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Adam Gilchrist and Glenn McGrath were in a car returning to the Australian team hotel after visiting Matt and Kel Hayden’s place in Brisbane before the First Test of the 2006/07 Ashes series. Both men felt as if they were a million miles away from their respective families and homes. McGrath, aged 36, had hours earlier told the media he felt good enough to play until he was 40 – but that was in response to jibes he was part of a Dad’s Army outfit which contained too many players on the wrong side of 30 to be a serious threat to England’s hold on the Ashes. What annoyed McGrath most of all was that former Australian fast bowlers Geoff Lawson and Jeff Thomson had joined Ian Chappell in throwing barbs his way.
While McGrath respected and understood everyone’s right to an opinion, he found his fellow quicks’ input hard to take. ‘But those guys always questioned my form heading into a new season. I knew I was closer to the end of my career than the start, but I still believed I was contributing. It had always been my intention to step down if I figured I’d passed my use-by date. And they should have known that. Guys like Courtney Walsh and Richard Hadlee bowled until well into their late thirties and they continued to produce. However, I found that the older I became, the quicker they were to point out it could be my last series, which was frustrating.’
McGrath was stung by the apparent lack of faith – and his declaration that he still had a few good years left in him was his ultra-positive response. However, during the car trip back to his hotel, the fast bowler’s thoughts weren’t with the knockers but with Jane and the kids. He’d recently started to think often about the amount of time he’d lost with them due to his commitment to cricket, and the all-too-many magic moments he’d sacrificed as a father and husband weighed heavily upon his mind. He’d previously steeled himself from such thoughts by believing playing cricket was ‘what I did’, but cracks had started to appear in that protective barrier and they threatened to destabilise everything.
While the idea of retiring hadn’t taken root, the factors that would soon lead to it began to mount. And it had to happen. While Jane had faithfully documented on video and digital camera such things as friends’ birthday parties and other outings, McGrath found watching James’ and Holly’s lives unfurl on a television screen or laid out in a photo album a poor substitute for living their experiences of wonder and delight. He missed the other fatherly duties as well, like being close by to comfort his children after they’d had a nightmare or when they tripped and scraped their knees.
In the lead-up to the summer of 2006/07, McGrath had spent eight months at home recovering from an ankle problem. During that time he had been enchanted by family life and doing normal dad things. He drove his children to school, fished with James, marvelled at Holly’s imaginative stories and spent invaluable time with Jane. However, bliss came to an end when McGrath had the tough job of sitting James and Holly down to explain it was time for Daddy to return to work – to contest the DLF Cup in Malaysia, a triangular one-day series which involved the Aussies, India and the West Indies. The looks of disappointment on their faces were clear in McGrath’s mind as he opened up to Gilchrist in Brisbane. He remembered how, as he tried to convince his children that everything would be all right, his own eyes started to sting.
‘When I was growing up, my parents were around 24/7 and my grandparents were only down the road,’ he says. ‘While you don’t think about it as a kid, you realise as you grow older that there was a lot of comfort in knowing you have the support of a parent or grandparent nearby. Through cricket, Jane had pretty much been a single parent. I could be anywhere in the world at any given time; my parents were 500 kilometres away and Jane’s were in England. While she has plenty of good friends who’d do anything for her, there was no family network and although she never complained, I know it was tough on her ... it’d be tough on anyone.
‘I know it was hard on the kids, too. They’d go to things where the other kids had their fathers, but James and Holly’s father was away most of the time. In the eight months I stayed at home, Holly became a real Daddy’s girl and James liked having me around to do things like kick the footy and play backyard cricket. I was concerned when he started bowling leg spin, though. Concerned, because you might’ve noticed those spin bowlers are a different breed.
‘Those thoughts were on my mind when I spoke to Gilly in the car. I was expressing things I would normally keep private and it really surprised me to hear myself saying them out loud. It was one of those things you wouldn’t do too often, because I think if you went on about those things on a regular basis it could create a negative environment. But on that particular day, talking openly to Adam made me feel as if I was ridding myself of a great weight. I never really spoke about the personal stuff to the guys because I thought it might be considered a sign of weakness. Perception is everything: I was a member of the all-conquering Australian cricket team and people form a picture of you – and deep down you try to live up to it. However, what I realised from talking to Adam was that I wasn’t the only person who felt the way I did ... and that helped a lot.’
