15
Pirate of the Caribbean
Standing at first slip during the opening Test of the 1995 series against the West Indies, it was obvious to Australia’s captain, Mark Taylor, that the West Indies’ fast bowler Courtney Walsh didn’t fancy being on the receiving end of the style of bowling he loved to dish out: an attack of sustained short-pitched deliveries that made batsmen – especially tail-enders like Walsh – fear for their safety.
While facing Australia’s new fast bowler, Walsh did all he could to appear ‘chilled’ by laughing and grinning as the latest McGrath bouncer whistled dangerously close to his chin, but the Jamaican’s body language betrayed him. Taylor saw Walsh wasn’t merely uncomfortable – he was very nervous. It was exactly what the captain had hoped for.
If Taylor’s team was to become the first Australian side to win a series in the Caribbean since Ian Chappell’s men in 1973, and the first team from any nation to beat them in a series since the Kiwis in 1980, they needed to tame the Windies’ fast bowlers first. While seemingly simple in theory, the plan to target the opposition’s pacemen with ‘chin music’ whenever they batted would test the mettle of its implementers, because if the Windies’ pace attack had proved anything in their domination of world cricket from the late 1970s, it was that they possessed short tempers, long memories and a disregard for mercy.
McGrath had no concern about the prospect of being bruised – or worse – when he bowled his grenades at Walsh and his brothers-in-harm Curtly Ambrose and the Benjamin boys, Kenny and Winston, that day in Barbados. He’d often dreamed of this moment as a kid at Lagoona when he’d waged imaginary battles against the West Indies during his marathon bowling sessions at the old 44-gallon drum – battles where Australia had relied on him to come through. He was now living the dream and – in a performance that had overtones of sadism – he dragged out Walsh’s suffering by bombing him with bouncers rather than rushing to bowl the yorker that would have ended the number 11’s torment.
‘Glenn’s bowling really shook Courtney up,’ Taylor remembers. ‘Courtney was trying to look cool about it, as the West Indies often do, but I think he was genuinely concerned because the Pigeon was ripping into him with plenty of short stuff. For a good half-dozen deliveries I don’t think Glenn was all that worried about getting him out – he wanted to let him know we were there to play. When the rest of us out in the field saw that we thought, “You beauty!” – because we’re now on equal terms here. His bowling made the West Indies appreciate we Australians weren’t going to give them an inch, just as we knew they weren’t going to give us an inch. It was game on, and that set a tone for us.
‘Our plan was one any team who had been to the West Indies during the ’80s and ’90s would have hoped some of their bowlers would implement. We spoke about it in ’95. We spoke about it in 1991 as well, and Craig McDermott did a pretty good job of unsettling them, but it was a bit of a one-man show in ’91. In 1995, Glenn, in particular, ran with it – and it was a great effort because, to be fair, he was a pretty ordinary batsman and he was going to cop it, but it didn’t faze him. He seemed to have the attitude of “I’m going to give it you blokes”. And he did.’
The West Indies speed quartet was given fair warning of what to expect when, on the eve of the Test, McGrath made a public vow to take the fight to them. Reports suggest each of them chuckled at the skinny white man’s threat, but that laughter was soon hushed when they stood before him with bat in hand. For the first time in their careers, Walsh, Ambrose and the Benjamins suffered the indignity of being forced to dance to another’s tune, as McGrath peppered them in full view of the fans who’d long considered them supermen.
Thirteen years after the match that established McGrath as a spearhead bowler, Walsh won’t reveal exactly how he felt about being targeted by a player determined to make his mark. He prefers instead to mention feeling a sense of solace that McGrath could humble more capable batsmen than himself.
‘I thought he was a very good bowler the first time I saw him and realised he would give any batsman trouble on his day, much less me,’ says Walsh.
McGrath wasn’t naive, however. From the moment he unleashed the first bouncer of his campaign – one that almost kissed Winston Benjamin’s nose – he knew his name had been entered into the West Indies’ book of blood feuds.
‘My bowling bouncers and intimidating their bowlers was the team plan; we thought it might unsettle them because it hadn’t been done to them too often before,’ McGrath says. ‘We thought, “Well, we’re going to cop it no matter how we bowl to them anyway.” It didn’t matter if we intimidated them, bowled at their stumps or short of a length, we were still going to cop it. I thought if the batsman did the business I’d be out of the firing line. But when I started, it didn’t cross my mind I would have to go out and bat either. I think our team in ’95 was luckier than other teams because we didn’t have the psychological – and in some cases, physical – scars of other Australian teams, and that held us in good stead.’
