibility I ventured down to the Gold Coast for a day with my girlfriend Kate at the time, and had a call from Rick to say that Victoria’s coach Greg Shipperd wanted to speak with me. Curious, I booked a flight down to Melbourne to meet Greg and the cricket operations manager Shaun Graf. Their message was simple: Jason Arnberger had reached the end of the road and they were eager to find another strong opening batsman. There were other helpful circumstances also: Damien Wright, who I knew well, was moving up from Tasmania, and my old juniors teammate David Hussey had established himself as one of the leading lights of the Bushrangers’ middle order. My sister lived in Melbourne, and my growing admiration for London had me thinking it might be nice to live in a bigger Australian city. It wasn’t long after I walked out of the meeting with Greg and Shaun that my mind was made up. The response to my interest was a three-year contract.

  Queensland were understandably disappointed to hear I’d committed to the Bushrangers, and I felt somewhat bad about giving the impression of wanting a move there to Graham Dixon in particular – it was a big loss to cricket when he died of cancer in 2013. South Australia took the news as well as could be expected, and the conversations I had with Rod Marsh around that time were the start of a decent relationship. Some years later when I dealt with him as selection chairman for Australia we got along nicely, and that rapport began with talks about my state future in 2008.

  After choosing Victoria, I didn’t really give the move interstate much more thought, until I got a message from a guy called Charlie Burke. We’d crossed paths a few times when he worked at the WACA, but were no more than acquaintances when he sent me a Facebook message asking if I’d like to move in with him in Prahran, just south of the Melbourne CBD. I can admit now that in WA I’d struggled to remember Charlie’s name, but this generous offer came at the right time. When I touched down in Melbourne for the first time later in the year, he picked me up from the airport and took me out for a drink and a look around. He’s become one of my best friends, and is now doing terrific work as coach of the Hong Kong men’s and women’s teams. After a short stint with Essendon, I also ended up playing club cricket for Prahran through Charlie. He helped a lot in getting me settled in.

  My introduction to the Bushrangers squad had come through a pre-season camp in Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. I was assigned to a three-bed apartment with Brad Hodge and Andrew McDonald, two very senior members of the squad and close mates. Initially there was a bit of distance, not helped by the fact I had a bedroom to myself while they shared the other one – their choice! ‘Huss’ was initially quite busy and Damien had settled quickly into the group, having joined them a few weeks before I got back from England. For a couple of days I started to question whether the move had been the right one, particularly when one evening Brad and Andrew went off for dinner without me. It didn’t feel like my team.

  A few minutes after their departure I mustered the courage to message Andrew, who quickly replied that they’d just assumed I was asleep – the red-eye flight I had caught to meet the team from Perth and the return from the UK were still wreaking havoc on my sleeping habits. So I joined the pair for dinner and from that point the ice was broken. We had a team night out at the end of the camp where I mixed with the rest of the guys, and on our return to Melbourne I did not take long to get into the swing of the town through Charlie’s help. Victoria’s first away trip was to Adelaide, and some first-innings runs that game helped build respect for me within the room.

  The greater catalyst for finding a good place in the Victorian team was how ‘Hodgey’ warmed to me. I had worried whether he would feel threatened, as the team’s premier batsman, by having another top-order type arrive. But within the space of a few games he could see how a strong opening partnership between Nick Jewell and myself meant that he was now coming in to bat when opposing bowlers were getting into second and even third spells and the shine was off the ball. There was a healthy respect for the way I went about my batting and my bow-legged running, even if Hodgey’s way of showing it was to mimic my technique with hilarious accuracy! He is without a doubt one of the funniest blokes in cricket.

  Seeing how Hodgey and I were getting along, other members of the team started to open up to me, and that went hand in hand with scoring a lot of runs. An aggregate of 1195 runs went a long way towards taking the Bushrangers to a victorious Shield season, and five hundreds was a new mark for me in any first-class season, including three centuries against WA and a first-innings hundred in the Shield final against Queensland when we had first use of a sticky seamer on day one.

  As satisfying personally was to play all Victoria’s one-day games and win the limited-overs player of the year award for the competition – a bit of a riposte to WA’s selectors, who hadn’t thought I was suited to the format.