Gilchrist was amazed to hear Pigeon open up. In all the years he’d known McGrath, he’d been reserved and resilient. While surprised by his team-mate’s candour, he kept quiet and allowed McGrath to bare his soul. What struck Gilchrist, though, was that the big bloke could quite easily have been reading his own mind.
‘Well, I echoed Glenn’s thoughts,’ says Gilchrist. ‘It was probably not just Glenn who felt that way, but the entire Australian cricket team.’ Gilchrist acknowledges the extent to which the team members helped each other, but this was mostly related to cricket.
‘Ask any bowler about Glenn’s impact and I know they’d say Pigeon helped them a lot, that he led by example and he was happy to lead the discussions about cricket. But I think we could do more for each other in regard to our emotional state; issues that relate to family and friends and the loneliness of long tours. I’m not sure if Pidgey – given that what he and Jane endured was played out in public – was a little bit cautious about how much information he divulged. That came back to his personality.
‘After our conversation, I made it a point of asking how he was going because I began to understand the frustrations he felt at being away from his family, especially the kids. We don’t get the time we lose back. I always felt as if I wanted to grab Glenn and get more out of him after that chat and to let him release what was on his mind, because he kept so much to himself. I guess that was the style of the guy. He obviously endured extraordinary private moments and situations with Jane. We all have our own things, but some find it more difficult to deal with than others. I think Glenn dealt with his in an admirable way – an amazing fashion, actually.’
Being a long-distance dad and husband wasn’t easy. McGrath was grateful for Jane’s efforts not only to run the house and care for the kids but also to keep the connection between James, Holly and him ‘alive’. She never allowed the sun to set without letting the children know how much their father loved them. It was an exercise that spared McGrath the devastation an Australian rugby league player experienced when he returned from the three-month Kangaroo tour of Great Britain and France in 1986. When he returned, his children – after 12 weeks of kissing a photograph of their dad while he was away – walked straight past him when it was time to say goodnight and kissed the glass frame on the dressing table. The footballer vowed on the spot never to tour again. And he didn’t.
Thankfully, McGrath never experienced anything as crushing. While the emotion he carted about was heavy, it wasn’t guilt. It was loss. One such moment of loss was when James played his first game of cricket in September 2006. As his son measured out his first steps to bowl in an under-8s game, McGrath was on tour in Malaysia. He was torn. It was vital he played in the DLF Cup to prove he was ready to take part in Australia’s quest to regain the Ashes later that summer. It was no secret to McGrath that some at Cricket Australia doubted whether he could come back. Despite the fact he was fighting for his future, he would’ve given almost anything to have been sitting alongside Jane and Holly and offering his son some encouragement.
‘Jane sent me constant updates from the ground via text messages,’ says McGrath. ‘The kids play 20-over games and each player gets two overs of batting, bowling and keeping. They share it around, which is a great idea. James took two consecutive wickets and was then involved in a run-out from his third delivery. A team hat-trick – not a bad way to start cricket. I couldn’t allow myself to get emotional. A long time ago, when I’d think about the problems of being away from Jane, and then the kids, I’d told myself, “This is what I do” – and I focused on cricket. When I was in Malaysia, I told myself the time would come when I’d be able to attend every game James played. Also, when I was with the kids, I’d make it a point to make the most of the time we had together. We cricketers only get a certain amount of time to play at the top level and we have to make the most of it while we can. However, it was getting harder.’
Surprisingly, Jane was always happy to see her husband leave. However, her joy at the sight of him packing his kitbag stemmed not from being happy to be rid of McGrath, but because it was a sign her health was good. McGrath had made Jane’s health his main priority early in their relationship and he’d ruled himself out of tours to stay by her side whenever she was ill.
‘If ever I thought, even for a second, that something was not right with Jane, I would not have gone,’ says McGrath. ‘She was always my priority. I would’ve stepped down from a tour in a second – and I did that on a couple of occasions.’
