27
In the first three years of his tenure as skipper of Australia, Ricky Ponting slept soundly at night, safe in the knowledge that regardless of whatever might happen on the field, he had as his backup Test cricket’s most lethal combination: Warne and McGrath. Their skill and statistics had provided similarly comfortable mattresses for Ponting’s predecessors, Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh. In the 104 Tests Pigeon and Warnie played together, they captured 1001 wickets – 513 of those to the skill and cunning of Warne’s leg spin, and 488 to McGrath’s relentless line and length. And in those 104 Tests they celebrated 71 victories and suffered only 18 defeats. Waugh believes they possessed an ‘X-factor’ that allowed them to read an opposing batsman’s body language and to zero in on his vulnerabilities. For his part, Warne believes Australia was always in control of the moment – and the game – when he or McGrath had the ball.
While the pair are as far apart in manner and appearance as humanly possible – Warne was beset by a series of off-field controversies, had a shock of bleached blond hair and wore an earring; McGrath stalked wild boars for fun, boasted a no-nonsense haircut and desired a quiet life – they ‘clicked’ as both friends and team-mates, and Ponting watched on with a sadistic delight as the world’s top batsmen suffered at their hands.
‘You could see the sweat drip off the batsmen, especially if Shane or Glenn had a good strike-rate against them,’ says Ponting. ‘If McGrath bowled to Michael Atherton, for instance, you just knew Atherton would be absolutely shitting himself. You just know there are certain match-ups when you have a Warne or McGrath in your team. Before we played India in the 2006 ICC Champion’s Trophy, I hadn’t used Glenn to open the bowling in the tournament, but because I was aware of his great record against Sachin Tendulkar, I knew Tendulkar wouldn’t be too keen to bat against him. I let Glenn take the new ball and, sure enough, he knocked Sachin over in the first three overs. I was incredibly lucky, as was everyone else who played with those two guys. Now we have to replace them and that won’t be easy.’
During the last Test of the 2001 Ashes series, Warne was fielding at first slip at the Oval. He smiled to himself as he watched McGrath trudge back to his mark to bowl another ball at Atherton, who was playing his final Test. The Englishman’s body language against McGrath, allied with his hesitant and clumsy strokes, brought to Warne’s mind the idea of water torture. If anyone looked as if he was being slowly but surely sent around the bend, Warne thought, it was the English opener.
‘It was the torture technique, the drip on the forehead,’ says Warne, recalling his old bowling partner’s nagging line and length which brought the best in the business undone. ‘It was relentless. Glenn would just keep dripping away. He had an uncanny knack of working batsmen out. Every bowler has a plan, but you need to be able to execute it. Glenn didn’t do that just once or twice – he did it so many times, and he changed the face of the game doing it. From first slip I had one of the best views in the house to watch him work the batsman over, and it was brilliant to watch. The power of positive thinking when you have the wood on a batsman can have amazing results: he’ll fall to a magnificent catch; the ball that has done nothing all day will suddenly keep low and shoot along the ground or it hits back further than anyone else’s; the fifty-fifty LBW decisions seem to go your way. It’s amazing what that confidence can do for a bowler.’
What was also amazing was watching the prey’s confidence crumble in the presence of his hunter. At the Oval McGrath bowled his next ball and Atherton edged it straight into the waiting hands of Warne. It was the nineteenth – and final – time McGrath would skin his bunny.
Warne says the pair bowled against their opponents so often that they came to know exactly where to bowl. ‘The trick was knowing how to execute the plan on the day. I can’t recall too many days when I thought to myself that Glenn didn’t look too good. As a bowler, you could always sense when a batsman wanted to take the challenge to you, and that was when you had to rise to the occasion. There weren’t too many days when I thought a batsman had got the better of Glenn. There were the occasional days, but overall there weren’t too many. And he was very honest. If Pigeon bowled rubbish he’d tell you so, and that says a lot about his character.
‘But we had a great partnership. It wasn’t as if Glenn and I sat down and spoke about it all the time. We really didn’t have to say much; we just knew if I was bowling at one end and he was at the other, something would happen. It might’ve been a run-out because of the pressure we’d built up, or when someone came on to replace us they’d get a wicket straight away. If a game was getting away from us, I thought we grabbed control back when Glenn and I were brought back on.
‘I put a lot of my wickets down to having Glenn McGrath bowl at the other end. I was very lucky to have someone with such accuracy and high concentration levels. Something always happened. I loved bowling with Pigeon. As a friend, he has been very loyal to me – we’ll be lifelong friends. Our families get on great and he is a genuine guy, an amazing bloke who has overcome so much in his private life, with Jane, to do well.’
McGrath looked upon Warne as the man born to be Australia’s cricket captain. But when circumstances didn’t allow that to happen, Warne received what McGrath considers the next best accolade: being considered by his peers as the leader of Australia’s bowling attack, the go-to man for answers, advice and inspiration. And Warne was not only proud to carry such a responsibility, but he lifted his bowlers with him.
