At the Close of Play
Ricky Ponting
Love him or loathe him, Ricky Ponting is one of the biggest names in cricket, having been at the heart of so many memorable Ashes and Test encounters over the years. Coinciding with the end of Ponting’s spectacular career, ‘At the Close of Play’ is a must-read for all cricket fans.For so long the scourge of English cricket, Ricky Ponting – unarguably one of cricket’s all-time greats – looks back on the story of his remarkable life and career.With his customary honesty and candour, Ponting reflects on a lifetime at the crease – from childhood prodigy to the highs and lows of his extraordinary international career.But beyond the triumphs, scandals and his own private struggle to maintain his later form, this remarkable autobiography will offer rare insights into an elite sporting career with Ricky’s reflections on leadership, captaincy, winning, defeat, competitiveness, teamwork, the greats of the game and the lessons learned at the helm of Australia’s cricket team.This autobiography, of a very private man, and one who the English public loved to hate, will resonate with lovers of cricket as well as anyone who strives to reach the top of their chosen field.
COPYRIGHT (#u1a613d51-2819-5a3a-8040-6c44ec1edda0)
HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
FIRST EDITION
© Ricky Ponting and Geoff Armstrong 2013
Thematic features © Ricky Ponting and James Henderson 2013
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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Ricky Ponting and Geoff Armstrong assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007544752
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007544776
Version: 2014-07-23
For my beautiful wife Rianna and our gorgeous children Emmy and Matisse
And for Mum, Dad, Drew and Renee
Thanks to you all for always being there for me
Cover (#u505e3399-4c9f-59c0-b440-b45dc332e075)
Title Page (#ue99c726f-d1e6-5fe1-bc70-e1762b538527)
Copyright
Dedication (#u835722ab-41f8-5943-8cc4-bed06eca9237)
Insights
The Ponting Foundation (#ulink_ddca6f40-1f15-527e-8f2f-a82e85349379)
Giving back
My routine
Prologue Invermay Park
1. THE FIRST INNINGS
1 Backyard Cricket
2 Playing with Dad
3 Out of Tasmania
4 Punter
5 In the Company of Boonie
6 An Angry Young Man
7 Making the Team
8 Retaliate First
9 The Hundred That Got Away
10 Best Seat in the House
11 High Security
12 Dropped
13 Hope Builds, Fear Destroys
2. AT THE CREASE
14 Solidarity Forever
15 I’m Not Going, I’m Staying
16 Betting Rings and Broken Helmets
17 The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time
18 Starting Over
19 Mateship Matters
20 Team First
21 Good Versus Great
22 Turning Pro
23 From Harbhajan to Headingley
24 Love Comes to Town
25 Three Amigos
3. AT THE HELM
26 Captain and Player
27 Swimming Between the Flags
28 Leading Our Defence of the World Cup
29 One Game After Another
30 Character
31 Doing the Right Thing
32 The Last Frontier
33 Playing with Brian
34 Behind the Times
35 Helmet On, Helmet Off
36 Resurgence
37 Test Century
38 No Fear
39 Mind Games
40 Getting Dizzy
41 Ugly Australians?
42 Ashes Regained
43 Most Tough Guys Cry
44 WC2007
45 Good Times
46 Zero Tolerance
47 Irreplaceable
48 Over-Rated
49 Last Man Standing
50 The Old Boy
51 Six Days in Potchefstroom
52 Public Enemy No. 1
53 Mug or Magician
4. AT THE CLOSE OF PLAY
54 Tactics and Tweets
55 Execution
56 Punted Out
57 Something New
58 Under Pressure
59 Matisse
60 Edge of the Abyss
61 Thanks for the Memories
62 It’s Time
63 End of the Journey
Epilogue Winding Down
CAREER RECORD
Picture Section
List of Searchable Terms
Acknowledgments
Final word
About the Publisher
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Giving back (#uf23af6c8-7ba7-5775-ba91-89a24d48ae6f)
My routine (#u9e64d1c4-f8d3-5cdc-8dad-61b5af842be5)
The baggy green (#ua5f0a645-d5bb-55bd-bf84-77e0dfb6f216)
Bravery (#ulink_236cc06e-0631-52ec-8d1b-7423e439f0e3)
Family (#ulink_e37a4652-1b27-5e80-8590-bdc608c9357f)
Life on the road (#ulink_3ba47af9-0243-5db4-90a4-323be55e8f00)
Planning (#ulink_99de9967-9a40-5745-b3c8-41f9a4984c4f)
Mentors (#ulink_8d0d026d-3e5e-51de-86be-d7fce93f14c5)
Being in the zone
Building a team
Practice makes perfect
Honesty
Look at those around you
Role models
Loyalty & trust (#u78ad2a3b-1ce0-5fa2-8c83-154cc224c7cb)
Feedback
The media
Technique
Patriotism
Mateship
On golf
Brilliance
Communication
Mentoring (#uf2c41b3a-e79c-5b2e-9795-2bf9f22c9ad2)
Tactical advantage
Criticism
Leadership
Captaincy
Team song
Coaching
Partnership, pressure & patience
Concentration
Celebrating success
Match-ups
Delegation
The Ashes
Great Australian players of Test cricket
Best ODI Australian team
Mumbai retrospective
Loss
Playing fresh
Top five English players
Winning
Losing (#u173870f4-2a6f-5cd6-b7ca-f8e88cd59ab0)
Unsung heroes
Top five Indian players
Favourite international players
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How the Ponting Foundation makes a difference
The Ponting Foundation is dedicated to doing everything possible to help young Australians and their families beat cancer.
It provides funding for a wide range of essential services that comfort and nurture young Australians with cancer, while providing emotional support and financial assistance for their family.
Through alliances with some of Australia’s leading cancer charities and research groups, Ricky has used his profile to influence widespread community engagement to raise important incremental funds for specific charity programs, hospitals and ground-breaking research projects engaged in the fight against cancer in Australia’s children and youth.
The Foundation also funds programs that assist in the care and well-being of the wider family unit as they support their child through illness.
How you can help
Make a donation
Visit www.pontingfoundation.com.au and make an online donation. Donations of $2 or more are fully tax deductable for Australian residents.
Get Involved with the Biggest Game of Cricket
The Biggest Game of Cricket is the Ponting Foundation’s major annual fundraising activity. Harnessing the pride of Australia Day, BGOC is a community based event with thousands of games being played and events all around Australia. Visit www.biggestgameofcricket.com.au for all the details.
Corporate partners — building pride through great partnerships
The Ponting Foundation sincerely appreciates the generous support of its corporate partners and invites interested companies to join the corporate team.
Become a Ponting XI member
A key pillar for the long-term success of the Ponting Foundation has been the creation of the ‘Ponting XI’.
The substantial donations made by members of the Ponting XI have ensured the Foundation remains fully self-sufficient, allowing funds raised by other means to be distributed to the Foundation’s beneficiaries.
By joining this thoughtful and generous group of leading philanthropists, you will be partnering with the Foundation and importantly, the wider healthcare community, in helping young Australians and families beat cancer.
Please contact the Ponting Foundation at
info@pontingfoundation.com.au for more details.
With Prof Murray Norris and Prof Michelle Haber AM at the Ricky and Rianna Ponting Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory, Children’s Cancer Institute, at the University of NSW, Sydney.
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The issue of childhood cancer is something very dear to the hearts of Rianna and myself since a hospital visit we made together back in 2002. Phil Kearns, a good friend who was involved at the Children’s Cancer Institute Australia (CCIA) invited us to visit the Sydney Children’s Hospital to meet with some of the many children and their families in the oncology ward. Listening to each family’s story was one of the most emotional experiences of our lives. We were deeply saddened by the stories we heard but at the same time overwhelmed by the commitment of the families, doctors and nurses to help these children fight the biggest battle of their young lives. Following our visit, we sat outside the Children’s Hospital and with tears in our eyes made a commitment to one another to do everything possible to improve the lives of young Australians with cancer and their families. We worked as ambassadors of the CCIA helping to raise money to fund research into Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia, the most common cancer in children.
It was through our work with the CCIA that we realised we were in a unique position to make a real difference. After very careful consideration, we decided to establish the Ponting Foundation with the aim of raising funds for the benefit of young Australians with cancer and their families. Since 2008, we have been steadily doing our best to give back to those most in need. We have partnered with a variety of incredible organisations, including the CCIA, Redkite, the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, the David Collins Leukaemia Foundation and the National Institute of Integrative Medicine, to spread our fundraising to the areas that we believe need the most focus. We visit hospitals regularly, spending time with the children and their families as well as meeting doctors, researchers and nurses, who always teach us something new about the issues of childhood cancer.
With my retirement from cricket, we intend to become even more active in our work, not only from a fundraising perspective but just as importantly, from an advocacy and awareness point of view. We need to do more for our children to protect their future. Cancer is the major killer of our children and we have to do everything we can to increase the survival rates especially around the uncommon forms of cancer. Rianna and I couldn’t do this on our own. We have an incredible Board that includes some of Australia’s most respected business people, including Trevor O’Hoy, Stephen Roberts, Ray Horsburgh, Ian Foote, Katie McNamara, Steven Ivak and James Henderson. Our founding Chairperson, Margaret Jackson, was an amazing contributor as are our Ponting XI members, including Christian Johnston, Peter de Rauch, Sir Ron Brierley, Philip Allison, Sir Michael Parkinson, Honey Bacon, and David and Kelli Lundberg.
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Here’s a simple summary of the routine that I went through every time I batted for Australia.
Last thing the night before a game or when I expected to bat
• Write a list of what I needed to do out in the middle
– Watch the ball
– Play straight
– Loud calls
– Be patient
– Be positive in attack and defence
– Bat for a long time
– Make 100
– Be man of the match
– Be man of the series
• Read this list out loud after writing it, underline each item when read and visualise each point for tomorrow
• Write a list of each bowler and how they will try to bowl
– Visualise how they will try to get me out
• Then switch off the light and go to sleep
Before going out to bat
• Get ready the same way each and every time
• Sit down and watch the openers with my gear all in same positions around me — ready to go
• Sit with a bottle of water and chew three pieces of gum
• Sip the water when needed
• As soon as a wicket falls, remove the gum and put it aside. Drink water and leave for the middle
Walking out to the middle
• Display energy and walk to the middle fairly quickly
• Do three or four butt kicks with each leg
• Play a number of shadow ‘straight drives’ while walking
• Flick my wrists with bat in hand — both hands
On arrival at the crease
• Take guard and get middle
• Clear all the rubbish on the wicket around the crease line — must be perfectly clear
• Walk down and look closely at the wicket
• Identify the area that I think the bowler can bowl a good ball
• Make sure that area is totally clear
• Move to the side of the pitch and do my hamstring stretches with bat in both hands
• Walk back to the crease while observing the field placement
• Take my grip and take my stance in the crease
Bowler’s run-up and delivery
• Say ‘watch the ball’ to myself twice
— halfway through run-up and just before release of the ball
• Look at the identified area down the wicket and look up at the bowler’s release of the ball
• Then whatever happens, happens
• Switch my mind off completely until bowler is back near top of run-up
• Switch back on and start this delivery routine again
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SO MUCH OF WHO I AM is where I came from.
It started here and in a lot of ways it’s right that it ends here in these dressing rooms. I’m two months retired from Test cricket and back playing for the Mowbray Eagles. Back where it all began.
I entered these rooms as a boy and left them 30 years later. I wore the baggy green cap at the crease and the Australian captain’s jacket at the toss. I wore one-day colours too in an era when we were unbeatable at World Cup cricket. I wore them all with pride, at all times striving to be the best I could, but if you stripped all that away you would find what matters most and what kept me going: cricket.
It is simple really. I loved the game, the rituals, the fierce competition and the equally fierce mateship it promoted.
Dressing rooms, hotels, cricket grounds and aeroplanes are the places where my life has been lived.
The rooms are our refuge. For Test players they’re a place away from the cameras, journalists, crowds and constant glare. For club cricketers they’re a sanctuary where you can be with your mates away from work and the grind of daily life. You check in Saturday morning and you check out Saturday night a little wobbly from the long day and a few drinks after the game.
