At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting
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