At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting

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СКАЧАТЬ said nice things about the way I batted, but I was very disappointed. I thought I’d cost us the game.

      Four weeks later, the two teams met again in Brisbane, and this time we were chasing 253 to win and Michael Bevan (who’d been dropped from the top Australian team) and I were going all right. Then, totally unexpectedly, David Boon came on to bowl. If Warne was the Ace in the pack in the previous game, this time Mark Taylor was playing his Joker. It was very good captaincy. Now Boonie didn’t really enjoy bowling, he never bowled for Tasmania and in the previous 11 years he had sent down the grand total of 6.4 overs in ODI cricket, and taken exactly no wickets.

      I knew he’d come on to bowl for my benefit — they knew how much I idolised Boonie and that I’d probably be too scared to play a shot, for fear of getting out. I figured he’d probably bowl off-breaks, and I think that’s what they were. And jeez they were hard to get away. ‘Don’t you get out, Ponts,’ he kept chirping down the wicket, ‘If you do, I won’t ever let you forget it.’

      ‘Bowled Boonie,’ chimed in wicketkeeper Ian Healy, as if he was keeping to Warnie or Tim May.

      My fellow ‘Swampie’ admitted later that it was he who had conned the captain into giving him a bowl. ‘He’ll be that scared of getting out he might not go for many,’ he’d said. Boonie didn’t get me out, but my fellow Swampie only went for 17 from four overs, at a time when we needed more than that. They’d outsmarted me. Bevo and I both ran ourselves out as we lost our last eight wickets for 52 runs, and we could only rue another opportunity lost. The real casualty, though, was poor Phil Emery. So impressed was Mark Taylor with Boonie’s bowling against me that he used him again in the second of the World Series Cup finals (we’d beaten England once and Zimbabwe twice to finish second on the table after the round-robin games), and this time he bowled five overs for just 13 runs and knocked Phil over with a slow, straight delivery that was somehow inside-edged back onto the stumps. Afterwards, Boonie wouldn’t leave our keeper alone, until eventually Phil had to say, ‘Piss off, will you, I don’t want to hear about it again!’

      We lost that best-of-three finals series 2–0, but we ran them mighty close. It came down to the 50th over of their run-chase, and our quick, Greg Rowell, bowled nearly the best last over in the history of the game: five perfect yorkers before a low full toss just outside off-stump was slashed over gully by Heals to win them the game. The second game of the finals series wasn’t as exciting, but they still needed 49 of their 50 overs to get home.

      The other thing was we beat England in one of the games. Which just goes to show how much depth there was in our cricket.

      I think the Australia A experiment was a fruitful exercise, but having gone on to captain Australia myself I can see why Tubby Taylor didn’t like the concept (and he certainly wasn’t the only one in his team who felt that way). If they won, they were the bad guys, but if they lost, their Test and ODI places were in jeopardy. The guys in the main team told me later they hated getting booed at home and fair enough. Things got heated at times and in one match I remember Matty Hayden and Glenn McGrath going at it before Pidge pushed Matty away. On balance, though, I believe the good outweighed the bad, so if Cricket Australia ever wanted to revive the idea I’d be for it. I didn’t have a very productive tournament, but it was still a chance for me at age 19 to share a dressing room with blokes who’d been there, done that, to showcase my technique on a national stage and to come up against the best in the business in matches that mattered. For guys like Greg Blewett (who came into the Australia A team for our last four games and scored a hundred and two fifties) and Paul Reiffel (who was controversially ‘promoted’ to be Australia’s 12th man for the finals), it offered a springboard into the Australian Test team.

      My ‘lucky break’ came three weeks after the one-day finals, when Michael Slater had his thumb fractured by England fast bowler Devon Malcolm in the fifth Ashes Test at the WACA. Australia was scheduled to fly to New Zealand straight after that game for an ODI tournament that would also feature India and South Africa and with Slats injured, a new batsman was needed. Realistically, the selectors could have picked any one of seven or eight players (Stuart Law, Damien Martyn, Justin Langer, Darren Lehmann, Michael Bevan, Matt Hayden, Tom Moody, Shaun Young …) but I was the bat they went for, which for me, the entire Ponting family and it seemed much of Mowbray, was just unbelievable.

      I was home in Launceston when the phone call came late on a Thursday. I have to admit there was a celebration that night and a stack of phone conversations the next day, as friends, family, cricket officials and reporters queued up to offer their congratulations. I was also quickly invited to a lunch in the city organised by the Century Club, but was a little embarrassed when I realised that my jeans and collared T-shirt hardly met the dress code of the club where the function took place. Boonie, much more up on these sorts of things, was wearing a jacket and tie. Mind you, if I’d known more formal wear was required I’m not sure what I would have done, because at that point in my life I certainly didn’t own a suit and I’m not sure if I even had a necktie to my name.

      With all this activity, it took a little while to sink in that I really was an Australian cricketer. The best chance I had to think about what was happening to me came on the Saturday, when I turned out for Mowbray against Launceston, opened the batting, and was out in the second over for a duck. Those who say cricket is a great leveller know what they’re talking about. On the Sunday, I was at Bellerive, playing for Tassie against WA in a Mercantile Mutual one-dayer, and this time I made it to 10 when we batted. I tried to cover-drive Brendon Julian on the up but hit a catch to Damien Martyn, my Australia A captain, at cover. ‘Take that to New Zealand with you,’ Martyn sneered at me as I began the long walk back to the pavilion.

      Twenty-four hours later, I was on the plane to Wellington, wearing a blazer with a very similar crest to the one on the blazer Uncle Greg wore to England in 1989, sitting in the same block of seats as some of the biggest names in Australian cricket. It was a happy time. The guys had just retained the Ashes pretty emphatically and their partners and children had all come along too. Mark Taylor was accompanied not just by his wife Judi and son William, but also their new baby Jack, who was less than two weeks old when he set off on his first overseas trip.

      I wasn’t too intimidated by the whole experience. In a way I had been preparing for it all my life and I had already met most of the guys on the plane somewhere in my travels. Initially, I stuck close to the blokes from the Australia A team, such as Grew Blewett and ‘Pistol’ Reiffel, but of course I knew Warnie, Boonie and Glenn McGrath pretty well and a guy I found I had plenty in common with was Mark Waugh, who loves talking racing, particularly harness racing. A day out at the Dunedin Golf Club, when I discovered that Blewey and I (the two youngest guys in the team) had the lowest handicaps, was an off-field highlight, not least for the way the senior guys reacted when Warnie claimed he played off 14. I heard the term ‘burglar’ whispered more than once before we teed off and then shouted by just about everyone after the wonder leggie walked away with all our prizemoney. The vibe through the group was terrific. When I look back on that short tour — indeed, on my first couple of seasons in the Australian set-up — I can’t help but think how lucky I was to start my career as a junior member of a team on the rise.

      I played in all four of our games, batting six against South Africa and New Zealand (scoring 1 and then 10 not out) but being promoted to first-drop for the game against India, when I made 62 from 92 deliveries. It wasn’t the most flamboyant dig of my life, but at the time I felt it was one of the most important because I made this half-century in a fair-dinkum one-day international (remember the Australia A games weren’t granted full status) in front of men whose respect I craved. Every time one of them said, ‘Well played,’ I felt even more important. In the final I was back at No. 6 and I walked to the wicket with us needing 17 to win and more than 20 overs available in which to get them. David Boon was at the other end and he challenged me to be with him at the end, two Swampies together. I was 7 not out when we sealed our six-wicket victory, and after the presentation, back in our dressing room, Boonie led us in a triumphal singing СКАЧАТЬ