  Returning to Perth as a Bushranger was a particularly memorable week. First we played a one-day game for which I scooped man of the match, before the Shield game revealed a certain level of tension about my move interstate. Marcus North made a hundred on day one, and when he reached the milestone made a point of kissing the WA badge while glaring in my direction. Our relationship had fractured somewhat over my departure. At the time I was enjoying a rare stint in the slips, and I remember Huss exclaiming, ‘Mate, he just looked at you and kissed the badge!’

  ‘Yeah he did, didn’t he?’

  Batting second, I found a fluent vein of form and made one of my better Shield hundreds, 115
from 132 balls out of 188 while I was at the crease. It was an innings where everything clicked for me and in tough conditions I played about as well as I ever had or ever would. It seemed destined for some reason. The game of one-upmanship was now well and truly on, and when Marcus got going again in the second innings, I said to Huss as a joke, ‘If he gets a hundred and kisses the badge again, if I get a hundred in the last innings I’m going to kiss the badge!’ Sure enough, Marcus looked straight at me again and kissed the badge for his second hundred of the match. ‘You’ve got to do it now,’ said Huss, as I realised it had been a stupid comment to make.

  We needed 321 to win on the last day, and I anchored our chase with help from Huss and ‘Ronnie’ McDonald. When three figures rolled around I did as promised, and it all kicked off in the middle – the WA guys didn’t like it one bit. Adam Voges, who had been one of the guys who tried hardest to get me to stay, sledged the shit out of me, and the gesture was widely reported on. A sweeter moment arrived when I swept the winning runs, then stood, bat raised skywards, while looking towards my family sitting on one of the WACA’s grass banks. It was an extraordinary week, quite emotional, my innings clearly inspired by the turmoil that had taken me to Melbourne and then back to Perth as an opponent. But I’ve never kissed the badge since.

  That season is the most dominant one of which I’ve been a part. We had an extraordinarily strong group of players, just about every base covered, and also a good, strong and professional dynamic among the team. This applied especially to their ability to play strongly for each other despite various ructions between guys off the field. Even during that first trip to Adelaide we’d had to have two team meetings about a dispute going on between a couple of the players. In the middle of the second meeting Simon Helmot, the assistant coach, looked across the room at me with a wry grin and a bit of a chuckle, as if to say ‘welcome to Victoria’.

  It gave me a fast introduction to the way things worked. Basically, the Bushrangers played cricket as though it was AFL. They were all connected to that culture, which was all about playing an incredibly intense and hard style of the game, verbally merciless on opponents and all about securing the win, whatever it took. But the other side to it was that you didn’t have to be best mates off the field to do that. So from the same dressing room where I saw some spectacular infighting, I also watched numerous guys who might be at each other’s throats pull together brilliantly to perform as a unit on the field. They are a breed apart.

  An example of that came during one of my early club games for Essendon, playing alongside Clint McKay. At the end of a day’s play he said to me: ‘Mate do you actually enjoy playing here with us? It doesn’t really look like you do.’ We talked about that and I came to realise that my way of playing the game, partly from doing so full-time in England, was a lot more reserved than the Victorians were used to. I was managing my emotions and getting through games without resorting to sledging and aggression all the time, whereas they played it right on the edge, like footy.

  Around that time there was some criticism of Victoria from other parts of the country for being a great Shield set-up that did not pull enough weight in terms of producing Australian players. I did notice a certain imbalance in the coaching staff, in that apart from Greg and Simon, most of the other development and skills coaches came from bowling backgrounds, which didn’t necessarily help in developing young batsmen in the system. It did feel at times as though they felt junior and club cricket would turn up batsmen, while the real work had to be done in shaping an attack to bowl out opponents. But to an extent I could understand this: Victoria had gone a long time without winning the Shield after 1991, and there was a strong desire to keep challenging year in, year out.

  Cameron White was captain, and projected a very confident persona on the field. A very direct communicator, he was a leader the rest of the side were prepared to follow in the belief that he knew best. Sometimes in cricket that quality is more important than whether or not you’re actually making the right tactical calls all the time – loyalty and willingness to follow instructions go a long way, particularly in a talented side. I didn’t always agree with Cam’s ideas, but I respected how the team fell in behind him. He could be a hard man with teammates and opponents alike, but that was the approach Victoria needed, rather than anything softly softly. With Australia I would later see similar qualities in Darren Lehmann as coach, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that both men were shaped a lot by the mentoring of the late David Hookes.

