Test of Will Read online

  That series started with Brian under pressure as the captain of a team the Caribbean people would not accept. After decades of watching the West Indies rule international cricket with intimidation, fire and brimstone, the country found itself suddenly represented by a team ranked by many critics as ‘second tier’. That burned them but their frustration turned to outright fury by the end of the First Test when we rolled them for 51 (it would be their lowest ever total before England routed them for 47 in 2004). I think what would have added to Brian’s intimidation was that the confirmation of the Windies’ fall from grace occurred in front of his home crowd. He copped it—and how!

  If I had any thought the pressure that may have been weighing on his shoulders would play into our hands, I was given a rude shock as he put on a masterclass. He and Jimmy Adams batted and batted … and batted for the entire second day of the match against an attack that contained Shane Warne, Jason Gillespie, Stuart MacGill and myself. Both of them were in the zone and we finished the day footsore, bone-weary and wicketless. Brian was destructive. He not only scored his first Test century in two years but he and Adams put on a record fifth-wicket partnership of 322, and it gave their team a foundation for a famous 10-wicket victory. Brian would say 16 years after his gutsy effort that the reason he prized that innings so highly was because of the context in which those runs were scored. ‘The criticism I got even before the Test match was so great, it was not looking promising at all,’ he said. ‘Through the immense pressure, physically and psychologically that I was going through at the time, I really had to muster a lot of courage and commitment. I went and produced what I thought was the best I’ve ever batted under that situation.’

  It really was an incredible effort, especially under the circumstances. And as someone who saw too much of him that day, I agree the innings was built on courage and commitment. It is one of quite a few examples that I call upon when I explain to people why I always rated his wicket so highly. However, while he’ll always be remembered by me as a champion batsman, I found Brian had a touch of Jekyll and Hyde about him. Something I realised early in our contests was that you really never knew what to expect when it was his turn to bat.

  There were times when he would come to the crease and appear so focused that the air literally crackled with anticipation, but there were those other occasions when mentally he seemed to be all over the place and from my perspective he appeared a mess. I’ve heard people say there is a fine line between genius and insanity, and there were days when his antics out in the middle made me wonder whether he walked that fine line. For instance, I vividly remember a Test we played in Antigua because Matthew Hayden chirped him, and it wasn’t really anything that could be considered too bad or over the top, but for reasons best known to Brian he just lost it—and in a big way. He stood in his crease and yelled at the top of his voice: ‘SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!’ I remember thinking to myself, This will be interesting, because Steve Waugh obviously smelt blood, and a few seconds after Brian’s final demand for us to ‘shut up’, he moved to field at short cover and promptly engaged in what was described during Steve’s era as our Test Captain as a spot of ‘mental disintegration’—he turned the screws.

  Throughout my career I never once felt as though I was the underdog, even when the likes of Brian Lara, Sachin Tendulkar, Jimmy Adams, Mohammad Yousuf, Kumar Sangakkara, Rahul Dravid, Graeme Smith or Jacques Kallis were on song, because I knew the plan I was bowling to and I knew what I wanted to achieve. That mentality meant I didn’t ever say to myself ‘I don’t want to bowl at this bloke’, nor did I ever despair and ask myself ‘How do I get this guy out?’, even when they were scoring freely. I was always armed with a plan and I trusted the plan. When Brian came in to bat, I sometimes felt as though I lifted by at least ten per cent. My game plan early in his innings was to bowl around the wicket and bowl full outside off stump with a packed slips, gully and point region. My intention was to tempt him to slash at the ball because he was a batsman who wanted to play his shots and craved the chance to showcase his flair and flamboyance. However, I stacked the field so if he got it slightly wrong I had six or seven blokes ready to take the catch, and I know the field I set played on his mind. Sometimes I thought Brian may have felt as though the Aussies were suffocating him.