Every club cricketer has got a dressing room routine, sometimes it’s hard to pick the pattern in the mess, other times it’s obvious. Me? I’m not neat, I take the bats out and stand them up to clear some room in the jumble of the kit bag. The gloves are numbered, but in no order and as the game goes on things spread out further. Matthew Hayden said I spread my gear round like a ‘scrub turkey’ but he was almost as bad; Justin Langer, Mike Hussey they were like me; others were neat as pins. Damien Martyn was, and Michael Clarke and Brad Haddin verge on the obsessive, everything laid out like it’s a display in a store window. Marto would mark the edges of his territory with tape and warn us not to let our mess trespass within. In different grounds we had different seating patterns that established themselves over the years.
Spreading the bats and placing your bag somewhere is about marking your turf, setting out the boundaries of your space.
From the time I was small I was drawn to the equipment. The bats, the shoes, the gloves and the pads … I was always looking at what somebody else had, always picking up bats and feeling them. They are, I suppose, the tools of the trade. If I’d followed through on that building apprenticeship when I left school I wonder if I’d have had the same romantic attachment to what was in the toolbox.
Occasionally you’ll meet a cricketer who couldn’t give a toss, but most of us, particularly batsmen, are obsessed with our gear. Huss would carry a set of scales with him to ensure the bat was an exact weight. If it was over, out would come the sandpaper and he would start to scrape away. I’d give him a bit of grief about it, but when he wasn’t around I’d weigh mine too. Most of us arrive with an arsenal of bats: the lucky one, the one that’s almost broken in, the one that’s there and about …
The secret to a good one is how it feels in your hands and the soft tonk sound a new ball makes on good willow. Your ear tells you. I suppose a guitar or a piano is the same, but you’d have to ask a musician if that’s right.
My game bat never comes out until the morning of the match, it never gets an appearance at practice. The others are works in progress, bits of willow that will, with a bit of tuning and knocking, make it to game-bat status one day. Like players, bats have to earn a place in a game.
WE PONTINGS ARE WORKING-CLASS PEOPLE from a working-class part of Launceston and our entertainment consisted of footy in winter, cricket in summer and golf whenever we could. It was the same with everybody we knew.
From the time I was old enough to ride my bike past the end of the street I would come down to watch the Mowbray Eagles play. I was always drawn to the cricket ground and the dressing room. Uncle Greg played for the Eagles before he moved on to the Shield side and then to Test cricket. Maybe it was him who got me down there the first time, but I knew Dad had played for the same team and most of the adults in my life had something to do with the club. Every Saturday morning I’d be up early, have a quick breakfast and then climb onto my BMX and race down to here or wherever they were playing. If somebody was around I’d have a hit in the nets while the old blokes of the district went about the serious business in the middle, but the best of the times were in their half-lit dressing rooms.
When they were on the field I’d come in and go through the kits. Weighing the bats in my hands, feeling the grips and the balance and examining the grain. Looking back it was pretty rudimentary gear, but at the time it seemed possessed of some sort of magic. I’d try on the gloves and the inners that were way too big for me and I’d memorise where everything was before I touched it to make sure it went back exactly there, so when they came in hot and sweaty from a couple of hours on the field everything would be where they’d left it, and I’d be in the corner where they expected me to be.
I was small and could hide quietly in a corner so you wouldn’t necessarily know I was there. I would spend hours there listening to them talk about cricket as they drank beer and cooled down after play. It was a conversation I longed to join and one that when I did I’ve stayed engaged with all my life. Back then I was soaking it up like a sponge. Listening to their deep, gruff voices cracking jokes and weaving stories about that place out in the middle where I would long to be.
The Mowbray boys had a reputation for being the hardest cricketers around. When we played Launceston or Riverside it was almost class war and the teams from the other side of the river used to quietly dread crossing into our territory. After the game, however, they were always welcome for a drink in the rooms.
Sometimes Dad would drag me home early, other times someone would say ‘come on young fella’ and throw my bike in the back of their car and drive me home. Being the first to arrive and last to leave is a habit I’ve maintained ever since those early days.
And today I’m back here at the cricket club that started it all.
When, as captain of the Australian Test team, I would hand players their first baggy green I would tell them that they were following in a grand tradition and to think about the people who had worn it before, but I would also ask them to think about all the others out there at club and state level and how much it would mean to them.
Cricket’s given me everything but it’s taken things from me too. I’m a Mowbray boy and it’s here I feel at home and it’s probably the greatest regret of my life that the game took me away from here too soon. As a boy I just wanted to be one of the men in this dressing room, but I suppose the trade-off wasn’t too bad. Instead of sharing victory with these men I shared it with some of the great cricketers of our time and some of my greatest mates. Matty Hayden, Marto, Lang, Gilly, Warne, Pidge … we ruled the world for a while there, climbed the mountain and we were as close as men can be. Having said that, I am just as close and just as comfortable with the people I met in these rooms when I was still a boy. The blokes who put their hands on my shoulder and pointed me in the right direction.
NATURALLY I’M THE FIRST in the rooms at Invermay Park this morning. Had to open up myself. It’s fitting in a way as I’ve always been the first to arrive. The last to leave. Lately I’d found myself looking up expecting to see Gilly or Marto or Lang only to find they’ve gone and the spot that was theirs has been taken by someone else. One by one they had all left the dressing room until I was the last one left.
Rianna, my wife, has a way of putting things in perspective. When everybody had become emotional at my retirement ahead of the Perth Test she said, ‘He’s not dead yet people, it’s just cricket,’ and I love her for that. I love that sense of balance she brings. Recently she came to me and asked if I had really made that many Test runs. She’d seen something on television. Sometimes I think she’s the only person who doesn’t know these things. (There are whole villages in the backblocks of India who know more about my career.) And I love her even more for that.
To be honest it all became a bit overwhelming when I retired from Test cricket and I wish I could have had her sense of acceptance. Admitting to myself that I was no longer up to it, saying the words out loud to Rianna and then the team and then telling the world; wandering out to bat for that last time and seeing the South Africans lined up in a guard of honour as I approached the WACA pitch … all the other little things that happened for the last time ever in the few weeks leading up to that moment had been like a series of small deaths.
I only ever wanted to play cricket and I could never bring myself to imagine a time when I wasn’t playing the game, but that time is approaching.
Since leaving the Test team I have been like a salmon (Tasmanian, of course) swimming back upstream to where it all started. Before I put this old kit bag away for the last time I had some unfinished business. Cricket swept me up early. One day I didn’t know how to get on a plane and then for a long time after I wondered if I would ever get off one.
International cricket expanded to fill every available space in my life. At the academy I had been able to get home occasionally, but after that visits got rarer until there was barely time to swing by and have a hit of golf with the old man, or a cup of instant coffee with Mum at the breakfast bar. My little brother, Drew, and sister, Renee — my whole family I guess — watched me on television and tracked my progress that way. I suppose all of Australia did and a few other nations as well. I was away when my pa died and will never forget the helplessness as I spoke to Dad on the phone from England. I wasn’t there for him when he needed me.
I’m fiercely loyal. I’m proud of my background and the values I was taught in this town and these dressing rooms. No matter how many five-star hotels I’ve slept in, how many first-class flights I’ve been on, how many politicians and businessmen and celebrities have swept through my life I have never lost the sense that I’m that small-town boy who didn’t have much but wanted for nothing.
So, in what’s left of this last summer of my cricket life, I am trying to catch up.
It’s all rushed as it always is. I trained in Hobart yesterday, drove up to Launceston last night and will head back to Hobart first thing tomorrow. I’m so early for the game I park the car down the road a bit and call Rianna on the phone, even when I’ve done that I’m still the first there so I open the clubrooms and find a space where I figure nobody else will be, just as I did when I was a boy. It’s best to stay out of the way and not be noticed, although that’s impossible today.
It’s early February and the Mowbray Eagles are playing Launceston on the parkland by the Esk River, next to the footy ground.
There’re hundreds at the ground and they line up for autographs and I sign them all when I get a chance. There’s a lot of familiar faces, people from my past introducing me to their kids. My mum and dad are playing golf because it’s a Saturday and that’s what they do and I love them for that. They’re set in their ways but I have never for one moment felt they haven’t been with me every innings I’ve played. They’re locals and they like their lives down here. They don’t like their routine disrupted so they haven’t seen me play that much. They would never think of going overseas to watch a game of cricket. It was hard enough getting them to Perth for my last match. No, there’s a golf course down the road and every Saturday Mum and Dad have a date that starts at the first hole.
I STRAP ON MY PADS and make my way out to the middle. Head down at first, trying to block out the crowd like I do whether I’m at the MCG, in Mumbai or at Mowbray. Hitting the grass I try and get a little feeling in the legs, running on the spot a bit. I make it to the middle and take centre, just as I learned all those years back, and I scratch my studs into the surface of the wicket. Marking out my territory again.
I do it really tough. Cricket is such a great leveller. I last an hour, but it’s as hard an hour as I’ve spent at the crease. The council owns the ground and keeps the grass long and it’s impossible to hit a boundary along the ground. It’s been raining and the wicket is seaming. Finally I shoulder arms to a ball that cuts back a foot or two and takes my off-stump.
This game rarely lets you get ahead of yourself. In the evening we have a few beers in the rooms with our gear all around us and the chat begins all over again.
This is who I am and now this is finishing and I suppose that begs a question I am not too keen to ponder: I might not have been finished with the game, but it was finished with me and am I now the person it has shaped?
Someone said when I walked out of the Australian dressing room the door slammed on a generation of cricket. That might be right, but for me there was something deeper. I had been raised in the game. The dressing room was a cradle, I was formed in these confines, I grew up in them and I have as good as lived in them for all my adult life up to this point. There was only ever the game and the team, the competition and the anticipation, and now it is time to move on.
AFTER MOWBRAY it was back to Sheffield Shield.
Twenty years ago I played my first game for Tassie as a 17-year-old and here I am again. At 38 I get to celebrate for the first time as my home state wins the coveted Sheffield Shield. It’s a great feeling and I’ve had a good year, even knocking up a 200 in the game against NSW that followed my Mowbray visit.
Cricket is a cruel mistress and there she was at me again. I had started the summer in great form in first-class cricket and was the highest run-scorer going into the series against South Africa that would be my last. I felt like my technique, my reflexes, my game were in the best place they had ever been, but when it came time to wear the baggy green I could not make a run. So, going out and hitting a double hundred in the Shield a few months after I had literally landed on my face in Test cricket was a bitter irony, but a sure indication that there’s an enormous mental element to this game. No matter how hard I tried — and believe me there is nobody who tries and trains harder than me — I couldn’t put all the pieces back together at Test level.
It still hurts to admit I had lost it, but it felt good to end the season giving back to my home state, a place that had given so much but for most of my career had been so far away, so hard to get back to.
While Tasmania was winning the Shield competition Australian cricket seemed to be spiralling out of control during a series against India.
They’d barely missed a beat after I left. In my last game in Perth we had a chance to regain the number one rank in world cricket, but now that seemed so far away. In the first series they played after my retirement they easily accounted for a Sri Lankan side. My only contribution was a lap of honour at Bellerive before the Test.
After that things just seemed to go wrong and it was hard to watch. I know more than most how India can get on top of you. The cricket is like the country — it can be breathtaking, but at times it can close in on you and you feel like you are being smothered. It’s easy to lose your way there and the Aussies did. I had never led a team to a series victory in India, but not only did they lose 4–0 on the field, they lost their way off it. The dressing room that I loved had changed in the past few years and as hard as it was to see how bad they were going out in the middle, it was just as hard knowing how much they were struggling off it.
I’d seen the signs. When we lost in Perth I went with the boys to have a drink with the South Africans and I was taken aback by the feeling they had in the sheds. Sure, it’s easy to be happy when you’ve won so well, but they were a tight group, a small travelling band that had gelled together and taken down the enemy and as I looked at them enjoying the afterglow I was gripped with a sense of loss.
We used to be like that, I thought.
Everything has to change in cricket, but I’m not so convinced that all the changes I’ve seen in the past few years are for the better. I was in that Australian dressing room for 20 years and it seemed every time a legend left his corner another arrived to take that place. I saw Adam Gilchrist replace Ian Healy, and Stuart MacGill pick up a lazy 200 wickets when forced to play understudy to Shane Warne. I remember when a 30-year-old called Michael Hussey first got his shot at the big time and a young bloke called Michael Clarke came into the side.
Michael Clarke’s got the captaincy now and it’s fair to say that the trend that started in the last years of my time in the job has continued. First-class cricket just isn’t bringing up the players, particularly batsmen, it once did. There was a time when guys with 10,000 first-class runs, guys who had scored century after century all around Australia and in England for counties, could not get a look-in. Sure there were a few, myself included, who came in young and relatively inexperienced, but we knew we were always under pressure for our places from others who had equal rights to them.
