At the Close of Play

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, but Erskine was willing to bring not just his negotiating skills but also his considerable financial clout into the battle, on the basis that on top of the commission the ACA would pay him, he could also win a piece of the marketing pie when a settlement was finally reached. If Maysie said hiring Erskine was a good idea, then that seemed like a fair deal to me. The ironic thing about this situation was the same Graham Halbish had left the Board on bad terms and was now working with us. It was a stroke of genius by Tim May. He told us there was plenty of money in the bank and any nonsense the Board told us about it being put away for a rainy day was rubbish, as the revenue streams were pretty good.

When Tim stressed that we had to stick together, it just seemed to be a natural thing to do. You don’t need to tell a working-class Tasmanian how these things work. When he explained that part of this was necessary because of Australia’s industrial laws, saying how we needed to get the Board to recognise that the ACA was entitled to negotiate on the players’ behalf, it went straight over my head. Maysie told us it was inevitable the Board would use the old ‘divide-and-conquer’ trick by painting our tactics in an unfavourable light, saying the ACA was being unreasonable, that a players’ union was bad for the game and by making subtle approaches to individual cricketers who they thought might not be totally committed to our cause.

By the time I returned to Australia a story was out that Denis Rogers, in his capacity as Tasmanian Cricket Association (TCA)chairman (he was also the chairman of the ACB), had told a few guys from the Tassie Shield team that the TCA and the ACB would only negotiate with individual players.

Under these circumstances, you would suspect that Denis might have made contact with me, perhaps to offer me a special deal or to argue that my allegiances should be with him, a fellow Tasmanian, rather than with my Test team-mates. He knew I respected the way he had climbed the ladder to become the first Tasmanian to chair the Board, and how I was grateful for the things he had done for Tasmanian cricket, and I was also aware of the work he had done for the Clarence footy club. But the truth is I don’t recall Denis ever trying to get me to break away from the ACA. I reckon that was simply because he knew me well. One time early in my first-class career, he drove me home from Hobart to Launceston, partly because I needed a lift and partly, I’m sure, because he wanted to get to know me better. He knew I would stick solid with my mates.

Denis has always been good to me and for me. I have made sure, whenever I’ve been back to Tassie, that I’ve always caught up with him and spent time with him, because I enjoy his company, am grateful for the support he has shown me and recognise the remarkable job he has done for Tasmanian sport. Many of the developments we’ve seen at Bellerive Oval, for example, have been because of his efforts. He is a very smart and generous man, and if Denis was guilty of anything during the ACA dispute it was that he was too concerned with protecting the Board’s interests, but that was his job.

During all the public debates that took place in the early part of the 1997–98 season, Denis and his fellow Board members, along with Board CEO Malcolm Speed, regularly painted us players as being greedy and selfish. They even released the amount top players were being paid, knowing the public would think we were greedy. At the same time they never revealed just how much money was in their bank account. Money they earned from marketing our talents. For a while, with the help of a largely compliant cricket media, it appeared they were winning the public relations war, but at the same time their refusal to come to the negotiating table was stiffening our resolve. The turning point came in the third week of November, during the second Test against New Zealand in Perth, when word got out that a player strike was a real possibility unless the Board got fair dinkum about talking to the ACA. By this time, Channel Nine, Australian cricket’s TV network, had become concerned that the players might even be planning to form a rebel competition, but there was nothing in that scuttlebutt and the players who worked for Nine — Tubby, Warnie, Tugga and Heals — were able to set the TV bosses straight. Further, Warnie was allowed to go on Nine’s coverage of the Test the next day to explain the ACA’s position, and he did it so well there was immediately a massive change in the public’s perception of who was right and who was not.

At the same time, however, Tubby sat down with Denis and the pair came up with a possible compromise, a surprise development because by working one-on-one with the Board our captain was going against the wishes of the ACA. Thinking about it now I have no problem with Tubby making that move, because when the players are dealing with the Board, the captain should always have the right to talk to the Board chairman. At the time, though, it did cause some angst within our group.

