Читать книгу At the Close of Play - Ricky Ponting - Страница 10

SO MUCH OF WHO I AM is where I came from.

It started here and in a lot of ways it’s right that it ends here in these dressing rooms. I’m two months retired from Test cricket and back playing for the Mowbray Eagles. Back where it all began.

I entered these rooms as a boy and left them 30 years later. I wore the baggy green cap at the crease and the Australian captain’s jacket at the toss. I wore one-day colours too in an era when we were unbeatable at World Cup cricket. I wore them all with pride, at all times striving to be the best I could, but if you stripped all that away you would find what matters most and what kept me going: cricket.

It is simple really. I loved the game, the rituals, the fierce competition and the equally fierce mateship it promoted.

Dressing rooms, hotels, cricket grounds and aeroplanes are the places where my life has been lived.

The rooms are our refuge. For Test players they’re a place away from the cameras, journalists, crowds and constant glare. For club cricketers they’re a sanctuary where you can be with your mates away from work and the grind of daily life. You check in Saturday morning and you check out Saturday night a little wobbly from the long day and a few drinks after the game.

Every club cricketer has got a dressing room routine, sometimes it’s hard to pick the pattern in the mess, other times it’s obvious. Me? I’m not neat, I take the bats out and stand them up to clear some room in the jumble of the kit bag. The gloves are numbered, but in no order and as the game goes on things spread out further. Matthew Hayden said I spread my gear round like a ‘scrub turkey’ but he was almost as bad; Justin Langer, Mike Hussey they were like me; others were neat as pins. Damien Martyn was, and Michael Clarke and Brad Haddin verge on the obsessive, everything laid out like it’s a display in a store window. Marto would mark the edges of his territory with tape and warn us not to let our mess trespass within. In different grounds we had different seating patterns that established themselves over the years.

Spreading the bats and placing your bag somewhere is about marking your turf, setting out the boundaries of your space.

From the time I was small I was drawn to the equipment. The bats, the shoes, the gloves and the pads … I was always looking at what somebody else had, always picking up bats and feeling them. They are, I suppose, the tools of the trade. If I’d followed through on that building apprenticeship when I left school I wonder if I’d have had the same romantic attachment to what was in the toolbox.

Occasionally you’ll meet a cricketer who couldn’t give a toss, but most of us, particularly batsmen, are obsessed with our gear. Huss would carry a set of scales with him to ensure the bat was an exact weight. If it was over, out would come the sandpaper and he would start to scrape away. I’d give him a bit of grief about it, but when he wasn’t around I’d weigh mine too. Most of us arrive with an arsenal of bats: the lucky one, the one that’s almost broken in, the one that’s there and about …

The secret to a good one is how it feels in your hands and the soft tonk sound a new ball makes on good willow. Your ear tells you. I suppose a guitar or a piano is the same, but you’d have to ask a musician if that’s right.

My game bat never comes out until the morning of the match, it never gets an appearance at practice. The others are works in progress, bits of willow that will, with a bit of tuning and knocking, make it to game-bat status one day. Like players, bats have to earn a place in a game.

WE PONTINGS ARE WORKING-CLASS PEOPLE from a working-class part of Launceston and our entertainment consisted of footy in winter, cricket in summer and golf whenever we could. It was the same with everybody we knew.

From the time I was old enough to ride my bike past the end of the street I would come down to watch the Mowbray Eagles play. I was always drawn to the cricket ground and the dressing room. Uncle Greg played for the Eagles before he moved on to the Shield side and then to Test cricket. Maybe it was him who got me down there the first time, but I knew Dad had played for the same team and most of the adults in my life had something to do with the club. Every Saturday morning I’d be up early, have a quick breakfast and then climb onto my BMX and race down to here or wherever they were playing. If somebody was around I’d have a hit in the nets while the old blokes of the district went about the serious business in the middle, but the best of the times were in their half-lit dressing rooms.

When they were on the field I’d come in and go through the kits. Weighing the bats in my hands, feeling the grips and the balance and examining the grain. Looking back it was pretty rudimentary gear, but at the time it seemed possessed of some sort of magic. I’d try on the gloves and the inners that were way too big for me and I’d memorise where everything was before I touched it to make sure it went back exactly there, so when they came in hot and sweaty from a couple of hours on the field everything would be where they’d left it, and I’d be in the corner where they expected me to be.

I was small and could hide quietly in a corner so you wouldn’t necessarily know I was there. I would spend hours there listening to them talk about cricket as they drank beer and cooled down after play. It was a conversation I longed to join and one that when I did I’ve stayed engaged with all my life. Back then I was soaking it up like a sponge. Listening to their deep, gruff voices cracking jokes and weaving stories about that place out in the middle where I would long to be.

