At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting

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СКАЧАТЬ expect to be picked for that tour, but I went into the next Shield season thinking I could be a long shot to go to South Africa at the end of the summer. I went all right too, scoring three 100s and as many 50s, but on reflection I knew I had let things get to me. The season started well, WA came down to Hobart and in the first innings Justin Langer and Damien Martyn knocked up 100s. In our innings me and Michael Di Venuto both did the same. The pair of us put on 207 and had fun wearing down the visitors.

      After that I went through a frustrating run of ‘starts’ but could not kick on. I felt in terrific form, but was playing some really dumb shots and I can remember more than once sitting in the dressing room after I’d been dismissed thinking, What did you do that for?

      People kept telling me to be patient, as if I’d forgotten the lessons of my debut season, but with hindsight I reckon my struggles were more a case of me trying to be more than what I was. A pressure was building in my mind for me to be a spectacular player (as some critics were suggesting I could be), which I never was and never would be, rather than just being technically sound and consistent. When I did finally make another hundred, against WA in Perth, it took me the best part of five hours and it was one of the most sensible innings of my life. A win in Adelaide would get Tasmania into the Shield final for the very first time, and I had a field day in an eight-wicket victory, scoring 84 not out and 161.

      Unfortunately I failed twice in the final in Sydney. Michael Bevan got a hundred and so did Brad McNamara and that was us done. It was pretty disappointing, but I wasn’t 20 yet and I guess at that age you figure there’ll be other chances. If you’d told me I wouldn’t get there for another 18 years …

      Anyway, I came out of the season with my reputation as one of Australia’s most promising young batsmen reasonably intact. More importantly, I was a smarter cricketer now. I’d learned to bat within my limitations and felt pretty good about where I was going. Even if taking the next step meant spending the first winter for a couple of years — and the last for decades to come — back at home.

      THE REASON FOR THIS was simple. After two years of pretty much constant cricket, I needed a break. An incident at the Australian Under-19 championships in Melbourne was telling. Because of the Shield schedule, I was available to play two games in this championship and the first of these was against South Australia. When we batted I was 83 not out at lunch and absolutely flying. Straight after the break, I was facing Jason Gillespie, a future Test star and at this point one of the best young quicks in the country. The strategy they’d come up with was to put every fielder in a semi-circle on the offside, with no one on the legside. It’s a ridiculous field and one you don’t see too often although MS Dhoni did it to us in India years later when they wanted to stop us chasing runs. I remember that time well: Simon Katich was batting and he was forced to play balls way outside off onto the onside. Eventually he went out and later that night an Indian journalist made the mistake of asking him why he’d been so defensive out there. He blew up and unfortunately that was what happened with me in this Under-19s game. Jason was aiming well wide of the off-stump, so for the first couple of overs I just let everything go, but eventually I went for a cut shot and nailed it … straight to the fielder at backward point.

      Of course, they carried on as if they were geniuses while I was extremely annoyed with myself. As I turned to storm off I went to swing my bat over the stumps. I connected with the top of the off-stump, it came clean out of the ground and I knew I was in trouble. At a hearing at the Victorian Cricket Association offices they made the point that it must have been deliberate because I didn’t bend down to put the stump back in, but the truth was I was too embarrassed. I just wanted to get out of there. I was suspended for a game, which we thought was over the top — no one got hurt and the only person I’d embarrassed by behaving the way I did was myself — but there was no avenue of appeal. After going out with the boys that night I flew home.

      At times I could be an angry young man on the cricket field. Earlier in the season, during our Shield game against WA at Bellerive, their quick Duncan Spencer — next to Pakistan’s Shoaib Akhtar, the quickest bowler I’ve ever faced — was bowling to me with the second new ball. Again, I played a cut shot and Brendon Julian, who was an unbelievable fielder, dived in the gully and took a screamer. I was out and they were laughing and shouting and throwing the ball in the air. But it was a no-ball! Now they were spewing and I was grinning. Spencer was blowing up big time.

      Next ball, he charged in and, no surprise, it was a short one, right at my throat. I managed to block the ball down at my feet, it dribbled up the wicket and Spencer grabbed it, looked up at me, I eyeballed him back, and then he threw the ball as hard as he could straight at me. It was all I could do to jerk my head back out of the way as the ball went whistling past my chest. In those situations the adrenalin kicks in. It was on! I dropped my bat and ran straight at him and we banged chests in the middle of the pitch as players, umpires and fieldsmen raced in from everywhere. They had to pull us apart before the game could proceed. Later, I found out he was a pretty good boxer, but even if I’d known that then it wouldn’t have stopped me.

      I seriously regretted knocking the stumps over in the Under-19 game against South Australia. A large part of that reaction was frustration at the field they set for me, but that was no excuse. I should have worked out a way to outsmart them. Duncan Spencer was different. He was not entitled to throw the ball at me from three or four metres away. The way I reacted might have looked bad and I guess those people who talk about certain things ‘not being cricket’ will say I was wrong, that I should have left it to the authorities to work out, but that was not how my brain worked in such situations. My natural reflex was to try to set injustices right as quickly as I could, a reaction that was formed in part on the field with my comrades at Mowbray who strongly believed in playing hard but fair. Part of that equation meant if something wasn’t fair you’d go hard. I went where my emotions took me, in this case straight up the pitch to confront the bloke who’d done me wrong.

      AS THE END of the 1993–94 Australian season approached, I talked to a number of people — Dad, Ian Young, Greg Shipperd, David Boon and Rod Marsh among them — and they all agreed that after two nine-month stints at the Academy, two full seasons of Shield and one-day games with Tasmania, and youth tours to South Africa (March 1992) and India and Sri Lanka (August–September 1993), some time away from the game would do me good.

      My life that winter was fairly predictable and really good. On the weekend I went to as many North Launceston footy games with my mates as I could. On Monday nights we went to the dogs, on Thursdays, we played golf ($50 in, winner takes all) and on Tuesday and Thursday nights we were at the gym, in the indoor nets, or just running laps of the oval.

      By the end of a winter of playing pennants for Mowbray my golf handicap had dropped from six to four and my head was clear.

      I guess I could have done what my good mate Shaun Young — Ian’s son — did and sign a deal to play league cricket in England, which he did after being named Tasmania’s Sheffield Shield player of the year. But to tell the truth, a little part of me simply wasn’t game — I didn’t like the idea of being that far from home. Going over with a squad was one thing, going over on my own seemed pretty daunting. I guess I was still a Rocherlea boy learning his way around the world and I wasn’t going out there unless it was with a tour group.

      The plan was to take a complete break from cricket from April to September and I did that except for when Rod Marsh invited me to be part of an Australian XI that played three games against an Indian XI in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. It was fantastic to share a dressing room with some of the country’s best young cricketers, including Stuart Law, Jimmy Maher, Andrew Symonds, Damien Martyn, Justin Langer, Brad Hodge, Darren Berry, Shane Lee, Matthew Nicholson, and a future Tassie captain in Daniel Marsh, but the real buzz was to play against a team that included some big names in world cricket.

      There was a touring group of Indian players, including Sunil Gavaskar, Gundappa Viswanath, Ravi Shastri, Sandeep Patil, СКАЧАТЬ