At the Close of Play

THE WORLD WAS WATCHING South Africa in early 1992 as the country decided if it should end years of white rule and the apartheid system. And, so was I, but from a lot closer than you would think. I had arrived in the country a week before with a side from the Cricket Academy and the day we played Orange Free State in Bloemfontein was the day white South Africans were asked to decide if the process of ending apartheid and sharing power should continue or not. We had our bags packed sweating on the outcome of what may have been the most significant referendums of the 20th century. If it had been defeated we would have been straight out of there and the ban on sporting ties with the country would have resumed. I was all of 17 and learning fast that cricket soon takes you right out of your comfort zone.

It was a long way from Launceston, but life was moving fast. So let me just take you back a step.

ONE OF THE THINGS I remember most clearly about my early games with Mowbray thirds was how big the grounds were and how I often felt as if I couldn’t hit the ball out of the infield. My lack of size and power held me back for a while, and it wasn’t until near the end of my second season that I was promoted to the A-Reserves — for the grand final, no less — when I was chosen as a specialist No. 8 batsman. It was a bit of luck really. Someone was injured, but you weren’t allowed to bring a player back from A-Grade for the A-Reserve final, so they picked me primarily for my fielding. All the indoor games, the fielding practice and the hours my mates and I had spent in the vacant land across the road from home and in the nearby park and surrounding scrub, not just throwing and catching cricket and tennis balls, but also throwing rocks at targets like telegraph poles and tree stumps and, occasionally, each other, had turned me into a pretty fair fielder for my age.

I batted for almost three hours in that final, playing one defensive shot after another, though occasionally I’d tuck one down to fine leg for a single or maybe a quickly run two. It can’t have been much fun to watch. A tattered newspaper clipping in one of Mum’s scrapbooks describes my knock this way: ‘Mowbray was struggling at 6–114 against Riverside in the A-Reserve grand final at the Coca-Cola Ground before 14-year-old Ricky Ponting came to the rescue … the nephew of Tasmania’s latest Australian tourist Greg Campbell was finally out with the score at 9–246. Ponting scored 30 in 163 minutes at the crease in his A-Reserve debut. He combined with former state paceman Roger Brown for an eighth-wicket partnership of 65 in 76 minutes and with Ross Clark for 36 in 34 for the ninth.’

Having taken the best part of two seasons to earn a promotion to the A-Reserves, I promptly made my A-Grade debut for Mowbray at the start of the following summer, and in my very first game I snared what might have been the best catch I ever took. Troy Cooley, a Tasmanian opening bowler (and later the bowling coach for England and Australia), was bowling and Richard Bennett, a Tasmanian opening bat, was facing. I was pumped just to be playing. Troy, who was as quick as anyone in his day, bowled a full wide one and Bennett played a half slash, half cover drive, and I dived full length and caught it above eye-height, one handed. Before I knew it, everyone had a hold of me.

I’ll also never forget a one-dayer against Riverside, when I came to the wicket at 5–44 chasing 147 and with our wicketkeeper, Richard Soule, put on 91 runs to win with little more than an over to spare. To bat in that situation with Richard, a former Australian Under-19 gloveman who’d been Tassie’s Shield keeper since taking over from Roger Woolley in 1985, was thrilling and enlightening, especially the way he stayed calm and smart when the pressure was at its fiercest.

When Richard was away playing state cricket that season, Clinton Laskey took over as keeper, but Clinton had to miss our game against Old Scotch that year, which created my one and only chance to wear the keeper’s gloves in an A-Grade match. I was up for anything in those days. I think there was even a suggestion on one of my first tours as part of the Australian squad that I could act as reserve keeper if necessary.

You learn on the job in cricket and I was blessed to get an apprenticeship among such good players. I can’t remember now if it seemed strange, but a lot of those guys were so much older than me and so much bigger. If Launceston hadn’t been such a small town the other sides would have mistaken me for the team mascot, but word got around pretty quick that I was a young bloke with a bit of talent. Naturally the opposition saw this as an invitation to take me down a peg or two. I can’t blame them for that and probably should thank them.

Not long after that experience, I was on a plane to Adelaide for the Australian Under-17s championships, my first interstate tour. It’s funny, when I think of all the flights I have been on to all parts of the world since then, how the excitement I felt that day — packing my bag, driving to the airport, checking in, eating on the plane — remains in my memory. Dad was team manager, which was reassuring, because if there was something I wasn’t certain about (and there was plenty) I could ask him without fear of being embarrassed, but it also meant I had to stay firmly in line all the time. On the field, we defeated South Australia and the Northern Territory, and held our own against the ACT and Queensland.

