At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting
dressing rooms. I’m two months retired from Test cricket and back playing for the Mowbray Eagles. Back where it all began.
I entered these rooms as a boy and left them 30 years later. I wore the baggy green cap at the crease and the Australian captain’s jacket at the toss. I wore one-day colours too in an era when we were unbeatable at World Cup cricket. I wore them all with pride, at all times striving to be the best I could, but if you stripped all that away you would find what matters most and what kept me going: cricket.
It is simple really. I loved the game, the rituals, the fierce competition and the equally fierce mateship it promoted.
Dressing rooms, hotels, cricket grounds and aeroplanes are the places where my life has been lived.
The rooms are our refuge. For Test players they’re a place away from the cameras, journalists, crowds and constant glare. For club cricketers they’re a sanctuary where you can be with your mates away from work and the grind of daily life. You check in Saturday morning and you check out Saturday night a little wobbly from the long day and a few drinks after the game.
Every club cricketer has got a dressing room routine, sometimes it’s hard to pick the pattern in the mess, other times it’s obvious. Me? I’m not neat, I take the bats out and stand them up to clear some room in the jumble of the kit bag. The gloves are numbered, but in no order and as the game goes on things spread out further. Matthew Hayden said I spread my gear round like a ‘scrub turkey’ but he was almost as bad; Justin Langer, Mike Hussey they were like me; others were neat as pins. Damien Martyn was, and Michael Clarke and Brad Haddin verge on the obsessive, everything laid out like it’s a display in a store window. Marto would mark the edges of his territory with tape and warn us not to let our mess trespass within. In different grounds we had different seating patterns that established themselves over the years.
Spreading the bats and placing your bag somewhere is about marking your turf, setting out the boundaries of your space.
From the time I was small I was drawn to the equipment. The bats, the shoes, the gloves and the pads … I was always looking at what somebody else had, always picking up bats and feeling them. They are, I suppose, the tools of the trade. If I’d followed through on that building apprenticeship when I left school I wonder if I’d have had the same romantic attachment to what was in the toolbox.
Occasionally you’ll meet a cricketer who couldn’t give a toss, but most of us, particularly batsmen, are obsessed with our gear. Huss would carry a set of scales with him to ensure the bat was an exact weight. If it was over, out would come the sandpaper and he would start to scrape away. I’d give him a bit of grief about it, but when he wasn’t around I’d weigh mine too. Most of us arrive with an arsenal of bats: the lucky one, the one that’s almost broken in, the one that’s there and about …
The secret to a good one is how it feels in your hands and the soft tonk sound a new ball makes on good willow. Your ear tells you. I suppose a guitar or a piano is the same, but you’d have to ask a musician if that’s right.
My game bat never comes out until the morning of the match, it never gets an appearance at practice. The others are works in progress, bits of willow that will, with a bit of tuning and knocking, make it to game-bat status one day. Like players, bats have to earn a place in a game.
WE PONTINGS ARE WORKING-CLASS PEOPLE from a working-class part of Launceston and our entertainment consisted of footy in winter, cricket in summer and golf whenever we could. It was the same with everybody we knew.
From the time I was old enough to ride my bike past the end of the street I would come down to watch the Mowbray Eagles play. I was always drawn to the cricket ground and the dressing room. Uncle Greg played for the Eagles before he moved on to the Shield side and then to Test cricket. Maybe it was him who got me down there the first time, but I knew Dad had played for the same team and most of the adults in my life had something to do with the club. Every Saturday morning I’d be up early, have a quick breakfast and then climb onto my BMX and race down to here or wherever they were playing. If somebody was around I’d have a hit in the nets while the old blokes of the district went about the serious business in the middle, but the best of the times were in their half-lit dressing rooms.
When they were on the field I’d come in and go through the kits. Weighing the bats in my hands, feeling the grips and the balance and examining the grain. Looking back it was pretty rudimentary gear, but at the time it seemed possessed of some sort of magic. I’d try on the gloves and the inners that were way too big for me and I’d memorise where everything was before I touched it to make sure it went back exactly there, so when they came in hot and sweaty from a couple of hours on the field everything would be where they’d left it, and I’d be in the corner where they expected me to be.
I was small and could hide quietly in a corner so you wouldn’t necessarily know I was there. I would spend hours there listening to them talk about cricket as they drank beer and cooled down after play. It was a conversation I longed to join and one that when I did I’ve stayed engaged with all my life. Back then I was soaking it up like a sponge. Listening to their deep, gruff voices cracking jokes and weaving stories about that place out in the middle where I would long to be.
The Mowbray boys had a reputation for being the hardest cricketers around. When we played Launceston or Riverside it was almost class war and the teams from the other side of the river used to quietly dread crossing into our territory. After the game, however, they were always welcome for a drink in the rooms.
Sometimes Dad would drag me home early, other times someone would say ‘come on young fella’ and throw my bike in the back of their car and drive me home. Being the first to arrive and last to leave is a habit I’ve maintained ever since those early days.
And today I’m back here at the cricket club that started it all.
When, as captain of the Australian Test team, I would hand players their first baggy green I would tell them that they were following in a grand tradition and to think about the people who had worn it before, but I would also ask them to think about all the others out there at club and state level and how much it would mean to them.
Cricket’s given me everything but it’s taken things from me too. I’m a Mowbray boy and it’s here I feel at home and it’s probably the greatest regret of my life that the game took me away from here too soon. As a boy I just wanted to be one of the men in this dressing room, but I suppose the trade-off wasn’t too bad. Instead of sharing victory with these men I shared it with some of the great cricketers of our time and some of my greatest mates. Matty Hayden, Marto, Lang, Gilly, Warne, Pidge … we ruled the world for a while there, climbed the mountain and we were as close as men can be. Having said that, I am just as close and just as comfortable with the people I met in these rooms when I was still a boy. The blokes who put their hands on my shoulder and pointed me in the right direction.
NATURALLY I’M THE FIRST in the rooms at Invermay Park this morning. Had to open up myself. It’s fitting in a way as I’ve always been the first to arrive. The last to leave. Lately I’d found myself looking up expecting to see Gilly or Marto or Lang only to find they’ve gone and the spot that was theirs has been taken by someone else. One by one they had all left the dressing room until I was the last one left.
Rianna, my wife, has a way of putting things in perspective. When everybody had become emotional at my retirement ahead of the Perth Test she said, ‘He’s not dead yet people, it’s just cricket,’ and I love her for that. I love that sense of balance she brings. Recently she came to me and asked if I had really made that many Test runs. She’d seen something on television. Sometimes I think she’s the only person who doesn’t know these things. (There are whole villages in the backblocks of India who know more about my career.) And I love her even more for that.
To be honest it all became a bit overwhelming when I retired from Test cricket and I wish I could have had her sense of acceptance. Admitting to myself that I was no longer up to it, saying the words out loud to Rianna and then the team and then telling the world; wandering out to bat for that last time and seeing the South Africans lined up in a guard of honour as I approached the WACA pitch … all the other little things that