McGrath, aged 25, had assumed the role of Australia’s enforcer by default. Australia’s most potent bowler, Craig McDermott, was forced to abandon the tour after injuring his ankle jumping off a sea wall before the First Test, and his new-ball partner Damien Fleming was sent home with an injured shoulder, the recurrence of an old problem. Their withdrawals were seen as serious body blows to Taylor’s quest. McDermott’s last act as a member of the team before he limped onto the aeroplane back to Queensland was to anoint McGrath as the man whose star was set to shine.
‘If anyone is going to come through and make the big step forward, it will be Glenn McGrath,’ said McDermott to the media contingent that saw him off. ‘I have seen him make a lot of progress over the past 18 months – from someone brought in raw to the situation, to now where he is a genuine Test bowler.’
But nothing could camouflage the loss of McDermott and Fleming – their absence appeared to leave Australia’s attack threadbare and exposed. With bowlers Brendon Julian, Paul Reiffel, the Waugh brothers, Shane Warne and McGrath left to carry the can, the Windies are said to have dismissed their bowling line-up as ‘weak’ in the privacy of their dressing-room.
After being rushed into the Australian Test team, McGrath was exposed during the Gabba Test of the 1994/95 Ashes series for lacking an important component in any top-class fast bowler’s arsenal: the ability to bowl swing. He was yet to master the intricacies of that craft and made the mistake of listening to the critics who maintained that a bowler couldn’t be considered to be of genuine international standard unless they understood the art. McGrath decided to become an instant expert, much to his own detriment.
‘I hadn’t cemented my place in the team and I listened to all the people who said you have to bowl consistent swing bowling to be considered successful at Test level,’ recalls McGrath. ‘It took me away from my game plan, which was being a seam bowler who hit the deck. I wanted to be successful, and while I did start swinging the ball, I couldn’t control it.’
McGrath watched on in despair as the English batsmen plundered 40 runs off him in the first innings and 61 in the second. It would be one of the few times that McGrath finished a Test wicketless. It came at a high personal cost.
‘I lost my bounce, I lost everything,’ he says of that time. ‘I was young and I didn’t know my game that well, so it was a huge learning experience. I was dropped for the next three Tests, so I had a lot of time to sit down and think about things. Ultimately, I decided to go back to doing what got me picked in the first place – hitting good areas, getting a bit of bounce and seam movement, and going from there.
‘Over the next three Tests I watched a lot of Damien Fleming. He bowled well, taking 10 wickets. However, he injured his shoulder and that allowed me to play in the last Test at Perth.’
McGrath made the most of his recall, reverting to his own game – ‘what I did best’ – and finishing the match with 3 for 88 and 3 for 40. The six-wicket haul ensured his selection in the squad to tour the West Indies, where he’d made enough noise to come under the scrutiny of a fearsome attack.
While McGrath ought to have been shaking in his boots at the retaliation awaiting him in Barbados when it came his turn to bat, he found inspiration from the battalions of Aussie supporters in the outer who chanted ‘Ooh aah, Glenn McGrath’ as a tribute to his effort.
‘It was the first time I’d ever been singled out like that and it was an incredible feeling,’ he says. ‘I looked at the people chanting it and they wore Aussie caps and T-shirts, waved the flag and had their faces painted green and gold. I looked at them and thought it’d be great to win the trophy for them.’
If the chanting wasn’t enough, Steve Waugh also spurred McGrath on by offering words of encouragement loud enough for the likes of Walsh and Ambrose to hear whenever they were forced to duck for their personal safety.
‘I just encouraged him to keep going – to continue bowling aggressively and not to back down in any situation,’ says Waugh. ‘I knew Glenn had great stamina and you could back him to keep bowling. I guess I may have encouraged him to bowl a bit aggressively, but I knew he’d find a happy medium and not go over the top. So, yeah, I encouraged him. I thought someone had to take a stance, and with him being a new guy, I thought it was a great opportunity for him to put his hand up and say, “I want to take the West Indies on.” I bowled a few bouncers at them and I wanted a partner in crime. I think Glenn saw it as an opportunity to make his mark – I was simply throwing him a challenge. I was trying to push him in a direction where he was considered a spearhead. I think the West Indians respected those guys anyway.’
Courtney Walsh confirms that even though McGrath risked getting burnt by the fire he played with, there was a begrudging respect for the Australian.