Anyway, I have to let that go now …
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The baggy green cap is the most powerful symbol in Australian sport. Nothing comes close to it for its tradition, meaning and representation. Only a small number of cricketers have played Test cricket for Australia and been presented with the baggy green. 365 cricketers achieved that honour before I made my Test debut in 1995. My Test cap number 366 is now almost part of my DNA.
Fewer than 450 cricketers have earned a baggy green since Test cricket began in 1877. That’s quite phenomenal when you think how many Australians have dedicated their life to cricket but have never reached the level of playing Test cricket for Australia. This is what I’ve always talked about when presenting brand-new baggy green caps to players making their debut for Australia. You are joining a pretty elite group and have achieved a pinnacle of personal achievement in Australian cricket. You are now part of the baggy green family — an exclusive club. How lucky are we!
During my career, I had two baggy greens. My original cap was stolen out of my luggage on the way home from Sri Lanka in 1999. I’d only played 24 Tests at the time and I was gutted to think that the cap was gone. I was given a replacement baggy green that would stay with me right through to my last Test in Perth in 2012. It was a constant companion on and off the field. After losing my first cap, I carried my baggy green in my hand luggage wherever I went. It was with me in 144 Test matches all over the world and was looking pretty worse for wear when I retired from international cricket. There had been calls for me to change to a brand-new baggy green. Some said I was not treating the cap with the respect it demands, by wearing a faded, torn and out of shape baggy green on which you could hardly identify the Australian coat of arms on the front. But I am traditionalist and my baggy green tells a story — the story of my career. It reflects where I was, where I went and, in the latter years, how it was on its last legs — just like me. To me, my baggy green was a symbol of national pride, a monument to all my predecessors, team-mates and future Australian Test players, and a trophy for all the successes we achieved together. That baggy green was me.
Now it forms part of a very special presentation box that Rianna and the girls gave to me for my first Christmas as a retired international cricketer. It sits beside a brand-new baggy green with the most beautiful images of our family standing on the WACA after my last game. The new baggy green now symbolises the next stage of my life. A time of looking forward while never forgetting the incredible opportunities that 168 Test matches, with my baggy green, gave me.
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MY NAME IS Ricky Thomas Ponting and I played cricket.
I played junior cricket, indoor cricket, club cricket, rep cricket, state cricket, T20 cricket, one-day cricket and Test cricket. When I didn’t play cricket, I trained to play cricket. I played cricket almost everywhere cricket is played and with some of the greatest players there have ever been. I played in what might have been the best team the world has ever seen. I tried to be the best cricketer I could possibly be. I gave everything I had to that cause from the time I was a small boy until long after most of my contemporaries had walked away.
I was born in Launceston, Tasmania, a small town on a small island state that often gets left off the map of Australia. We’re proud people who look after ourselves and who figure Hobart is the big smoke and the mainland is another country.
My early years were spent in the suburbs of Prospect and then Newnham, where we lived with my grandparents. When we could afford it, we moved to the housing estate at Rocherlea. I played cricket at school and then for the Mowbray Eagles, just like my dad and just like my Uncle Greg who was Mum’s brother. People identify me with Mowbray and that’s all right with me because that is where I learned the game.
I was born on December 19, 1974 to Graeme and Lorraine Ponting. My mum reckons I was a ‘beautiful baby’ but she might be biased. ‘No trouble at all,’ she tells me. ‘Slept and ate, that’s all you did.’ One of her most prominent early memories of me is when I was sitting on the lounge-room floor, eyes fixed on the television, watching Kim Hughes bat. Kim was my first hero in Test cricket, a batsman who, when he was on, was unstoppable. I remember him taking on the West Indies at the MCG the week after my seventh birthday, their fast bowlers aiming at his chest and head, him hooking and pulling fearlessly. That knock stays burned in my memory and probably set the standard for the sort of cricketer I wanted to become. Australian cricket wasn’t going so well then, but he stood up that day and scored 100 out of an innings total of 194. Holding, Roberts, Garner and Croft threw everything they had at him, but he was undefeated at the end of the innings and the Australians went on to win that match. That didn’t happen all that often back then. There was no doubt in my mind, even then, that I wanted to be out there doing exactly the same.
One of Dad’s early recollections of me is not as flattering as Mum’s. ‘When you were three, you used to wait out the front for the children walking home from school, and you’d run out and kick them and then run back inside,’ he once told me. It was, he reckons, one of the first signs of my ‘mischievous’ streak. I’d like to think it showed I was never going to be intimidated by anyone older or bigger and for the next 20 years of my life I always seemed to be the youngest person in the room. I was the boy in the men’s team, the 16-year-old at the cricket academy with Warnie who already had his own car and his own ways, the kid who was missing the final years at school to play first-class cricket, the 20-year-old walking onto the WACA to make my debut in Mark Taylor’s team. Fortunately by then I’d stopped kicking the big kids in the leg …
I have a younger brother, Drew, and a sister, Renee, who is younger again. Today they both live within a couple of minutes of our parents’ place. I’m the only one that went away.
Mum also has strong memories of me always being outside playing cricket as a boy. ‘You always had to be the batsman and Drew had to bowl or field,’ she says. ‘You’d bat for an hour before Drew would get a bat. Then Drew would finally have a go, but he’d only last two minutes and you’d go back in.’ My little brother was the first to suffer for my love. Most batsmen value their wicket, none like getting out, but I took it to an extreme and it all started in the backyard.
Like all kids we built the rules of cricket around the circumstances of our backyard. Over the fence was out and God help you if the old man caught you wading into his prized vegetable patch to fetch a ball. He loved that garden and it lay in wait from point to long-on, ready to swallow a ball. Drew reckons I mastered the art of hitting the ball over the garden and into the fence. I never let him bat for too long because it seemed part of the natural order of things that I was there doing what my hero, Kim Hughes, had done, although with all due respect to Drew he was no Michael Holding. I’d knock him over with my bowling as quick as I could and then take guard again. I have to admit Drew’s ability to bowl endless overs was important to my development and I must thank him some time.
As a kid, growing up, I looked upon Mowbray as being a flash part of town.
We didn’t come from the wrong side of the tracks so much as the wrong side of the river. Launceston is divided by the Tamar river, one side was middle class and nice and the other was where we lived. On our side they had the railway workshops, the factories and all the key landmarks of my early life — at the centre of which was the cricket club. In the Mowbray dressing rooms on a Saturday night they used to tell beery yarns about having to fight to cross the bridge into town, they weren’t true but they told you a little bit about the ‘us and them’ nature of where I came from. Our greatest rivals were Riverside; they came from the nice part of town and sometimes complained that we played cricket too hard. It was a complaint I would hear on and off for a lot of my career, but I never heard them say we weren’t playing fair or honestly.
My father was born in Pioneer, a mining village in the north-eastern tip of the island. His father, Charlie, was a tin miner who wanted a better life for his family so he worked two jobs, digging tin from the ground all week and then travelling to Launceston to dig foundations for houses on the weekends. With the money he made they moved to Newnham. They were people who knew a different life. Dad would tell stories about trapping rabbits and the like so they could eat, and I reckon that his enormous vegetable garden had something to do with that poor background.
The Pontings had arrived in Tasmania back in about 1890. My great great grandfather was a miner, his son was a miner and so was his son, my grandfather Charlie, but Charlie joined the RAAF when the war broke out and that might have changed things. He married Connie, my grandmother, during the war and sometime later they moved from Pioneer into Launceston and that was the last time our family dug for tin.
Pop kept greyhounds and Dad tells the story that he went to the races one night and an owner said to him, ‘You want a dog? I’ve got one that’s no good to me, it can’t win a race.’ Dad walked five kilometres home with the dog and put it under the house. Fed it some steak. His father said he couldn’t keep it, but when Dad came home the next day his father had built a run across the back garden and it all started from there. The dog won its first race and we were away. Or that’s how the story goes.
In Rocherlea Mum and Dad rented a small three-bedroom housing commission home on the bend at 22 Ti Tree Crescent. It was a cottage that had a nice front yard and a reasonable backyard dominated by Dad’s vegetable garden. We were on the edge of town. It wasn’t the best neighbourhood and always had a bad reputation — there were some houses that seemed to be visited by the police on a regular basis and I suppose there was a bit of trouble around but I avoided it. I can’t ever remember our house being locked, which tells you a little bit about how life was.
We didn’t have much money when I was growing up, but I never remember us wanting for anything. Dad left school early to pursue a life as a golf professional, which didn’t work out. He was a great sportsman and I think the interest he took in my life was because he wanted me to have a chance to do the things he didn’t. Dad was a good cricketer and footballer and a better golfer; I suppose you could say he was pushy, but that’s probably too simplistic. Dad saw I was good and did the right thing by letting me know when I could be better. I always wanted to make him proud and never resented the way he encouraged me. He worked at the railways and other jobs, eventually finding his place as a groundsman. He didn’t earn a lot but he loved — loves — the work. Mum and Dad’s life revolved around us kids. Mum worked, but always made sure she or Dad was there for us when we were home. She was raised in Invermay and for most of our early lives she worked at the local petrol station there.
I sometimes think that if I hadn’t dragged them to the odd game of cricket in the past 30 years that they might never have left Launceston.
From our house in Rocherlea, it was about two kilometres south to Mowbray Golf Club, a bit less than a kilometre further to the racecourse, and another kilometre closer to the city centre to get to Invermay Park, the former swampland that would become the home ground of the Mowbray Cricket Club in the late 1980s. That reclaimed land is why people from around this area have long been known as ‘Swampies’.
I am extremely fortunate to have parents who love their sport. My mum represented Tassie at vigoro (a game not too dissimilar to cricket), played competitive badminton and netball, and later in life started playing golf because, as she explains it, her husband was always down at the clubhouse. Taking up the game was her best chance of seeing more of him.
Mum and Dad wanted their kids to be happy, humble, brave and honest. There was a toughness about where I was growing up and my parents never hid me from that, but neither did they use it as an excuse to let me run wild. I was sort of street-smart, and that and a combination of my parents’ love for me and my addiction to all things sport kept me out of serious trouble. There was, though, a bit of rascal in my make-up. One evening I came home late, explaining that I’d been at a mate’s place doing schoolwork, which was in itself a long bow. Worse, my shoes were covered in mud from the creeks at Mowbray Golf Club, where we’d been searching for lost balls that we could sell back to the members. I’ll never forget how Dad belted me as he demanded that in future I tell the truth, and how the message sank in. At the same time, I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been, not cleaning my shoes before I got home.
Honesty was important to Dad and he passed that on.
I was never top of my class academically, but neither was I near the bottom. In Rocherlea, learning to stay out of trouble was as important as learning your times tables. Some might be surprised to learn I was a prefect for two of the years I was at high school. I suppose that shows that even at an early age I showed some hints that there was some leadership capabilities somewhere deep inside this sport-obsessed kid.
Sport was the making of me. From a very early age I knew I could hold my own at cricket or football, which gave me plenty of confidence and a lot of street cred with boys bigger and older than me. Because of the rules governing school sport in Tasmania at the time I didn’t play any organised cricket or football until grade five at Mowbray Heights Primary School, when I was 10, and I didn’t make my debut in senior Saturday afternoon cricket with the men at Mowbray until 1987, when I was 12. Before then, though, I did take part in some school-holiday coaching clinics, watched the Mowbray A-Grade team play and won a thousand imaginary Test matches against my little brother and whoever else we could recruit into neighbourhood contests.
There were other kids who might have had more material possessions, but living on the edge of town meant we had plenty of open space and in the days before laptops and the like we used it well. It could get icy in winter, but it’s never too cold to kick a footy, and Dad found me a set of clubs when I wanted to hit a golf ball. If Drew and I could get down for a round of golf Mum would pack us a flask of cordial and give us enough money for a pack of chips and we were away. There was always cricket gear around the house and when a group of us went down to the local nets or park we always practised with a fair-dinkum cricket ball.
Mowbray boys learned not to flinch from an early age.
