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West Australian batsman Michael Hussey, who’d scratched and scraped his way to 27 in the first innings of the 2005 Boxing Day Test against South Africa, felt a wave of calm wash over him as Glenn McGrath walked onto the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The World Champions were on the ropes at 9 for 248 against an aggressive South African attack and, while Hussey had only made his Test debut a few weeks earlier, he understood McGrath’s arrival at the crease was generally viewed as the equivalent to last rites being read over an Australian innings. As McGrath imitated the warm-up style of the game’s ace batters like Adam Gilchrist and Brian Lara by swinging his batting arm around like an old Tiger Moth propeller, Hussey committed himself to attack the Proteas’ bowling.
‘When Glenn walked out it was initially a case of the pressure being taken right off me,’ says Hussey. ‘I decided to enjoy it: to take as much of the strike as I possibly could and then tee off. From my point of view, it was very simple: I had to make as many runs as I possibly could.’
Ricky Ponting, who’d plundered 117 runs off the South African attack before being caught by Herschelle Gibbs off Andre Nel, also watched his number 11 saunter to the crease. Minutes earlier Ponting had looked on with impatience – and some mirth – as McGrath had ‘stuffed around’ to get kitted up.
According to Ponting, McGrath was always late onto the field. ‘The second-last wicket would fall and Glenn would just sit there and have a drink, pick his helmet up and muck around with it for a while. Then he’d struggle to put his arm guard on properly – the strap would go here, it would go there – he’d wait to put his pads on, and finally he’d be ready to go.’
The television and radio commentators waxed lyrical about McGrath’s batting record, pointing out that he vied for the record number of ducks in Test history, or perhaps noting that Steve Waugh had once said a pair of old stockings had more runs in them than McGrath. There was also the story of the time Waugh – who was within reach of becoming just the seventh Australian to score 200 against the West Indies – had consoled himself, at the sight of McGrath taking guard, that 197 not out in the Caribbean would be something to tell his grandkids. But Australia’s so-called ‘bunny’ had passed the test on that occasion, helping to nurse his friend to a historic double-century. Indeed, McGrath was to criticise Waugh – who was caught in the slips on 200 – for leaving him stranded on 3 runs.
When McGrath joined Hussey in the middle, the more optimistic members of the Melbourne crowd pointed out that he’d scored 61 against New Zealand the previous summer – but that hopefulness was tempered by the view of his former teammate Mark Waugh.
‘When I heard he scored a half-century in English county cricket a few years earlier, I almost ran off the road,’ laughs Waugh. ‘But I was glad to have seen that innings against the Kiwis with my own eyes, because I would never have believed it.’
Jane McGrath, who sweated on the day Glenn would raise his bat in acknowledgement of a decent score, would not have appreciated hearing that.
‘I never worried about Glenn getting hurt when he was batting, but I used to get really, really cross when people didn’t take his wicket seriously,’ she says. ‘I knew how hard he worked on his batting, and it meant a lot to him – yet it became a standing joke: “Yeah, number 11, he can’t bat for toffee.” And he could, he could, and nine times out of ten he’d be given out when he wasn’t. I’d think, “There’s another 50 nipped in the bud.” It was like, as long as the batsman at the other end got his 50 or ton, don’t worry about Glenn, don’t worry about the workhorse! And that, as you can see, used to get me really fired up.’
McGrath says he never allowed the criticism – or the jokes – about his batting to upset him. However, Steve Waugh, who coached him for a while, is adamant McGrath was driven to work harder because he didn’t like being taunted by his teammates. McGrath’s sole demand was that his critics should at least credit the fact he showed ticker, even though common sense suggested early in his international career that he was in above his head.
While another Australian fast bowler – Rodney Hogg, who played in the late 1970s and early ’80s – phoned his wife from the dressing-room to demand she erase from a video a soft dismissal to the West Indies because he didn’t want his son to see it and grow up thinking his old man was a coward, McGrath never backed away from the bowler.
‘Early on in my career, I didn’t wear a chest-guard against the West Indies because it was an ego thing. I didn’t want it to look as if I was scared of them. I came around, though, when I thought if I was hit and my ribs were broken I wouldn’t be able to bowl. But I was never scared of the ball. The most surprising thing about being hit is it doesn’t hurt straight away. I think the adrenaline helps to mask the pain, but you certainly feel it later on. They always left a deep-purple bruise. However, I was prepared to cop that – any time – rather than get out for another duck. My only fear when I batted was of embarrassing myself. People will never understand how bad I felt when I was dismissed for a duck, because I put a lot of effort into my batting.
