Scaling the Pyramid
Max Bonnell | May 26, 2023
Australian cricket used to built as a pyramid. It was widest at its base, where we all started, playing at school, or in the juniors in a local park. A few hundred stepped past that on to the next tier, joining a Grade club. From there, at least in theory, you could scale to the very top of the pyramid – the Australian team – if you were good enough.
Today, the pyramid is looked on as a clumsy, inefficient and amateurish method of talent selection. Bright young kids are handed State contracts after bossing around a bunch of seventeen year-olds in age-group tournaments. People are picked on the basis of what they can become, rather than on what they’ve done. And maybe that’s better. Except that the pyramid worked. If you were good enough, you reached the top, having earned every promotion along the way. And if you weren’t – well, the pyramid delivered that message, too.
I spent almost twenty years in the pyramid, most of them thickening up the base. But every now and then, things fell into place, I put together a few decent performances and a few of the people above me were promoted to representative sides, or injured, or suspended, and I had the chance to test myself against players who habitually operated at a much higher level.
And so, late in 1982, I found myself at Bankstown Oval, playing for Western Suburbs against a formidable Bankstown side. Bankstown Oval: no friend to bowlers. An even, blameless pitch, and a smooth and fast outfield. I was accustomed to primitive lower-grade pitches, where simply landing the ball somewhere near the stumps was usually guaranteed me at least a few wickets. That wasn’t happening here. I don’t remember who was out of the side that day to make room for me, but it would have been someone – or probably quite a few, I suspect, for one reason or another.
We warmed up. I concentrated on trying not to make a mistake, sweating on drills that everyone else performed effortlessly. Across the ground, two of Bankstown’s players stood slightly apart from the rest of their side, looking quiet and thoughtful. “Those Waughs”, snarled one of my team mates, “they think they’re the kings of cricket!” He thought their aloofness was a sign of arrogance – to me they just looked a little shy, two seventeen year-olds in their first year in First Grade, confident of their talent, but still not quite sure where they slotted in to the rough, hyper-masculine culture of the team. It was harder to forgive the mullets. Mark’s made the more dramatic statement. Have you seen David Bowie in the movie Labyrinth? It was like that exactly: high and spiky on top, and long, very long, at the back. But it was 1982. Then we didn’t laugh so much at hair like that.
Anyway, so, we batted. It was a 60-over game, which was probably why I was in it (“Keeps it tight. Too slow to get people out, though.”). We made 226. Brad McNamara, only seventeen himself, somehow born with a flawless technique, stroked an elegant 60. Greg Douglas, the hardest hitter of a cricket ball in all of Sydney, hit a fifty too, landing several meaty blows against left arm spinner Freddy Freedman. I went in last, though not for long. Mark Waugh ambled in to bowl with the laziest run-up imaginable, but then suddenly the ball was fizzing past me, the pace coming from God-knows-where. I lunged forward to my first ball, and missed. An unimpressed voice came from gully: “f***ing second grader!” Nothing to lose, so I turned and answered, “Steve, it’s worse than that, I’m a second grader who can’t bat!” He did not smile. Mark’s third ball flicked the very outside of my pad and disappeared to fine leg. I was half way through running the leg-bye when the umpire gave me out. The decision was wrong, but not unfair – he probably figured he was just saving time.
We usually reckoned to win most games when we scored 226, but we played at Pratten Park, where you could never be sure whether the ball would hit you in the ear or the ankle, and this was Bankstown Oval. And this was Bankstown. Mark Waugh came out to open the batting with Steve Smith. No, not him, the other one. Today almost no one remembers just how good Steve Smith was – a brave opener with all the shots who was given the cruellest of introductions to Test cricket in the West Indies and ended up joining Kim Hughes’ team in South Africa. But that Steve Smith, the original, could really play.
Stu opened the bowling for us. Stu had heaps of talent – he’d been in the Australian Under-19s the previous season, and he trained with the State squad. But he was so desperate to impress against Steve Smith – to impress Steve Smith – that he lost his nerve, and with it, any sense of control over where the ball was going. His first ball was a wide – a wide, wide wide. He waved his hand at the batsman: “Sorry, Smithy.” His second ball was wider: “Sorry Smithy.” Steve Smith’s expression didn’t change once, which took some doing through an eleven ball over. Stu’s two overs cost 19 runs, a few of them off the bat. I was on.
Here’s what surprised me about bowling to Smith and Waugh. They were respectful. If I bowled a decent ball, they answered with the appropriate stroke. And in some ways this made it easier to bowl to them than to, say, a third grader, who might hack a perfectly good outswinger over square leg, or sky a ball on leg stump somewhere down near third man. They played the ball, not the bowler, and they played perfectly orthodox cricket. But the moment you strayed off line, or dropped your length, they hit it away with a textbook stroke and – this is what lingers most in the memory – they hit it through the gaps in the field. Every time.
Of course, in hindsight I realise that, as they were scoring at seven runs an over at the other end, they had no need to take any risks by forcing the pace against me. Why bother? And so I plugged away uneventfully, while every time a loose ball was bowled at the other end, it disappeared through the field through an elegant drive, a precise cut, a thumping pull.
Steve Smith had just passed his hundred when it happened. I put everything I had behind an off-cutter. It was a little short, but fortunately it landed on the seam, so it gripped the surface and bounced. Smith shaped to cut, then somehow found the time to adjust to force the ball off the back foot with a straighter bat. But the bounce beat him, and the ball sailed over the edge. Who’d have thought it? After ten overs on Bankstown Oval, I’d got one past Steve Smith’s bat. I can still see the entire thing in my mind, which is sad, I suppose, because I’m sure Smith barely remembers the game.
I suspect Mark Waugh does, though, because when Bankstown needed three to win, he was on 99. Facing me. What would you do? Well, the off-cutter nearly worked once, so maybe it was worth another try. This one didn’t bite or bounce as much, so it pitched a few inches outside off stump and deviated only marginally – not a bad ball, but a harmless one. Except that Waugh then made the only error of his innings. If his score had been 9, he would have played the ball back where it came from. But on 99, he decided to open the face of his bat, run the ball down to third man, and draw another stick man on his thigh pad. He didn’t account for that tiny bit of movement, and the ball clipped his bat on its way to the base of the off stump.
Two people have bowled Mark Waugh for 99. Me and Phil Tufnell. I’m still not sure how I feel about this.
I didn’t celebrate. It would have been embarrassing. We were getting pounded. A few minutes later, we lost by nine wickets. I’d bowled 12 overs for 26 runs, but Bankstown had 16 overs to spare, and they hadn’t even needed Steve Waugh to bat or bowl. The message I took from the game was clear and simple: players like Smith and the Waughs were exceptionally good, and were going to get better. Whereas I wasn’t, and wasn’t. That game was going to be as good as it got.
Three weeks later, Steve Smith was in Perth, wearing the canary-yellow of the Australian one-day team, smashing a hundred against New Zealand. I was on some lower-grade ground, chucking pies at hacks who hit my good balls to third man and missed the half-volleys. The pyramid had done its job. It usually did.
