04 January 2010
Steve Cannane
If anyone suggests a game of backyard cricket this summer, feign injury, propose a game of backgammon, pretend you’re asleep...
Those heading to Australia for the first time would no doubt have been briefed on some of the hazards of a summer down-under. Sunburn. Sharks. The box jellyfish. Bundaberg Rum. All can catch a novice unawares. But there’s another, potentially more insidious, threat: an informal game of cricket in someone’s back garden.
In Australia, backyard cricket is a blood sport. Pitches are dodgy, ball tampering is rampant, poor umpiring is customary, sledging is mandatory. Disputes are sorted out with threats and violence. Mothers are summoned from inside the family home to act as peace envoys, but these missions rarely deliver lasting harmony.
The backyard is where Australia’s best cricketers honed their survival instincts. After Greg Chappell made his test debut against the pace of John Snow on a bouncy Perth pitch, it was put to him that starting out in test cricket must have been a tough experience.
“The toughest cricket I played was in the backyard against my older brother Ian,” Chappell said. “After that, test cricket was a breeze.”
In one of Chappell’s first games in the backyard of his Adelaide home, he was cracked on his gloveless fingers with a hard ball and given an earful. “Normally Ian stood about 10 metres away and glared at me until I got up,” he says, “but on this occasion he’d come right up the pitch. I thought, ‘At last, a bit of compassion from the older brother.’ I looked up, tears in my eyes. He said, ‘I wouldn’t worry about the fingers if I was you. It’s your head next.’”
Chappell showed no mercy towards his younger brother Trevor. In one innings he scored more than 1000. When it was Trevor’s turn to bat, conditions would invariably deteriorate. Chappell was known to water the wicket while his younger brother prepared to bat. Trevor was no shrinking violet. Once, after being dismissed and sent to the pavilion, he returned with a tomahawk to chase Chappell around the yard.
A similar code of ethics existed in the Hussey brothers’ backyard games in Mullaloo, Western Australia. David, two years younger than Mike, became cannon fodder for his brother’s long innings. Cheating was his only option. “Dave was never out,” Mike Hussey wrote in Mr Cricket: Driven To Succeed (Hardie Grant, 2007). “If he nicked one to the keeper, he wouldn’t walk.” Hussey would then chase David around the backyard. David would invariably lock himself in the family car. “That’s how so many of our games ended: him in tears, running away from me and me crying because I’d been hoodwinked again into bowling for ages and not getting to bat,” Hussey says.
At Brett Lee’s family home in Mount Warrigal, NSW, physical evidence of the violence in their backyard games remains – the garage door is dented at head height, more like a hail-damaged car than an automatic wicketkeeper. When their parents went out, the Lee boys brought out the hard ball and dug it in short on their driveway strip.
Ian Healy got used to chin music in his backyard in Biloela in the Queensland bush. If he nicked one behind and failed to go out, older brother Greg would aim the hard ball at the willow tree root that jutted out of the pitch, on a good length.
In Mosman, Sydney, Allan Border and his brothers also played for keeps. Often they’d use unripe grapefruits as balls in their backyard tests. “They’d come out of the hand at 50 miles an hour and come off the concrete at 250 miles an hour,” recalls Johnno Border. “If you bowled a bouncer with them, well, it was just the brothers trying to hit each other in the head.”
One of the more brutal games the Border boys played involved darts. Unlike the conventional game, the brothers used each other as the bullseye. No wonder Allan Border showed no fear against the West Indies pace attacks of the 1980s.
About the only civilised aspect of the Waugh brothers’ backyard games in Panania, Sydney, came at the start of their matches. They would toss the bat to see who was Australia and who was England and then get on with it. If the batsman was hit by a short-pitched delivery they’d chuck it back just as fast to/at the bowler. The match would often descend into a game of brandings. As Steve Waugh recalled, “One of us would wet the ball so it would sting a bit more.”
The Waugh brothers weren’t the only aspiring test cricketers to soak the ball to gain an advantage. In his Wagga Wagga, NSW, backyard, Geoff Lawson would dip his ball in the dog’s water bowl. “It was right next to the run-up, so you could bowl with a wet, skiddy ball,” Lawson says. “When you hit people it was really good. It gave a bit of a sting.” Neil Harvey and Ray Lindwall used the same technique in street games with their brothers in the 1930s.
If someone tells you Australians don’t engage in ball tampering, don’t believe them. The Waugh brothers would tape their tennis balls on one side to accentuate swing. Jeff Thomson lacquered the balls he used against his four brothers in the Sydney suburb of Bankstown. Jason Gillespie unfolded paperclips and taped them down the middle of balls to provide a seam than never wore down. Colin Miller did the same thing with a piece of rope, and in the Miller backyard games, had to wear a bike helmet to avoid a braining from his older brother.
Occasionally these backyard tests can inflict permanent damage. Sid Barnes, one of Bradman’s Invincibles, carried a scar for life from one of hisneighbourhood games in Sydney’s Stanmore. Playing against a team of street urchins known as the Sewer Gang, he was involved in a contentious umpiring decision that cost them the game. Soon after, he was shanghaied on the upper lip by one of his opponents in an act of retribution that left its mark.
Steve Cannane is the author of First Tests: Great Australian Cricketers And The Backyards That Made Them (ABC Books, $33)
Source: Qantas The Australian Way January 2010