The Mowbray boys had a reputation for being the hardest cricketers around. When we played Launceston or Riverside it was almost class war and the teams from the other side of the river used to quietly dread crossing into our territory. After the game, however, they were always welcome for a drink in the rooms.

Sometimes Dad would drag me home early, other times someone would say ‘come on young fella’ and throw my bike in the back of their car and drive me home. Being the first to arrive and last to leave is a habit I’ve maintained ever since those early days.

And today I’m back here at the cricket club that started it all.

When, as captain of the Australian Test team, I would hand players their first baggy green I would tell them that they were following in a grand tradition and to think about the people who had worn it before, but I would also ask them to think about all the others out there at club and state level and how much it would mean to them.

Cricket’s given me everything but it’s taken things from me too. I’m a Mowbray boy and it’s here I feel at home and it’s probably the greatest regret of my life that the game took me away from here too soon. As a boy I just wanted to be one of the men in this dressing room, but I suppose the trade-off wasn’t too bad. Instead of sharing victory with these men I shared it with some of the great cricketers of our time and some of my greatest mates. Matty Hayden, Marto, Lang, Gilly, Warne, Pidge … we ruled the world for a while there, climbed the mountain and we were as close as men can be. Having said that, I am just as close and just as comfortable with the people I met in these rooms when I was still a boy. The blokes who put their hands on my shoulder and pointed me in the right direction.

NATURALLY I’M THE FIRST in the rooms at Invermay Park this morning. Had to open up myself. It’s fitting in a way as I’ve always been the first to arrive. The last to leave. Lately I’d found myself looking up expecting to see Gilly or Marto or Lang only to find they’ve gone and the spot that was theirs has been taken by someone else. One by one they had all left the dressing room until I was the last one left.

Rianna, my wife, has a way of putting things in perspective. When everybody had become emotional at my retirement ahead of the Perth Test she said, ‘He’s not dead yet people, it’s just cricket,’ and I love her for that. I love that sense of balance she brings. Recently she came to me and asked if I had really made that many Test runs. She’d seen something on television. Sometimes I think she’s the only person who doesn’t know these things. (There are whole villages in the backblocks of India who know more about my career.) And I love her even more for that.

To be honest it all became a bit overwhelming when I retired from Test cricket and I wish I could have had her sense of acceptance. Admitting to myself that I was no longer up to it, saying the words out loud to Rianna and then the team and then telling the world; wandering out to bat for that last time and seeing the South Africans lined up in a guard of honour as I approached the WACA pitch … all the other little things that happened for the last time ever in the few weeks leading up to that moment had been like a series of small deaths.

I only ever wanted to play cricket and I could never bring myself to imagine a time when I wasn’t playing the game, but that time is approaching.

Since leaving the Test team I have been like a salmon (Tasmanian, of course) swimming back upstream to where it all started. Before I put this old kit bag away for the last time I had some unfinished business. Cricket swept me up early. One day I didn’t know how to get on a plane and then for a long time after I wondered if I would ever get off one.

International cricket expanded to fill every available space in my life. At the academy I had been able to get home occasionally, but after that visits got rarer until there was barely time to swing by and have a hit of golf with the old man, or a cup of instant coffee with Mum at the breakfast bar. My little brother, Drew, and sister, Renee — my whole family I guess — watched me on television and tracked my progress that way. I suppose all of Australia did and a few other nations as well. I was away when my pa died and will never forget the helplessness as I spoke to Dad on the phone from England. I wasn’t there for him when he needed me.

I’m fiercely loyal. I’m proud of my background and the values I was taught in this town and these dressing rooms. No matter how many five-star hotels I’ve slept in, how many first-class flights I’ve been on, how many politicians and businessmen and celebrities have swept through my life I have never lost the sense that I’m that small-town boy who didn’t have much but wanted for nothing.

So, in what’s left of this last summer of my cricket life, I am trying to catch up.

It’s all rushed as it always is. I trained in Hobart yesterday, drove up to Launceston last night and will head back to Hobart first thing tomorrow. I’m so early for the game I park the car down the road a bit and call Rianna on the phone, even when I’ve done that I’m still the first there so I open the clubrooms and find a space where I figure nobody else will be, just as I did when I was a boy. It’s best to stay out of the way and not be noticed, although that’s impossible today.

It’s early February and the Mowbray Eagles are playing Launceston on the parkland by the Esk River, next to the footy ground.

There’re hundreds at the ground and they line up for autographs and I sign them all when I get a chance. There’s a lot of familiar faces, people from my past introducing me to their kids. My mum and dad are playing golf because it’s a Saturday and that’s what they do and I love them for that. They’re set in their ways but I have never for one moment felt they haven’t been with me every innings I’ve played. They’re locals and they like their lives down here. They don’t like their routine disrupted so they haven’t seen me play that much. They would never think of going overseas to watch a game of cricket. It was hard enough getting them to Perth for my last match. No, there’s a golf course down the road and every Saturday Mum and Dad have a date that starts at the first hole.

