At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting
we’d enjoy the short trip through some lovely countryside, but it took forever and the train was so filthy you couldn’t see through the windows. We’ve been stitched-up a few times over the years with travel arrangements — such as when we’ve been on planes that have flown over the city we’re going to, continued in the same direction to another airport and then we’ve landed, got off, got on another plane and flown back a few hours later — but the ‘Patiala Express’, as we sarcastically called it, was the worst of them. Tugga said it was a good ‘team-building exercise’, but he was wrong.
Complaining about these things might sound precious, but too often when we were trying to prepare for a series we were sent to play at places that had substandard facilities.
For future tours, we learned not to worry about ordeals such as this, working on the basis that it was just part and parcel of the careers we’d chosen for ourselves. There is no doubt the good times far outweighed the bad. They’d make us travel all over India for ODIs, and we’d feel they were trying to make it hard for us to win, but we’d use it as motivation: You can send us wherever you want, we’ll still find a way to win.
Most of the time we were well looked after on tour and the team hotels were the best available, but there were always exceptions. You talk to the older guys and they tell terrible stories from earlier tours. Rod Marsh says that for a whole tour of Pakistan he never drank anything apart from soft drinks and beer because there wasn’t even bottled water. The one thing as a cricketer you are most scared of is getting sick. I do remember once sitting opposite Adam Gilchrist at dinner in a hotel that is infamous in Australian cricket and seeing something that was simply unbelievable. Gilly’s meal came with a small bowl of soy sauce and when the waiter put it down there was a cockroach in it. Gilly pointed it out and the bloke just grabbed it and stuck it in his mouth and said ‘there’s nothing there’. We were absolutely horrified. The waiter was struggling to talk because he still had it in his mouth and I can tell you we couldn’t eat after that.
I came to think that it was a good indication of how the team was going if we were whingeing or fighting with each other on tour and I think you can see that from the outside too. The worse the performance on the field, the more likely you are to hear about things happening off it.
I knew the team wasn’t in great shape if there was a lot of griping or squabbling going on. This India tour might have offered proof of that — at a time when we weren’t sure where our next win was coming from, on a flight from Indore to Bangalore after about three weeks of touring, I was involved in a dust-up with Paul Reiffel. I still think the catalyst for the blue remains one of the funnier things I’ve seen while travelling with the team, but the result was anything but amusing and I regret my part in it. We’d just lost our opening game of the one-day tournament and I was sitting across the aisle from Pistol when they brought out our meals. There was a very old Indian fellow on the other side of him, and I could see this gentleman trying to open a tomato-sauce satchel by twisting it this way and squeezing it that way. It was one of those situations where you know what’s about to happen. Finally, he decided to bite the satchel open … at the same time he kept squeezing … and, sure enough, the sauce flowed all over Pistol. Our pace bowler, who’d go on to become an international umpire, cried out in a mix of anger and anguish, while I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
‘Tone it down, Punter,’ he said to me, and then he started cleaning himself up.
After a couple of minutes, Pistol and his sparring partner sat down to continue their meals. Everything was fine until the man decided to try to read a newspaper while he tucked into his curry, at which point, he knocked his cup of water straight into Pistol’s lap. Again, Pistol’s cries of dismay were heard around the plane, while I just lost it completely.
Maybe you had to be there, or perhaps I’m just a bloke with no compassion …
I tried to rein myself in, but I couldn’t. Pistol was spewing, but he couldn’t take his rage out on the old bloke. ‘What are you laughing at?’ he snarled at me, to which I rather naively replied, ‘What do you think I’m laughing at?’
Pistol went to tap either the top of my head or the top of my seat, as a way of underlining the fact he wasn’t happy, but he missed his target and clipped me across the mouth. Now, I wasn’t laughing; instead I tried to stand and confront him, but I had my seat belt on so I couldn’t get up and suddenly I was looking like a goose. Embarrassed and angry, when I finally got to my feet I went to grab him by the scruff of the neck, which was an over-the-top reaction, but where I come from you never hit someone unless you want a reaction, and he’d hit me. A few of the boys had to come between us and settle us down, with more than one of them reminding us that the Australian reporters covering the tour were also on the plane. Pistol was happy to let it go but — ridiculously, thinking about it now — I was not, and a little while later, as we waited in the aisle to disembark, I said just loud enough for him to hear, ‘You wait till we get off this plane.’
I’d scored 35 batting at three in the game against South Africa we’d played before the flight, and Pistol had opened the bowling, but we were both dropped for our next game. Tubby brought the two of us together and told us that while he understood that touring isn’t always easy, and inevitably blokes can get on each other’s nerves occasionally, we had to be smarter than to get into a fight in such a public place. When I stopped to think about how I’d reacted, I realised I’d totally underestimated how much the stress of travelling back and forwards was getting to me. Recalling the incident now, it’s amazing it never made the papers but those were different times. A great irony for me is that Pistol is a terrific bloke, someone I like and just about the last person I would have imagined myself fighting. Except for this one time, we always got on really well.
I WAS HAPPY to get home, and this showed in my only Shield game before the start of our Test series against the West Indies, when I had a productive game against WA at the beautiful bouncing WACA. I was duly picked to bat at three for the first Test in Brisbane, and at the pre-game team meeting Tubby underlined the same points he’d made before the celebrated series in the Caribbean: how we mustn’t be intimidated by them; how we had to be aggressive; how the blokes who like to hook and pull had to keep playing those shots.
My ‘baptism of fire’ came quickly enough, as I was in on the first morning when there were only four runs on the board, after their captain, Courtney Walsh, sent us in and new opener Matthew Elliott (in for Michael Slater) was out for a duck. At lunch I was 56 not out, with Tubby on 19, and I was flying. Ambrose, Walsh and Bishop had all tested me with plenty of ‘chin music’ but I went after them, and it was one of the most exhilarating innings of my life, right from the moment the first ball I faced kicked up at me and I jabbed it away to third man for four. All my early runs came through that area, and then I put a bumper from their fourth quick, Kenny Benjamin, into the crowd at deep fine leg. When Bishop tried a yorker I drove him through mid-off for four, and then I did the same thing to Ambrose, while Walsh fired in another bouncer and I hooked past the square-leg umpire for another four. On the TV, Ian Chappell described me as the ‘ideal No. 3’ but others may have been thinking differently.
Benjamin came back and I moved into the 80s with a drive past mid-on for another four. I was thinking not so much about making a hundred as going on to a very big score, but then he pitched one short of a length but moving away, and I hit my pull shot well but straight to Walsh at mid-on. It was a tame way to get out, and I had one of those walks off the ground where I was pretty thrilled with my knock but upset that it had ended too soon, so I was hardly animated as I acknowledged the crowd before disappearing into the dressing room. I made only 9 in our second innings, caught down the legside, but we went on to win the game by 123 runs and I felt my counter-attack on the first day had played a significant part in the victory.
My bowling had also played a part, after Steve Waugh strained a groin in the Windies’ first innings. I was called on to complete his over and with my fifth medium-paced delivery I had Jimmy Adams lbw. This meant my Test career bowling figures now looked this way: 29 balls, two maidens, two wickets for eight.
A week later we were in Sydney for the second Test, but I suffered a double failure, out for 9 and 4, both times playing an ordinary shot. But we won again to take a firm grip