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The torment was over and McGrath watched through what even he thought at the time were ‘strangely sympathetic eyes’ as Mike Atherton walked for the last time from centre wicket towards the England dressing-room. In his final Test, in 2001, he was caught by Shane Warne off McGrath for a disappointing 9 at the Oval. His head bowed, each of the opener’s steps could have been timed to the beat of Chopin’s Funeral March. It was a significant moment, not only because it’d be the last time the foes would cross swords, but also because it was the first – and only – time the fast bowler ever felt a slight pang of sorrow for his natural-born enemy: a batsman.
McGrath dismissed Atherton six times during the opener’s last campaign – the 2001 Ashes series – and 19 times in total throughout their careers. There were people who joked that ‘Athers’ must have woken in the dead of the night howling and shaking after his latest nightmare of a wild-eyed pig hunter from Narromine gunning for him. That day at the Oval, though, McGrath thought it was unfair he’d actually dismissed the man who, at his most dogged, made batting look like trench warfare with such a simple delivery.
‘I wasn’t bowling all that well,’ says McGrath. ‘I was bowling gun-barrel straight and the ball kept missing the edge of his bat. He just kept playing and missing. I decided to bowl one straight at the stumps and I couldn’t believe it when he nicked the ball and it went to Warnie. All I could think to myself was, “How unlucky could a bloke be?” I actually felt sorry for him. Though, that was the only time I felt that way about a wicket.’
Atherton’s problems with McGrath’s bowling first made headlines during the 1998/99 Ashes series in Australia, when the media noted the spars between the pair normally ended with McGrath standing with his fist raised in the air triumphant. Former England opener Graham Gooch – who opened for his country alongside Atherton – seized on it as an issue, as did Australian skipper Mark Taylor and a host of others, including McGrath, who turned the screws in a public and purposeful manner.
When Atherton spoke of having a back problem ahead of a Test, McGrath vowed to bowl bouncers at him the next time they met. Before a match McGrath would call Atherton his ‘bunny’ and would do his best to sow seeds of doubt in his opponent’s mind by telling the media how much he enjoyed bowling at him.
McGrath talked the talk, but Steve Waugh loved the fact his strike bowler could also walk the walk.
‘We all knew Atherton struggled against Glenn long before it was made into something,’ says Waugh. ‘McGrath bowling at Atherton was like watching a cat stalk a mouse. He knew he’d get him at some stage, but he had fun with him in the meantime – toss him around in the air before putting him away. He had the mastery of line and length and Atherton had that unusual technique where he’d sort of push the ball outside his off stump. You just couldn’t do that to McGrath ... you couldn’t offer him any encouragement in the area. The slips fielders knew it would only be a matter of time before something would happen. Glenn also started bouncing him and had Atherton caught out hooking a few times. Atherton just didn’t have any weapons to counter what Glenn delivered.’
When Atherton returned to the SCG as a television commentator during the New Year’s Test of the 2002/03 Ashes series, he was adamant McGrath’s mind games hadn’t affected him.
‘I can’t speak on behalf of the other batsmen, but his comments didn’t prey on my mind,’ said Atherton in between commentary shifts. ‘I didn’t take any notice of it; it was all psychological on Glenn’s behalf. The truth is every bowler wants to get the opening batsmen out; every opening bowler with the pill in their hand is targeting you.’
England wicketkeeper Alec Stewart supported his old skipper, suggesting McGrath’s penchant for targeting opponents was perhaps a ploy by the Aussie to bring out the best in himself.
‘I don’t know if it is to intimidate people or to spur himself on,’ said Stewart. ‘I’ll give him this, though – he backs himself well, because more often than not he does what he says. However, I don’t think it affects batsmen.’
Graham Thorpe missed Atherton’s last Test because of an injury; however, he was in the dressing-room after his old skipper was dismissed. During a stint as NSW’s assistant coach in 2006, Thorpe relived Atherton’s loud sigh of relief four years earlier when he realised his private war with McGrath was finally over.