Cricket was consuming my adolescence. I was easily the youngest guy in the Under-17 squad, and then midway through the year, still six months short of my 16th birthday, I was included in the Tasmanian Sheffield Shield team’s winter training squad. I was one of 60 players chosen and it was weird to see my name in the paper alongside prominent Test and Shield cricketers like David Boon, Dirk Wellham, Greg Shipperd, Dave Gilbert, Greg Campbell and Peter Faulkner. I had to grow up quickly, and maybe the men at Mowbray Cricket Club were teaching me a lesson of sorts when early in the 1990–91 season they spiked my one can of beer with vodka. Having had a good laugh at my expense, they then dropped me on our front doorstep, which I’m sure didn’t impress my parents at all. But even this time, Mum and Dad knew that when I was with the cricketers I was safe, and if they ever needed to find me they knew exactly where I’d be. Not all parents in Rocherlea could say that about their 14- or 15-year-old sons.

I PLAYED MY LAST full season of football in 1990, the end coming abruptly when I broke my right arm just above the elbow while playing in the Under-17s for North Launceston. The doctors had to put a pin in my arm, which stayed there for 16 weeks and meant I missed the early part of the following cricket season. By this stage of my life, I was confident cricket was my future, so it wasn’t hard to give the footy away, on the basis that it wasn’t worth risking an injury that might end my sporting dream. I think Dad would have stopped me anyway, if I’d tried to keep playing.

Earlier in that 1990 season, not long after I captained the Northern team at the Under-17 state carnival, I was asked to answer a series of questions for our club newsletter. Mum stuck my responses in her scrapbook …

Player Profile

Name: Ricky Ponting

Position: Wing

Occupation: Student, Brooks High School

Ambition: To play cricket for Australia

Favourite AFL club/player: North Melbourne/John Longmire and John McCarthy

Favourite TFL club/player: North Launceston/Todd Spearman and Marcus Todman

Favourite ground : York Park

Other sports: Cricket, Golf

Favourite food: Kentucky Fried Chicken

Girlfriend: No one (they give me the poops!)

Dislikes: Hawthorn and Essendon supporters

Most embarrassing moment: Getting dropped from senior firsts to the seconds at school after being the captain the week before!

TWO WEEKS IN THE MIDDLE of winter in 1991 changed not just my cricket career but the way my life evolved. I had been selected in the Australian Under-17 development squad following the 1990–91 Under-17 championships in Brisbane, which led to me receiving specialised coaching from two cricket legends: Greg Chappell and Barry Richards.

I left school at the end of Year 10. It was a big move I suppose, but it was pretty clear to everyone by then that cricket was the only thing I cared about. Ian Young got me a job as part of the ground staff at Scotch Oakburn College, one of Launceston’s most respected independent schools, located to the immediate south-east of the city centre, and that job confirmed for me that a life in sport was what I really wanted. Then it happened: I spent a fortnight at the Australian Institute of Sport’s Cricket Academy in Adelaide courtesy of a scholarship from the Century Club, a group of cricket enthusiasts based in Launceston who had come together in the 1970s with the aim of fostering the game and its players in Northern Tasmania. It is impossible to underrate what that scholarship meant to me and my life.

The Cricket Academy, a joint initiative of the Institute of Sport and the Australian Cricket Board (now Cricket Australia), had been officially opened in 1988. Its policy was to invite the country’s best young cricketers, most of them Under-19 players, to work together and learn from some of the game’s finest coaches.

The Australian Under-19 team was touring England at the time, which meant there were very few Academy cricketers in Adelaide when another top Tasmanian junior, Andrew Gower, and I arrived.

There had recently been some major organisational changes at the Academy, the most notable being the appointment of the former great Australian wicketkeeper Rod Marsh as head coach. Rod had only been there a couple of months and I can imagine he was battling through any number of administrative issues, so the chance to work with a couple of keen young Tasmanians would have been a godsend for him. He took a genuine interest in us and I quickly came to realise he is a bloke who is very easy to talk to and he knows an amazing amount about our game. We were both in our element: Rod, the wily old pro, encouraging and teaching; me, shy but fiercely determined, listening and learning.

One thing Rod said to us during my first full year in Adelaide has always stayed with me, ‘If you blokes aren’t good enough to score 300 runs in a day you can all pack up your bags and go home now.’ That was the style of cricket he wanted us to embrace, but it wasn’t the style of cricket you saw too often in Test matches back in the early 1990s. Rod was perceptive enough to realise that assertive cricketers were coming to the fore, that the game needed to be entertaining if it wanted to survive, and that we — the players of the future — needed to be ready for this revolution. Simply put, he was ahead of his time.

Andrew was a very promising leg-spinner from the South Launceston club. While he never made an impact in first-class cricket he did build up an imposing record in Launceston club cricket, spending a number of years at Mowbray as our captain–coach. As teenagers, we played a lot of junior outdoor and indoor cricket together (I first met him at the Launceston WACA), and even after I’d faced Shane Warne I thought Andrew had the best wrong’un and top-spinner I’d seen. In the years to come, he’d do very well in business, and only recently bought a pub, the Inveresk Tavern, not far from Mowbray’s home ground, Invermay Park. It’s a small town, Launceston, and before Andrew and I went to the Academy together, Dad and I used to go to the Inveresk most Thursday nights, to have a wager or two (I was betting in 50-cent and one-dollar units) on the local greyhound meetings.