‘I believe there are only two men who have had a real effect on cricket – Bradman and Warne,’ says McGrath. ‘You might throw Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara in the mix, but I think Warne had the bigger impact. He has a passion for the game. You look at what he has done for Hampshire in English county cricket – he’s turned the place around.’
And just as Warne feels lucky to have bowled with McGrath, so McGrath considers himself blessed to have bowled at the other end from Warne. McGrath also believes that without Warne he wouldn’t have taken as many wickets as he did, and that Australia wouldn’t have won as many games as it did during Warne’s reign.
‘When Australia needed a breakthrough, he’d come through time and time again. We were opposite bowlers, but we were the same in that we could build pressure. People talk about seeing the sweat drip from the batsmen and how they’d sigh with relief when we were taken off – only to play a rash shot and get out against the new bowler because they wanted runs. The pressure was our strength. And while people talk about great bowling partnerships they normally think about fast bowlers working in pairs, but the reason Warnie and I complemented each other was we had good control over the ball.’
Steve Waugh highlights another benefit of the Warne– McGrath partnership, one which helped Australia to dominate the world stage: their bowling partnership was so powerful it effectively allowed an extra batsman to be selected in the Aussie side. That Australia needed only four bowlers when Waugh was at the helm was due to the unique ability of Warne and McGrath not only to attack the batsmen, but to contain the flow of runs. In other words, the two of them could do the job of four men.
‘I was lucky because [in both] I had two bowlers in one,’ says Waugh. ‘They could tie up an end and no runs were scored off them, yet they were capable of taking wickets too. They were both attacking and containing bowlers, and that is very rare. That is why we only needed four bowlers – because we really had six with Warne and McGrath doubled up. The difficult part of the job was ensuring they were happy with the amount of bowling they were going to get, or the ends they bowled from. Actually, the biggest problem was taking the ball off either of them to give someone else a chance! It was sometimes difficult to do that when the tail-enders were in; Glenn and Shane had done all the hard work beforehand and that was sometimes hard to manage. But in saying that, there were far more positives than negatives with those two.
‘Glenn just wanted to bowl all the time. He’d never tell you if he was struggling. Every time I’d say enough, he’d ask for just one more go, and it was very hard to say no. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I’d give in and he’d take a wicket and get another three or four overs on top of that! Some blokes might feel unlucky bowling with McGrath, because when he’d come on for a spell it’d look innocuous but he’d get a wicket. The aura he and Warne exerted meant they put pressure on the batsman straight away. It was as if they’d say, “Oh no, it’s Glenn McGrath – or it’s Shane Warne – so this is going to be hard.” And all of a sudden they’d get a wicket.’
In October 2007, Warne’s and McGrath’s enormous contribution to cricket was acknowledged by the Sport Australia Hall of Fame’s prestigious ‘The Don’ Award. As well as high achievement, the Don recognises the traits of respect, dignity, courage and sportsmanship, criteria laid down by Sir Donald Bradman shortly before his death. The pair’s citation acknowledges the enormous amount of work undertaken by their respective charities, the McGrath Foundation and the Shane Warne Foundation (which raises money for causes that range from homelessness to sick children).
McGrath is proud that the ties that bind him to Warne go much deeper than past cricket glories, awards and time spent together forming strategies that rattled both the egos and the wickets of the world’s batting line-ups.
‘Warnie is an amazing guy,’ says McGrath. ‘How he is viewed for what he has done off the field is up to individual opinion, but I stand by him. We’ve spoken more than ever since we retired and we plan to do plenty more good things together. It’s funny: he is larger than life and he did me a favour by taking a lot of the limelight off me when it came to the media. He revelled in it and I did it because it had to be done.
‘The last cricketer who was like Warnie was Keith Miller – and maybe it’s a generational thing, but Miller’s so-called playboy antics were celebrated, but Shane copped grief ... Shane is my friend and those of us who really know the bloke and what he is about can’t help but to love him.’
For Warne, taking the skinny newcomer with the nerdy haircut under his wing in 1993 when he first made the Australian team has had numerous rewards as well.
‘It has been an absolute pleasure to play with him,’ says Warne. ‘He was an absolute pest around the changeroom. You notice those things when you’re away from the game. When we played and he annoyed us you’d think, “McGrath, can you piss off for a while?” Because he’d squashed a grape in your ear, tied your shoelaces together, signed his autograph on the back of your bat, all those stupid things. But when you’ve retired and you sit back and think about how much fun it was, you think about those times – the crap you talked as you sat around in buses, the lows and the highs you shared. It was about being a part of a team and the spirit we shared. And when I think of that, it’s when guys like Pigeon come to my mind.’