Ricky Ponting – At the Close of Play (страница 13)
I WAS BACK ON the mainland in February 1992 to represent the Cricket Academy in one-day games against the South African and Indian teams preparing for the 1992 World Cup which was held in Australia and New Zealand, and this was when I came across a batsman I would get to know well over the next 20 years.
We’d spent a morning practising at the Adelaide Oval and were supposed to go back home for lunch but I asked for permission to stay. I wanted to see this Sachin Tendulkar who everyone was talking about, and I took up a position behind the nets while he had a bat. It’s fair to say I was going to watch him bat for a long time to come, but that day I was studying his technique, trying to see what it was about him.
And then I was named in a 13-man Academy team that toured South Africa in March.
My head, as you can imagine, was spinning. One day I was walking out to bat for Mowbray, then I was being fitted for junior Tasmanian representative teams, flying to the Academy, flying back for more and then I was being fitted for an Australian team uniform. It might have been only the Under-19s but I was an
On that journey from the airport to our flash hotel, I saw squalor, I saw suburbia and then I saw a city that didn’t look too different at first glance from the big cities back home. I’m sure there was much to discover if I ventured out from our hotel, but we’d been told to be very careful if we did go out — these were tense times in Johannesburg — which only reinforced something I’d already decided: I’d stick with the group whenever possible and at other times stay close to home base as often as I could. And to think people thought Rocherlea was hard core …
In retrospect, it seems a bit amazing that the Australian Cricket Board sent a youth team to South Africa at such a critical time in that nation’s history. The country was still governed by a white administration, and no official senior team had gone there in more than 20 years. I was an uncomplicated sports-mad kid from Tassie, so almost all of the politics went over my head, but it was obvious this was a country going through a painful period of change. There was a tension about the place. I can still remember a coaching clinic in Soweto just a week before the referendum in which the white population was asked whether they supported reforms that would eventually lead to fully democratic elections. The enthusiasm, natural ball skills and hand–eye coordination of the kids in that township were special, but the referendum was what everyone was talking about. It was hard even for us not to realise how big this thing was — we’d been told that if the vote went against change, we’d be out of the country on the first available plane. I hadn’t been thinking of all those victims of apartheid; I was thinking only of myself.
Cricketers are not politicians or diplomats — hell, I was a teenager who’d left school at 15 — but as I said earlier, the game was already taking me out of my comfort zone and into extraordinary situations.
Cricket was my focus. It was what I knew; it was what I was good at. If the conversation turned away from cricket, most of the time I just listened, but I loved talking cricket or sport of any kind. On the flight to South Africa, I sat for a long time with our skipper, Adam Gilchrist, a keeper–batsman who was originally from the NSW North Coast but was now playing in Sydney — and all we did was yak about sport and play a dice-like game called ‘Pass the Pigs’ for hours and hours. Getting on the plane, I hardly knew ‘Gilly’ but by the time we landed in Jo’burg we were best mates. He already had a reputation as a special player and from our first practice session I knew that he was so much more advanced in his cricket and the way he thought about the game than I was. He also had a sense of fun that really appealed to me, and a captain’s ability to have a good time but never get himself into trouble. We’d see a lot of each other over the next two decades, and these were skills he never lost. There were a couple of others on that trip who you might have heard of too. One was a long thin farmer’s son who was living in a caravan in Sydney to advance his career. Glenn McGrath was a funny bloke even then. He reckoned the only way he could stand up in his portable home was to pop the air vent in the roof. Blocker Wilson was on that trip too and a leg-spinner, Peter McIntyre, who played a couple of Tests in the mid 1990s.
After easily winning a one-dayer at Pretoria to launch the tour, our second game was at the famous Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg, a three-day contest against the Transvaal Under-23s. In our first innings, I batted at six, and then in our second dig we collapsed to 2–4 and Gilly, our regular No. 4, was feeling crook so someone had to go in at short notice. I put my hand up and went on to bat for nearly three hours for 65. To me, volunteering to bat near the top of the order was nothing exceptional — I always wanted to open or bat at three or four, as it was where I batted in junior cricket in Tassie and it was where I was always keen to bat at Mowbray — but I sensed I earned a bit of respect from my team-mates, and from Rod, too, which set up my whole tour. I finished second on the batting averages, behind South Australia’s Darren Webber, and topped the bowling averages, too, taking three wickets for 43 with my part-time off-breaks. More important than any numbers, even though I was younger than my team-mates, I didn’t feel out of place. I was heading in the right direction.
Life as a professional cricketer sees you on the road more often than being at home, which sounds glamorous to many — but let me assure you that after doing it for almost 20 years, I’m looking forward to settling down in retirement in our new home in Melbourne.
The highlight without a doubt has always been the tours to England. There’s something very special about an Ashes tour when you can spend up to four months on the road with your team-mates. It builds a special camaraderie as you travel around the country by bus, playing at the traditional grounds of cricket and living in a culture that is similar to what we are used to at home. New Zealand is very similar as well, plus it has some amazing golf courses, so it’s always been one of my preferred touring spots.
Test cricket tours, despite the length of time away, tend to give you the best opportunity to adapt to life on the road. You can unpack a suitcase and make yourself more comfortable in your home away from home. We would stay in each Test location for at least a week, so we could settle in and create a few little home comforts. But one-day cricket was mostly the direct opposite. Always on the move, travelling from city to city as well as regional and smaller towns to play, made it much more difficult to settle down. But that’s life as an international cricketer.
A lot of international cricket is played in developing countries, so I have seen great diversity on my travels around the globe. India is the best example of this for me, where I’ve seen its grandeur, royalty and wealth but have been really touched and moved by its poverty and its underprivileged areas. Front of mind for me is the work the Mumbai Indians do with the ‘Education for All’ initiative. It’s focused on the 62 million primary school age children who drop out of school before grade eight. They are doing amazing work with these children, and I was most fortunate to see it all first-hand in 2013. Don’t get me wrong: I have been so lucky to see some of the most amazing sights, cities and wonders of the world, but it’s the diversity and social inequality that has probably left the biggest impression on me. Cricket makes a big difference in these countries and we, as international cricketers, should continue to do everything we can to visit these areas, give the people something to enjoy and aspire to and most of all, do our bit to put a smile on the faces of those less fortunate than ourselves.
ON THE PLANE HOME from South Africa, I was confident I’d never be going back to the groundsman’s job at Scotch Oakburn College. As it happened I was only going back home to leave again.
My year was pretty much mapped out: after just a couple of weeks back with Mum, Dad, Drew and Renee I’d be returning to Adelaide, first to train with the Australian Under-19 Development Squad and then to live for the rest of the year as a full-time resident at the Academy. My life was now wall-to-wall cricket, whether in the nets, playing in games, talking cricket or doing physical work and mental conditioning for cricket. I’d get a little homesick at times but never to the point where I was sitting in my room depressed about the fact I wasn’t home. Rod Marsh ran a tight ship and if anyone fell short of his high standards we paid a price, sometimes individually, often as a group. Washing cars and gym sessions that moved from eight to six in the morning were two of his favourite punishments.