Being born in a small town had its advantages as everything was close and parents never needed to worry too much about where the kids were. If I was missing Mum or Dad just had to find the nearest game of cricket or footy and they were comfortable that even if I was in the sheds with the older blokes that they were all neighbours and friends and they were all keeping an eye on me. I had a BMX bike that I used to ride about town, and often to senior cricket matches involving the Mowbray club, my home team, Dad’s old team, a club that in the years after it was formed in the 1920s used to get many of its players from the nearby railway workshops or the Launceston wharves. I started following them partly because I just loved the game, but also because my Uncle Greg was one of their best players.
Cricket fans know him as Greg Campbell. He’s Mum’s brother, 10 years older than me and a man who had a significant influence on my cricket career. Greg encouraged me all the way and spent a lot of time playing cricket with me, but more importantly he set an example. Looking back now I can see how important it was to know that someone from our family could make the big time, could go all the way from Launceston to Leeds, where he made his Test debut in the first Test against England in 1989. That was a huge day in our lives. Not only was Mum’s brother bowling for Australia, another local hero, David Boon, was playing too. Our little town provided two Test players. It was like Launceston had colonised the moon, although in my world landing in the Australian cricket team was a bigger deal.
Having someone in the family who could do that made the dream of one day doing it myself all the more real. Here was a bloke in the side who had played cricket with me in the back garden. It meant Test cricket was a viable option for people like us. Greg nurtured my interest in cricket and we could get pretty competitive when we played each other. One day, when he thought I was out and I thought I wasn’t, we had to go and ask Dad to come out and decide. The ruling went in Greg’s favour, which didn’t surprise me because he and Dad were best mates, to the point that when Dad coached the footy team at Exeter (a town 20 kilometres north of Launceston) one year, Greg went there and played as well. If there was one thing that could and still does get the men of our family into an argument it’s sport. You should hear Dad and myself when a golf game is on the line. To an outsider these disputes might sound pretty serious. They’re definitely earnest, but it’s just our competitive nature and I suppose it was something that got me into hot water a few times over the years.
One of my strongest memories involving Greg is the day when Mum told me that his Ashes kit had arrived. I flew around on my bike to his house in Invermay to check it all out, to try on his baggy green cap and even his Australian blazer, which was many sizes too big but felt absolutely perfect. He was a hero of mine then and he remains a hero of mine today; he’s a good friend who helped show me the way. Standing in that Launceston house dressed in his gear I knew there was only one way my life was going.
In the early and mid 1980s, when I started watching Greg and his team-mates at the Mowbray Eagles, they played their home games at the ground at Brooks High, the local high school at Rocherlea. Sometimes I’d be down there at nine in the morning, even though the game didn’t start until 11. I just didn’t want to miss anything. It was the same when I joined the team working the scoreboard at the Northern Tasmanian Cricket Association (NTCA) ground during Sheffield Shield games — I scored that gig after I rode my bike down to the ground, found the right person and asked for the job. They paid me $20 a day, but much more important than that, I had a bird’s eye view of the game, the warm-ups, the net sessions, everything.
As I said earlier I loved to sit in the corner of the Mowbray A-Grade team’s dressing room. Some of the tactical talks and most of the jokes went over my head, but at the same time I was absorbing plenty. I saw their loyalty and passion for each other and the game. Not least, I saw how those men played hard and fair, enjoyed the wins and hated the losses, wouldn’t take crap from anyone and always sought to be friendly with the opposition once the game was done. Most times, that mateship was reciprocated and if it wasn’t, we knew who the losers were. Those were lessons in cricket etiquette for me. The men set the standard and they said ‘no matter what happens on the field you shake hands and you have a beer after the game’. It was a tradition in Australian Test cricket but one that all nations were keen on. Once it happened after every day’s play, then it shifted to the end of the Test and later, because everything was so hectic, it became something that you did at the end of a tour. I know whenever we had a drink with the opposition after a series it was a positive experience. Arguments happened on the field and stayed there, relationships were built off it.
If Uncle Greg was my favourite, everyone else in the Mowbray dressing room was a star, too. I’d seen his fast-bowling partners, Troy Cooley and Roger Brown, bowling in the Sheffield Shield. Brad Jones, later my coach when I played for the Mowbray Under-13s, had played for Tasmania Colts. Richard Soule was the Tassie wicketkeeper. A standout was Mick Sellers, a strong burly left-hander who strode out to bat at the start of an innings and whacked the ball all over the place. He used a big Stuart Surridge Jumbo, four or five grips on the handle, batted in a cap and took on the fast bowlers every time. If there was ever a blueprint made of the classic Mowbray Cricket Club player it was Mick. He represented Tasmania in a few first-class and one-day games in the 1970s. He played over 400 games for Mowbray and was the club coach. After he retired, he would still be down at the ground, helping to roll the wicket, put on the covers, anything to help. He remains a legendary figure around the club. He was there, of course, when I came back at the end of my career.
He looked after me in those days when I was a constant in their dressing room. He got me involved when the time was right, and sheltered me at other times. In doing so, he taught me so much. They all did. They were kind and generous men. At the same time, everyone feared playing Mowbray; I could see that from the looks on the opposition’s faces, what they said to each other while we were fielding. A game against Mowbray was a tough day at the office, plenty of words spoken, no quarter given. A lot of what you see in me today is a result of learning the game the way they used to play it. When we were truly at our best other sides hated playing Australia. South African cricket captain Graeme Smith admitted as much once, and while a lot of people took this the wrong way, to me and to the others in the side the point was we would not give an inch on the field.
After stumps, if Dad had come from golf to see how the boys had played, he would put down his beer, and bowl to me so I could try to mimic the shots I’d seen played earlier in the day. At home games, we used a big incinerator drum as the wicket and just the same as when they were bowling to me at school my ambition was to never get bowled. Dad was my first coach, at cricket and footy, and he could be a tough marker, but he wanted me to be a winner and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
You often read or hear of the so-called bravery of sportspeople who overcome great adversity to win. I’ve certainly seen and been a part of some very brave sporting accomplishments over the years, but I must say that the use of the expression ‘bravery’ is completely over-stated when you are witness to some real acts of bravery in everyday life. Rianna and I have met some of the bravest children and families in our work around the area of childhood cancer. The children, especially, move us. While they fight the most horrible disease in the world, they show incredible resilience to go through their treatment and hopefully survive. Without a doubt, it’s even tougher for the families. Parents and grandparents continually ask the question: ‘Why our child or grandchild?’ They have to be brave for the child while maintaining a sense of normality to support siblings and other loved ones at a time that most of us cannot even start to imagine how difficult it must be. Some of the bravest families we have met had children who didn’t survive the battle with cancer.
In our days of supporting the Children’s Cancer Institute Australia, I stayed in regular contact with a number of children, exchanging text messages and keeping up to date with their progress. Those close to me know that I’m a bit slack at returning text messages but my contact with these children was different — I always made a point of answering straight away. Sadly, in many situations, a message would come through from parents letting me know their child didn’t make it. Over the years, though, we have stayed in contact with many families whose children have survived. One very special child close to our hearts is Toby Plate from Adelaide. I first met Toby and his family on the eve of the Adelaide Ashes Test in 2010. During that series, I had a young cancer sufferer join me at each of the opening ceremonies. Of all the children I met that summer, Toby was the sickest — fighting a brain tumour and undergoing the most intensive treatment. We spent considerable time together that day and he left a lasting impression on me. The next day we stood together and sang the national anthem before the second Test began. Sadly not all the children who stood with me in the anthem ceremonies that summer survived their battle with cancer, but Toby did. We have stayed in touch and last year played cricket together at the MCG with Owen Bowditch, who was with me at the Boxing Day Test opening ceremony that summer. These boys and their families epitomise bravery for me. They are symbolic of what it means to overcome adversity. Not all the stories have a happy ending but the bravery shown by each and every child that is confronted by cancer is overwhelming, to say the least.
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MOST KIDS PLAY CRICKET with their fathers in the backyard, but where we came from there was a bit of a tradition of the fathers dropping down in the grades to guide their sons through. We never had a big partnership, but I loved the year I played with my old man.
Dad retired from weekend cricket to concentrate on his golf well before I played my first serious game, but after a number of seasons on the sidelines he was talked into making a comeback, the lure being the chance to play with his son. Up until this time I had played a little at school and some indoor cricket, but all the while I was waiting to join the men and that’s what I did on the eve of my 13th birthday.
We were both in the thirds at the start of the 1987–88 season. Dad was captain, I was a tiny but promising novice who struggled to hit the ball off the square. My technique was pretty good, but lofted shots were risky because I was never sure I could get the ball over the fielders’ heads and there was just not enough power in my arms to play a forcing shot through the field. Still, Dad put me up near the top of the order, reasoning the experience would be good for me, and eventually the day came when he walked out proudly to bat with me at the other end. It was a home game against South Launceston. Just like my favourite players — Launceston’s own David Boon, former Australian captain Kim Hughes and the then Aussie skipper Allan Border — did in the Test matches I watched so avidly on television, I sauntered down the pitch before Dad faced a ball, to tell him the leg-spinner who was bowling, a bloke named Matthew Dillon, was getting a bit of turn.
‘Just be careful for a little while,’ I suggested. I was all of 12 years old. ‘Don’t play across the line because he’s getting a bit of turn.’
The first delivery was handled without a problem, but the second ball Dad went for the big shot and skied a simple catch to cover. I was really disappointed and a bit dirty that he’d thrown his wicket away, but thinking about it now, I guess this might have been the first time I saw what pressure can do on a cricket field — we’d talked so much about what it would be like to bat together, how we really wanted to have a decent partnership, and that seemed to be what Dad was thinking about rather than just playing each ball on its merits. At least that’s what we decided at the inquisition after stumps and it says something about the way we were that we sat down and analysed what went wrong. Ironically, in the matches that followed, it was me, not Dad, who struggled to make a big score. At season’s end, he was top of the competition for batting aggregates and averages, and having guided me through my first year, he promptly retired for good so he could get back to playing golf all weekend.
I think part of his motivation to come back was simply to protect me, because he knew what senior grade cricket in Launceston could be like. I was sledged more in my first season with Mowbray than I would ever be sledged again in my life. I’d developed a bit of a reputation as a ‘young gun’ and some old blokes seemed very keen to put me in my place. There were a number of guys playing third grade who were in a similar boat to Dad — older, former top-grade players who were now helping young guys out and at the same time were eager to ‘educate’ teenage opponents who stood out. Old bulls out to slow the young bulls down and teach them a thing or two about how the game should be played. It was a time-honoured tradition and one that we might have got away from a little now in the select streams of Australian cricket where the best young players are channelled off into age competitions or lured by scholarships to private schools where they only get to play against people their own age.
You can get put back in your place fairly quickly playing against cranky old blokes who played their first game before you were born. Respect is earned in these scenarios and if you have the talent and character to survive you come out a better cricketer and a better person. I got fearsome sledgings on a few occasions; one that stands out was the wicketkeeper from Riverside who had played some representative cricket a few years earlier and now gave me an almighty serve on their home ground after I made the mistake of responding to something he’d muttered from behind the stumps. If I’d been out of line, Dad would have said so. Instead, he got into this keeper and the language was pretty full-on.
Most weeks someone tried to knock my head off, but nothing about playing with the men harmed me. Some people keep their kids away from real cricket balls and some talent streams lock them into playing in their age groups for fear they will be roughed up and mentally scarred. Fortunately I had no fear and came through unscathed. Indeed, the value of playing against cricketers twice, even three times, my age shone through in the January of that season, when I played for Mowbray in the Northern Under-13 Cricket Week — I scored four separate hundreds in the space of five days, all of them undefeated. To me the other team were just like Drew and there was no way they were going to get me out. It was a simple game in those years — you were either in or out and it was obvious who you were competing with; with age comes the doubts and mental struggles that all sportsmen face.
Apparently at one point during this tournament a few of the parents became a little agitated because their kids weren’t getting a bat, so Dad suggested to our coach, Brad Jones, that he give someone else a go. Brad disagreed, saying he’d sort it out later. ‘I didn’t think it warranted this kid who loved the game so much being denied the chance of batting just because some parents wanted to watch their kid bat,’ he recalled when interviewed a couple of years back.
Two weeks later, I was picked in Mowbray’s team for the final game in the Northern Under-16 Cricket Week and made another ton, which was enough for me to be selected in the NTCA’s Under-16s training squad and the Tasmanian Institute of Sport Under-19 squad, and for me to get my picture in the paper for the first time, alongside an article that was headlined: ‘Ricky’s Making a Big Hit in Cricket Circles’.