  Of course it wasn’t always one-way traffic because there were those times when he’d drop anchor and the sight of him hitting the ball seemed as natural as watching a bird fly or a fish swim. Brian scored some big double hundreds against Australia—and it is worth noting he scored nine centuries in total against us—and on those occasions he was ferocious. He was always a batsman who, regardless of the situation, would play the shot he wanted, and when he was in that frame of mind it didn’t really matter what you bowled. I bagged Brian Lara’s wicket on 15 occasions in Test cricket. The second most successful bowler to dismiss him was Andre Nel of South Africa who got him eight times. We had some great duels and the honours were evenly shared, but my approach was to allow Brian to be his own undoing; it was simply following the old edict of giving someone enough rope to hang themselves. You see, I realised if I bowled enough balls in the right area it would only be a matter of time before he got himself out, and as sure as night follows day, that’s what happened. There was a stage when people joked that it looked as though I could get him out at will because he allowed me to frustrate him. Brian wouldn’t have realised this, but he actually helped me formulate the way I bowled to him the first time we spoke, during the 1995 series we played in the Caribbean.

  Over the years Brian spent a lot of time in our dressing room after a match and he was always warmly welcomed. He was seen as a nice guy—and he is—he’s charismatic and likeable, and I formed the opinion that he was someone who liked to be liked. It was obvious he was happy to enjoy himself and we shared some good times over the years. Something I remember about that series was that it was the only one I ever played in that had a rest day (we didn’t need it in Bridgetown because we won that Test in three days), and I found myself on a replica pirate ship called the Jolly Roger, which was a popular party cruiser, and there I was in Brian’s company. I was still buzzing from my first five-for at Test level and Man of the Match award. Brian had become one of my wickets in the second innings when he nicked one of my deliveries to our wicketkeeper Ian Healy for nine runs. Despite the 10-wicket defeat he was in good spirits and he started the conversation by saying, ‘Well played.’ I thought that was nice, but before I had a chance to reply he continued with, ‘That ball wouldn’t have got anyone else in world cricket. I’m in such good form I was good enough to nick it … I’m telling you, no one else would have got near it.’ From that first sentence he spoke to me he struck me as a very confident guy and I realised you’d need that brand of self-belief to bat like him and to be so good. At that stage in my life I was still a shy young fellow from the bush, and I didn’t say too much. I was happy just to think that I was contributing something to the Australian team and I didn’t take any offence to Brian’s comment about his talent being the reason I dismissed him … there was a compliment in what he said, but I sometimes thought it was directed at himself! In any case, after the function I thought long and hard about what he’d said—‘That ball wouldn’t have got anyone else in world cricket’—and I constantly replayed in my mind the delivery that brought him undone. I realised that my approach to bowling at the left-hander was for the ball to hit the wicket and go away off the wicket, and if I picked that length up it moved ever so slightly, forcing the batsman to play at it in an area where the chances of nicking the ball increased significantly. In opposing Brian you needed to throw in a couple of factors—that he liked to be flamboyant and he wanted to dominate the attack—and I realised that could be used against him.

  Thanks to Brian’s input on the Jolly Roger I found a formula and it served me well over the years that followed. It sometimes pays to listen. The scorecards from our old battles noted that it wasn’t a one-sided battle becau
se on the days he dug in, Brian gave nothing away. One of those knocks was in Adelaide during the 2005–06 series when he scored 226 against us, and 24 boundaries were included in that score. It was yet another Lara masterclass and in the process Brian became Test cricket’s highest run-scorer when he overhauled my old skipper Allan Border’s 11,174 runs by hitting a single to fine leg off my bowling early on the second day’s play. He was in total control for each of the 402 minutes he was at the crease, until I set him up by making it appear as though I planned to send down a bouncer but instead bowled it full at the stumps. It was the only ball of the 298 he faced during that knock that he misread, because he was bowled when he gave himself room to try and hit me over third man. While he scored a double century, I was still happy as a bowler that I’d set a trap and it had worked.

  I wonder how Adam Dale, who was a right-arm fast bowler from Victoria, must have felt about his fate as a bowler when his first match in the baggy green cap saw him pitted against Tendulkar in Bangalore in 1998, and a year later he was thrown in against Lara in Antigua! Some might have considered it a curse but Adam collected Tendulkar’s scalp when he bowled him for 177. And while it would have been seen by some as a David versus Goliath type of battle, I reckon Adam was like me in that he would have enjoyed the challenge fate had picked for him—two of the toughest batsmen on the planet to match wits and pit skills against.

