At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting
players have always received what I think is a fair slice of the cricket pie, and our incomes increased significantly as overall revenues continued to rise. As someone whose career was largely post-1997 I have benefited as much as anyone from this, so I will never forget the actions of Tim May and his comrades at the ACA. Furthermore, because of the ACA’s persistence, productive dialogue between Australian players and Australian officials finally became a feature of the cricket landscape, and more often than not it felt like we were working together, rather than being from opposite sides of the same fence.
BACK IN THE 1990s, it was rare for an inexperienced member of the Australian cricket team to think about anything that wasn’t directly related to how his cricket was going. Even things like team tactics were not that important to me, other than how they impinged on my role in the side. At this stage of my cricket life I wasn’t going to be standing up at the next team meeting to tell senior blokes how to play. I knew my place.
There were a number of significant things that happened in my first two or three years in the Australian team — Mark Taylor’s form slump, Ian Healy losing the vice-captaincy, the ACA conflict, the match-fixing controversy — and I was aware of all of them and saw how they affected the guys involved. However, I never stopped to think too much about them because they didn’t impact directly on what I had to do. I don’t think this makes me callous or naive or different to the other young guys. My priority was performing to a high standard because that would keep me in the side. Staying in the side was all I really wanted. With the benefit of time and seniority I realise a few of those things were big issues, in some cases momentous, but at the time, to a large degree, they passed me by.
Later in my career I came to have a different appreciation of these events as I went through similar things. At the start of the 1997–98 season Mark Taylor had the one-day captaincy taken away from him when he was still Test skipper. I didn’t see it as a big deal — Tubby hadn’t been scoring a million runs in the one-dayers, the team’s ODI form in the previous 12 months had been mediocre, the selectors made the call, let’s move on. That’s how I was thinking. Now, having been Australian captain for a number of years, I realise it was a massive thing to happen to him and that a decision of that magnitude had enormous consequences for the team.
In the years since Tubby retired I have been asked many times, ‘How good a captain was he?’ When I was Test skipper from 2004 to 2010 the bloke I was most unfavourably compared to was Tubby. ‘He’s no Mark Taylor,’ the critics would say of me.
When I first came into the Australian team it was hard for me not to think of Tubby as a special captain because, compared to the skippers I’d previously played under at club and state level, almost everything we did at the international level was a step-up in class, intensity and professionalism. The amount of thinking that went into training and the analysis the leadership group put into an international match in those days compared to what we did at state level was chalk and cheese.
Yet it is also true that the all-round preparation teams put in today is a million miles ahead of what we did back in the mid-1990s. The biggest change is how inclusive it is. The young players of today are involved in everything the team does and everything the team hierarchy talks about when it comes to planning and meetings. Their input is encouraged, as it is vital everyone is on the ‘same page’. In contrast, when I first made it into the side, tactics were the realm of the coach, the captain and the vice-captain, and maybe one or two other senior guys. Most times, we’d only talk about a few specifics in a team meeting that lasted for 15 minutes or half an hour. Then we went out to play.
The most telling example I can give of how it often was back then occurred at the 1996 World Cup, before the quarter-final against New Zealand, when we were discussing the Kiwi batting line-up. After a brief discussion about guys like Nathan Astle and Stephen Fleming, we got to Chris Harris. ‘He’s hopeless,’ said one of the senior players. It could have been Steve Waugh, or it might have been Mark. ‘Let’s not waste our time talking about him.’ Harris, of course, promptly went out and made 130 from 124 balls. In most meetings involving the whole group, we’d breezed through opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, devoting no more than an average of 30 seconds for each player. And then the team meeting was done. See you at the bar at six. Inevitably, there’d be more talk of tactics over a feed or a couple of beers, but unless a formal team dinner had been organised, only a few — usually the senior blokes — would be heavily involved in these informal discussions.
On the field, Tubby was a chatty captain, but these conversations were usually with the bowler or the guys in the slips cordon. If I was fielding at cover or deep point I could only guess as to why a change was made. Maybe, because of what we’d discussed in a pre-game meeting, I might have had a clue to the tactics behind a move, but otherwise I was just a soldier following orders. So when people asked me about his leadership how could I know if a captain was a wizard or just lucky? Tubby certainly had a bit of awe about him and under his leadership we usually felt things were going to turn out right. More than once — the semi-final at the 1996 World Cup and the third Ashes Test of 1997 are two examples — he made decisions at the toss that many questioned but they worked out fine in the end so he looked like a genius. The way he nurtured Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath — helped turn them into champions — was fantastic. Yet it’s amazing how little memory I have of Tubby’s captaincy style or things he did or advice he gave that made me a better cricketer or person. Perhaps that’s more an indictment on me as a young cricketer than it is on him as a mentor of young cricketers. Or perhaps it’s just a reflection of the times.
WE PLAY CRICKET almost all the time now. It’s difficult to believe that in the past there were years when no international side toured Australia, a time when we weren’t rushing from one tournament to another. There were times late in my career when I was lucky to spend two months at home in a year — and they were often comprised of weeks grabbed here and there. The schedule is full because cricket earns big money from television networks and players are (now) well compensated for their time. There was a time when we complained there was too much cricket, then the Indian Premier League (IPL) came along and almost anybody who could ran to that honey pot and the money ensured we stopped complaining.
That said, at times, there is still too much cricket and you can tell when it’s getting to us because that’s when things happen on the field. Sometimes, in the swirl of airports and buses and hotel rooms and long hot days in the sun the cracks finally open up and what comes spilling out is not always pretty.
I guess that might have been part of the reason I found myself being dragged out of a Kolkata (then, Calcutta) nightclub in 1998, but it is too easy an excuse. In truth I still had a lot to learn and when my Aussie rules team, North Melbourne, beat Warnie’s St Kilda I think I might have got a little too excited.
And, as I was about to learn, when you are growing up in the public eye your mistakes become very public.
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