From that time on, I never really thought about a working career outside of sport. When people asked me what I was going to do for a living, I’d reply, ‘Play cricket.’ I think they thought I was joking, but I was very serious.
I was a student at Brooks High School, Rocherlea, by this stage, and one day at school I was interviewed by journalist Nigel Bailey. Today, the story is stuck in Mum’s scrapbook and my responses are exactly what you’d expect from a 13-year-old grade-eight student terrified of embarrassing himself. When asked if I’d like to play for Australia, I replied, ‘I’d love to play for Australia.’ When Nigel asked me if David Boon was a hero, I responded, ‘I look up to David Boon because he’s from here.’ And that was about it, except when I was asked what I liked to do outside of cricket.
‘I like to fish for trout with my dad,’ I said.
THE FIRST TIME I threw a line in the water occurred during school holidays at Musselroe Bay, a village on Tasmania’s far north-east coast, where my grandparents had a caravan and we’d stay at one of the campsites. Quite often, Dad’s sister and her kids used to come up as well and other relatives of Dad’s had a shack a couple of minutes down the road, so family gatherings could be huge. You had to drive through old Ponting country to get there, the road running through the town of Pioneer which always had Dad telling stories as we drove.
Getting there was half the fun. Dad had a few cars when we were young and none of them were very flash. There was an old Holden, a Ford Cortina and a Toyota Cressida he bought when he got laid off from the railways. My grandparents had a station wagon and would take most of our gear in the back of that. We’d squash into the family car and hold our breath most of the way, just hoping it would get us there.
In Musselroe I’d watch the Boxing Day Tests on a little black-and-white portable TV, sitting on a couch or lying on the floor. I can remember Dennis Lillee bowling off his long run, Allan Border wearing down the opposition and Kim Hughes playing a brand of cricket that I hoped to emulate one day. At other times we’d go out on Pop’s little dinghy fishing for salmon. My childhood memories are of us never failing to bring back at least enough food for dinner that night. These were the happiest days of my childhood.
If we weren’t fishing, opening Christmas presents or watching Test matches at Musselroe Bay, the odds were I was involved in a sporting activity of some kind. A couple named Sue and Darrel Filgate had a shack on a large, well-grassed block of land, and it was nothing for me to play cricket all day in summer with the Filgates’ two sons, Darren and Scott, who were around the same age as me. There were days when I’d bounce out of bed in the morning, have a slice of Vegemite toast for breakfast, and then be gone for the day. Often, one or more of Mum, Dad, Nan or Pop had to come up to the Filgates’ house to get me for dinner, because I had no sense of time when we were on holidays, especially if I was batting.
I thought I was going okay and Nan obviously agreed with me. Around the time of my 10th birthday, it could have been Christmas 1984, she gave me a T-shirt that featured an ambitious message: ‘Inside this shirt is a future Test cricketer’. A few people had a friendly go at me whenever they saw that shirt, whether it was that Christmas or in the next few that followed. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t see a problem.
UNTIL I WAS 13, most of the organised cricket I played was at school or indoors. Wherever I played I made sure bowlers worked hard if they were ever going to be rid of me. Drew wasn’t the only one who suffered. I don’t think I was dismissed in my two years of cricket at Mowbray Heights Primary and I do recall that in grade six they introduced a limit on how long anyone could bat — if a batsman reached 30, he had to retire — to stop me from batting all the time.
Our coach was also the umpire and the scorer too, so whenever I was at the bowler’s end I’d ask him, ‘How many am I?’ My plan was to get to 29 and then aim for the boundary so I’d finish unconquered on 33 or 35. The indoor games were played at the Waverley Area Cricket Arena, at St Leonards in south-east Launceston, known across town as the WACA. I was our team’s wicketkeeper. Dad was captain.
I played a lot of indoor cricket, including some big games in Hobart representing the WACA. I loved it, but my old man wasn’t so keen on me playing so much because he thought it was bad for my outdoor cricket. The key to indoor cricket is to push the ball into the side netting, which meant we were always hitting across the line. ‘You can’t play straight in indoor cricket,’ he’d sneer, because a drive back to the bowler could lead to a run out if the batsman at the non-striker’s end (who was always looking for a quick single) backed up too far. He was right, of course, and eventually I gave the game away for that reason.
THE FIRST ‘SERIOUS’ BAT I ever owned was a Duncan Fearnley size five that Dad bought for me from a local sports store. Then, one day not long after my 10th birthday, Dad and I went along to watch the Mowbray Under-13 team in action. Within minutes of arriving, we learned they were one player short, because someone had dropped out at the last minute. It was my big chance and not one I hadn’t fantasised about. The people at the club were aware I was keen and they knew I could hold a bat and catch and throw, and as there was no one else available, I was drafted in, batting last and with no chance of getting a bowl. I was the most excited kid in the world.
In our first innings I made one not out, but we were soundly beaten and the other team sent us back in, even though there was little chance of an outright result. I had the pads on and the coach said I could go in again if I wanted to, an invitation I wasn’t going to knock back. While I was waiting for the umpires to take us out Dad came over and said quietly, ‘If you can get to 20, I’ll buy you a new cricket bat.’
Years later, this was the knock Dad recalled when he was asked if there was a moment when he realised I was going to be a good batsman. I wasn’t much taller than the stumps but I knew how to play straight and I could leg glance and push the ball between the fieldsmen at mid-wicket and mid-on for a single. I certainly wasn’t scared. In the end, it was more a matter of whether I’d get to 20 before sunset, but I made it and by the following Saturday I had my Gray-Nicolls ‘Super Scoop’, a David Hookes signature. A year later, I was given some County gear — a bat, gloves and pads after impressing the right people at indoor cricket — but the Scoop remained my favourite bat until, in early 1988, on the back of those hundreds in the Under-13 and Under-16 Cricket Weeks, I was signed up by Kookaburra, whom I’ve been with ever since.
This sponsorship deal was instigated by a gentleman named Ian Young, a man who became a family friend. Youngy was the hardest working bloke I’ve ever met, someone who was passionate about everything he did. I first ran into him when I got the part-time job as a scoreboard attendant at the NTCA ground, where he was the curator, but he really came into my life early in my first season playing for Mowbray. One night when we were using the indoor nets at the NTCA ground, he stopped to watch me bat and then came up to me afterwards and offered to help me out.
Youngy had already devoted a lifetime’s worth of work to the game, as a player, mentor and administrator, and now here he was — clad in his King Gee work pants, steel-capped boots and big flannelette shirt — meeting me at Invermay Park on Saturday mornings after he’d worked on his pitches in the early hours, to bowl at me for over after over, all because he believed I was a good cricketer in the making. Not long after, he was appointed coach at Mowbray and our bond grew tighter. If he ever rang and said, ‘Let’s go have a hit,’ I’d be on my way. I’d bat, he’d bowl; as I remember my childhood, he was always around to throw balls at me or bowl to me. But he never forced me to go to practice; in those days, I would have batted all day every day if I could have. As long as I worked hard, greeted him with a firm handshake and looked him straight in the eye and listened when he spoke to me — that was all he wanted. When it came to batting technique, he was big on the simple stuff: play as straight as you can and wait for the ball. For me, the biggest buzz was simply that someone of his stature was taking such an interest in me; that he cared as much as Mum and Dad did.
Youngy always stood out in the crowd, and not just because he was a tall bloke. He was confident, assertive, never short of a word but always talking sense. It was so good to have him on my side. He was a coach who, if he saw a problem, he tried to fix it and he was happy to work and work until things were right. He taught me the value of a good work ethic. He’d been an outstanding bowler in his day, and if I made a mistake in the nets on a cover drive, you could guarantee the next ball he’d bowl would pitch in the same spot, to give me the chance to do it better.
Sometimes when he got tired Youngy would invite me back to the indoor nets, where he would feed one of the bowling machines so I could keep working on my technique. Often, we were joined by his youngest son Shaun, who was four-and-a-half years older than me and played his cricket with South Launceston. Two other sons, Claye and Brent, were also excellent cricketers. Claye even opened the bowling for Tasmania one season with Dennis Lillee. Shaun, a gifted all-rounder, and I would play plenty of Shield cricket together and in an Ashes Test at the Oval in 1997, an event that prompted the Launceston Examiner to organise a photo of two proud fathers, Ian and Graeme, which they put on the front page of the paper.
In 1988, Youngy was good mates with a bloke named Ian Simpson who was working for Kookaburra at that time, and he told him, ‘There’s a kid down here who looks like he might be all right.’ I was introduced to Ian soon after, when he was in Tassie for the Kookaburra Cup final and about a week later, a kit, complete with bat, gloves and pads, landed on our front door.
As the story goes, Ian Simpson went back to Melbourne and told Rob Elliot, the boss at Kookaburra, ‘We’ve got this kid down in Tassie we’ve got to look after. I’ve sent him some gear already.’ Rob, who is a terrific bloke but who can be tough to deal with, snarled back, ‘Why don’t you go back to the local prep school and find a few more kids. We’ll sign ’em all up!’
I’d like to think the deal I signed turned out to be a pretty good one for Kookaburra, but Ian Simpson left the company soon after, and within a few weeks he was actually mowing the lawns at the Kookaburra warehouse. Not that he was bitter about this development — his first venture after leaving the cricket-gear business was to take on a ‘Jim’s Mowing’ franchise, which worked out very well for him. One of his clients was Kookaburra and no one greeted him more warmly, if they crossed paths, than Rob Elliot.
I obviously made a good impression in those days. Around that time Tasmanian ABC cricket commentator Neville Oliver told a reporter from the Examiner newspaper: ‘We’ve got a 14-year-old who’s better than Boon — but don’t write anything about him yet, it’s too much pressure.’
Back then, I continued working with Ian Young and our bond remained as strong as ever until he passed away, aged 68, in October 2010. He was always a fantastic friend and one of my strongest supporters. I was playing a Test match at Bangalore in India when Ian died and was on the flight home when he was laid to rest in Launceston. On that plane I had plenty of time to think about everything he taught me, about batting, leadership and life. Like just about everyone connected with the Mowbray club, he was big on loyalty, big on sticking with your mates and on looking after each other. And I thought about his ability to cut to the core of a problem but then help you find the correct answer for yourself, rather than just giving advice and hoping you understood. Wherever I was in the world, he would always call me if he thought he’d spotted something about my game that wasn’t quite right, and because he knew my technique so well his advice was inevitably on the money. But I was only one of a great number of promising cricketers he helped on and off the field, which is one of the reasons, in the days after he died, so many people referred to him as a ‘champion’ and a ‘legend’.
The last time I caught up with Ian Young was when we arranged to meet at a restaurant located, appropriately enough, just across the road from Invermay Park. The thing that sticks with me of that final meeting was how we greeted each other: I looked him straight in the eye and gave him a firm handshake, no differently to how we did it when I was just a little kid, all those years ago.
Missing Youngy’s funeral because of the demands of cricket was hard, but that was the nature of the job. From an early age the game took me away from the people who introduced me to it and made me the person I am. I did get used to it but I can honestly say it never got any easier, in fact as I got older it got harder but I suppose that’s just the way life goes. I know I wouldn’t have swapped my lot for anything and I know I was doing something that people like Mum, Dad, Youngy and so many others wanted for me.
Still, it would have been nice to have been there for someone who’d always been there for me.
Words can never express how grateful I am for the upbringing my family gave me. My childhood memories are always front of mind for me and are detailed in the early chapters of this book. They are special memories that have become even more important to me as I have travelled around the world.
The toughest part of leaving home and becoming a professional cricketer was the disconnect from my family back in Launceston. When I first moved away, I didn’t realise that my cricket journey would end some 23 years later when I was married with two children and settling down in a new home in Melbourne. But that’s now a reality for me and I can’t wait to re-connect with the family back in Tasmania. That might sound quite dramatic, but a recent phone call from Dad reinforced the sometimes remoteness of our relationship. ‘So I can call you again now!’ Dad said with a cheeky chirp in his voice. You see, when I was overseas, Dad would never call me on my mobile. If he or Mum needed me, they’d get Drew or Renee to text or call me and I’d phone home. But that was very unusual. I’d keep up to date with how things were at home through regular texts and infrequent calls from Drew and Renee.
The opportunity to go home was dictated by my cricket schedule. A game in Tassie meant I might squeeze in a quick trip home or more likely, the family would come to Hobart to watch me play and we would catch up for dinner. But that’s behind me now, and our move to Melbourne means I’m only an hour away from Launceston.
