At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting

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СКАЧАТЬ out playing a bad shot, Shippy would be at the gate as I walked off to tell me. But then he would watch the video with me to break down where I went wrong so that I wouldn’t make that mistake again. We have become good mates and he has been great for my batting, especially in the latter years of my career, where I’ve had a few challenges creep into my technique.

      What stands out for me with my three mentors is that they all pushed me hard, taught me to work harder than anyone else and, above all, to aim to be a good person. I am forever indebted to all three of them.

      

      THERE WERE A COUPLE of good young players going around in the Sheffield Shield in the summer of 1992–93 and if I was one of them I was a fair way down the pecking order. Today it’s hard to believe how much talent was bubbling away in domestic Australian cricket back then.

      A half-century in my first game wasn’t a bad start, but I struggled a bit after that, getting only 4 in the second innings of that game. I got a few starts after that but didn’t get to 50 again until my fifth game, which luck would have it was at Bellerive against South Australia. Against Western Australia in Perth I saw a young bloke called Damien Martyn score a century, he was only 21 and had just made his Test debut against the West Indies and he was one of those setting the standard. He was one of the best batsmen I had seen and to this day I still say the same thing. Justin Langer didn’t do too badly either against us.

      We went up to Sydney in late January to take on NSW at the SCG, which in those days always helped the spinners. Glenn McGrath was playing his first Shield match and opened the bowling with Wayne Holdsworth, an honest fast bowler who took over 200 first-class wickets. At six was another making his debut for the Blues, my former Academy captain Adam Gilchrist who had been chosen as a batsman because Phil Emery was the wicketkeeper. Gilly was 21 and had been killing them in the seconds and even got a shot playing in the Prime Minister’s XI, but until then couldn’t force his way into the state side. It still amazes me that he took another seven years to make it to the Test team.

      It was, however, a bloke who was a bit older who sticks in my mind from that match. Greg Matthews is one of the more unique people to have ever played for Australia. He was a great bowler and will always be remembered for getting the final wicket in the Madras (Chennai) tied Test but he also made valuable runs. He could be different, but there’s no doubt he was talented and on this day he put me through one of the hardest exams of my cricketing life.

      Pace bowling never worried me that much, but as you can tell by now it was the spinners who challenged me to knuckle down and do the really hard yards in the middle. I batted for four hours that day, much of the time doing my best to hang on as we went off three times for rain delays. Scoring had been relatively easy at first but then the Blues put on the handbrakes. We lost a few wickets then, but I managed to find the mental energy needed not to throw things away. They extended play for an hour to draw out my pain and Matthews, aided by Emery, really tied me down, but when they eventually did call us in at stumps I had moved to 98 not out. Apparently I spent the best part of an hour in the 90s.

      I can’t say I wasn’t thinking about a century, but the overriding feeling I had as I made my way back to the sanctuary of the dressing room was pride that I had shown so much patience. I was also pretty pleased that my footwork had really improved. Tim May had pinned me to the crease in Adelaide but now I was following the advice of Ian Chappell who had told us during a coaching session at the Academy that you have to get to the ball on the full or the half volley when playing spinners. He’d also advised using the sweep but it wasn’t a shot that I ever truly mastered so it wasn’t one I was willing to play.

      No batsman should sleep soundly on 98 not out, especially one who hasn’t scored a Shield 100, but I was the most exhausted 18-year-old on the mainland that night and fell straight into a deep sleep when I got back to my bed. Okay, I admit waking with the cold sweats during a dream where I had run myself out trying to get to three figures, but even then I was so tired I think I just passed out again.

      I got there the next morning and it was a great feeling. It wasn’t just getting my first hundred, it felt like I had matured as a cricketer and taken my game to another level. When I went home Mum showed me how the papers had covered the innings, and the quote that stayed with me was from Richard Soule, when he said the difference in my batting now to where I’d been before was ‘astronomical’ in terms of my ‘mental application’.

      That’s how I felt, too.

      There was a fair degree of excitement in the papers about that century. I was the third youngest ever in the Shield to reach three figures, Archie Jackson did it at 17 and Doug Walters at 18, but he was about a month younger than I was. The journos must have asked Rod Marsh if I was the ‘next Doug Walters’, but he was too smart to fall for that. ‘There’s a touch of Doug Walters about him ... there’ll never be another Doug Walters, make that clear, he’s Ricky Ponting.’ Later that year Launceston cricket writer Mark Thomas shot down comparisons between me and Boonie by saying ‘there will never be another David Boon; but there could be the first Ricky Ponting’. It was all starting …

      It’s funny looking back, but I think we were all pushing each other onto bigger things then whether we knew it or not. Gilly said later that watching me score the hundred made him think, ‘If he can do it I can do it.’ When our time did come there was a sense among us that we could do anything because I think we’d seen the talent in each other and watched as our contemporaries took things up to the next level. If he could do it, I could …

      Greg Matthews finally got me in the second dig when I’d got to 69.

      Running through someone’s Shield stories can be a bit eye-glazing but there was something that happened in the next game against Victoria that I reckon I was reminded about every time Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland got to speak publicly with me in the room. Back then he was a long thin medium-pace bowler and while he didn’t play a lot of first-class matches he did in this one and as anybody who has been on the receiving end of one of his speeches will know by now, he got me out.

      I’ll give James his due, he tells a good story and he follows that boast by explaining that I was out ‘hit wicket’. I’d actually played a pretty good shot and set off for a run or two, but had made the mistake of wearing a new type of shoe. When I tried to take off, my foot slipped back and I knocked off the bails. I wasn’t happy at the time, but it gave the man who was later to become my boss something to talk about for years to come …

      In the penultimate game of the year I got back-to-back 100s against a Western Australian attack that included Jo Angel, Brendon Julian and another tall bowler, Tom Moody. It was a nice thing to do as I was playing against a home crowd at Bellerive, but in those days the pitch was a road and if you considered yourself a batsman then Tassie was the place to fill your boots.

      Three centuries and four 50s is a pretty good start to a Shield career, but it had me a fair way down the table compared to some of my contemporaries. Damien Martyn played four matches and got four 100s, Matthew Hayden bagged a couple and reached 50 five times playing up at Queensland where the wickets were pretty juicy, Jamie Siddons got four 100s too and Michael Slater scored over 1000 runs in the competition.

      There was an Ashes series coming up that winter and some talk that I might get a look-in. Marto and Lang had already made their Test debuts and while Lang missed this time round they took Marto and big Mattie Hayden. My old mate Warnie also made a bit of a splash when he got his first chance to bowl in England. The batting line up for the first Test was M Taylor, M Slater, D Boon, M Waugh, A Border and S Waugh with Marto and Haydos in the wings … I was a lot further back in the pecking СКАЧАТЬ