Jane had stopped going to the airport long before because their emotional farewells had become fodder for the prying lenses of television cameras to show on the evening news and for newspaper snappers commissioned to fill space in the morning papers. Even members of the public had made that last, desperate embrace at the terminal awkward because of their impulse to capture anything that resembled celebrity on their mobile phone cameras. So the McGraths said their goodbyes at home and the taxi ride to Mascot seemed that little bit lonelier and a lot tougher for it.
Jock Campbell left the Australian team in 2005 to start his own personal training business by the beach at Cronulla. He helped McGrath maintain peak physical condition as he recuperated during his eight-month break on the sideline. However, a number of what Campbell called ‘tell-tale’ signs led him to conclude the great bowler was primed to draw stumps.
‘Glenn didn’t actually come out and say he was going to give up,’ says Campbell. ‘He dropped a few hints that the time was coming, but I didn’t expect it to come as soon as it did ... I thought he might’ve taken a little bit longer. He said he’d had enough of going to the gym and would prefer to do outdoor training. He was a bit stale, so we did a lot of outdoor stuff. We didn’t worry so much about the weights. Pigeon seemed like someone at the end of his tether. While he trained hard, I sensed Glenn was doing it tough.’
Despite calls by critics that McGrath was too old to spearhead the Australian bowling attack, he felt relaxed and in control during the countdown to the 2006 Gabba Test. However, Ponting read the reports bagging McGrath and the so-called ‘pension-aged’ members of his team with a feeling of utter contempt. While he played a straight bat in the public arena in response to what he considered low blows, the words stung.
‘We may have said publicly that we didn’t care what people said or thought, but of course we cared,’ he says. ‘Deep down it was an insult to all of us. The selectors didn’t pick the team because of names; they selected the 11 best players to represent the nation. If that meant one was 36, or another aged 37, so what? My only concern about Glenn going into the Ashes was whether he had enough bowling under his belt after returning from injury.
‘We were always conscious of whether he had enough bowling. He was pretty rusty in Malaysia, so we tried to pump a lot of bowling into him to get his workload back up there. The fact that NSW had no first-class games when we returned didn’t help his cause, because he needed time to get his rhythm back. And he needed his rhythm for a number of reasons: firstly, to get his pace and everything else right; secondly, to get a bit of bounce and rip into the wicket; and thirdly, for his own confidence. Everyone had written him off going into the First Test.’
McGrath responded brilliantly to the challenge by tearing through the English batting line-up on his way to taking six first-innings wickets; it was his twenty-ninth five-wicket haul in Test cricket and his tenth against the old enemy. Statisticians also noted that the match, played in humid conditions, was the hundredth time McGrath and Shane Warne had played alongside one another in Test cricket. As he walked from the field holding the ball aloft in recognition of the Brisbane crowd’s enthusiastic applause for a job well done, McGrath theatrically grabbed the bottom of his back and faked an old codger’s limp. While some interpreted it as a swipe at his critics, it was nothing more than a show of McGrath’s humour, anything to give his team-mates a belly laugh.
‘I took 6 for 50 and it hit me to take off an old man,’ he says. ‘The boys thought it was hilarious. I wasn’t having a go at anyone or being disrespectful, I was just having a bit of fun. With the columnists, especially the former cricketers, I’d often wondered if they wrote things about players being too old, or whatever, just to create headlines or to help the team. I never really cared what the critics said, unless it was a former Australian player having a crack. I was never a big fan of that because it always seemed wrong. It’s a path I certainly won’t be taking in the future.’
Rather than use his return to gloat at the expense of his detractors, McGrath used his moment in the sun to pile praise on his greatest supporter via his Sunday Telegraph column.
‘To get six wickets after being out of the Test arena for the best part of a year is one thing,’ wrote McGrath. ‘To do it with my wife, Jane, in the grandstand was another. Yesterday was Ladies’ Day at the Gabba, and what I achieved by taking six wickets was as much for her as anything else I have done in the game.
‘It was great for Jane to be there and it was a big thing for her. It was virtually her first big appearance in public since everything that happened in the past year [a brain tumour operation]. All I hope is she enjoyed it as much as I did. I knew where she was sitting and I made the effort to acknowledge her after I got my five wickets.’
Australia humiliated England by 277 runs in Brisbane. While McGrath could afford to bask in the accolades he received for a job well done, what he didn’t realise was that the end of the line was so much closer than he ever could have expected.