At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting

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СКАЧАТЬ the Caribbean and the belief I had in my ability meant I felt a genuine sense of belonging when I played top-level cricket, even though I was not yet 21. This was a step up from the confidence the Century Club had in me when they sponsored my trip to Adelaide, that Rod Marsh had in me when he freely told others that he thought I could play, or that companies like Ansett, Kookaburra, Launceston Motors and the Tasmanian TAB were showing in me when they signed me up for cricket scholarships or sponsorship deals.

      It was as if I’d moved from standby to actually having a seat on the plane. I felt like I’d never have to work again. And in a sense that’s what happened, because playing cricket has always been a joy for me. I’ve never felt like I had to be there for someone else’s sake, or because I needed the money. I think if I’d never played in a grade any higher than park cricket I would have been one of those blokes who kept playing forever, into my fifties, just because I love the game so much. I was getting well paid for doing something I would have done for nothing. Few people get this lucky and I’ve never forgotten that.

      Every year of my cricket life I’ve had to pinch myself.

      Being honest shouldn’t be that hard. It’s a value that every person should have. Honest team members create an honest team — and if you don’t have that, then trust and team values break down. Honesty has been a core value of mine for as long as I can remember. It’s been essential to me, right through my whole career — being honest to myself and to my team-mates, to the media and, above all, to the Australian public and cricket fans all over the world. It’s not a trait that you manufacture; it’s a way you live your life.

      It’s also the way you should play your cricket. Honesty in the way you prepare, in your training, in your interactions with your team-mates and in your mental approach to a game. Honesty is integral to how you play the game. Always giving 100 per cent, being true to the values of the team and of your country, and of your team-mates. It’s also about being true to the spirit of the game of cricket. Playing to win, playing within the rules and playing with the integrity that is expected of all cricketers. Honesty is for the public eye but also behind closed doors with the way you communicate and interact with others. For me, honesty is not negotiable.

      

      IN MY FIRST THREE TESTS, I saw a ball-tampering controversy in Perth, Muttiah Muralitharan no-balled for throwing by umpire Darrell Hair in Melbourne and David Boon announce his retirement from international cricket in Adelaide. In between, relations between the Australian and Sri Lankan teams became pretty ugly, to the point that the two teams refused to shake hands after we won the World Series Cup in Sydney.

      Simmering in the background was the continuing match-fixing controversy, which had become a headline story in Australia back in early 1995 when it was revealed that Mark Waugh, Shane Warne and Tim May had accused Salim Malik of trying to bribe them to play poorly in a Test match and a one-day international on Australia’s tour of Pakistan in 1994.

      During the following October, Malik was cleared by Pakistan’s Supreme Court. But the so-called Malik affair didn’t end there. It was to be in and out of the courts for another ten years.

      Then on January 31, 1996, two days after Boonie’s farewell Test, a huge bomb blast went off in Colombo, where we were scheduled to play a World Cup match two-and-a-half weeks later. The loss of life was horrifying. Some of the guys received death threats, I was being asked questions about being a possible terrorist target, and not everyone was keen to go to the subcontinent for the Cup. I hadn’t been prepared for any of this and wasn’t sure what to make of it all.

      I was supposed to be soaking up every moment of being a Test cricketer, but there was so much going on around the games it was almost overwhelming.

      The ball-tampering episode in Perth was a bit of a joke, because the umpires didn’t take the allegedly damaged ball out of the game, so it was a bit hard later on for anyone to determine if the Sri Lankans had done what the umpires reckoned they had. In the Boxing Day Test, Darrell Hair cast his verdict against Murali from the bowler’s end, where I would have thought it was harder to make a clear judgment than if he was standing at square. Mark Waugh reckoned Hair’s no-ball calls were the worst thing ever, because for the rest of the day every time Murali bowled the crowd was yelling, ‘No ball!’, which was very off-putting for the batsmen. Mark was eventually bowled, when he gave himself some room and late cut the ball onto his leg stump. Not his off-stump, his leg stump!

      In our dressing room, we initially thought Murali had been no-balled for over-stepping the popping crease, but when the umpire kept going we quickly realised something awful was happening and I couldn’t help thinking that if there was a problem with his action there had to be a better way to fix it than to slaughter him on such a public stage. There had been some talk among us about Murali’s action, with a few guys adamant that his action wasn’t right, but I’d say the overriding view was that it wasn’t for us to worry about. Our job was to work out a way to counter him. I came to see his action as unusual rather than bent, and because his top-spinner often deviated from leg to off, we had to be wary of him in the same way we’d be careful against a leg-spinner with a good wrong’un. Over the years, scoring runs against Murali would become among the biggest and most enjoyable challenges I’d face as a Test batsman.

      As things turned out, the only time Sri Lanka beat us in Australia in 1995–96 was in a one-dayer in Melbourne, the irony for me being that this was the game in which I scored my first ODI century. Batting at No. 4 and in at 2–10 in the seventh over, I lasted until the last ball of the innings, when I was run out for 123. There are two things I clearly remember about this knock. One, I hit a six, which was very rare for me in those days. I wasn’t sure I could hit it that far on bigger grounds like the MCG and the SCG, which is a reflection on where I was in my physical development and also on the bats we used then compared to today’s much more powerful pieces of willow. Here, I charged down the wicket and hit one as hard as I could right out of the middle of my bat … and it landed three rows beyond the boundary fence. And two, I didn’t claim the man-of-the-match award. That prize deservedly went to Romesh Kaluwitharana, who set up Sri Lanka’s run-chase with a superb knock of 77 from 75 balls. Ironically, when we talked about the defeat straight after the game we thought his effort was a fluke — it was only his second innings as an opener in ODI cricket and most people in those days still thought it was a top-order batsman’s job to build a platform and help ensure there were wickets in hand for a late-innings assault. In fact, Kaluwitharana’s smashing innings was the start of a revolution that would gain traction during the 1996 World Cup and explode from there in the hands of dynamic top-of-the-order hitters such as Australia’s Adam Gilchrist, India’s Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag, Sri Lanka’s Sanath Jayasuriya and South Africa’s Herschelle Gibbs.

      The best thing about my hundred was that it locked up a World Cup spot for me. I thought I batted really well when I scored 71 in the Boxing Day Test (a game in which I also took my first Test wicket: Asanka Gurusinha, caught by Heals before I’d conceded even a single run as an international bowler and after I thought I had him plumb lbw with a big inswinger), but my batting form in the early World Series Cup games was mediocre and with Steve Waugh due to come back into the team, my place might have been in jeopardy if I’d failed again. Instead, Michael Slater was dropped when Steve returned, Mark Waugh went up to opener and I became the new No. 3. I’d stay at first drop pretty much full-time for the next 15 years.

      THREE DAYS BEFORE the Adelaide Test, we met with the ACB to discuss the World Cup tour. A civil war in Sri Lanka had been going on for more than a decade, and while Australian teams had toured there as recently as 1992 and СКАЧАТЬ