At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting

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СКАЧАТЬ Bevan, a left-arm wrist spinner as well as a fine batsman, who was picked as the fourth bowler for the Tests in South Africa ahead of Paul Reiffel, seemingly to stiffen the batting order, even though the pitches over there suited the quicks.

      When Pistol then missed selection for the Ashes tour some critics reckoned his career had been set back for the sake of the captain. At the same time, Steve Waugh replaced Ian Healy as vice-captain, which seemed to have shaken our champion wicketkeeper. You could see, even on the flight to England, that he wasn’t his usual chirpy self. That change, we all understood, had been made so that if Tubby was dropped from the Test XI in England, Tugga would be his replacement, but Heals couldn’t understand why he couldn’t remain the deputy no matter who was in charge. I couldn’t either.

      In the years since, I have read stories of how the team was split, but I can’t recall any major blow-ups, just that mood shift, that sense that things weren’t quite right. Looking back over the statistics, it is a little surprising that Tubby survived his run of outs — at the start of this Ashes tour, he hadn’t scored a Test fifty since early December 1995 and since I’d been dropped he’d scored 111 runs in 10 Test innings — but I was not the sort of person to get involved in conjecture about another player’s place in the team, especially when he was the captain and I was a young bloke lucky to even be on the tour. I’ve always hated seeing behaviour or hearing talk that might divide my team. This time, my attention was devoted to forcing my way back into the side.

      However, there were moments that showed just how much our captain was struggling with the bat, and not all of these were in the early weeks of the tour. The day before the third Test at Old Trafford, I was standing near the entrance to the nets, waiting for my turn to bat, which gave me a close-up view of him struggling to lay bat on ball. It looked like Michael Kasprowicz and Paul Reiffel (who’d been called up as a replacement after Andy Bichel was hurt) were bowling at 100 miles an hour, and when Tubby walked out of the net, he said to me, ‘If you can lay bat on those blokes in there you can have my spot in the Test.’ In reality, batting in that net wasn’t all that difficult. I also recall him saying to Matthew Elliott one day, ‘Next time, I’ll wear your helmet out. If I look like you out there maybe I’ll get a few half volleys and a few cut shots like you’re getting.’ Tubby had convinced himself his batting was just one long hard-luck story. Everything was going against him.

      In fact, if my memory is right, he got a bit lucky. We played Derbyshire just before the first Test and when Tubby batted in our second innings, his former Aussie team-mate Dean Jones dropped him a sitter at first slip, and he went on to make 63. Four days later, the boys were bowled out for 118 after being 8–54 on the first day of the opening Test at Edgbaston. England replied with 478 before Tubby famously saved his career with a sterling 129. Even though we lost the game by nine wickets, the turnaround in our fortunes was massive. Finally, we could stop responding to the rumours that the skipper was about to get dropped and start concentrating on retaining the Ashes.

      To this point, my on-field contribution had been minimal. I batted with little success in our first three matches — an exhibition game in Hong Kong and one-dayers at Arundel and Northampton — and then didn’t play for a month, missing a limited-overs game against Worcestershire, three ODIs, three-day games at Bristol and Derby, and the opening Test. First, I was told they had to give the guys in the one-day team the playing time; then it was the guys in the Test team. At practice, I often had to wait for ages to get a hit and it reached the stage where I was spending more time bowling off-breaks as a net bowler than I was playing off-drives. When I did eventually get a chance, in a three-day game against Nottinghamshire, the first day was washed out completely, and when we did get on the field I batted at three and was lbw for just 19. Fortunately, they chose me again for the next fixture, at Leicester, and I managed to score 64 in our first innings, when the only other contributors to get past 20 were Heals (34) and extras (48). When Michael Bevan failed with the bat in the third Test, which we won to level the series, I was suddenly in the running for the Test team.

      Things really did change that quickly.

      Before the first Test, the selectors were auditioning Greg Blewett and Justin Langer for the No. 3 spot, with Bevo certain to bat at six because his spinners added depth to our bowling attack. Greg made a hundred against Derbyshire, while Lang failed in both innings, and from there my little mate from Perth gradually faded from contention while Blewey hit a century in the first Test and locked up his place for the series. There were three weeks between the third and fourth Tests, and after a sojourn to Scotland we found ourselves at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff, for our tour game against Glamorgan. Tubby won the toss and batted first, and I went out and scored 126 not out, while my main rival for Bevo’s spot, Michael Slater, was out for exactly 100 runs less.

      When we batted again, Slats opened the batting and was out for 7, and I was kept back to give others a knock, as if I was now one of the Test regulars. There was one more game before the fourth Test, against Middlesex at Lord’s, and I was picked again, to bat at six after the guys who had batted one to five in the first three Tests, and the strong impression I was given was that this was being seen as a rehearsal for the big game a week later. If it was, I didn’t do myself any favours — out for just 5 — but it didn’t matter. When they announced the team for Headingley I was in, and I felt the same emotions as when I’d learned I was going to make my Test debut, only this time the stakes were higher. It wasn’t just that this was the Ashes, cricket’s oldest trophy, the contest all budding Aussie cricketers dream about; this time, I really thought my career was on the line, that if I stuffed up this chance I might not get another.

      It’s funny how cricket takes you down a rung. By comparison I’d been reasonably confident when I made my Test debut, but from the moment you’re dropped the game becomes another proposition and the older you get the harder it becomes to deal with those mental pressures. For that reason I have always been wary of axing young players or any player when it comes to that. If you’re going to do it you have to understand the profound effect it will have on the person and be aware that it can genuinely set people back. Greg Chappell always said it was better to give somebody one Test too many rather than one too few and I agree.

      THE OTHER BLOKE who might have been a chance to bat at six for Australia in that fourth Test was Adam Gilchrist but, cruelly for him, he wasn’t available. Instead, he was flying home, having hurt himself during a training session in the lead-up to the third Test. We were playing ‘fielding soccer’, which as its name implies is a game where you pass a cricket ball to a team-mate by throwing it below knee-height and attempt to score. I was standing slightly in front of Gilly when someone threw the ball to his left, and I dived in front of him to try to cut the ball off, he put his left leg in front of my dive, I clipped the side of his knee, and down he went. Within 10 minutes, you could prod your fingers into his leg and it felt and looked like Play-Doh, all the way from his ankle to his knee. The eventual diagnosis was a torn ligament and poor Gilly was on that plane home. We still have a bit of a laugh about my dive being ‘deliberate’ — that was the only way I was going to get a game on the tour. It would have been a bold call, picking our second keeper as a specialist batsman in the Test team, but he had played in two of the three ODIs as a batsman, so it wasn’t completely out of the question.

      I was very sorry to see Gilly depart. In the early days of the tour, when morale wasn’t as bubbly as it could have been it was almost inevitable that we young blokes would seek refuge in each other’s company, and bonds that were first established at the Academy or on youth tours were forged tighter. Gilly and I have a lot in common, from a love of harmless practical jokes to enjoying working hard at practice. But the team-mate I grew especially close to on this tour was Blewey, who shares my passion for golf, and we had time to experience a number of famous courses, including the Belfry, St Andrews, Sunningdale and Royal Portrush.

      The day at St Andrews felt almost like a pilgrimage to me; I’m not sure I felt a similar sense of golfing anticipation until the day I visited Augusta for the US Masters in 2010. However, purely from a quality-of-layout perspective, Royal Portrush on Northern СКАЧАТЬ