After stumps on day two Tubby presented the playing group with the results of his meeting with Denis. Our reaction was lukewarm at best. There is no doubt our skipper was motivated solely by his desire to see the impasse solved and as always he was persuasive in his arguments, but by this stage the rest of us were determined to stick with Maysie and see the battle through. Tubby went back to Denis the following morning and then returned with yet another proposal that the two of them hoped would do the trick, but our determination was stronger than ever and when Matthew Elliott asked why we were now negotiating in this way rather than via the ACA it was decided to stop the dilly-dallying, and to put things to a ballot.

Twelve pieces of paper were handed out, with each of us asked to write down ‘yes’ for strike or ‘no’ for no strike. A few ODIs in December had been targeted. Quickly, each of the voting slips was placed in a baggy green cap (the symbolism was lost on no one), and Blewey was given the job of returning officer. The result was dramatically decisive: 11 to 1. The boys were serious. We were going to strike.

The irony was that when Tugga rang Maysie to tell him of our decision, the reply was succinct: ‘Don’t do it! The momentum is swinging our way.’ I have no idea what clinched the deal, but my guess is that the powerbrokers at Nine asked the Board to fix the impasse. Or maybe the administrators saw that public opinion was swinging our way. Or was it because Tubby had been rebuffed? Perhaps commonsense prevailed. Whatever the reason, we were relieved, nobody really wanted to strike.

In the following few days, the ACA announced it was postponing the threat of strike action and the Board finally decided to talk to the ACA. This proved to be the starting point for some spirited but constructive negotiations. It would be many months before the first memorandum of understanding between the Board and the ACA was agreed to, one which in part gave players 20 per cent of the first $60 million of consolidated ‘Australian Cricket Revenue’ and a quarter of every dollar thereafter: 57.5 per cent of that pool was to be allocated to Test and ODI players, the rest to those who performed at interstate level. The top Test players actually took a hair cut on this so extra money could be fed into the Sheffield Shield payment pool.

Since then players have always received what I think is a fair slice of the cricket pie, and our incomes increased significantly as overall revenues continued to rise. As someone whose career was largely post-1997 I have benefited as much as anyone from this, so I will never forget the actions of Tim May and his comrades at the ACA. Furthermore, because of the ACA’s persistence, productive dialogue between Australian players and Australian officials finally became a feature of the cricket landscape, and more often than not it felt like we were working together, rather than being from opposite sides of the same fence.

BACK IN THE 1990s, it was rare for an inexperienced member of the Australian cricket team to think about anything that wasn’t directly related to how his cricket was going. Even things like team tactics were not that important to me, other than how they impinged on my role in the side. At this stage of my cricket life I wasn’t going to be standing up at the next team meeting to tell senior blokes how to play. I knew my place.

There were a number of significant things that happened in my first two or three years in the Australian team — Mark Taylor’s form slump, Ian Healy losing the vice-captaincy, the ACA conflict, the match-fixing controversy — and I was aware of all of them and saw how they affected the guys involved. However, I never stopped to think too much about them because they didn’t impact directly on what I had to do. I don’t think this makes me callous or naive or different to the other young guys. My priority was performing to a high standard because that would keep me in the side. Staying in the side was all I really wanted. With the benefit of time and seniority I realise a few of those things were big issues, in some cases momentous, but at the time, to a large degree, they passed me by.

Later in my career I came to have a different appreciation of these events as I went through similar things. At the start of the 1997–98 season Mark Taylor had the one-day captaincy taken away from him when he was still Test skipper. I didn’t see it as a big deal — Tubby hadn’t been scoring a million runs in the one-dayers, the team’s ODI form in the previous 12 months had been mediocre, the selectors made the call, let’s move on. That’s how I was thinking. Now, having been Australian captain for a number of years, I realise it was a massive thing to happen to him and that a decision of that magnitude had enormous consequences for the team.