When I left home, my little sister, Renee, was only nine years of age. Now she is married to Greg, has two children, Thomas and Macey, and we are closer than ever before. My little brother, Drew, has also grown up from our backyard cricket games and is married to Krysta. They also have two children, Josh and Chloe.
Growing up, there was quite a bit of routine in our family. A lot of this hasn’t changed, especially around games of golf, family outings and celebrating special occasions. I’m longing to slip back into that routine now and enjoy more time together. No doubt there will be a lot more family golf games ahead, too.
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THE WORLD WAS WATCHING South Africa in early 1992 as the country decided if it should end years of white rule and the apartheid system. And, so was I, but from a lot closer than you would think. I had arrived in the country a week before with a side from the Cricket Academy and the day we played Orange Free State in Bloemfontein was the day white South Africans were asked to decide if the process of ending apartheid and sharing power should continue or not. We had our bags packed sweating on the outcome of what may have been the most significant referendums of the 20th century. If it had been defeated we would have been straight out of there and the ban on sporting ties with the country would have resumed. I was all of 17 and learning fast that cricket soon takes you right out of your comfort zone.
It was a long way from Launceston, but life was moving fast. So let me just take you back a step.
ONE OF THE THINGS I remember most clearly about my early games with Mowbray thirds was how big the grounds were and how I often felt as if I couldn’t hit the ball out of the infield. My lack of size and power held me back for a while, and it wasn’t until near the end of my second season that I was promoted to the A-Reserves — for the grand final, no less — when I was chosen as a specialist No. 8 batsman. It was a bit of luck really. Someone was injured, but you weren’t allowed to bring a player back from A-Grade for the A-Reserve final, so they picked me primarily for my fielding. All the indoor games, the fielding practice and the hours my mates and I had spent in the vacant land across the road from home and in the nearby park and surrounding scrub, not just throwing and catching cricket and tennis balls, but also throwing rocks at targets like telegraph poles and tree stumps and, occasionally, each other, had turned me into a pretty fair fielder for my age.
I batted for almost three hours in that final, playing one defensive shot after another, though occasionally I’d tuck one down to fine leg for a single or maybe a quickly run two. It can’t have been much fun to watch. A tattered newspaper clipping in one of Mum’s scrapbooks describes my knock this way: ‘Mowbray was struggling at 6–114 against Riverside in the A-Reserve grand final at the Coca-Cola Ground before 14-year-old Ricky Ponting came to the rescue … the nephew of Tasmania’s latest Australian tourist Greg Campbell was finally out with the score at 9–246. Ponting scored 30 in 163 minutes at the crease in his A-Reserve debut. He combined with former state paceman Roger Brown for an eighth-wicket partnership of 65 in 76 minutes and with Ross Clark for 36 in 34 for the ninth.’
Having taken the best part of two seasons to earn a promotion to the A-Reserves, I promptly made my A-Grade debut for Mowbray at the start of the following summer, and in my very first game I snared what might have been the best catch I ever took. Troy Cooley, a Tasmanian opening bowler (and later the bowling coach for England and Australia), was bowling and Richard Bennett, a Tasmanian opening bat, was facing. I was pumped just to be playing. Troy, who was as quick as anyone in his day, bowled a full wide one and Bennett played a half slash, half cover drive, and I dived full length and caught it above eye-height, one handed. Before I knew it, everyone had a hold of me.
I’ll also never forget a one-dayer against Riverside, when I came to the wicket at 5–44 chasing 147 and with our wicketkeeper, Richard Soule, put on 91 runs to win with little more than an over to spare. To bat in that situation with Richard, a former Australian Under-19 gloveman who’d been Tassie’s Shield keeper since taking over from Roger Woolley in 1985, was thrilling and enlightening, especially the way he stayed calm and smart when the pressure was at its fiercest.
When Richard was away playing state cricket that season, Clinton Laskey took over as keeper, but Clinton had to miss our game against Old Scotch that year, which created my one and only chance to wear the keeper’s gloves in an A-Grade match. I was up for anything in those days. I think there was even a suggestion on one of my first tours as part of the Australian squad that I could act as reserve keeper if necessary.
You learn on the job in cricket and I was blessed to get an apprenticeship among such good players. I can’t remember now if it seemed strange, but a lot of those guys were so much older than me and so much bigger. If Launceston hadn’t been such a small town the other sides would have mistaken me for the team mascot, but word got around pretty quick that I was a young bloke with a bit of talent. Naturally the opposition saw this as an invitation to take me down a peg or two. I can’t blame them for that and probably should thank them.
Not long after that experience, I was on a plane to Adelaide for the Australian Under-17s championships, my first interstate tour. It’s funny, when I think of all the flights I have been on to all parts of the world since then, how the excitement I felt that day — packing my bag, driving to the airport, checking in, eating on the plane — remains in my memory. Dad was team manager, which was reassuring, because if there was something I wasn’t certain about (and there was plenty) I could ask him without fear of being embarrassed, but it also meant I had to stay firmly in line all the time. On the field, we defeated South Australia and the Northern Territory, and held our own against the ACT and Queensland.
Cricket was consuming my adolescence. I was easily the youngest guy in the Under-17 squad, and then midway through the year, still six months short of my 16th birthday, I was included in the Tasmanian Sheffield Shield team’s winter training squad. I was one of 60 players chosen and it was weird to see my name in the paper alongside prominent Test and Shield cricketers like David Boon, Dirk Wellham, Greg Shipperd, Dave Gilbert, Greg Campbell and Peter Faulkner. I had to grow up quickly, and maybe the men at Mowbray Cricket Club were teaching me a lesson of sorts when early in the 1990–91 season they spiked my one can of beer with vodka. Having had a good laugh at my expense, they then dropped me on our front doorstep, which I’m sure didn’t impress my parents at all. But even this time, Mum and Dad knew that when I was with the cricketers I was safe, and if they ever needed to find me they knew exactly where I’d be. Not all parents in Rocherlea could say that about their 14- or 15-year-old sons.
I PLAYED MY LAST full season of football in 1990, the end coming abruptly when I broke my right arm just above the elbow while playing in the Under-17s for North Launceston. The doctors had to put a pin in my arm, which stayed there for 16 weeks and meant I missed the early part of the following cricket season. By this stage of my life, I was confident cricket was my future, so it wasn’t hard to give the footy away, on the basis that it wasn’t worth risking an injury that might end my sporting dream. I think Dad would have stopped me anyway, if I’d tried to keep playing.
Earlier in that 1990 season, not long after I captained the Northern team at the Under-17 state carnival, I was asked to answer a series of questions for our club newsletter. Mum stuck my responses in her scrapbook …
Player Profile
Name:Ricky Ponting
Position:Wing
Occupation:Student, Brooks High School
Ambition:To play cricket for Australia
Favourite AFL club/player:North Melbourne/John Longmire and John McCarthy
Favourite TFL club/player:North Launceston/Todd Spearman and Marcus Todman
Favourite ground: York Park
Other sports:Cricket, Golf
Favourite food:Kentucky Fried Chicken
Girlfriend:No one (they give me the poops!)
Dislikes:Hawthorn and Essendon supporters
Most embarrassing moment:Getting dropped from senior firsts to the seconds at school after being the captain the week before!
TWO WEEKS IN THE MIDDLE of winter in 1991 changed not just my cricket career but the way my life evolved. I had been selected in the Australian Under-17 development squad following the 1990–91 Under-17 championships in Brisbane, which led to me receiving specialised coaching from two cricket legends: Greg Chappell and Barry Richards.
I left school at the end of Year 10. It was a big move I suppose, but it was pretty clear to everyone by then that cricket was the only thing I cared about. Ian Young got me a job as part of the ground staff at Scotch Oakburn College, one of Launceston’s most respected independent schools, located to the immediate south-east of the city centre, and that job confirmed for me that a life in sport was what I really wanted. Then it happened: I spent a fortnight at the Australian Institute of Sport’s Cricket Academy in Adelaide courtesy of a scholarship from the Century Club, a group of cricket enthusiasts based in Launceston who had come together in the 1970s with the aim of fostering the game and its players in Northern Tasmania. It is impossible to underrate what that scholarship meant to me and my life.
The Cricket Academy, a joint initiative of the Institute of Sport and the Australian Cricket Board (now Cricket Australia), had been officially opened in 1988. Its policy was to invite the country’s best young cricketers, most of them Under-19 players, to work together and learn from some of the game’s finest coaches.
The Australian Under-19 team was touring England at the time, which meant there were very few Academy cricketers in Adelaide when another top Tasmanian junior, Andrew Gower, and I arrived.
There had recently been some major organisational changes at the Academy, the most notable being the appointment of the former great Australian wicketkeeper Rod Marsh as head coach. Rod had only been there a couple of months and I can imagine he was battling through any number of administrative issues, so the chance to work with a couple of keen young Tasmanians would have been a godsend for him. He took a genuine interest in us and I quickly came to realise he is a bloke who is very easy to talk to and he knows an amazing amount about our game. We were both in our element: Rod, the wily old pro, encouraging and teaching; me, shy but fiercely determined, listening and learning.
One thing Rod said to us during my first full year in Adelaide has always stayed with me, ‘If you blokes aren’t good enough to score 300 runs in a day you can all pack up your bags and go home now.’ That was the style of cricket he wanted us to embrace, but it wasn’t the style of cricket you saw too often in Test matches back in the early 1990s. Rod was perceptive enough to realise that assertive cricketers were coming to the fore, that the game needed to be entertaining if it wanted to survive, and that we — the players of the future — needed to be ready for this revolution. Simply put, he was ahead of his time.
Andrew was a very promising leg-spinner from the South Launceston club. While he never made an impact in first-class cricket he did build up an imposing record in Launceston club cricket, spending a number of years at Mowbray as our captain–coach. As teenagers, we played a lot of junior outdoor and indoor cricket together (I first met him at the Launceston WACA), and even after I’d faced Shane Warne I thought Andrew had the best wrong’un and top-spinner I’d seen. In the years to come, he’d do very well in business, and only recently bought a pub, the Inveresk Tavern, not far from Mowbray’s home ground, Invermay Park. It’s a small town, Launceston, and before Andrew and I went to the Academy together, Dad and I used to go to the Inveresk most Thursday nights, to have a wager or two (I was betting in 50-cent and one-dollar units) on the local greyhound meetings.
For our first two weeks in Adelaide, Andrew and I lived in a room at the Seaton Hotel, which was located out near the Royal Adelaide Golf Club, right next to a railway line (which meant we could never get any sleep) and not too far from the state-of-the-art indoor facilities at the Adelaide Oval.
During my first day at the Adelaide Oval indoor nets, Andrew and I were introduced to a strapping young pace bowler from Newcastle, Paul ‘Blocker’ Wilson, who had quit his job as a trainee accountant and apparently had been hassling Rod for weeks about getting an opportunity at the Academy. Beaten down by the bloke’s persistence, Rod had agreed to give Paul a try-out, which was at this time, and I was the bunny nominated to face the best he could offer. I guess in a way we were both on trial. The first ball was a quick bumper, and I did the same as I would have done if one of Mowbray’s senior quicks, say Troy Cooley, Scott Plummer or Roger Brown, had pinged one in short at practice: I hooked him for four. The next one was even quicker and a bit shorter, and according to Rod, Blocker ran through the crease and delivered it from a lot closer than he should have, but I smashed him again. Later, Blocker and I became good mates, but now he was filthy on the little kid who was threatening to ruin his Academy adventure before it even began.
I had no fear about getting hit in the head — at this moment, when I was batting in a cap — or at any stage in my life. This was true when Ian Young was teaching me the basics of batting technique, when I was 13 playing against 16-year-olds, when I was 15 playing for A-Grade against men, at the Academy taking on Blocker or the bowling machine, or later in my cricket life when I was up against the fastest bowlers in the game, like Pakistan’s Shoaib Akhtar or the West Indies’ Curtly Ambrose. I had to try and find a way to hold my own. I’m not sure I could have done that if I was frightened, even a little. The combination of no fear and a lot of quality practice is why I ended up being a reasonable back-foot player.