  I think Australia’s current opener, David Warner, has that same destructiveness, but unlike Brian his confidence is in your face. Brian didn’t need to do that because while he wasn’t quite as intimidating as Viv Richards—I thought from watching him on television that Viv had the aura of a prize-fighter—he was born with the strut and swagger that characterises the great West Indians.

  He also had a good sense of humour, as Adam Gilchrist can attest. Adam tells a great story about Brian when he was keeping to Brad Hogg during a game in Grenada—it might’ve been a one-dayer in 2003. In between deliveries, Brian would chat to Gilly and not only tell him the shot he was going to play to the next ball but where he was going to hit it—and he did! As you can imagine, it blew Gilly’s mind … it was amazing and gives an insight into what made Brian one of the sport’s great entertainers.

  I spent time with Brian during the 2015 World Cup when we did some commentary together and what I learned gave me a better insight into what enabled him to dominate in so many of his 131 Tests; to score a century against every Test nation; to hit Test cricket’s highest score of 400 not out; to hammer 501 not out in English County cricket; to score 11,953 Test runs; to record 34 Test centuries; and to notch 48 Test half-centuries. And while he finished with an average of 52, it’s incredible to think he scored 18.8 per cent of the West Indies team’s runs over his career. He was the tenth of 11 children, and with money scarce his first bat was carved from the branch of a coconut tree by one of his older brothers. They’d pick the hardest orange they could find and play cricket in the street. Brian said the fact that he had six older brothers bowling at him gave him an advantage over other kids his age because he said there was nothing quite like matching his skills against the ‘tough guys’ who gave him no quarter. He said, ‘If you wanted an innings out on the street you had to work for it.’

  At a time when West Indies cricket is on the ropes, I was interested to learn of his frustration with the system in the Caribbean because, as he complained, there is no infrastructure, no sponsorship, no money and no cricket academy—things we Australian players all take for granted. He is extremely passionate about West Indies cricket and I think the powers that be over there need to utilise him better than they do, because as a kid who graduated from batting against the older kids with his coconut-branch bat on the streets of Trinidad to conquering the world proves, there are no boundaries for greatness. I don’t know if we’ll see another Brian Lara but, for the sake of West Indies and world cricket, I certainly hope we do … the game needs its entertainers.

  19

  TAKING STRIKE

  And Glenn McGrath dismissed for two, just 98 runs short of his century.

  —Richie Benaud, on yet another innings of rich promise that was cut down too early

  There’s no number 11 in history who hasn’t done his best, whether he’s got 0 or 106 not out.

  —Mike Whitney, proud Australian No. 11 (1981–92) and scorer of 106

  Statistically, my 35 ducks and three pairs ranks me alongside the likes of Englishmen Monty Panesar, Devon Malcolm and Phil Tufnell, India’s Bhagwath Chandrasekhar, the West Indian Courtney Walsh and New Zealand’s Chris Martin as the so-called ‘most wonderfully inept’ batsmen to have ever played Test cricket. Steve Waugh joked early in my career that I should approach batting companies to pay me not to use their bats; but the truth is that the incredible amount of scrutiny I was placed under whenever I was on strike actually made me an attractive proposition to sponsors because their brand received maximum exposure, well at least for the few balls or minutes I hung around.