‘One thing I’ll say about Atherton is he was never different in the dressing-room before he went out to face McGrath, and that’s why I thought he was always a mentally strong player – because even though this bloke had knocked him over time and time again, you wouldn’t have known it until his last game,’ said Thorpe. ‘I remember speaking to him after the match and he told me that as he walked out to bat in the second innings, it felt like a relief to know he was facing McGrath for the last time. For McGrath to have a very good batsman like Atherton come technically undone was incredible. He could constantly get the ball in the right area, and basically he messed up his footwork.’
While there were batsmen who were reputed to have been ‘out’ before they even faced a delivery from McGrath, Thorpe made it clear he was not one of them.
‘I never had that approach to any bowler,’ said Thorpe. ‘We came up against some good bowlers in that ten-year span I played. Glenn had some good qualities which allowed him to thrive for as long as he did. One was his accuracy – and there were a few others who had it during that era, including Ambrose and Pollock. If they wanted the ball to land in a certain area, they were bloody good at it. They kept the pressure on the batsmen by doing that. I would have thought there were certain batsmen who would’ve struggled against Glenn. I played against Glenn early in his career, but something I noticed in 2001 when I came back from a broken hand was that he looked quite an imposing figure at the crease. Over the years he built up and he grew stronger and bigger. He also had greater knowledge of what worked well for him, and that helped.’
In time, one of the media’s first questions of the international cricket season was for McGrath to predict who would win the series and to name who his bunny was. His responses never failed to make headlines. His list of targets reads like a who’s who of big-time cricket, and his success rate – as the stats below indicate – was excellent.
‘The mind was something I knew a bit about,’ says McGrath. ‘But the longer I played, the more I developed that side of it, and I realised how powerful it is. The difference between those days I bowled well and those I didn’t was if I didn’t back myself. And that’s why I talked it up in the paper and it is why I targeted players – it was all part of the psychological game. And it is sometimes hard to back yourself during a game. You might feel tired, or there might be a niggling injury. On other occasions you know what you should bowl, but do the opposite – and that always hurt. People have their reasons for not backing themselves. I backed myself because I hated the idea of walking off the field and feeling as though I didn’t have the faith in myself.
‘The other thing I did, apart from visualising success, was I’d watch tapes of myself taking wickets because it was positive reinforcement. It worked, too. I stopped for a little while until Jane said she remembered when she first came to Australia I often watched my wickets. I started doing it again and it seemed to help. I guess cricket is such a confidence sport that anything you can do to reinforce positive thoughts can only be a benefit.
‘I was also lucky in that I can’t ever remember having a bad dream about bowling. When I dreamt about cricket, I just bowled the ball I wanted to and I either found the batsman’s edge or bowled him out. Sometimes in my dreams I’d bowl the entire team out ... but I was also fortunate in that I never had any trouble shutting down of a night during a game. Some blokes can’t switch off, but I could. It didn’t matter if I was batting, either; it wasn’t as though I lay awake all night worrying about what awaited me the next morning.’
Express bowler Brett ‘Binga’ Lee, as he read the paper before the start of a Test series, would see who McGrath had decided to target and learn that Australia was going to win the Ashes, or any other series, in a whitewash. He’d smile and shake his head, but one thing he appreciated about McGrath early in his career was that, like the postman, he always delivered.
‘As a team, we found it pretty funny,’ says Lee. ‘But we also knew there are players out there who risk getting egg on their face by making big statements because they can’t back it up. Glenn thrived on making bold predictions, but he could come through. If he said he was going to knock Brian Lara over for 10 runs, well, nine times out of ten he’d do it. He put the pressure on the batsman and not himself. If a bowler said he was going to do this or that and he gets hit around, he’d wish he never said anything to the press, so it’s not going to work for everyone. However, it worked well for Glenn and he did it very well. Was the way he dominated Atherton and Lara mental? Big time. It helps, though, when you’re bowling at a good pace; when you’re as tall as Glenn and have a perfect wrist, especially when bowling at the left-handers. He enjoyed the challenge and I think it put the pressure on the batsmen and not the bowlers.’