After those two weeks at the Academy in 1991, it was impossible for me not to think very seriously about my chances of playing for Tasmania and Australia. The Academy had been formed in 1987 and guys who had gone there before me had been some of the stars of recent Under-17 and Under-19 Australian championships. By the winter of 1991, 23 graduates had played Sheffield Shield cricket, including Shane Warne (Victoria) and Damien Martyn (Western Australia), who had made their respective Shield debuts while working at the Academy in 1990–91. No one had made the Australian team as yet, but it was just a matter of time. Perhaps the best bet for this elevation was Michael Bevan, who had made such an impact in 1989–90 he forced a rule change — back then, the Academy guys living in Adelaide could be selected in the South Australian Shield team, but when the NSW authorities saw Bevan (who was actually from Canberra, but in reality a NSW player) making a hundred for another state instead of them they quickly decided it wasn’t right. By 1990–91, Academy cricketers were playing for their home state. I’m extremely glad the change was made, because the only cap I ever wanted to wear in Australian domestic cricket was the Tassie one.
It felt as if I got years’ worth of tuition in those two weeks and they obviously liked what they saw because I was invited back in 1992 to join the two-year program. I was leaving home.
For the first half of my first full year at the Academy, we lived in serviced units called the ‘Directors Apartments’ in Gouger Street, not far from the city centre, where we ate pub meals every day — chicken schnitzel and chips for lunch and something equally exotic for dinner. We moved to the Del Monte Hotel at Henley Beach halfway through the year and that’s where we lived until the end of my second year.
In January 1992 I was part of Tasmania’s Under-19 squad at the Australian championships, even though I was still eligible for the Under-17s, and after I scored a few runs Rod was on ABC Radio describing me as ‘a heck of a good player’ and adding, ‘He has a big future in the game if he keeps his head and keeps learning. He has a very good technique and appears to have an old head on young shoulders.’ Rod also made a point of praising the Tasmanian selectors for picking me in the Under-19s, saying, ‘Too often young players are pigeon-holed by age group instead of being allowed to play to their full potential.’
I’m sure there were some who thought I was being fast-tracked ahead of my time, but in my view my progress through Tasmanian cricket was handled fantastically well by the local administrators. There was always a suspicion where I came from that while many of the best cricketers were from the north of the state, many of the most influential officials were based in Hobart, but I never had any hurdles unnecessarily put in front of me just because I was from Launceston. Maybe the facilities and practice wickets in my home town weren’t always as good as those available to the young cricketers in Hobart and on the mainland, but that might have made me a better player rather than worse. The truth is I was encouraged at every level in Tassie. After that, the success of Launceston’s own David Boon at Test and one-day international (ODI) level (by 1992 he was as important as anyone in the Australian batting order) and the fact I’d gone through the Cricket Academy, paved the way for me to get a fair shot at the Australian team.
I WAS BACK ON the mainland in February 1992 to represent the Cricket Academy in one-day games against the South African and Indian teams preparing for the 1992 World Cup which was held in Australia and New Zealand, and this was when I came across a batsman I would get to know well over the next 20 years.
We’d spent a morning practising at the Adelaide Oval and were supposed to go back home for lunch but I asked for permission to stay. I wanted to see this Sachin Tendulkar who everyone was talking about, and I took up a position behind the nets while he had a bat. It’s fair to say I was going to watch him bat for a long time to come, but that day I was studying his technique, trying to see what it was about him.
And then I was named in a 13-man Academy team that toured South Africa in March.
My head, as you can imagine, was spinning. One day I was walking out to bat for Mowbray, then I was being fitted for junior Tasmanian representative teams, flying to the Academy, flying back for more and then I was being fitted for an Australian team uniform. It might have been only the Under-19s but I was an Australian cricketer. Most of the side gathered at Sydney airport; by now I was getting used to all this flying business. We met up with the Western Australian players in Perth and then were met by officials from the United Cricket Board of South Africa in Johannesburg before jumping on the team bus emblazoned with our team name to go to our first team hotel. I didn’t want the experience to end in a hurry and looking back I guess it didn’t for a long time to come. Most of my adult life has been taken up by such journeys.
On that journey from the airport to our flash hotel, I saw squalor, I saw suburbia and then I saw a city that didn’t look too different at first glance from the big cities back home. I’m sure there was much to discover if I ventured out from our hotel, but we’d been told to be very careful if we did go out — these were tense times in Johannesburg — which only reinforced something I’d already decided: I’d stick with the group whenever possible and at other times stay close to home base as often as I could. And to think people thought Rocherlea was hard core …
In retrospect, it seems a bit amazing that the Australian Cricket Board sent a youth team to South Africa at such a critical time in that nation’s history. The country was still governed by a white administration, and no official senior team had gone there in more than 20 years. I was an uncomplicated sports-mad kid from Tassie, so almost all of the politics went over my head, but it was obvious this was a country going through a painful period of change. There was a tension about the place. I can still remember a coaching clinic in Soweto just a week before the referendum in which the white population was asked whether they supported reforms that would eventually lead to fully democratic elections. The enthusiasm, natural ball skills and hand–eye coordination of the kids in that township were special, but the referendum was what everyone was talking about. It was hard even for us not to realise how big this thing was — we’d been told that if the vote went against change, we’d be out of the country on the first available plane. I hadn’t been thinking of all those victims of apartheid; I was thinking only of myself.
Cricketers are not politicians or diplomats — hell, I was a teenager who’d left school at 15 — but as I said earlier, the game was already taking me out of my comfort zone and into extraordinary situations.
Cricket was my focus. It was what I knew; it was what I was good at. If the conversation turned away from cricket, most of the time I just listened, but I loved talking cricket or sport of any kind. On the flight to South Africa, I sat for a long time with our skipper, Adam Gilchrist, a keeper–batsman who was originally from the NSW North Coast but was now playing in Sydney — and all we did was yak about sport and play a dice-like game called ‘Pass the Pigs’ for hours and hours. Getting on the plane, I hardly knew ‘Gilly’ but by the time we landed in Jo’burg we were best mates. He already had a reputation as a special player and from our first practice session I knew that he was so much more advanced in his cricket and the way he thought about the game than I was. He also had a sense of fun that really appealed to me, and a captain’s ability to have a good time but never get himself into trouble. We’d see a lot of each other over the next two decades, and these were skills he never lost. There were a couple of others on that trip who you might have heard of too. One was a long thin farmer’s son who was living in a caravan in Sydney to advance his career. Glenn McGrath was a funny bloke even then. He reckoned the only way he could stand up in his portable home was to pop the air vent in the roof. Blocker Wilson was on that trip too and a leg-spinner, Peter McIntyre, who played a couple of Tests in the mid 1990s.
After easily winning a one-dayer at Pretoria to launch the tour, our second game was at the famous Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg, a three-day contest against the Transvaal Under-23s. In our first innings, I batted at six, and then in our second dig we collapsed to 2–4 and Gilly, our regular No. 4, was feeling crook so someone had to go in at short notice. I put my hand up and went on to bat for nearly three hours for 65. To me, volunteering to bat near the top of the order was nothing exceptional — I always wanted to open or bat at three or four, as it was where I batted in junior cricket in Tassie and it was where I was always keen to bat at Mowbray — but I sensed I earned a bit of respect from my team-mates, and from Rod, too, which set up my whole tour. I finished second on the batting averages, behind South Australia’s Darren Webber, and topped the bowling averages, too, taking three wickets for 43 with my part-time off-breaks. More important than any numbers, even though I was younger than my team-mates, I didn’t feel out of place. I was heading in the right direction.
Life as a professional cricketer sees you on the road more often than being at home, which sounds glamorous to many — but let me assure you that after doing it for almost 20 years, I’m looking forward to settling down in retirement in our new home in Melbourne.
The highlight without a doubt has always been the tours to England. There’s something very special about an Ashes tour when you can spend up to four months on the road with your team-mates. It builds a special camaraderie as you travel around the country by bus, playing at the traditional grounds of cricket and living in a culture that is similar to what we are used to at home. New Zealand is very similar as well, plus it has some amazing golf courses, so it’s always been one of my preferred touring spots.
Test cricket tours, despite the length of time away, tend to give you the best opportunity to adapt to life on the road. You can unpack a suitcase and make yourself more comfortable in your home away from home. We would stay in each Test location for at least a week, so we could settle in and create a few little home comforts. But one-day cricket was mostly the direct opposite. Always on the move, travelling from city to city as well as regional and smaller towns to play, made it much more difficult to settle down. But that’s life as an international cricketer.
A lot of international cricket is played in developing countries, so I have seen great diversity on my travels around the globe. India is the best example of this for me, where I’ve seen its grandeur, royalty and wealth but have been really touched and moved by its poverty and its underprivileged areas. Front of mind for me is the work the Mumbai Indians do with the ‘Education for All’ initiative. It’s focused on the 62 million primary school age children who drop out of school before grade eight. They are doing amazing work with these children, and I was most fortunate to see it all first-hand in 2013. Don’t get me wrong: I have been so lucky to see some of the most amazing sights, cities and wonders of the world, but it’s the diversity and social inequality that has probably left the biggest impression on me. Cricket makes a big difference in these countries and we, as international cricketers, should continue to do everything we can to visit these areas, give the people something to enjoy and aspire to and most of all, do our bit to put a smile on the faces of those less fortunate than ourselves.
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ON THE PLANE HOME from South Africa, I was confident I’d never be going back to the groundsman’s job at Scotch Oakburn College. As it happened I was only going back home to leave again.
My year was pretty much mapped out: after just a couple of weeks back with Mum, Dad, Drew and Renee I’d be returning to Adelaide, first to train with the Australian Under-19 Development Squad and then to live for the rest of the year as a full-time resident at the Academy. My life was now wall-to-wall cricket, whether in the nets, playing in games, talking cricket or doing physical work and mental conditioning for cricket. I’d get a little homesick at times but never to the point where I was sitting in my room depressed about the fact I wasn’t home. Rod Marsh ran a tight ship and if anyone fell short of his high standards we paid a price, sometimes individually, often as a group. Washing cars and gym sessions that moved from eight to six in the morning were two of his favourite punishments.
One not-so-pleasant memory I have of my time in Adelaide was a job fast bowler Simon Cook and I had to do at the Adelaide Oval. In the years that followed, I never gazed at any of the glorious features of the ground, such as the cathedral that overlooks the field or the famous scoreboard or the Victor Richardson Gates, I just grimaced at the sight of the wooden benches in front of the Members’ Stand. That was because Simon and I had to change every nut and bolt in those benches. We had to remove the old ones, replace them with new ones, and then go back and retighten them all one more time, before our work was given a tick of approval. My memory is it took the best part of a year to get the job finished.
Most of the boys used to go out for a big one on Saturday nights and use Sunday to get over it, but in my first year I stayed away from most of that. In those days I was determined not to squander the chance I was given, and I remember Gilly telling me years after that South African trip that he couldn’t believe how focused I was and how hard I worked.
Inevitably, with the boys concentrating their drinking to just one night, there were some stories to be told, but I can’t recall anyone getting into serious trouble. One of the more bizarre moments concerned a room-mate of mine at the Academy, a guy who would go on to play Test cricket. This bloke used to love going out and was rarely home early on Saturday night, even though we were required to attend coaching clinics with groups of young cricketers every Sunday, starting at 8am. One Sunday morning, we couldn’t find this bloke — he wasn’t in his room, hadn’t been home, so all we could do was leave without him. We had to go across a bridge over the River Torrens on our drive from the Directors Apartments to the Adelaide Oval, and the lanes on that bridge were separated by a wide median strip. That morning, as we approached the bridge, someone spotted a body lying on the middle of that median strip, which on closer inspection proved to be my ‘roomie’, sound asleep with a big bag of Twisties tucked under his arm. After a big night, he’d realised there was no point going home, so instead he parked himself on the route he knew we’d take to the ground, in a place where he knew we couldn’t miss him. We stopped the van, picked him up and five minutes later he was coaching the kids as if nothing unusual or untoward had happened. The grog on Saturday night was part of club cricket back home, so it was hardly surprising that it became part of the culture at the Academy, too.