In the years since Tubby retired I have been asked many times, ‘How good a captain was he?’ When I was Test skipper from 2004 to 2010 the bloke I was most unfavourably compared to was Tubby. ‘He’s no Mark Taylor,’ the critics would say of me.

When I first came into the Australian team it was hard for me not to think of Tubby as a special captain because, compared to the skippers I’d previously played under at club and state level, almost everything we did at the international level was a step-up in class, intensity and professionalism. The amount of thinking that went into training and the analysis the leadership group put into an international match in those days compared to what we did at state level was chalk and cheese.

Yet it is also true that the all-round preparation teams put in today is a million miles ahead of what we did back in the mid-1990s. The biggest change is how inclusive it is. The young players of today are involved in everything the team does and everything the team hierarchy talks about when it comes to planning and meetings. Their input is encouraged, as it is vital everyone is on the ‘same page’. In contrast, when I first made it into the side, tactics were the realm of the coach, the captain and the vice-captain, and maybe one or two other senior guys. Most times, we’d only talk about a few specifics in a team meeting that lasted for 15 minutes or half an hour. Then we went out to play.

The most telling example I can give of how it often was back then occurred at the 1996 World Cup, before the quarter-final against New Zealand, when we were discussing the Kiwi batting line-up. After a brief discussion about guys like Nathan Astle and Stephen Fleming, we got to Chris Harris. ‘He’s hopeless,’ said one of the senior players. It could have been Steve Waugh, or it might have been Mark. ‘Let’s not waste our time talking about him.’ Harris, of course, promptly went out and made 130 from 124 balls. In most meetings involving the whole group, we’d breezed through opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, devoting no more than an average of 30 seconds for each player. And then the team meeting was done. See you at the bar at six. Inevitably, there’d be more talk of tactics over a feed or a couple of beers, but unless a formal team dinner had been organised, only a few — usually the senior blokes — would be heavily involved in these informal discussions.

On the field, Tubby was a chatty captain, but these conversations were usually with the bowler or the guys in the slips cordon. If I was fielding at cover or deep point I could only guess as to why a change was made. Maybe, because of what we’d discussed in a pre-game meeting, I might have had a clue to the tactics behind a move, but otherwise I was just a soldier following orders. So when people asked me about his leadership how could I know if a captain was a wizard or just lucky? Tubby certainly had a bit of awe about him and under his leadership we usually felt things were going to turn out right. More than once — the semi-final at the 1996 World Cup and the third Ashes Test of 1997 are two examples — he made decisions at the toss that many questioned but they worked out fine in the end so he looked like a genius. The way he nurtured Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath — helped turn them into champions — was fantastic. Yet it’s amazing how little memory I have of Tubby’s captaincy style or things he did or advice he gave that made me a better cricketer or person. Perhaps that’s more an indictment on me as a young cricketer than it is on him as a mentor of young cricketers. Or perhaps it’s just a reflection of the times.

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WE PLAY CRICKET almost all the time now. It’s difficult to believe that in the past there were years when no international side toured Australia, a time when we weren’t rushing from one tournament to another. There were times late in my career when I was lucky to spend two months at home in a year — and they were often comprised of weeks grabbed here and there. The schedule is full because cricket earns big money from television networks and players are (now) well compensated for their time. There was a time when we complained there was too much cricket, then the Indian Premier League (IPL) came along and almost anybody who could ran to that honey pot and the money ensured we stopped complaining.

That said, at times, there is still too much cricket and you can tell when it’s getting to us because that’s when things happen on the field. Sometimes, in the swirl of airports and buses and hotel rooms and long hot days in the sun the cracks finally open up and what comes spilling out is not always pretty.

I guess that might have been part of the reason I found myself being dragged out of a Kolkata (then, Calcutta) nightclub in 1998, but it is too easy an excuse. In truth I still had a lot to learn and when my Aussie rules team, North Melbourne, beat Warnie’s St Kilda I think I might have got a little too excited.

And, as I was about to learn, when you are growing up in the public eye your mistakes become very public.