Team trainer Jock Campbell, however, remembers muffled groans from some players when they heard McGrath had predicted Australia would waltz undefeated through a series. Yet Campbell always considered McGrath’s confidence a strength.
‘You’d hear the players read that Pigeon had predicted a 5–0 whitewash and they’d say, “Oh no, not again!” ’ laughs Campbell. ‘He was right about those things more times than not, and I think it intimidated the opposition – and if that is ever proven to be the case, then he has done his job, because international sport is all about confidence and competitiveness.’
That was the view McGrath’s bowler partner Jason Gillespie subscribed to. ‘I didn’t ever feel pressure when Glenn made his big statements,’ he says. ‘He was asked how many were we going to win by. What does he say? We’re not going to win? We’re going to lose 3–1? We’ll draw? He’d say 5–0, 4–0, however long the series was scheduled to go for. It was Glenn’s little way of saying he wasn’t going to give away a game – and if you look back on his predictions, he did all right.’
However, McGrath also admits one reason why he was never scared to back himself or make the bold predictions was the calibre of his team-mates.
‘I was lucky to have played in an era where Australian cricket was so strong. Every time I walked out on the field, I only had to look at the sides I was in and there were guys like Mark Taylor, Shane Warne, Steve Waugh, Adam Gilchrist, Ricky Ponting, Matty Hayden. Walking alongside them gave me a lot of confidence, because not only did we go out there to have fun, but the thought of losing never entered our minds. We went for the win from ball one – I couldn’t help but to think we’d win every series in a whitewash.’
McGrath’s foray into the power of the mind extended beyond making his opponents doubt their own ability by airing his thoughts – like a hypnotist in a public forum – on what he considered their weaknesses to be and how those would lead to their demise. When others tried to turn the tables on him and say he was getting old or was too slow, McGrath had too solid a foundation of self-belief to be rattled. After all, that faith in himself had been formed when he was a teenager who had to defy the popular opinion that he couldn’t bowl.
‘The two things that always held me in good stead were that I knew my game well and I knew myself very well. It helped for me to be successful, knowing who I was; knowing how I worked best and always looking for ways to improve and learn. I always thought I was fairly stable emotionally and mentally. My highs were never all that high and my lows were never all that low. I was always controlled – but other guys had massive highs and the downside was they suffered terrible lows.
‘They say we only use between five to ten per cent of our brain capacity, so we really don’t know what we are capable of. In time, and I guess it’ll be a long time, we’ll do amazing things by harnessing the power of our minds. I believe you can heal yourself with your mind – that is very real.’
McGrath put his belief into practice when he injured his ankle and needed a quick recovery to galvanise Australia’s bowling attack during the 2005 Ashes series. He had been given by Justin Langer a book to read titled Zen in the Martial Arts, which taught Zen principles to open potential sources of inner strength. In its pages McGrath read such things as: ‘The mind of a perfect man is like a mirror. It grasps nothing. It expects nothing. It reflects but does not hold. Therefore, the perfect man can act without effort.’
However, of all the book’s wisdom, the story that hit home for McGrath concerned the time when its author had used his mind to help heal some horrific injuries as he lay in his hospital bed.
‘Before he would go to sleep he’d imagine teams of little men going inside his body to work the overnight shift to help him heal,’ says McGrath. ‘The concept was while he slept these little blokes would repair the damage. And when he’d wake up an imaginary siren would sound in his head and that was the signal for them to stop work and he took over. It seemed such a great concept, so I applied it – and it worked. The philosophies in the book ring true and they apply to so many areas of life. It was a powerful tool for me. It’s about the state of mind and that we are all a product of ourselves. We can blame everyone else for what happens in our lives, but I think we all need to take responsibility for our actions and also for who we are and how we feel, because ultimately we are the only ones who can change it. I think it’s true some people aren’t happy unless they are unhappy. They whinge and moan about how much they hate things, yet the fear of changing their environment scares them. It comes down to their insecurities, or they lack the courage to change. Basically it comes down to backing yourself. In the book it says the mind is like a fertile garden and whatever you plant in it, be it negative or positive, is what will grow and flourish.
‘So be careful about what you think.’