Читать книгу At the Close of Play - Ricky Ponting - Страница 21

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 1994 (and I’d been there with an Academy team in 1993), fighting in the country had escalated in recent times and there was a real fear that terrorists might see the World Cup as a vehicle to push their cause. Further, some Australian players and coach Bob Simpson had received threats suggesting their lives were in danger if they went to Sri Lanka, a frightening state of affairs. However, I was still keen to tour and I went into the meeting dreading the idea that choosing not to tour might be an option. With hindsight, thinking this way was naive, and I have to say that not everyone shared my enthusiasm, but I didn’t want to miss a minute of being an international cricketer.

Mark Taylor initiated discussions by asking what our alternatives were. Did we have to play every game or could we just go to India and Pakistan, where all our World Cup matches bar the Sri Lanka group game were scheduled? Was it one Aussie player out, all out? The ACB bosses said we could pull out of our pre-tournament camp and opening game in Colombo, but if we did that it would put back relations between Australia and Sri Lanka by a decade.

‘Okay then,’ said Tubby. ‘What security measures will be in place?’

First, we were assured that the ACB had been to Pakistan and was happy with the arrangements that had been promised. For Sri Lanka, we would be treated the same way as a visiting head of state. We would leave the airport from a different exit to the general public, after going through a special passport control. There would be no parked cars on the sides of the roads we’d be travelling on and armed guards would look after us 24 hours a day, patrol the ground at practice and ride with us on the team bus. Our luggage and gear would travel on a different bus to us, and no one else would be allowed on our floor of the hotel. The only time we could escape this protection was when we were in our hotel rooms. It all blew me away, such a total contrast to the days when I used to ride my BMX bike from Rocherlea to Invermay Park.

We were grateful for all this, though that feeling was tempered by the news that the ACB had only just received a fax saying that we would be greeted by a suicide bomber when we landed in Colombo. Craig McDermott had received a chilling message that stated he would be ‘fed a diet of hand grenades’, Warnie was advised to look out for a car bomber, and a couple of their players had told us on the field during matches that if we went to Colombo we’d be ‘blown up’. Our security experts advised us that if we received a suspicious-looking parcel it would be best not to open it.

Before the final day’s play of the Test, we had a players’ meeting in which we decided unanimously to go, with the one change that our pre-tournament camp would be in Brisbane. But two days later, a huge bomb blast exploded in the centre of Colombo, just a few blocks from what was going to be our hotel, killing more than 100 people. When I heard about that, I suddenly didn’t want to go to Sri Lanka. I would have gone if we’d been made to, but soon the call was made by the ACB, in consultation with Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs, to abort the Sri Lankan leg of our tour. We were criticised by some people on the subcontinent and a few dopey columnists in England, and the World Cup organising committee ruled it a ‘forfeit’ and gave the two points to Sri Lanka, which seemed a bit ridiculous but didn’t worry us at all. Thinking about it now, I’m sure not going was 100 per cent the right decision.

SO WE WOULD BE going to the World Cup, but one man who wouldn’t be travelling with us was David Boon, who called time on his international career after the Tests against Sri Lanka. It is one of my regrets in cricket that even though we played three times together at the highest level I never managed to bat with Boonie in a Test match. However, that doesn’t diminish the huge influence he had on me as a cricketer, how much he helped me from the time he was making it possible for all young cricketers in Northern Tasmania to realistically dream of greatness to the days we were together in the same Aussie dressing room.

Of all the things he taught me about big-time cricket, the thing that stands out most for me is patience. I was lucky in that from when I first came into the Tasmanian team, I could observe him closely at training and in games and study the manner in which he made the bowlers come to him, how he would wait until the ball was in his area, and then he’d score his runs. ‘You have to know your game,’ he would say. ‘And try to stay out in the middle for as long as you can.’

I thought I knew what he meant when he advised me to ‘know my game’, but in fact I didn’t really get it for a few more years. And that last line might sound obvious, but in my early days in the Tassie team I often threw away a potential big score by trying to blaze away. A rapid-fire fifty might excite the fans, but Boonie knew it was big hundreds that win games and impress the selectors. After I scored my first ODI century, I really felt a part of the side, much more than I did after making 96 in my first Test. In cricket, the difference between two and three figures can be huge, even if it is a matter of two, three — or four — runs.

Unfortunately, my promotion to the Australian side coincided with Boonie’s fight to prolong his Test career. From afar, I’d seen the media pursue out-of-form stars in the past, great players like Allan Border, Merv Hughes, Dean Jones and Geoff Marsh. But that was when I was a spectator; now I got a whole new perspective on the situation. I was at a stage of my career where everything that was written about me was positive, so I was always keen to head to the sports pages. Boonie, about to turn 35 and — as far as some reporters were concerned — well past his use-by date, probably hadn’t read a paper in weeks, but he couldn’t avoid the whispers, the well-meaning advice to ‘ignore what they’re writing about you’, the negative tone of the journalists’ questions. Watching him in the nets, I wondered if he was working too hard, but there was no way a young pup like me was going to say anything. I saw how stoic he was in the dressing room at the WACA after he was fired by Khizar Hayat (I think I’d have flipped in the same situation) and I admired how he fought so hard in Melbourne to score 93 not out on the day Murali was no-balled by Darrell Hair. He went on to his final Test century the following day.

I also was taken by the way he handled his omission from the one-day squad, a decision announced straight after the Perth Test. The sacking of a long-time player always cuts at the psyche of a team, but there was no way Boonie was going to sulk or make it awkward for his mates; instead, as usual, he was one of the first guys down to the hotel bar to toast our Test victory before we headed back to Launceston — me to play golf with my brother, Drew, at Mowbray; Boonie to visit his wife Pip in hospital, where she was recovering from a minor operation. Of all the things on his mind, that was easily the one he was most concerned about.

I’ll never forget how good he was to me on that flight, despite all the turmoil that must have been spinning through his head. He told me how proud he was seeing a ‘fellow Swampie’ making runs in Test cricket, and how determined he was for the two of us to go to England together on the 1997 Ashes tour. It wasn’t to be. I think Boonie found it hard to adjust to being in the Test side but out of the one-day team, and when it became clear he wasn’t going to make the World Cup squad he pulled the pin. He told us at a team meeting just before the Adelaide Test, reading from notes he’d prepared so he got the words right, emphasising how much playing for Australia meant to him and how he had treasured the camaraderie he shared with his team-mates. For 30 seconds straight afterwards there was silence, before Tubby, Simmo and a few of the boys told Boonie how grateful they were to have shared the ride with him.

I didn’t say anything, not then anyway. It was a bit different for me, because Boonie was not so much my team-mate as my hero. One thing he kept saying was that he was very comfortable with his decision to retire, that it was the right time. Well, it might have been the correct call for him, but I’d had visions of playing a lot of Test cricket with David Boon. I wish I could have batted with him in a Test match. One part of my cricket dream was over almost as quickly as it had begun.