  One of the effects of such a strong and results-oriented culture was that I was able to find my own niche within it. I wasn’t a sledger or ranter like some of the other guys, but they respected me for the runs I made and the role I played. Amid all these big personalities, I could actually sit back quietly and be a contributor without having to take centre stage. That was useful whenever there were squabbles inside the team, because I wasn’t aligned to any particular camp or looking to build alliances. In many ways it was a simpler time for me than anything I experienced in WA, and a clean break from some of the negativity than had built up within me and around me.

  Despite scoring significantly, higher recognition seemed as far away as ever. A brilliant new star in Phil Hughes had emerged and Simon Katich was proving one of the most reliable batsmen in the national side – those two looked like they had sewn up the opening slots. Cricket for me once again became about enjoyment, with the feeling that perhaps my only opportunity had slipped away for good.

  Even when Phil was unceremoniously dumped during the 2009 UK Ashes and I was nearby playing for Derbyshire in County cricket, my brief flicker of hope was extinguished before it even properly took flame when Shane Watson was elevated to replace Phil.

  The writing was clearly on the wall – too old and not the right fit. I was gutted, as I wanted to show the Aussie players I was not who I was made out to be.

  After another good County season where I scored more than 1400 runs at 73 was followed by another victorious season for Victoria averaging just shy of 50, which was in the middle of a period of my career where I scored the most runs in first-class cricket in the world five years out of nine from 2006.

  But despite Australian chairman of selectors Andrew Hilditch’s advice to go away and score runs when he phoned me to say I was no longer to be nationally contracted at the end of the 2007–08 season, his argument didn’t seem to carry weight, even as Australia enjoyed a slightly tumultuous time.

  Frustrated, I still admired the players I was trying to oust but my aim was just to be the best I could and try to prove the selectors wrong.

  In 2010 though, it was clear I was very much on the outer. When Usman Khawaja was selected for the series against Pakistan in England, John Morris, the coach of Derbyshire at the time, said he firmly believed I was the better player at the time. No doubt a push had been made for youth and Ussie’s talent was beyond question, but his credentials were yet to be proven, having tasted success albeit briefly in state land.

  A chronic knee injury caused my 2010 County performances to tail off and after some advice I went under the knife and missed a chunk of the state season, as I had to have my meniscus cartilage stitched back down in my knee after I had ripped it off the bone.

  In the end, I was available for only four matches that season for Victoria. My return of runs was poor and there was talk of me being left out of the last match for a younger player.

  I was as far away from playing for Australia as I had been at any point in my professional career. I still hadn’t given up hope, but these had become the lost years.

  Was it time to face reality and admit defeat?

  CHAPTER 8

  MIDDLESEX MAKEOVER

  Derby, London, Melbourne

  WHAT DOES A county look for in an overseas players? Runs and wickets of course, but there’s more to it than that. As Middlesex’s director of cricket, Angus Fraser is the man on the lookout for someone who can flourish at Lord’s as a cricketer, a leader and a tea
mmate. Fraser, who played 46 Tests for his country, took on the role at Middlesex in late 2008, with the club in the second division. Among his first moves was to ink a short-term deal with the late Phillip Hughes, who clattered no fewer than 574 runs in three matches before he was seconded for that year’s Ashes.

  By the time 2011 rolled around, Fraser knew what he wanted: an overseas opening batsman prepared to commit, who would make Middlesex hard to beat. As he tells it:

  ‘I’d been aware obviously of Chris’ performances in County cricket, he’d scored runs against us for Derbyshire, and the fact he’d scored a lot of runs for Victoria in Australia. Performances on the field indicated he was used to English conditions and had success here, and we wanted a top-order batsman to score consistently and get us off to a good start. Nick Compton had moved on to Somerset, Sam Robson was coming through, but we hadn’t found the opener we needed with some experience.

  ‘I went up to see Chris at a pub near Derby. We had a good chat, I liked what I saw, liked what I heard. I spoke to a number of people in Australia and some were questioning whether that was quite the path to go down, but we thought it was right and he did outstandingly well for us.

  ‘The image from the outside is of a gnarled, old Aussie figure, not the most aesthetic batsman you’ll see, but someone who got stuck in and was hard to get out. In person he’s different, because he’s quite a lively bloke, enjoys an evening out and a bit of fun. The way he plays his cricket is a bit different to the way he is in real life, but he was a really positive influence in our dressing room. There’s an energy there, it gets a bit up and down at times, a bit frustrated when guys didn’t perform or weren’t producing what he wanted them to, but as far as giving us a bit more steel and leadership on and off the field, he was very, very good.’