At the Close of Play. Ricky Ponting

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      Loyalty and trust are two of the most important traits that I look for in a person. They are certainly core values in my life and are becoming even more important as I grow older and wiser. A successful team will have a high level of trust and loyalty built into its values and performance. The individuals within that team will have a strong team ethic as a natural behaviour, having taken themselves out of their individual approach and behaviour. These individuals are conscious of the needs of their team-mates, providing a level of co-operation and trust that helps the whole team perform at its best.

      I probably trusted people too much. While I was aware that not everyone shared my views on the importance of putting the team before oneself, I still gave all of my team-mates the opportunity to develop these characteristics to strengthen the team. If players broke mine or the team’s trust, I would let them know straight away. I would make it very clear that they had let the group down and they needed to go away and rebuild the team’s trust, my trust, and their own trust. Most of the time, this happened, and I’d sit back and watch the players do their best to make up for their indiscretions. If they fell back again, for a second or third time, I was a lot harder on them but overall was probably very forgiving.

      My own loyalty to the team and my players was really important to me. I was absolutely willing to back all the players I played with. I wanted stability around the group and would do my best to fight change. I wanted new players who came into the group to feel this loyalty and trust. I treated everyone as an equal and went out of my way to give new players this feeling, in the aim they didn’t feel less valued than those players who had been with the group for a long time.

      AS A YOUNG PLAYER, I was often surprised by the self-importance of some cricket officials. Not all of them — there were many smart, hard-working administrators who went way beyond the call of duty for the sake of the game and its players, but there were others who I came to view as nothing more than hangers-on. These people seemed to be there for what they could get out of it, the free lunches and the plum seats in the stands. They were the bosses and we Test players merely the workers who if they had their way would come and go from the tradesmen’s entrance. Their attitude whenever a cricketer or group of cricketers sought improvements to wages or playing conditions appeared to be simple: ‘If you don’t like what you’re getting, there are thousands of others out there who’d gladly play for nothing.’

      Some, astonishingly, were past top-level players, who’d had this attitude ingrained into them and now fought to preserve the status quo for as long as they could. Here’s just one example. In 1997, our manager Alan Crompton agreed to a request from Mark Taylor for the players’ wives and partners and children to travel with the team for the month from the start of the second Test match. I was only 22, but even I could see the benefits of this move, not least for how the older guys treasured the chance to share the experience with their kids. Today, few would argue with the concept of families being on tour, but things were different back then. I learned recently that a number of Board directors, one of whom was a former Test player, were vehemently against the innovation, their argument being, I guess, that ‘it didn’t happen in my day’.

      By the mid 1990s, the senior members of the Australian side were sick of this. I might have been new to international cricket, but it seemed to me that in arguing for a better deal my experienced and battle-hardened team-mates had a pretty fair case. And so it was that I was a first-hand witness as men like Tim May, Shane Warne, Steve Waugh and Ian Healy fought long and hard to win Australia’s front-line cricketers a much better deal than we might have otherwise enjoyed. Their battle also led to an improved relationship between the players and the Australian Cricket Board, and it increased the professionalism of the Board, too. In the years that followed, the way our administration thought and operated finally moved with the times, and some of the Board’s revenue streams— including media rights, sponsorship and merchandise — increased dramatically. This would not have happened, at least not as quickly, if my team-mates, some of the great players of the 1990s, had declined to make a stand or if some of the officials had got their way.

      Having gone on to captain the Australian team, and to have enjoyed so much of the fruits of their labours, it would be nice to describe here how I played a major role in the birth of the Australian Cricketers’ Association (ACA), but the truth is I was on the periphery. I certainly didn’t feel underpaid — I was probably the best-paid 21-year-old in Tasmania — but that didn’t stop me being 100 per cent behind whatever direction Maysie, Tugga, Warnie and Heals wanted us to go in. I was young and new to international cricket, but I believed strongly in the concept of ‘team’ and I had complete faith in the leadership group. ‘You can count me in,’ I quickly said after the ACA concept was explained to me.

      For me, the story began at the start of my first major trip — the West Indies in 1995 — when everyone in the team was invited to a pre-tour meeting in Sydney. Thinking back, it was a pathetically unprofessional scene: the players were lying on a bed or on the floor while then Board CEO Graham Halbish told us how things would be. Some of the players were clearly frustrated with Halbish’s responses to their questions on subjects like player payments, personal sponsorships, TV rights and insurance, and there were some terse exchanges.

      This was also the meeting when we were officially told that Salim Malik had been accused of attempting to bribe Tim May, Shane Warne and Mark Waugh, a story that had just been broken in the newspapers, and that Mark and Shane had been punished by the Board for ‘supplying information’ to an Indian bookmaker. Apparently, we were firmly told these matters were not to be discussed with anyone outside the room, but I can’t recall that direction being given. I guess I’d tuned out by then.

      I was new to debates about player payments. Whatever they wanted was fine by me; whatever they paid me was more than I could have dreamed of when I was pushing lawn mowers for Ian Young at Scotch Oakburn College, and more than any of my mates from school were earning. More than once on that Windies tour I heard team-mates comparing how much we were paid to the huge sums being earned by stars from other sports, how poorly Shield cricketers were being treated and the restrictive nature of the Board’s player contracts, but I hardly stopped to listen.

      The Australian Cricketers’ Association was formed after the tour, with Tim May, whose Test career had come to an end, getting the gig as our union boss. Over the next two years Maysie tried to get the idea of payments for Test and Shield players to be tied to the Board’s revenue, but the Board wouldn’t have a bar of that. It wouldn’t even discuss the concept.

      You’d think people would have learned their lesson. Back in the early 1970s Bill Lawry and then Ian Chappell had stood up to the Board (in those days the Board was really just one man, Sir Don Bradman). Bill lost the captaincy after demanding a fair go for his exhausted players and when Ian had no more luck in demanding fair compensation Kerry Packer leveraged the situation to split cricket in half by offering proper pay to anyone who joined World Series Cricket.

      Here we were fighting the battle again.

      Late in the 1997 Ashes tour, between the fifth and sixth Tests, the ACA organised a get-together in a conference room at our hotel at Canterbury. The thing that stands out most clearly for me about that meeting is how stuffy the hotel was because of a lack of air-conditioning. James Erskine, a high-profile sports businessman, was brought on board to negotiate with the ACB on the players’ behalf, and he was introduced to us at the meeting. The Board had been stonewalling, СКАЧАТЬ