‘Once you decide to compete as McGrath did, you have to be ready for anything, ’ he says of the Windies’ plans to return serve at McGrath. ‘But, that said, I think it was a brave move by Glenn [to bowl aggressively at the Windies’ tail] and it was one that worked for him at the time.’
McGrath certainly deserved their respect by the end of the opening Test, which finished in a ten-wicket victory to Australia. He was named Man of the Match after he captured 3 for 46 in the first innings and in the second innings snared 5 for 68, his first five-wicket haul in Test cricket. His five-for included three wickets in ten balls.
Robert Craddock, writing for The Daily Telegraph-Mirror, documented the emergence of cricket’s new star bowler when he wrote after the Test: ‘The greatest dynasty world cricket has known is on the verge of collapse thanks to a bold young Australian who dared to put the wind up the Windies.’
Former Test batsman David Hookes covered the tour as a reporter and commentator. Hookes knew well the physical and psychological power the West Indies had over their opponents: his own career – and confidence – had never truly recovered from the time West Indies paceman Andy Roberts had broken his jaw during a World Series Cricket Super Test at the Sydney Showground in 1977. 3 But while he viewed McGrath’s effort to bombard the West Indies with bouncers as a turning point for world cricket in the 1990s, he was convinced that Australia’s great effort in winning the Frank Worrell Trophy was equally the result of deficiencies in the defeated West Indies team.
‘I made the point at the time – and since – that Glenn McGrath’s decision to bowl short at the West Indians in the First Test at Barbados was a defining moment in world cricket in the ’90s. I believe that,’ said Hookes. ‘There is a bit of bluff and bullshit about the Windies in 1995; they were a pretty ordinary side in the two-and-a-half years before that series. Their record was pretty ordinary and they saved a few series, though they hadn’t been beaten. They hadn’t flogged sides; they were certainly on the wane, in a batting perspective particularly. Having said that, the end result – Australia winning – was fantastic.
‘For as long as I can remember there was a lack of desire by any opposition fast bowlers to bowl at these blokes’ throats and heads with the specific intention to hit them. To see McGrath, a bloke who couldn’t bat, do that was what I call a defining moment. As a spectator who was there, I had no qualms about him being the leading bowler. Whether he was physically capable of doing it was what I thought remained to be seen – and he was. I don’t know if he’s been given worldwide recognition for getting rid of the old fast bowlers’ unwritten rule of not bowling short or trying to hit tail-enders because, quite clearly from where I was sitting, he was trying to hit them – and that was fine. And they were shocked. It hadn’t happened before. They’d treated everyone else like school bullies but some kid in the playground was prepared to pick up a slingshot and give it back to them. I didn’t think either McDermott or Fleming was going to do it; they may have as a group, but they needed someone to do it first. The relentless way McGrath went about business proved he was prepared to give it to them.’
McGrath says Hookes did have a point that the West Indies side the Australians faced in 1995 weren’t as formidable as the Windies of old, because the outstanding players of those years – Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Colin Croft and Malcolm Marshall – had all retired.
But as he also observes: ‘It has to be remembered we were considered by them the weakest team they faced. If you go through our attack there was me; Warnie was there but he hadn’t played a lot; ‘Pistol’ Paul Reiffel was thrown in along with Brendon Julian – and yet we beat them. In one respect they weren’t the same team as they were in the ’80s, but they were still winning and when you know how to win it helps. And they still had guys like Ambrose, Lara, Richardson and Walsh, so they were still an awesome side. While I agree with Hookesy in that they weren’t the same team when you compared eras, we could only play the team they picked and we beat them.’
While the likes of Hookes and Craddock highlighted McGrath’s devotion to duty, the bowler credits Waugh for inspiring him to continue to dig deep and to stay true to the team’s blueprint for success.
‘The senior players, Mark Taylor and Steve [‘Tugga’] Waugh, came up with the plan,’ says McGrath. ‘I knew Tugga always liked to get stuck into their bowlers and to give them a hard time. He might not have been as quick or got as much bounce, but I reckon he probably bowled more bouncers per over at the West Indies than anyone else in world cricket. He was always standing up to them and letting them have it.’
McGrath’s success in unsettling Walsh and company also vindicated a view Steve Waugh had long held since the days when he’d taken on the West Indies with his medium-paced bouncers.
‘I think there was the old fast bowlers’ club, where if you didn’t bounce the opposition’s bowlers they didn’t bounce you. However, that didn’t work with the West Indies because they just bounced everyone. I always thought, “Why don’t we get stuck into them?” I thought some of our bowlers may have worried too much about their safety, thinking if they didn’t pitch ’em up they’d get nothing back. McGrath thought, “I’m not going to cop this any more; I’m really going to give it to them to see how they react.” While I didn’t have the same pace as Glenn, I had the same intent.’