  I never had any trouble picking up the ball when it left the bowler’s hand; the root of my problems, especially in the early days, was that I lacked the technique needed to get myself set, and I also didn’t ever allow myself enough time to play shots. While I know there were jokes made about my batting—such as the old line that suggested a stocking had more runs in it than my chunk of willow—I took my role as a batsman extremely seriously. Something I read in a cricket book when I was a kid rang true: a batting line-up consists of 11 players and it doesn’t matter if you’re an opener, No. 5, No. 8 or 11, your job is to go out and show a commitment to score runs or at the very least hold up your end. I took it seriously, so much so that my teammates said I’d often return to the dressing room fuming about being on the wrong end of a dodgy decision. I know they’ve claimed that I’d rant and rave and carry on that ‘there’s no justice in this game’, throwing my bat to the ground and hurling my gloves into the locker—by the way they give their accounts, I’d still be paying off my fines if the ICC match referee heard what I had to say about another dodgy delivery. On the flipside, my bowling mate Jason Gillespie said he was ecstatic when I was dismissed cheaply—and even more so if he heard me carrying on about the umpire—because he thought that signalled an ‘easy’ day for him and the other bowlers, knowing I’d be fired up to bowl well. Since my retirement I’ve also heard that other blokes used to hide their faces and laugh at my carry-on after being dismissed, which is something I’m pleased I never saw because I was so serious about trying to contribute to the team as a batsman, I think seeing that would’ve really sent me over the edge. Batting—it was a source of so much anguish and frustration, but ultimately it provided me with one of my most treasured moments in cricket.

  My batting was something that, for whatever reason, people became fascinated by, but they weren’t watching me to marvel at lusty cover drives or hook shots, they wanted to see me sweat and poke and prod for singles that were worth their weight in gold. I heard the jokes from the outer, that some bloke’s near-sighted 90-year-old grandmother was a better bat than me (and I would’ve liked to have seen it). But perhaps the cruellest jibe of all was the time Steve Waugh—who I nursed to his historic double century in Jamaica—said I’d wake up one day and realise I was actually left-handed. It wasn’t an easy road and I am often asked about my trials and tribulations at the crease. What I thought I would do here is detail the development of my batting career from starry-eyed slogger to a so-called rabbit who bettered his average by a multiple of ten in one innings. I thought I’d roughly chart my battle with the bat from my days as a Narromine bush-basher to being a specialist No. 11, who turned down the opportunity to bat at No. 3 in an SCG Test.

  It wasn’t always pretty, but one thing I always did as a batsman was this: I gave my best.

  IN THE BEGINNING

  My dad has a dry sense of humour. When I made the Australian team and my batting was put under a spotlight and I was exposed as being, well, technically flawed, he didn’t do
my reputation any favours or instil much confidence in the public that I might hold up the tail against the likes of Wasim Akram. He said with a straight face and deadpan delivery that, in his opinion and judging from our family’s backyard Test matches, my sister Donna was the best batter—and possibly even best bowler—of all his kids. I’d like to think my efforts out in the middle, and not Dad’s joke, defined how the public viewed me as a batsman!

  I know I’ve said on many occasions that my bowling benefited from the fact that no one at the Backwater club saw anything special in me when I was a kid trying his hardest to get a bowl, because it meant no one ruined my action. The general consensus was that it would be a waste of time and effort showing me how to bowl because I didn’t have any talent and I was destined to utilise my height and play in the bush basketball league anyway. However, the flipside to that is I didn’t receive a skerrick of batting coaching for the same reasons, and in the years that followed I paid heavily for not being given a solid foundation—or better still, sound defence—in the town’s cricket nets. I was left to my own devices, and as a kid left to his own devices, I adopted the philosophy of ‘when in doubt hit out’. That helped me score a few runs in the bush, especially when I was a teenager. It was also around this time that I bought a ‘piece’ of Viv Richards from Greg Chappell’s cricket store in Brisbane …

  There’s a great saying in cricket and sport in general that suggests even if you’re not a good cricketer, you ought to look the part. So when I changed clubs from the Backwater XI to join the Rugby Union XI, I figured if I wanted to give myself a fighting chance of scoring some runs, I ought to invest in a decent bat. I ordered a Stuart Surridge Jumbo, the humped-back bat made famous by Viv Richards—the man who was undoubtedly cricket’s most damaging batsman in my childhood years. Apart from the appeal of it being the Master Blaster’s preferred weapon of choice, what lured me to pay the princely sum of $100 for it was the blurb in the catalogue describing it as perfect for the cricketer who liked to hit the ball long and far, and that was definitely me … if only in my dreams.