At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting
deaths.
I only ever wanted to play cricket and I could never bring myself to imagine a time when I wasn’t playing the game, but that time is approaching.
Since leaving the Test team I have been like a salmon (Tasmanian, of course) swimming back upstream to where it all started. Before I put this old kit bag away for the last time I had some unfinished business. Cricket swept me up early. One day I didn’t know how to get on a plane and then for a long time after I wondered if I would ever get off one.
International cricket expanded to fill every available space in my life. At the academy I had been able to get home occasionally, but after that visits got rarer until there was barely time to swing by and have a hit of golf with the old man, or a cup of instant coffee with Mum at the breakfast bar. My little brother, Drew, and sister, Renee — my whole family I guess — watched me on television and tracked my progress that way. I suppose all of Australia did and a few other nations as well. I was away when my pa died and will never forget the helplessness as I spoke to Dad on the phone from England. I wasn’t there for him when he needed me.
I’m fiercely loyal. I’m proud of my background and the values I was taught in this town and these dressing rooms. No matter how many five-star hotels I’ve slept in, how many first-class flights I’ve been on, how many politicians and businessmen and celebrities have swept through my life I have never lost the sense that I’m that small-town boy who didn’t have much but wanted for nothing.
So, in what’s left of this last summer of my cricket life, I am trying to catch up.
It’s all rushed as it always is. I trained in Hobart yesterday, drove up to Launceston last night and will head back to Hobart first thing tomorrow. I’m so early for the game I park the car down the road a bit and call Rianna on the phone, even when I’ve done that I’m still the first there so I open the clubrooms and find a space where I figure nobody else will be, just as I did when I was a boy. It’s best to stay out of the way and not be noticed, although that’s impossible today.
It’s early February and the Mowbray Eagles are playing Launceston on the parkland by the Esk River, next to the footy ground.
There’re hundreds at the ground and they line up for autographs and I sign them all when I get a chance. There’s a lot of familiar faces, people from my past introducing me to their kids. My mum and dad are playing golf because it’s a Saturday and that’s what they do and I love them for that. They’re set in their ways but I have never for one moment felt they haven’t been with me every innings I’ve played. They’re locals and they like their lives down here. They don’t like their routine disrupted so they haven’t seen me play that much. They would never think of going overseas to watch a game of cricket. It was hard enough getting them to Perth for my last match. No, there’s a golf course down the road and every Saturday Mum and Dad have a date that starts at the first hole.
I STRAP ON MY PADS and make my way out to the middle. Head down at first, trying to block out the crowd like I do whether I’m at the MCG, in Mumbai or at Mowbray. Hitting the grass I try and get a little feeling in the legs, running on the spot a bit. I make it to the middle and take centre, just as I learned all those years back, and I scratch my studs into the surface of the wicket. Marking out my territory again.
I do it really tough. Cricket is such a great leveller. I last an hour, but it’s as hard an hour as I’ve spent at the crease. The council owns the ground and keeps the grass long and it’s impossible to hit a boundary along the ground. It’s been raining and the wicket is seaming. Finally I shoulder arms to a ball that cuts back a foot or two and takes my off-stump.
This game rarely lets you get ahead of yourself. In the evening we have a few beers in the rooms with our gear all around us and the chat begins all over again.
This is who I am and now this is finishing and I suppose that begs a question I am not too keen to ponder: I might not have been finished with the game, but it was finished with me and am I now the person it has shaped?
Someone said when I walked out of the Australian dressing room the door slammed on a generation of cricket. That might be right, but for me there was something deeper. I had been raised in the game. The dressing room was a cradle, I was formed in these confines, I grew up in them and I have as good as lived in them for all my adult life up to this point. There was only ever the game and the team, the competition and the anticipation, and now it is time to move on.
AFTER MOWBRAY it was back to Sheffield Shield.
Twenty years ago I played my first game for Tassie as a 17-year-old and here I am again. At 38 I get to celebrate for the first time as my home state wins the coveted Sheffield Shield. It’s a great feeling and I’ve had a good year, even knocking up a 200 in the game against NSW that followed my Mowbray visit.
Cricket is a cruel mistress and there she was at me again. I had started the summer in great form in first-class cricket and was the highest run-scorer going into the series against South Africa that would be my last. I felt like my technique, my reflexes, my game were in the best place they had ever been, but when it came time to wear the baggy green I could not make a run. So, going out and hitting a double hundred in the Shield a few months after I had literally landed on my face in Test cricket was a bitter irony, but a sure indication that there’s an enormous mental element to this game. No matter how hard I tried — and believe me there is nobody who tries and trains harder than me — I couldn’t put all the pieces back together at Test level.
It still hurts to admit I had lost it, but it felt good to end the season giving back to my home state, a place that had given so much but for most of my career had been so far away, so hard to get back to.
While Tasmania was winning the Shield competition Australian cricket seemed to be spiralling out of control during a series against India.
They’d barely missed a beat after I left. In my last game in Perth we had a chance to regain the number one rank in world cricket, but now that seemed so far away. In the first series they played after my retirement they easily accounted for a Sri Lankan side. My only contribution was a lap of honour at Bellerive before the Test.
After that things just seemed to go wrong and it was hard to watch. I know more than most how India can get on top of you. The cricket is like the country — it can be breathtaking, but at times it can close in on you and you feel like you are being smothered. It’s easy to lose your way there and the Aussies did. I had never led a team to a series victory in India, but not only did they lose 4–0 on the field, they lost their way off it. The dressing room that I loved had changed in the past few years and as hard as it was to see how bad they were going out in the middle, it was just as hard knowing how much they were struggling off it.
I’d seen the signs. When we lost in Perth I went with the boys to have a drink with the South Africans and I was taken aback by the feeling they had in the sheds. Sure, it’s easy to be happy when you’ve won so well, but they were a tight group, a small travelling band that had gelled together and taken down the enemy and as I looked at them enjoying the afterglow I was gripped with a sense of loss.
We used to be like that, I thought.
Everything has to change in cricket, but I’m not so convinced that all the changes I’ve seen in the past few years are for the better. I was in that Australian dressing room for 20 years and it seemed every time a legend left his corner another arrived to take that place. I saw Adam Gilchrist replace Ian Healy, and Stuart MacGill pick up a lazy 200 wickets when forced to play understudy to Shane Warne. I remember when a 30-year-old called Michael Hussey first got his shot at the big time and a young bloke called Michael Clarke came into the side.
Michael Clarke’s got the captaincy now and it’s fair to say that the trend that started in the last years of my time in the job has continued. First-class cricket just isn’t bringing up the players, particularly batsmen, it once did. There was a time when guys with 10,000 first-class runs, guys who had scored century after century all around Australia and in England for counties, could not get a look-in. Sure there were a few, myself included, who came in young and relatively inexperienced, but we knew we were always under pressure for our places from others who