The big difference between the pair, though, was that Waugh could bat; McGrath could not. And when Australia’s number 11 eventually found himself out in the middle and facing the music, he vowed not to lose his nerve, even when the likes of Curtly Ambrose bored holes through him with murderous stares as his team-mates yelled, ‘Let’s kill him, mon!’
‘I was not worried about being hurt by them. I was only scared of being embarrassed out there,’ says McGrath. ‘I got behind the ball and I watched it closely so I knew when to duck.’
Whilst Waugh admired McGrath’s courage, he couldn’t help but think there was an element of bravado in the way McGrath strode out to take strike, like the man who heads to the gallows without first offering a prayer. Waugh figured it wouldn’t have been normal for McGrath – or anyone else in his situation – to feel anything but nervous as he watched his opponents charge in like deranged lions.
Waugh certainly believes McGrath must have been nervous in the Fourth and final Test, when Waugh was on 197 runs and McGrath walked out to join him at the crease. Waugh had upset the Windies early in the series: they’d accused him of cheating Brian Lara out of his wicket by wrongly claiming a catch in the First Test, and he had also been involved in a tense stand-off with Ambrose. On the way to his 197, Waugh had endured the closest thing possible to a mugging on the cricket field when he was hammered by the Windies attack. He boasted an ugly purple bruise that spread from his left wrist to his hand; the elbow of his right arm had been branded; he wished two of his fingers belonged to someone else because they screamed in agony where they’d been hit; and he’d been whacked in three other parts of his body. Yet Waugh had almost amassed a double-century when McGrath left the safety of the players’ pavilion – and the Windies made it clear they wanted to give the new batsman a taste of the same medicine they’d been doling out to Waugh.
‘I don’t think Glenn showed fear,’ says Waugh. ‘You could sense there was some trepidation. I think it’s to his credit he stuck to it, because you could see some West Indian bowlers didn’t like what he’d done to them too much. They were laughing and trying to make a joke about what was happening, but they didn’t like it. Glenn was always going to cop it. It was a test of his mental strength and his nerve. He didn’t get hurt, which was amazing because you’d expect a guy who was averaging five or six runs to get cleaned right up.’
McGrath didn’t get cleaned up in the Fourth Test. Instead he supported Waugh to his double-century, making Waugh only the fourth Australian, behind Neil Harvey, Bob Simpson and Bill Lawry, to score 200 or more in the Caribbean.
Ricky Ponting had been named in the 15-man squad for the 1995 West Indies tour – part of a long-term process to groom him for Test cricket – and he learned a lot from the impact his mate from the Cricket Academy had on the West Indies. Ponting later drew on this experience when he succeeded Steve Waugh as captain, to provide Australia with an ‘X-factor’ against teams good enough to challenge them.
‘I remember thinking Glenn’s decision to take on the West Indies bowlers sent out a positive message to the West Indies that the Australian side was really up for it,’ Ponting says. ‘Ambrose, Walsh, Kenny Benjamin had never been treated like that before. It made the West Indies sit back and think, “This Australian team is fair dinkum – they’re really up for it.”
‘Even if you aren’t the murder boys of cricket, you can show little things to let the opposition know you are serious. It might be the way you warm up, how you dress to go to the ground. Perception can be enormous. If you can give off the right signals to the opposition you’re halfway to (a) bluffing them or (b) showing them what you’re all about. McGrath, at that stage of his career, showed them what he was all about. His body language and the way he looked at their batsmen – the wry smile – it sent a signal to the batsmen and his own team-mates that he knew what he was doing. He gave us all the confidence in the world he could do the job.’
And McGrath did the job.
Although the Second Test finished in a draw and the West Indies bounced back to humiliate the Aussies in the third game at Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, by nine wickets on a dog of a pitch (a pitch for which Windies skipper Richie Richardson publicly apologised), McGrath maintained his rage.
While Reiffel was applauded for following the old dictum of bowling stump to stump, every McGrath bouncer – every delivery that made the West Indies fear for their safety – was cheered in lounge rooms across Australia by a generation of pacemen who’d been treated by the West Indies in previous years without a scrap of mercy. Geoff Lawson, whose jaw had been shattered by an Ambrose bouncer at the WACA during the 1988/89 season, was among their number.