‘But I never worried about criticism, and I know a lot of people had a good laugh about it. While I would’ve liked some more runs, what I was most proud of as a batsman was that I didn’t just go out there and throw my wicket away, and that I didn’t look scared. I really tried to get behind the ball, and if need be I’d put my body on the line. I worked hard on my batting and I tried my best.
‘I never had a problem picking the ball up. In the early days I just didn’t have the defence to get myself set, and I also didn’t allow myself time to get in there and play shots. I figured that as the number 11, if I went out and blocked five balls in a row it wouldn’t be appreciated back in the rooms, because the feeling would be, “Get on with it, try to get some runs.” A batsman has the luxury of being able to take four or five overs to settle in without scoring a run, but if a tail-ender does that it’s considered a waste of time. If we look as if we aren’t going to score runs then the captain will bring us back in. More often than not, my innings depended on where the team was and what was needed.’
On 26 December 2005, Australia needed McGrath – and Hussey – to hang on for grim life. In the two minutes it took for McGrath to reach the pitch, Hussey had devised a plan – to keep as much of the strike as possible.
‘We’ll wait until the last two balls of the over, and if they bring the field in I’ll try to hit a four and then get a single off the last ball,’ he told McGrath with the cool, calm and collected demeanour of a fighter pilot. ‘If they leave the field out, you’ll have to face the last ball.’ McGrath nodded in agreement.
The West Australian batsman lifted to the challenge, responding brilliantly to the simplicity of his own plan. South African skipper Graeme Smith consistently took the pressure off Hussey by moving the field back when McGrath was at the non-striker’s end. Hussey exploited the gaps in the field, and, by his own admission, what had been a scratchy knock was transformed into a confident, fluent innings, which frustrated the Proteas. Hussey reached 50 and when he made it to the nineties, the man they call ‘Mr. Cricket’ – because of his renowned and all-consuming love for the game and its stats – tempted fate by sticking to the plan that had worked so well.
‘When I reached 96, I thought for a second or two that maybe I should hold the strike until I got my century,’ says Hussey. ‘But I decided to keep to the plan that Glenn and I had followed – it had worked well until that point. I took a single off the second-last ball of the over, leaving Glenn one to face.’
South Africa’s wicketkeeper, Mark Boucher, saw the moment as an opportunity to unsettle Hussey by asking, in an incredulous tone, ‘What have you done?’
‘Glenn had shown amazing courage and patience,’ Hussey says. ‘I heard Boucher’s comment, but I didn’t allow it to worry me. I thought to myself that it didn’t matter what happened; we’d scored more runs than people probably thought we would, and we’d had a lot of fun frustrating the South Africans. I was happy we’d put up a fight.’
The tone of Boucher’s words wasn’t lost on McGrath either, but as a self-proclaimed master of mind games, he refused to allow any negativity to creep into his head.
‘I’d helped get Steve Waugh to plenty of hundreds, so I treated this innings as my helping another batsman to three figures,’ McGrath says with a grin. ‘It’s funny, but of anyone in the Australian team, no-one could justify going the tonk quite like me. But when I practised my batting, I’d work on getting behind the ball and playing it. I always felt that when Stuart MacGill was at the crease, he had a license to swing and hit. But over the years, my defence had improved to such an extent I could hang around, especially if there was an established batsman at the other end. As I faced up to the bowler that day in Melbourne, I didn’t think about Huss being on 97. I didn’t think about the scoreboard or even that we were trying to set South Africa a first innings target to chase. I only worried about getting behind the next delivery.’
And it proved to be an unbeatable approach. McGrath kept his wicket and supported Hussey to his century. Makhaya Ntini finally knocked Hussey’s stumps over when he was on 122. The delivery ended a brave innings in which the West Aussie rescued his nation by batting bravely for over four hours, facing 203 deliveries and hitting 14 fours and four sixes. Hussey and McGrath entered Australia’s record book for their 107-run tenth-wicket partnership. Australia triumphed in the Test by 184 runs and Hussey’s knock secured him the Man of the Match award. Australia’s last man standing, McGrath, finished his two hours at the crease on 11 not out, although he was later to lament his score should have been higher.
‘We turned down about 10 possible runs, maybe more,’ says McGrath. ‘I told Mike, “You get your runs everywhere and I’m turning mine down!” Every run I scored during my career was like gold, so it was extremely hard to stand around that day and watch them go begging. On a serious note, though, that was exactly what we needed – and it worked.’
