Make 100
– Be man of the match
– Be man of the series
• Read this list out loud after writing it, underline each item when read and visualise each point for tomorrow
• Write a list of each bowler and how they will try to bowl
– Visualise how they will try to get me out
• Then switch off the light and go to sleep
Before going out to bat
• Get ready the same way each and every time
• Sit down and watch the openers with my gear all in same positions around me — ready to go
• Sit with a bottle of water and chew three pieces of gum
• Sip the water when needed
• As soon as a wicket falls, remove the gum and put it aside. Drink water and leave for the middle
Walking out to the middle
• Display energy and walk to the middle fairly quickly
• Do three or four butt kicks with each leg
• Play a number of shadow ‘straight drives’ while walking
• Flick my wrists with bat in hand — both hands
On arrival at the crease
• Take guard and get middle
• Clear all the rubbish on the wicket around the crease line — must be perfectly clear
• Walk down and look closely at the wicket
• Identify the area that I think the bowler can bowl a good ball
• Make sure that area is totally clear
• Move to the side of the pitch and do my hamstring stretches with bat in both hands
• Walk back to the crease while observing the field placement
• Take my grip and take my stance in the crease
Bowler’s run-up and delivery
• Say ‘watch the ball’ to myself twice
— halfway through run-up and just before release of the ball
• Look at the identified area down the wicket and look up at the bowler’s release of the ball
• Then whatever happens, happens
• Switch my mind off completely until bowler is back near top of run-up
• Switch back on and start this delivery routine again
SO MUCH OF WHO I AM is where I came from.
It started here and in a lot of ways it’s right that it ends here in these dressing rooms. I’m two months retired from Test cricket and back playing for the Mowbray Eagles. Back where it all began.
I entered these rooms as a boy and left them 30 years later. I wore the baggy green cap at the crease and the Australian captain’s jacket at the toss. I wore one-day colours too in an era when we were unbeatable at World Cup cricket. I wore them all with pride, at all times striving to be the best I could, but if you stripped all that away you would find what matters most and what kept me going: cricket.
It is simple really. I loved the game, the rituals, the fierce competition and the equally fierce mateship it promoted.
Dressing rooms, hotels, cricket grounds and aeroplanes are the places where my life has been lived.
The rooms are our refuge. For Test players they’re a place away from the cameras, journalists, crowds and constant glare. For club cricketers they’re a sanctuary where you can be with your mates away from work and the grind of daily life. You check in Saturday morning and you check out Saturday night a little wobbly from the long day and a few drinks after the game.
Every club cricketer has got a dressing room routine, sometimes it’s hard to pick the pattern in the mess, other times it’s obvious. Me? I’m not neat, I take the bats out and stand them up to clear some room in the jumble of the kit bag. The gloves are numbered, but in no order and as the game goes on things spread out further. Matthew Hayden said I spread my gear round like a ‘scrub turkey’ but he was almost as bad; Justin Langer, Mike Hussey they were like me; others were neat as pins. Damien Martyn was, and Michael Clarke and Brad Haddin verge on the obsessive, everything laid out like it’s a display in a store window. Marto would mark the edges of his territory with tape and warn us not to let our mess trespass within. In different grounds we had different seating patterns that established themselves over the years.
Spreading the bats and placing your bag somewhere is about marking your turf, setting out the boundaries of your space.
From the time I was small I was drawn to the equipment. The bats, the shoes, the gloves and the pads … I was always looking at what somebody else had, always picking up bats and feeling them. They are, I suppose, the tools of the trade. If I’d followed through on that building apprenticeship when I left school I wonder if I’d have had the same romantic attachment to what was in the toolbox.
Occasionally you’ll meet a cricketer who couldn’t give a toss, but most of us, particularly batsmen, are obsessed with our gear. Huss would carry a set of scales with him to ensure the bat was an exact weight. If it was over, out would come the sandpaper and he would start to scrape away. I’d give him a bit of grief about it, but when he wasn’t around I’d weigh mine too. Most of us arrive with an arsenal of bats: the lucky one, the one that’s almost broken in, the one that’s there and about …
The secret to a good one is how it feels in your hands and the soft tonk sound a new ball makes on good willow. Your ear tells you. I suppose a guitar or a piano is the same, but you’d have to ask a musician if that’s right.
My game bat never comes out until the morning of the match, it never gets an appearance at practice. The others are works in progress, bits of willow that will, with a bit of tuning and knocking, make it to game-bat status one day. Like players, bats have to earn a place in a game.
WE PONTINGS ARE WORKING-CLASS PEOPLE from a working-class part of Launceston and our entertainment consisted of footy in winter, cricket in summer and golf whenever we could. It was the same with everybody we knew.
From the time I was old enough to ride my bike past the end of the street I would come down to watch the Mowbray Eagles play. I was always drawn to the cricket ground and the dressing room. Uncle Greg played for the Eagles before he moved on to the Shield side and then to Test cricket. Maybe it was him who got me down there the first time, but I knew Dad had played for the same team and most of the