‘To the outsiders – and the outsiders being everyone but Glenn – the fear was he was going to get seriously hurt,’ says Lawson. ‘But he didn’t care. It was as if he was saying, “My job is to bowl and to get people out. When they bowl at me I am going to back myself.”
‘In 1984 we didn’t let loose on the West Indies until the end of the series, when we had the shits ... we’d had the crap bounced out of us. I remember Rodney Hogg and I bowled 36 consecutive bouncers and Desmond Haynes got hit. They got upset that we bowled quick and short. We should have done it earlier. Pigeon didn’t care. I’m trying to remember if he got hit. He was in the grand final as the game’s worst batsman but he watched the ball and kept it simple. He kept his eye on the ball and, rather than complicate it, he went through the process of making sure his feet were here and there, he had his backlift, his grip was right – and by doing so he proved a simple plan is often the best.
‘As someone who had dealt pretty closely with him, I was quietly confident Glenn could do the job even after McDermott and then Fleming returned home. You always keep your fingers crossed in those circumstances, but the great thing was he didn’t wait for the West Indies pacemen to put pressure on him, he put it straight on them by getting in early. He didn’t bowl anything too loose for them to hit. The West Indies didn’t put good balls away, they put away bad ones. I had a quiet confidence that at worst Pigeon would be competent, and at best he’d be good, very good. You always think that of anyone until they become a veteran. In Glenn’s case he always believed he could do it and that’s half the battle.’
There was no tougher place in the world for a cricket team to tour than the West Indies. The illusion of virgin beaches, hibiscus flowers and fruit cocktails in exotically named places such as Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad belied a harsh reality. Cricket – and more so the West Indies’ ability to play the sport better than anyone else in the world – was the single thread that unified the island nations. And heaven help anyone who trespassed upon their turf, as Steve Rixon discovered in 1978. He was wicketkeeper for an Australian team sent there like lambs to the slaughter. Depleted of such trump cards as Lillee, Marsh, the Chappell brothers and Hookes because of their allegiance to Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, the official Australian team was mentally bullied and physically belted in their 3–1 series loss. A photograph of Australian batsman Peter Toohey being cradled in the arms of Viv Richards after being floored by an Andy Roberts bouncer summed up the tour. ‘Toohey copped it between the eyes,’ says Rixon of the nightmare in paradise where Australia’s batsmen literally batted to survive.
‘I thought the danger at the time of the 1995 tour was the West Indies might retaliate by trying to break Glenn’s hand,’ says Rixon. ‘But he said, “Enough is enough,” and it was a courageous effort. However, I’d like to also give him credit for working out those blokes – he knew the West Indies would play their shots, so he bowled pretty good areas, which meant he was always a pretty good chance of knocking them over.’
The Australian’s respected writer Mike Coward noted during the Third Test at Port-of-Spain that McGrath seemed comfortable at last with his place in the national team.
‘McGrath’s career was transformed in the First Test at Barbados when he had Lara caught at the wicket by Ian Healy,’ wrote Coward. ‘Not only was this the most highly prized of all wickets, it was a legitimate dismissal. From that moment it was apparent McGrath finally believed he was entitled to wear the baggy green cap. Gone was the self-doubt; the self-consciousness.
‘He has since confessed he yearned to spearhead the Australian attack and despite the fact he was used behind Paul Reiffel and Brendon Julian – and, more often than not, Shane Warne – he seized his chance when Craig McDermott and Damien Fleming were lost to the cause because of serious injuries.’
Taylor, however, attributes McGrath’s bowling success – he topped the wicket tally – to his superb control, and not just the short stuff. ‘He showed magnificent control,’ says Taylor. ‘He knew where the ball was going. Glenn knew if he unsettled the batsmen he could fire in a yorker towards the stumps. There was no point in upsetting the batsmen if you can’t get them out – and he could.’
McGrath proved it was possible to frighten the so-called Terrors of the Tropics. He finished the four-Test tour with 17 wickets at 21.71; his 6 for 47 at Queen’s Park Oval in Port-of-Spain was his best haul. Among his victims were the men he was told to target: Ambrose (dismissed three times), Walsh (twice) and Winston Benjamin (once). In the aftermath of the West Indies’ first series loss in 15 years, their skipper Richie Richardson dismissed the victors as the ‘weakest’ Australian team to have ever toured the Caribbean – and the Australians saw wrenching the Frank Worrell Trophy from the Windies as their best comeback to that remark. Coach Bob Simpson, however, took the time to pay tribute to the efforts of his bowlers.
‘If we could bowl the right line and length, I believed we would always bowl them out for reasonable totals,’ Simpson wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘Our bowlers were able to do this and this was a great tribute to them.