We were all pretty fair cricketers when we got to the Academy, so the coaches concentrated on fine-tuning our techniques and toughening us up so we’d be ready for first-class matches. One drill we had at the Academy was described as a ‘bouncer evasion session’, where we put indoor-cricket balls in a bowling machine that seemed like it was set at 100mph. Then the machine fired bouncers at us and the trick was to drop your hands and rock out of the way, or duck. I’d been brought up never to shirk a challenge and as I’ve already said I had no fear. It’s not a boast, because it takes a lot more courage to do something if you are scared than if you are not; I just simply wasn’t worried about getting hit. When it came to my turn I would stand there and pick the balls off, hooking and pulling. I’m pretty sure I didn’t own a helmet back then and they were only indoor balls, but they could still do some damage. One of the students, Mark Hatton, a slow bowler from the ACT got hit flush in the helmet six times in a row and I remember Marshy dragging him out of the nets before he got hurt. Rod loved my aggression at these sessions and used to invite people down to watch this kid hooking like an old-fashioned cricketer. It got to the point where he would yell out ‘in front of square’, ‘behind square’, ‘on the up’ or ‘on the ground’ and I would do my best to oblige.
I enjoyed that and those shots remained an important part of my cricket arsenal. If you can pick off a ball that’s just short of a length it robs real estate from the bowler. He knows if you pitch it up you will drive and if not you will play the cross bat shot and it leaves him very little room for error. There was a time later in my career when the pull shot let me down and there were suggestions I stop playing it, but it would have been like cutting off a limb.
WHEN I ARRIVED at the Academy in April 1992 I had just a few hundred dollars in my bank account; when I left at the end of 1993 things were pretty much the same. We made a few bucks helping kids with their cricket and I also coached some junior footballers and umpired their games (for $5 an hour), but most of the time I was just about skint. When we were living in the Directors Apartments, we received something like $120 a week as an allowance, and we were required to pay for our own meals, laundry and so on. When we moved to Henley Beach, all that was taken care of, but they reduced our stipend.
In my first year, while I didn’t drink at all, I would head to a nearby TAB most Monday and Thursday nights, to bet on the greyhounds. I didn’t make a lot of money, but I enjoyed myself and I didn’t lose. I couldn’t afford to. I’d been following the dogs since I was very young, from the time I’d go to my grandfather’s place at Newnham, where he had a few greyhounds of varying ability kennelled in his backyard. There are photo albums of me when I was a baby with a dummy in my mouth on a picnic rug with the greyhounds around me, and we had one of Pop’s old racing dogs, which we named Tiny, as a pet. Dad also trained and raced some dogs, and he liked to have a bet as well. I’d sit with him and listen to the races, picking out my favourites and cheering them on, and I was hooked from the first time he took me to the White City track in Launceston. Mum reckons that when I was a kid I spent more time in our family home talking about the dogs than my cricket, and she might be right. One ambition I had was to earn enough money to own my own greyhounds. When that happened I made sure I went into partnership with friends of mine, especially with Tim Quill, my best mate through school, junior footy and junior cricket.
My first dog was named Elected, which won a number of races and made a Launceston Cup final. Like quite a few of the dogs I’ve been connected with, he was trained by Dale ‘Jacko’ Hammersley, who I’d met at White City and I also knew from the North Launceston footy club. Tim and I then purchased a pup from Melbourne called My Self, who went on to win the Tasmanian final of the National Sprint Championship. Of all the greyhounds I’ve raced over the years, a dog named First Innings — which started favourite in the Hobart Thousand in 2007 — probably won the most races for me, but My Self had the best strike rate. She only had about 30 starts and won half of them. I also won a Devonport Cup with Ricky Tim, which like First Innings I raced with Tim Quill and his dad, John.
I’ve raced a few slow greyhounds too, and I’m the first to admit I haven’t made any money out of the hobby, but that doesn’t matter to me. I still get nervous whenever I watch one of my dogs race. It was pretty much the same throughout my career — whenever I was away, I’d organise for races to be taped so I could listen to them later over the phone. Of course, these days I can get on the internet and listen to the replays wherever I am in the world, and the buzz is still the same. As Pop and Dad told me when I was young, you shouldn’t bet with what you haven’t got and if you never sway from that policy, the racetrack is always a good place to be.
Anyone who says you shouldn’t go to the greyhounds has never been.
IF I WASN’T IN an Adelaide TAB in 1992 and 1993, most of the time I was giving myself every chance to one day be a Test batsman. I hit as many balls as anybody there and spent my spare time analysing the better players and the international stars who came to use the facilities. I was very, very happy, and made friendships that will last forever, including some with guys who’d go on to stellar careers.
Among the future international cricketers I played or trained with at the Academy were Michael Slater, a precociously talented opener who figured if you were going to have a whack at a ball outside off you might as well throw the kitchen sink at it (he was a dasher but he had an unbelievably good technique, and his 152 on debut at Lords was a master class); Colin ‘Funky’ Miller, who was a medium pace swing bowler in those days and noted lower-order hitter, turned to spin bowling later and I can recall him opening the bowling in a match with medium pace and then coming back to bowl his offies; Paul ‘Blocker’ Wilson, who we’ve already met; Michael Kasprowicz, the mild-mannered fast bowler from Queensland whose heroic efforts in sweltering Indian conditions should never be forgotten (he has a massive heart and is a champion bloke); my mate Adam Gilchrist is reasonably well known; Murray Goodwin was my room-mate at the Academy, a funny bloke who loved a night out and who went on to play for Zimbabwe and scored a gutsy 91 against us in Harare some years later; the leggie Peter McIntyre, who played a couple of Tests before Warnie came on the scene and ruined it for everyone, but had a good career for South Australia after that; Brett’s brother Shane Lee, who was a hell of a good all-rounder, I think the best we had until Shane Watson came on the scene; Brad Hodge went through with me and he was a man who would have played 100 Tests in any other era; the fast bowler Simon Cook, who helped me fix the seats at Adelaide and then went on to take seven wickets in his first Test, none in the next — he never played at that level again, probably because of injury (he was an unlucky bloke, managing to run himself over with a steamroller some years later); John Davison passed through and he ended up playing for Canada in World Cups, breaking a record for the fastest century in a match against the West Indies and he popped up later as an Academy bowling coach; and Wade Seccombe, who was a great gloveman but spent his time living in Ian Healy’s shadow.
As a keen student of the game I learned so much by being around such diverse cricketing talents and such diverse people. And, it seemed the cricketers I encountered at that formative time would later show up here and there and travel part of the journey with me.
On my final tour with an Academy team — to India and Sri Lanka in 1993 — one of my fellow travellers was Tim Nielsen, a no-nonsense wicketkeeper who later became the Australian team coach. Tim was working at the Academy as a coach and brought with him an approach to the game that made him a good man to have around. He was treated poorly later on, but we’ll get to that in due course.
I have vivid memories of Glenn McGrath back then. I wasn’t interested in fashion, but it was obvious that the farm boy struggled to get a pair of pants that could fit. His cricket trousers finished closer to his knee than his ankle and consequently exposed a pair of seriously raw-boned legs. He was nicknamed Pigeon because he had legs like a bird. To complement this look Glenn wore huge leather-soled bowling boots that were laced like boxer’s boots. He looked like something from a different age, but there is one other thing about him from back then that stays strongly in memory: he was quick, real quick. I can still clearly picture Pidge at the Wanderers in Jo’burg, where the pitch was like Perth, fast and bouncy, and Adam Gilchrist was back 30 metres and taking them above his head. The two of us — Pidge from Narromine in north-western New South Wales and me from the outer suburbs of Launceston — had a certain affinity which came from the reality we were pretty unsophisticated compared to many of our city-slicker comrades. We quickly forged a friendship that remains rock-solid to this day.
This came about even though, in many ways, we were very different. My favourite videos were anything cricket or the 1975 VFL Grand Final (the year North Melbourne won its first premiership, beating Hawthorn by 55 points); his preference was an instructional number that demonstrated how to skin a wild pig. One day in Adelaide, I went up to Pidge’s room to discover that he had lined up a collection of empty cereal boxes, side by side, along a window ledge.
‘What did you do that for?’ I asked.
He didn’t say anything, just slowly walked over to his cutlery drawer, from which he dug out all the dinner knives he could find. Then, with a flick of the wrist, he started firing those knives across his bed at the boxes. How do you come up with this stuff? I thought to myself, my back safely up against the wall. Then I looked over at the carnage on and around the window ledge. And how is it that you hit the centre of the boxes every single time?
Warnie was different again and always seemed a little more mature than the rest of us. In a Warnie sort of way. He had a flash car, while we got around on buses and bikes. He had a contract with the Australian Cricket Board that had numbers on it that we could only dream about. I first met him in the winter of 1992, when he came to Adelaide to work at the Academy with his spin-bowling coach, the former Test leg-spinner Terry Jenner, in preparation for the Australian Test team’s tour of Sri Lanka. Shane had made his Test debut the previous January. I was 17 years old; he was 22, nearly 23, but despite the age gap he was headed in the same direction as me and we shared plenty of time together. He and Terry needed someone to bowl to and I put my hand up every time — and not just because I liked them and I wanted them to like me. Warnie was miles ahead of any spin bowler I’d ever faced before. I knew I could improve plenty by working with him.
One day, Shane announced that he had to head down to Glenelg to visit a friend, and he asked me if I wanted to go along for the ride. On the way back, we stopped to get a drink — a frozen yoghurt soft-serve for me and a slurpie of some kind for Warnie — and then we set off, with my drink in my left hand and Shane’s in the other, which he grabbed off me whenever he had the chance. We came to an intersection with the lights working our way, but a very old lady driving a gold hatchback Torana wasn’t paying attention and she went straight through her lights, Warnie only saw her at the last second, tried to swerve out of the way, but couldn’t avoid crashing into the back end of her car. From there, she shot straight across the road up onto the footpath, through the front fence of a house and smashed into a big tree, while the soft-serve and the slurpie went all over the windscreen (though at that moment that was the least of our worries). Fortunately, the other driver and her elderly friend in the passenger seat were okay, if a little shellshocked, and we were fine, though I couldn’t stand still from the adrenalin shooting through my body. Warnie, meanwhile, having established that everyone was safe, was staring blankly at the crumpled front of his Nissan Pulsar Vector, which was eventually taken away by a tow-truck. The poor bloke looked like he was farewelling a dear friend going off to war as his car slowly disappeared from view. He wasn’t totally bulletproof after all. We had to get a cab home.
Shane was the bloke responsible for my ‘Punter’ nickname, which he gave me because of my habit of sneaking down to the TAB twice a week to bet on the dogs. Everyone else called me ‘Pont’ or ‘Ponts’, but to Warnie that wasn’t quite right. I can’t remember if Shane ever came with me to the TAB, but he knew where I was and I think he was impressed with my nerve and the fact I liked a bet. What he definitely did try to do was ‘corrupt’ me by taking me to the nightclubs and casinos he liked to frequent. I had no time for that stuff and resisted for a while. My favourite excuse was that I didn’t own a pair of jeans or a decent shirt (which was 100 per cent true), but that alibi only worked for so long. Eventually, he found some gear, dressed me up and out we went. I might not have looked anything close to 18, but even back then there wasn’t a doorman in the universe who could resist Shane Warne. I can still remember Warnie saying to me during that night out, ‘Well, Punter, what do you reckon?’
And I just replied sheepishly, ‘Aw, mate, I dunno.’
I was like a rabbit in the headlights, not knowing which way to run. I realised the disco was all very colourful, even exhilarating, but my gut instinct said the old world I knew was better for me. Suddenly, I was feeling my age and considerable lack of sophistication. I got home in one piece that night and resolved to wait until I was a bit older before I went back. Cricket was my priority.
Planning is a critical foundation to achieving success. I learned this from a very young age and developed my own preferred process for planning. As Australian captain, I was able to use it to its maximum but it’s also been with me in other teams that I’ve played with. It involves three Vs — Vision, Values and Validation.
The Vision is the over-arching goal of what you want to achieve and how you will get there. It’s set by the captain — as leader you must have a vision for where you are heading with your team and what your critical goals are. I’ve always talked through this with the senior people around me but have set the ultimate goal myself. This is paramount to the position of leader or captain.
The second stage of my planning process is Values. These are set by the leadership group and senior players and are a set of behaviours for how we do things together to ensure we achieve the Vision. The process to create the values empowers the members of the group and ensures that they work with the captain to set the right example and culture for the team.
The third and final part of the process is the Validation. This is where we get the buy-in of the entire team including all the support staff and management. It establishes how we are all going to play a role in achieving the Vision and the principles for how we will go about it. It becomes part of the day-to-day activities of the team as well as the players as individuals. It creates the culture and the standards that the group becomes known for.
Over the years, I’ve been involved in all types of planning processes but when I’m in charge, I prefer to keep it very simple and straightforward as I firmly believe that’s the best way to get full buy-in and validation from the team.
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