While McGrath was warmly congratulated by his teammates and their support staff for his last-ditch stand, he finished his 56-ball dig feeling footsore and exhausted, although that wasn’t uncommon for him after a ‘longish’ stint at the crease.
‘I’d always feel more buggered after facing ten balls than bowling 20 overs,’ says McGrath. ‘I don’t think people realise how hot it is under the helmet. I always found I started sweating badly after wearing it for just a few minutes – it was like someone had turned a tap on. But I think the reason I’d feel exhausted after batting was the mental side of it, not the physical. In Melbourne that day I had to really concentrate.’
Hussey was well aware of the level of discomfort the fast bowler fought through that day at the MCG, as he recalls: ‘I remember during one mid-pitch talk Glenn told me he was feeling tired. He found the level of concentration exhausting and I was also hammering him. But in the next breath he’d settle himself by saying he knew the longer he batted, the less he would have to bowl. He was good value and it also made him happy to see how frustrated we were making the South Africans by hanging around.’
The euphoria McGrath felt having done his job as a batsman at Melbourne was a far cry from the sense of humiliation that weighed down on him 11 years earlier at the SCG, where he was dismissed for 1 in the Second Test of the Australia–South Africa series. McGrath remembers 6 January 1994 as the day of arguably his worst cricket experience. Australia needed an apparently easy 117 runs to win with a day in hand, but fast-medium bowler Fanie de Villiers single-handedly routed the Aussies by taking six wickets. The Australian batsmen fell like flies: Mark Taylor for 27; Michael Slater for 1; David Boon for 24; nightwatchman Tim May for 0; Mark Waugh for 11; Allan Border for 7; Damien Martyn for 6; and both Ian Healy and Shane Warne for 1.
Craig McDermott, with 29 runs to his name, waited for McGrath to join him at the crease. McGrath walked out slowly, painfully aware that he – and six lousy runs – were all that stood between defeat and victory.
Facing the bowler and sweating profusely, McGrath managed to make contact with the ball and scramble through for a single. But the pressure ultimately swamped him and he fell, caught and bowled to a regulation de Villiers delivery. McGrath was de Villiers’ tenth wicket of the match. A sense that he’d capitulated burned in McGrath that day.
‘I just wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole,’ he says. ‘It was humiliating. I could live with being dismissed by a decent delivery, but to be caught and bowled the way I was that day – a gentle defensive shot – really hurt. Nine times out of ten I would’ve hit straight through the ball. A lot of people tried to cheer me up by saying it wasn’t my fault, that our batsmen should have scored the runs and it shouldn’t have been left up to me – but the job was there to be done and it was up to me.
‘I carried the hurt from that day for a long time because I really felt as if I’d let Australia down. I’ve always thought the only person I could have any control over is myself. The fact is, I was the last batsman out and, up until that point, we had a chance. Whenever we lost a game or performed poorly as a team, I’d think about what I could have done to help the side. That was one reason why I never had a go at anyone else for something they may have done out in the middle – I realised that no matter what I said or did, I couldn’t change what had happened to them. But I could change things about my effort.’
Former Australian fast bowler Geoff Lawson was one of many who argued that Australia’s top order – not McGrath – had to answer for the SCG capitulation to the South Africans.
‘People who watch the game expect numbers one to 11 to bat, but it’s not like that at all,’ he says. ‘Numbers eight to 11 get picked to bowl, not for their batting ability. Yet with Pigeon, one thing I noticed was that every time he was dismissed during his career, it was treated by him as a shock. It was as if he was saying, “How did I do that?” His head would drop. He’d then shake his head in disbelief and he’d still be standing on the wicket when everyone else was three-quarters of the way off the ground. Everyone had a bit of a giggle about it – but if your number 11 gets out, it isn’t his fault you’ve lost the game. It’s normally the first six who should be answering questions.’
Insiders swear McGrath’s reaction to being dismissed bordered on psychotic at the best of times. While he didn’t quite follow Michael Slater’s symbolic act of jamming his bat and pads into a toilet bowl because he was dismissed playing a ‘crap’ shot, McGrath would put on a performance that Ponting likened to a comedy display rather than drama. The SCG loss to South Africa, however, was the exception.
‘We all knew Glenn worked his backside off to improve his batting,’ Ponting says. ‘He took it seriously – probably a bit too seriously, because when he was dismissed he’d storm into the dressing-room, chuck his helmet, throw his gloves and hurl his bat. While he’d be seething, most of the other guys would hide their heads in the lockers, pissing themselves laughing.’