‘I have been privileged to watch from first slip some great bowlers, such as Miller, Lindwall, Davidson, McKenzie, Benaud, and thrilled to Lillee and Thomson’s demolition of batsmen during the 1970s. But even they could not have given a better exhibition of controlled, tactical bowling than our team did on this tour.
‘A testimony to the tenacity, concentration and skill of the Australian bowlers was that the West Indies’ highest score was 265 and not once did they bat for a full day.
‘While on the surface the Australian attack might not have had the colour or charisma of some of our past heroes, none of those greats of the past could have bowled with better control, nor stuck so faithfully to our game plan. A tribute to their skill was that approximately 70 per cent of the West Indies’ batsmen got out in the way we had planned.
‘Aiding and abetting this great control was a fiercely aggressive fielding team whose performances surely have never been bettered in Test cricket.’
McGrath returned home a hero. He also acquired a manager, Sydney accountant Warren Craig. A former wicketkeeper for the Sydney and Fairfield clubs, Craig had met up with McGrath through his cricket contacts to discuss the possibility of representing him.
‘I knew a few people at Cricket NSW and had told them I wanted to break into sports management,’ he says. ‘I told them if ever there was an opportunity to assist a player to let me know. As it turned out, Glenn had a part-time person looking after his dealings and after the West Indies it was thought he needed a full-time manager and they called me.
‘What I noticed in our first meeting was Glenn had the same outlook as a lot of athletes, in that he’d just come onto the scene and didn’t know what he wanted from a commercial aspect: he didn’t know what to expect, he didn’t know what was out there. From a cricket perspective he definitely knew what he wanted, and that was to play for Australia. He’d had an outstanding tour of the West Indies but he didn’t have much of a profile, so we formed a strategy to work out what we call “industry contracts” – the bat, the sunglasses, footwear and clothing contracts. I focused on getting stories written on him in the media. Initially they homed in on his batting, and I said to Glenn the day he improved his batting would be the day he’d make my job harder.’
Although Craig received requests for interviews and personal appearances, McGrath refused to rest on his laurels.
Glenn McGrath at the age of two.
With his mates from Narromine High School. Glenn is second from the left.
Dale, Donna and Glenn McGrath, on their family’s farm in the late 1980s.
Jane Steele, while working for Virgin Airlines out of the United Kingdom.
Glenn and Jane on Kevin McGrath’s farm in 1996.
Together on Australia’s successful 1997 Ashes tour of England, shortly before the discovery of Jane’s cancer.
Jane in hospital in September 1997, after her first major surgery.
Engaged in 1998. Photo by The Sunday Times, Perth
Jane, with bridesmaid Tracy Bevan, on the day of her marriage to Glenn, 17 July 1999.
The happy couple, married at last ... 17 July 1999. Photo by Brad Newman/Newspix
Jane and Glenn celebrated the birth of their first child, James, in 2000.
With James on the Ashes tour, 2001. Photo by Hamish Blair/Getty Images
A proud father with his son at Lord’s, the home of cricket, 2001. Photo by Brett Costello/Newspix
Holly McGrath – ‘Daddy’s little girl’ – was born in 2001.
McGrath with his father, Kevin, in the dressing-room at Lord’s after taking his 500th Test wicket. Photo by Hamish Blair/Getty Images
The entrance to Wancobra, McGrath’s wool station in outback New South Wales, which is managed by his brother, Dale. A bale
A bale of Wancobra wool.
After setting up the McGrath Foundation in 2002, Glenn and Jane continue to work with their many sponsors to raise funds for breast-care nurses. Photo by Greg Wood/Getty Images
Glenn and Jane McGrath, arriving at the Allan Border Medal Awards in 2007. Photo by Kristian Dowling/Getty Images
Glenn McGrath with Jane, James and Holly – ‘my life’s greatest reward’. Photo by Chris Colls/acpsyndication.com
He worked hard in the gym for three months and piled seven kilograms of muscle onto his upper body. It was a smart move. After his triumph in the Windies, he’d need extra strength to help carry the Australian pace attack in the years to come, something Mike Coward predicted in his report from the Third Test at Trinidad:
‘In recent years there has been much angst throughout the Australian community because of an apparent dearth of quality fast bowlers,’ wrote Coward. ‘If the question has been asked once it has been asked a thousand times. Just who will take over from McDermott? On the evidence tendered in the Caribbean in recent weeks this is no longer an issue. McGrath has come of age.’