At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting
I’d made some runs in what, for me, was a very important audition. Most of the batsmen were out with me, which was the way it worked in those days — if we were going to be fielding the next day, the guys who’d already batted usually went out for a while. Next morning, however, I slept through the alarm (again) and by the time I got to the ground the boys had left our dressing room and were about to start their warm-up on the field. Bob Simpson, the long-time coach of the Australian Test and one-day teams, was working with the Australian XI and he was out there with them. Simmo was a renowned disciplinarian, but after I’d apologised and said it would never happen again and he replied it had better bloody not, there was nothing more said about it … until the warm-up was completed. The boys started to walk off, but the coach stayed where he was. ‘Ricky, you can stay out here with me till the game starts,’ he said.
First up, Simmo had me catching high ball after high ball — he was renowned for hitting balls where you had to sprint as hard as you could for 30, 40 or 50 metres to just get your hands on the catch, and then he’d do it again. And again. That’s what we did until the game started, which wasn’t good for a bloke with a hangover. I was buggered by the end of it. Later in the dressing room, I guess I should have been thinking about how I’d let myself down, but instead I was preoccupied by the thought that I’d been caught out doing what my more experienced team-mates had also been doing, but they’d got to the ground on time, so the coach was none the wiser, or at least more forgiving.
I liked Simmo. He made you work, he could be hard, but in my experience he was always fair. I quickly came to learn that one of his party tricks was to make hungover, late or ill-disciplined players work doubly hard in practice, and that he was testing me out on that second morning of the Australian XI game. Fortunately, I survived every challenge and we got on well after that. At least he couldn’t question my work ethic. In fact, I revelled in his fielding drills, though I never needed anyone to push me with that part of my game. I knew I was a good fielder and catcher, but I was never satisfied. Where this came from, I don’t know — but as with batting and golf, once I realised I was good at it, I kept trying to improve. I remember going to training with Mowbray, Tuesday and Thursday nights, and I fielded all evening. As soon as I’d done my batting, I was running around, catching high balls or ricochets off the slips cradle, taking pride in every aspect of it, trying to be better than everyone else. It was the same when I was at fielding practice with the Tasmanian and Australian teams. I didn’t care how good the best fielders, guys like Mark and Steve Waugh, were, I tried my best to outdo them. That trait stayed with me right up until my last game.
I found Simmo to be a helpful and perceptive coach, who had a very similar philosophy to Rod Marsh when it came to teaching cricket. Neither man set out to massively change the way I batted on the basis that I was obviously doing a few things right to get to the level I had reached. As a result they restricted their advice to fine-tuning my technique.
THAT FIRST AUSTRALIA A game we played in Adelaide happened in late November. A little more than three months later, I was at Sydney airport, walking into business class of a Cathay Pacific 747, finding my seat for the flight to Hong Kong, from where we’d fly to London for a two-day stopover before heading to Barbados. It was genuinely exciting to be in London for the first time, but what I noticed most was how different the mood was on this tour from the atmosphere in New Zealand, when partners and kids were with us, and the week had a ‘holiday’ feel. This time, we were serious.
Yes, there was time to walk around London, but we also spent time under team physio Errol Alcott’s expert supervision in the gym at the Westbury Hotel, watched some videos of the recent West Indies–New Zealand Test series and had a lengthy team meeting chaired by captain Mark Taylor that established the approach he wanted the team to take in the Caribbean. I was struck by how professionally run this gathering was, and how astute and perceptive many of the comments were — from Tubby, Simmo and a number of the senior guys. This was clearly a team with plenty of cricket nous and a tour that meant a great deal to them. I didn’t say anything during the meeting, just listened intently and lapped it all up.
The next morning, we had to be downstairs not long after 6am for the start of the next leg of our journey, and that hour of the morning was not one I usually enjoyed seeing. This time, however, I was the first one ready for the bus.
If I had a choice between two very similar standard players, I would always select the player with the right temperament, make-up and personality. While I was never a national selector, nor would this situation be a regular occurrence, my point is that the character of players is really important to building a successful team. We are always looking for the best talent to come through our system and play for Australia. In the most successful teams that I have been a part of, the talent in the team was outstanding and our performances showed that. We had a team of individuals from which you knew there was always at least one player who would stand up and deliver when the team needed something extra.
Success breeds success, and success also builds teams. But teams that do not achieve consistent success require a completely different approach. Sometimes you can’t build a team around individual brilliance, group dynamics and group leadership. Sometimes you have to pick players with particular character to support the younger, less experienced players or to add value to the leadership group or simply for their experience.
Over the final third of my time in the Australian team, there was a lot of turnover in our teams. As players retired, a new generation of players made their Australian debuts. Many of these never quite became permanent fixtures in the team and played only a few games. This was a challenge for me as captain. Players would come in to debut and we would have a data bank of information on their technique, strengths and weaknesses and other game data to help me and the team get the best out of them. But we lacked the detail on their character and personality. I had to spend as much time as I could with these guys when they first came into the group getting to know them, working out what made them tick and what I needed to be aware of in the game situation. A lot of this was done on the run and wasn’t always a success out on the field.
It’s when the pressure comes on that you really find out about an individual and their capacity to perform at the international level. When you are building a team or preparing for a period of change in a team, more time and care needs to be taken to focus on the character and make-up that will be required to balance the critical need for talent and the ability to perform consistently at the highest level.
‘THOSE HANDSHAKE AGREEMENTS between you blokes, where you don’t bounce each other, they don’t exist anymore,’ he said, looking straight at our pace bowlers: Craig McDermott, Glenn McGrath, Damien Fleming and Paul Reiffel. That sounded pretty fair to me, but then I wasn’t one of the late-order batsmen who were about to cop as good as they gave, maybe even worse.
Steve ‘Tugga’ Waugh had a reputation for being a tough and combative cricketer and he demonstrated it here, arguing that it was inevitable that the West Indies quicks were going to fire bumpers at us, so we had to bounce them too. Furthermore, they were going to attack our tail, so we should do the same to them.
As it turned out, Steve would have a famous tour, most notably when he stood up to the fearsome Curtly Ambrose on a dangerous wicket during the third Test at Port-of-Spain, and then followed up with a brave and brilliant double century in the series decider at Kingston.
Tugga was one of our most experienced players — having come into the Australian team as a 21-year-old in late 1985, when the side was losing more often than it won — and many times in the years we played together he would reminisce about those days, emphasising that we should never take winning for granted. In the days leading up to this Test series, he wanted us to know that during the 1980s and into the 1990s the West Indies played cricket bloody hard and to make this point he’d recount stories of fast bowlers like Malcolm Marshall, Patrick Patterson, Courtney Walsh and Ambrose firing bouncer after bouncer