I STRAP ON MY PADS and make my way out to the middle. Head down at first, trying to block out the crowd like I do whether I’m at the MCG, in Mumbai or at Mowbray. Hitting the grass I try and get a little feeling in the legs, running on the spot a bit. I make it to the middle and take centre, just as I learned all those years back, and I scratch my studs into the surface of the wicket. Marking out my territory again.

I do it really tough. Cricket is such a great leveller. I last an hour, but it’s as hard an hour as I’ve spent at the crease. The council owns the ground and keeps the grass long and it’s impossible to hit a boundary along the ground. It’s been raining and the wicket is seaming. Finally I shoulder arms to a ball that cuts back a foot or two and takes my off-stump.

This game rarely lets you get ahead of yourself. In the evening we have a few beers in the rooms with our gear all around us and the chat begins all over again.

This is who I am and now this is finishing and I suppose that begs a question I am not too keen to ponder: I might not have been finished with the game, but it was finished with me and am I now the person it has shaped?

Someone said when I walked out of the Australian dressing room the door slammed on a generation of cricket. That might be right, but for me there was something deeper. I had been raised in the game. The dressing room was a cradle, I was formed in these confines, I grew up in them and I have as good as lived in them for all my adult life up to this point. There was only ever the game and the team, the competition and the anticipation, and now it is time to move on.

AFTER MOWBRAY it was back to Sheffield Shield.

Twenty years ago I played my first game for Tassie as a 17-year-old and here I am again. At 38 I get to celebrate for the first time as my home state wins the coveted Sheffield Shield. It’s a great feeling and I’ve had a good year, even knocking up a 200 in the game against NSW that followed my Mowbray visit.

Cricket is a cruel mistress and there she was at me again. I had started the summer in great form in first-class cricket and was the highest run-scorer going into the series against South Africa that would be my last. I felt like my technique, my reflexes, my game were in the best place they had ever been, but when it came time to wear the baggy green I could not make a run. So, going out and hitting a double hundred in the Shield a few months after I had literally landed on my face in Test cricket was a bitter irony, but a sure indication that there’s an enormous mental element to this game. No matter how hard I tried — and believe me there is nobody who tries and trains harder than me — I couldn’t put all the pieces back together at Test level.

It still hurts to admit I had lost it, but it felt good to end the season giving back to my home state, a place that had given so much but for most of my career had been so far away, so hard to get back to.

While Tasmania was winning the Shield competition Australian cricket seemed to be spiralling out of control during a series against India.

They’d barely missed a beat after I left. In my last game in Perth we had a chance to regain the number one rank in world cricket, but now that seemed so far away. In the first series they played after my retirement they easily accounted for a Sri Lankan side. My only contribution was a lap of honour at Bellerive before the Test.

After that things just seemed to go wrong and it was hard to watch. I know more than most how India can get on top of you. The cricket is like the country — it can be breathtaking, but at times it can close in on you and you feel like you are being smothered. It’s easy to lose your way there and the Aussies did. I had never led a team to a series victory in India, but not only did they lose 4–0 on the field, they lost their way off it. The dressing room that I loved had changed in the past few years and as hard as it was to see how bad they were going out in the middle, it was just as hard knowing how much they were struggling off it.

I’d seen the signs. When we lost in Perth I went with the boys to have a drink with the South Africans and I was taken aback by the feeling they had in the sheds. Sure, it’s easy to be happy when you’ve won so well, but they were a tight group, a small travelling band that had gelled together and taken down the enemy and as I looked at them enjoying the afterglow I was gripped with a sense of loss.

We used to be like that, I thought.

Everything has to change in cricket, but I’m not so convinced that all the changes I’ve seen in the past few years are for the better. I was in that Australian dressing room for 20 years and it seemed every time a legend left his corner another arrived to take that place. I saw Adam Gilchrist replace Ian Healy, and Stuart MacGill pick up a lazy 200 wickets when forced to play understudy to Shane Warne. I remember when a 30-year-old called Michael Hussey first got his shot at the big time and a young bloke called Michael Clarke came into the side.

Michael Clarke’s got the captaincy now and it’s fair to say that the trend that started in the last years of my time in the job has continued. First-class cricket just isn’t bringing up the players, particularly batsmen, it once did. There was a time when guys with 10,000 first-class runs, guys who had scored century after century all around Australia and in England for counties, could not get a look-in. Sure there were a few, myself included, who came in young and relatively inexperienced, but we knew we were always under pressure for our places from others who had equal rights to them.

Anyway, I have to let that go now …