For our first two weeks in Adelaide, Andrew and I lived in a room at the Seaton Hotel, which was located out near the Royal Adelaide Golf Club, right next to a railway line (which meant we could never get any sleep) and not too far from the state-of-the-art indoor facilities at the Adelaide Oval.

During my first day at the Adelaide Oval indoor nets, Andrew and I were introduced to a strapping young pace bowler from Newcastle, Paul ‘Blocker’ Wilson, who had quit his job as a trainee accountant and apparently had been hassling Rod for weeks about getting an opportunity at the Academy. Beaten down by the bloke’s persistence, Rod had agreed to give Paul a try-out, which was at this time, and I was the bunny nominated to face the best he could offer. I guess in a way we were both on trial. The first ball was a quick bumper, and I did the same as I would have done if one of Mowbray’s senior quicks, say Troy Cooley, Scott Plummer or Roger Brown, had pinged one in short at practice: I hooked him for four. The next one was even quicker and a bit shorter, and according to Rod, Blocker ran through the crease and delivered it from a lot closer than he should have, but I smashed him again. Later, Blocker and I became good mates, but now he was filthy on the little kid who was threatening to ruin his Academy adventure before it even began.

I had no fear about getting hit in the head — at this moment, when I was batting in a cap — or at any stage in my life. This was true when Ian Young was teaching me the basics of batting technique, when I was 13 playing against 16-year-olds, when I was 15 playing for A-Grade against men, at the Academy taking on Blocker or the bowling machine, or later in my cricket life when I was up against the fastest bowlers in the game, like Pakistan’s Shoaib Akhtar or the West Indies’ Curtly Ambrose. I had to try and find a way to hold my own. I’m not sure I could have done that if I was frightened, even a little. The combination of no fear and a lot of quality practice is why I ended up being a reasonable back-foot player.

After those two weeks at the Academy in 1991, it was impossible for me not to think very seriously about my chances of playing for Tasmania and Australia. The Academy had been formed in 1987 and guys who had gone there before me had been some of the stars of recent Under-17 and Under-19 Australian championships. By the winter of 1991, 23 graduates had played Sheffield Shield cricket, including Shane Warne (Victoria) and Damien Martyn (Western Australia), who had made their respective Shield debuts while working at the Academy in 1990–91. No one had made the Australian team as yet, but it was just a matter of time. Perhaps the best bet for this elevation was Michael Bevan, who had made such an impact in 1989–90 he forced a rule change — back then, the Academy guys living in Adelaide could be selected in the South Australian Shield team, but when the NSW authorities saw Bevan (who was actually from Canberra, but in reality a NSW player) making a hundred for another state instead of them they quickly decided it wasn’t right. By 1990–91, Academy cricketers were playing for their home state. I’m extremely glad the change was made, because the only cap I ever wanted to wear in Australian domestic cricket was the Tassie one.

It felt as if I got years’ worth of tuition in those two weeks and they obviously liked what they saw because I was invited back in 1992 to join the two-year program. I was leaving home.

For the first half of my first full year at the Academy, we lived in serviced units called the ‘Directors Apartments’ in Gouger Street, not far from the city centre, where we ate pub meals every day — chicken schnitzel and chips for lunch and something equally exotic for dinner. We moved to the Del Monte Hotel at Henley Beach halfway through the year and that’s where we lived until the end of my second year.

In January 1992 I was part of Tasmania’s Under-19 squad at the Australian championships, even though I was still eligible for the Under-17s, and after I scored a few runs Rod was on ABC Radio describing me as ‘a heck of a good player’ and adding, ‘He has a big future in the game if he keeps his head and keeps learning. He has a very good technique and appears to have an old head on young shoulders.’ Rod also made a point of praising the Tasmanian selectors for picking me in the Under-19s, saying, ‘Too often young players are pigeon-holed by age group instead of being allowed to play to their full potential.’

I’m sure there were some who thought I was being fast-tracked ahead of my time, but in my view my progress through Tasmanian cricket was handled fantastically well by the local administrators. There was always a suspicion where I came from that while many of the best cricketers were from the north of the state, many of the most influential officials were based in Hobart, but I never had any hurdles unnecessarily put in front of me just because I was from Launceston. Maybe the facilities and practice wickets in my home town weren’t always as good as those available to the young cricketers in Hobart and on the mainland, but that might have made me a better player rather than worse. The truth is I was encouraged at every level in Tassie. After that, the success of Launceston’s own David Boon at Test and one-day international (ODI) level (by 1992 he was as important as anyone in the Australian batting order) and the fact I’d gone through the Cricket Academy, paved the way for me to get a fair shot at the Australian team.