Jason Gillespie, however, welcomed McGrath being on the receiving end of an alleged poor decision because it normally meant an easier day in the office for the bowlers.
‘Glenn was always funny when he got out,’ says Gillespie. ‘He’d be fuming, saying the umpire got it wrong – in his book he was never out. Most times he’d wear his bowling boots out to bat, and he’d be pacing as he waited to bowl when he got what he called a “dodgy decision” – and he’d go out there and bowl really well.’
While Ponting was one who enjoyed the locker-room banter concerning McGrath’s batting, he admits to a genuine admiration for his old number 11’s courage – and his willingness to take guard against pace bowlers who threw all they could at him.
‘We always have a bit of a laugh and joke about how scared some of these tail-enders must be,’ says Ponting. ‘But when you sit back and think about it, it must be scary to go out to bat knowing there is no way you can really protect yourself against someone who is bowling at 150 to 160 kilometres an hour. It must be really scary knowing there is nothing you can do if they bowl a good bouncer at you. If you remember that over Brett Lee bowled to South Africa’s Nante Hayward in Adelaide a few years ago, when he was running off the wicket to get away from the ball and Brett was following him; that must be terrifying.
‘At the end of the day, a lot of the tail-enders don’t have the skills to protect themselves. It would be a bit like me getting into the boxing ring with Mike Tyson and knowing he could kill me if he wanted. Cricket looks so easy on television. You can sit back and think, “This game can’t be that hard to play.” But I remember when some rugby league guys got in the nets – they were all talented athletes in a physical sport – they didn’t look comfortable at all when the NSW boys bowled a few bouncers at them. It’s brave for blokes like McGrath to show no fear out there even though they must be absolutely shitting themselves. Glenn never got hit badly. He ducked well, but he’d get behind the ball. He wore a few glancing ones off his helmet and he copped a lot on the gloves, but one thing about him is he never showed signs of fear.’
McGrath hadn’t always been so wonderfully inept. When he played in the Far West competition for Backwater and then for the Rugby Union XI, he was a slogger who could score a rapid-fire 50 or 60. There was nothing brilliant about his technique, although he did lay claim to owning the best bat in the district – a Stuart Surridge Jumbo, bought via mail order from the Greg Chappell Cricket Store in Brisbane for about a hundred hard-earned dollars. McGrath was attracted to the bat because of its chunky appearance – it looked mean, as if it were crafted to score runs. And it did, though McGrath admits the English willow performed as many air swings as scoring shots.
‘I looked at the scorebooks before I moved to Sydney and saw that I normally scored 60 to 70,’ he says. ‘I’d just go out and play my shots ... back then defence wasn’t my strong point. My first scoring shot might have been to charge down the wicket and slog the bowler over his head for six. You can do that on a synthetic wicket because the ball comes on to the bat better than it does off turf. I was never considered a gun batsman – it was just a bit of fun. Actually, while I have often said my bowling benefited because no-one took much interest in me as a young cricketer, I reckon my batting suffered because no-one ever showed me the fundamentals when I started out.’
Stuart Clark, who played alongside McGrath for Sutherland and NSW before breaking into the Australian Test and one-day teams, is a tail-ender who gained great heart from the way McGrath approached his batting.
‘He tried very hard,’ Clark says. ‘He tried, he tried, he tried – and Glenn actually went from the stage where he couldn’t bat to save himself to scoring 60-odd in a Test. He also helped a few batsmen get to their centuries – and if you look at it, he was probably cricket’s most improved batsman by the end of his career. I know people look at tail-enders and say it’s bad batting, however unless you experience it you can’t appreciate how quickly the ball can come at you. It can be scary at times. There are nerves when you’re sitting and waiting to bat, and once you get out there you have to overcome those.’
The public, however, was genuinely fascinated by McGrath’s batting. Perhaps it was cricket’s equivalent to motorists gawking at the aftermath of a car crash, but people just couldn’t look away. McGrath’s father felt a sense of pride during the 1996/97 series against the West Indies when his son was facing their bowlers at the SCG and the entire electronics department of the Grace Bros store in Dubbo came to a standstill. Staff and customers stood transfixed at the bank of television screens showing McGrath batting. As Kevin McGrath later told his son, the mob wildly cheered each of the 20 runs he scored before lunch as if Bradman himself were batting.
