At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting

At the Close of Play - Ricky Ponting


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over the line. I’d done what he’d asked me to do, so maybe he and his fellow selectors felt obliged to honour their side of the bargain by giving me another go. It would have been far from illogical to pick one less batsman and one more bowler; as things turned out, a couple of the batsmen hardly had a dig on tour, while we had to call up some extra bowlers after the first choices suffered major injuries.

      What I know beyond question is that my career might have turned out very differently if I hadn’t been chosen for this Ashes tour. Matty Hayden missed the trip and didn’t get another opportunity for two-and-a-half years. Great players like Damien Martyn and Darren Lehmann had been picked for Australia as prodigiously talented young players in the early 1990s, but after being discarded it would be ages before they would be granted another go at the top level. In contrast, I was very fortunate. My second chance came quickly. I was determined not to waste it.

      I’m a watcher, a listener, a learner. I like to sit back in the corner and take everything in; learn as much as possible from as many people as I can. I’ve never really had any defined role models in my life but there have been plenty of people who I’ve watched very closely to help me be a better person. Bottom line for me has been that it’s up to me to be the best possible person that I can be. I had an understanding of where I wanted to be as a cricketer and as a person. I’ve always just been me. Anytime I messed up along the way, I’ve given myself a kick up the backside and then got on with things, making sure that each day I got up, looked in the mirror and asked myself how I could be a better person today. In many ways, I’ve been my own harshest critic but it’s helped me respond at times when I’ve most needed to. It’s helped me be true to myself and those around me and probably also helped me be a better role model for those looking to me as an example for how they might live their lives. That’s a big responsibility in many ways but one I have always been comfortable with.

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      IT WAS A WEIRD experience, reacquainting myself with the other members of the Ashes squad for our flight to London via Hong Kong. I felt like I’d been out of the team for ages, rather than just five months, and quickly I discovered that things had changed a little in the time I’d been away.

      Mark Taylor had been struggling for runs, but had stayed in the Test team and ODI squad despite his lack of form, a policy that impacted on the positions of a few other players. Most people were talking about the selection of Michael Bevan, a left-arm wrist spinner as well as a fine batsman, who was picked as the fourth bowler for the Tests in South Africa ahead of Paul Reiffel, seemingly to stiffen the batting order, even though the pitches over there suited the quicks.

      When Pistol then missed selection for the Ashes tour some critics reckoned his career had been set back for the sake of the captain. At the same time, Steve Waugh replaced Ian Healy as vice-captain, which seemed to have shaken our champion wicketkeeper. You could see, even on the flight to England, that he wasn’t his usual chirpy self. That change, we all understood, had been made so that if Tubby was dropped from the Test XI in England, Tugga would be his replacement, but Heals couldn’t understand why he couldn’t remain the deputy no matter who was in charge. I couldn’t either.

      In the years since, I have read stories of how the team was split, but I can’t recall any major blow-ups, just that mood shift, that sense that things weren’t quite right. Looking back over the statistics, it is a little surprising that Tubby survived his run of outs — at the start of this Ashes tour, he hadn’t scored a Test fifty since early December 1995 and since I’d been dropped he’d scored 111 runs in 10 Test innings — but I was not the sort of person to get involved in conjecture about another player’s place in the team, especially when he was the captain and I was a young bloke lucky to even be on the tour. I’ve always hated seeing behaviour or hearing talk that might divide my team. This time, my attention was devoted to forcing my way back into the side.

      However, there were moments that showed just how much our captain was struggling with the bat, and not all of these were in the early weeks of the tour. The day before the third Test at Old Trafford, I was standing near the entrance to the nets, waiting for my turn to bat, which gave me a close-up view of him struggling to lay bat on ball. It looked like Michael Kasprowicz and Paul Reiffel (who’d been called up as a replacement after Andy Bichel was hurt) were bowling at 100 miles an hour, and when Tubby walked out of the net, he said to me, ‘If you can lay bat on those blokes in there you can have my spot in the Test.’ In reality, batting in that net wasn’t all that difficult. I also recall him saying to Matthew Elliott one day, ‘Next time, I’ll wear your helmet out. If I look like you out there maybe I’ll get a few half volleys and a few cut shots like you’re getting.’ Tubby had convinced himself his batting was just one long hard-luck story. Everything was going against him.

      In fact, if my memory is right, he got a bit lucky. We played Derbyshire just before the first Test and when Tubby batted in our second innings, his former Aussie team-mate Dean Jones dropped him a sitter at first slip, and he went on to make 63. Four days later, the boys were bowled out for 118 after being 8–54 on the first day of the opening Test at Edgbaston. England replied with 478 before Tubby famously saved his career with a sterling 129. Even though we lost the game by nine wickets, the turnaround in our fortunes was massive. Finally, we could stop responding to the rumours that the skipper was about to get dropped and start concentrating on retaining the Ashes.

      To this point, my on-field contribution had been minimal. I batted with little success in our first three matches — an exhibition game in Hong Kong and one-dayers at Arundel and Northampton — and then didn’t play for a month, missing a limited-overs game against Worcestershire, three ODIs, three-day games at Bristol and Derby, and the opening Test. First, I was told they had to give the guys in the one-day team the playing time; then it was the guys in the Test team. At practice, I often had to wait for ages to get a hit and it reached the stage where I was spending more time bowling off-breaks as a net bowler than I was playing off-drives. When I did eventually get a chance, in a three-day game against Nottinghamshire, the first day was washed out completely, and when we did get on the field I batted at three and was lbw for just 19. Fortunately, they chose me again for the next fixture, at Leicester, and I managed to score 64 in our first innings, when the only other contributors to get past 20 were Heals (34) and extras (48). When Michael Bevan failed with the bat in the third Test, which we won to level the series, I was suddenly in the running for the Test team.

      Things really did change that quickly.

      Before the first Test, the selectors were auditioning Greg Blewett and Justin Langer for the No. 3 spot, with Bevo certain to bat at six because his spinners added depth to our bowling attack. Greg made a hundred against Derbyshire, while Lang failed in both innings, and from there my little mate from Perth gradually faded from contention while Blewey hit a century in the first Test and locked up his place for the series. There were three weeks between the third and fourth Tests, and after a sojourn to Scotland we found ourselves at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff, for our tour game against Glamorgan. Tubby won the toss and batted first, and I went out and scored 126 not out, while my main rival for Bevo’s spot, Michael Slater, was out for exactly 100 runs less.

      When we batted again, Slats opened the batting and was out for 7, and I was kept back to give others a knock, as if I was now one of the Test regulars. There was one more game before the fourth Test, against Middlesex at Lord’s, and I was picked again, to bat at six after the guys who had batted one to five in the first three Tests, and the strong impression I was given was that this was being seen as a rehearsal for the big game a week later. If it was, I didn’t do myself any favours — out for just 5 — but it didn’t matter. When they announced the team for Headingley I was in, and I felt the same emotions as when I’d learned I was going to make my Test debut, only this time the stakes were higher. It wasn’t just that this was the Ashes, cricket’s oldest trophy, the contest all budding Aussie cricketers dream about; this time, I really thought my career was on the line, that if


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