At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting
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.