At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting
gone from being on the fringes of Tasmanian selection to being on the fringe of the Australian Test and one-day teams. For a 19-year-old from Rocherlea, that seemed like a pretty good place to be.
The best sports stars consistently appear to have more than others to execute their skill. They look to be doing it comfortably, seem to be in the right place at the right time, and perform the so-called ‘one percenters’ when they are most needed. They are also the sports stars who play ‘in the zone’ — doing what they do best in a ‘semi-conscious’ state.
Over the years, the best batsmen have been those who give themselves more time to play their shots. They use triggers in the bowlers’ run-ups and release points to pick up the line and length of a delivery quicker. They move their feet less, giving themselves more time for shot selection and execution.
For me, I reckon that happened half a dozen times in my entire career. In those knocks, I was seriously oblivious to what was going on — I was in auto-pilot mode. I’ve seen plenty of other batsmen do the same, and Andrew Symonds’ 143 not out in the first game of our 2003 World Cup campaign stands out for me as the best example of this. Symmo was a late call-up for that game after Shane Warne and Darren Lehmann were suspended and Michael Bevan was injured in our preparation. He took his chance and dominated the game for us. I sat with him in the dressing rooms after the knock, and was bouncing all over the place recounting great shot after great shot. But Symmo couldn’t remember any of those amazing shots and just took it all in his stride.
Bowlers would give different signals to show that they were in the zone. Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath are the two best bowlers I ever played with but they displayed completely opposite traits when they were in the zone. Glenn had a reputation for being a bit chirpy out in the middle but he did his absolute best when the ball and his bowling did the talking. If he started to chat to the batsmen, I knew it might be time to give him a spell. Warnie was the direct opposite: he thrived on getting under the skin of the batsman at the other end. He would chat away to them as he dished up his variations ball after ball. The more he spoke, the more the batsmen seemed to fall into his trap. That was when Warnie was in the zone.
The game of cricket doesn’t present opportunities for players to be in the zone all that often in their career. The game is about intense spells of concentration broken up with the ebbs and flows that go between each ball that is bowled. Staying on top and dominating is not easy.
I CAME IN AT FIVE. Darren Lehmann, Matthew Hayden, Damien Martyn and Justin Langer batted ahead of me and Tom Moody after. Phil Emery had the wicketkeeping job ahead of Adam Gilchrist. And, you know what the amazing thing was? We weren’t good enough. We were the B team. Well, they called us Australia A that summer, but we were the ones not playing for the Australian side, the one with Taylor, Slater, Warne, McGrath, Boon, Bevan …
It’s remarkable what depth of talent we had in Australian cricket then. There was a bottleneck of players just waiting for their chance, or another chance. I can’t stress too highly how important the opportunity to play in an A side against good opposition was and is. Like most of the players I came through with, I benefited greatly from the chance to test my skills against the top rung.
When Australia A took on Australia in the World Series one-day tournament that also included England and Zimbabwe there was as much, if not more, riding on the outcome of the matches between the home sides as those with the visitors. In footy there is no game played harder than an intra-club match and in cricket it has to be said that this was as close to that as you got.
ONE OF THE CRITICISMS I’ve often heard about one-day international (ODI) cricket is that we play too much of it. A consequence of this over-supply is that too many games are quickly forgotten. There is some fairness in this criticism — mostly, in my view, when there are too many games in a single series or tournament. The seven-game marathons in England in 2009 and against England in Australia in 2010–11 come to mind, or even the 2007 World Cup, which lasted 47 days from opening game to final. I reckon I’m qualified to make observations here as I’ve played more ODIs than any other Australian … there’s no way I can remember them all.
I can tell you, however, I have never forgotten playing those games against the Australian team. It was a great chance for a few of us young bucks to get out there and try to prove ourselves. While there wasn’t an edge to the game in the sense of cricketers from the two teams constantly sledging each other, there were a few words exchanged and the games we played during the summer were extraordinarily competitive. The Australia A team contained a couple of hard-nosed seniors in Merv Hughes and Tom Moody, a few blokes like Martyn, Hayden, Langer and Paul Reiffel who had been in and out of the Test and ODI teams in the previous couple of years, and young blokes like me who were anxious to impress. So there was never any question we’d try and take it up to the blokes on the next level.
In Adelaide we kept them to 202 from their 50 overs. When I came out to join Matt Hayden we were 3–77 and in with a real chance. Time wasn’t really an issue and when our keeper, Phil Emery, and I started building a decent sixth-wicket partnership I really thought we could win. However, Shane Warne came back on to bowl, and I found myself in a real battle. This was a different bowler to the skilful spinner I’d faced in the indoor nets when I was at the Academy — this bloke was turning them just as much but now he was the most competitive bowler I’d ever faced. Every ball felt like an exam, no two deliveries were quite the same, and while Warnie’s chat to me seemed friendly enough a few things he said seemed to stay in my head. What was he thinking when he asked Mark Taylor loudly if he could put a man in at bat-pad? Previously I’d felt we had the run-rate just about under control, but now it seemed to be climbing rapidly and we were under pressure to get things moving. And, when I did middle an attacking shot, there was always a bloody fielder in the road. I’d get to see this relentlessness in Shane’s bowling time and again — the remarkable way he could put the pressure back on the batsmen, so he had the whip hand.
Eventually, having scored 42 from 63 deliveries (which sounds awfully slow by 21st century standards but was actually okay for the mid 1990s), I tried to slog-sweep him out of the ground, but the ball wasn’t quite there and it ballooned out to Michael Bevan on the fence.
The final margin was just six runs in their favour, but we choked in the end, losing our last four wickets for six runs when we’d needed 13 to win from 21 balls in hand. Afterwards, a number of people said nice things about the way I batted, but I was very disappointed. I thought I’d cost us the game.
Four weeks later, the two teams met again in Brisbane, and this time we were chasing 253 to win and Michael Bevan (who’d been dropped from the top Australian team) and I were going all right. Then, totally unexpectedly, David Boon came on to bowl. If Warne was the Ace in the pack in the previous game, this time Mark Taylor was playing his Joker. It was very good captaincy. Now Boonie didn’t really enjoy bowling, he never bowled for Tasmania and in the previous 11 years he had sent down the grand total of 6.4 overs in ODI cricket, and taken exactly no wickets.
I knew he’d come on to bowl for my benefit — they knew how much I idolised Boonie and that I’d probably be too scared to play a shot, for fear of getting out. I figured he’d probably bowl off-breaks, and I think that’s what they were. And jeez they were hard to get away. ‘Don’t you get out, Ponts,’ he kept chirping down the wicket, ‘If you do, I won’t ever let you forget it.’
‘Bowled Boonie,’ chimed in wicketkeeper Ian Healy, as if he was keeping to Warnie or Tim May.
My fellow ‘Swampie’ admitted later that it was he who had conned the captain into giving him a bowl. ‘He’ll be that scared of getting out he might not go for many,’ he’d said. Boonie didn’t get me out, but my fellow Swampie only went for 17 from four overs, at a time when we needed more than that. They’d outsmarted me. Bevo and I both ran ourselves out as we lost our last