At the SCG that day, the members gave McGrath a standing ovation. On his arrival back in the dressing-room, his peers also celebrated as if he’d scored a century. One of them even chided him for not calling for a second pair of gloves like a ‘real’ batsman. The reason for that was simple – he didn’t own a spare pair. McGrath scored 24 that day – and his 57 minutes at the crease filled inches of newspaper space and commanded prime-time television coverage. It was because of the public’s fascination with McGrath’s batting that he never lacked interest from bat sponsors. Despite a frustrated Steve Waugh advising McGrath after a not-so-good net session to extort cash from bat manufacturers by threatening to use their product, Warren Craig had no problems getting his foot into plenty of doors courtesy of McGrath’s batting.
‘It was never hard to negotiate bat deals for Glenn,’ says Craig. ‘They were never lucrative deals, never the ones we hung our hats on financially or commercially. There was always interest in Glenn’s batting – you only had to go to a game and listen to the crowd cheer when he went out to the middle. I always thought the concentration of the television cameras, the photographers, the radio and TV commentators when he batted was something else. It meant, however, that there was always exposure when Glenn batted, and that meant sponsors saw value in getting on board. In the 12 years I represented him, there was only one time when he didn’t have a bat sponsor.’
Test opener Phil Jaques, who, like Clark, played the occasional first-grade game alongside McGrath for the Sutherland Sharks, says his earliest memories of McGrath are from when he’d make a rare return to grade cricket and he’d badger the captain to name him at number six. He’d point out that batting at number 11 at international level should entitle him to bat in the middle order in grade.
‘No matter how hard he pushed, Glenn would end up batting at nine, ten or jack,’ says Jaques. ‘But it always made me smile to hear him ask the captain to promote him. He was certainly passionate.’
McGrath did, however, convince John Dyson he was a talented batsman when he first played for Sutherland.
‘I asked where he batted and he told me he was an opener,’ says Dyson with a smile. ‘I thought to myself that was a bonus: an opening bowler who could open the batting. I thought the standard at Narromine couldn’t have been too great so we put him in at number seven. In his first innings for us, his off-peg disappeared. Unlucky – could’ve happened to anyone. In his second dig, he batted at seven again and was bowled middle stump. Suspicious. In the third game, I asked Evan Atkins what the chances were of Glenn getting some runs. He replied “none” and was right. His middle peg disappeared. He was dropped to bat at number 11 until he proved himself.’
Steve Waugh, who volunteered to act as McGrath’s batting coach, remembers how hard McGrath worked in the nets to ‘prove himself’ with the blade. While he recalls being terribly underpaid, Waugh at least had a willing student.
‘With Glenn it was a matter of getting the basics right, because he was playing a million shots without having a solid foundation,’ says Waugh. ‘I thought that if Glenn could get his defensive technique right, the attacking shots would follow. My main priority was to try to get his arms working together, and to help that I gave him a mental image. I’d say to rock the baby. The idea was to help him develop the action required to play a straight bat. Every time he dropped his front elbow, I wanted him to have the mental image of the baby falling out of his arms, and I’d reinforce it by saying he’d dropped the baby.
‘When he started, he looked as if he was going to get massacred every time he trundled out to the crease, but towards the end of his career he could handle it. He was always up for a partnership; he could hit a couple of fours and he even nailed the slog sweep at the very end. And when he tells you he never backed away – even when the West Indies were hunting him in ’95 – he’s telling the truth. He may have lacked technique then, but he was never once short on heart; never found wanting for courage.’
Towards the end of the 2007 World Cup – McGrath’s last appearance for Australia in international cricket – Ponting used McGrath’s absence from the team’s dressing-room to answer a question that had bugged him for years: what were the contents of McGrath’s batting kit? He couldn’t help but shake his head in disbelief when he opened it to find out.
‘I knew he’d had the same two pairs of batting gloves for the last four years – I go through 40 pairs a year – but when I rummaged through his kit I found he only had three gloves. Pidge had lost one somewhere along the way and hadn’t worried about replacing it,’ Ponting revealed. ‘He had two left-hand gloves, one right. I also noticed he’d broken his bat but didn’t have a replacement. I think that summed up Glenn’s batting.’
While McGrath defied his teenage tag of ‘the boy who couldn’t bowl’, despite all his hard work in the nets and the courage he showed under fire as a batsman, he never changed the perception of his batting. Throughout his career McGrath’s batting was analysed, criticised and ridiculed, yet not even his fiercest critic could ever accuse him of ‘dogging’ it. He was offered the chance to bat at number three in his farewell Test, when Ponting imagined the sight of McGrath striding out to bat would be greeted with thunderous applause from the crowd. However, Australia’s frustrated batsman made his farewell to arms on his own terms.
‘Punter,’ McGrath said, looking his skipper square in the eye, ‘I either bat first or I bat last.’