Peter Fitzsimons: Aussie grit forged in desperate 80s

COMMENT

You're right. The Australian cricket team do sometimes look like this massive juggernaut against which the best rivals that can hope for is to make a small dent on their bumper-bar.

For once I won't bang on about their victory over the Black Caps in the Champions Trophy, but we all know that it was not an untypical performance from the Australians.

Where did their ruthless, no-mercy culture come from?

From the despairing depths of defeat they experienced in the mid-1980s, and it was never grimmer than the misery they knew in NZ.

In early 1986, the Australian team that arrived in the Land of the Long White Cloud had the veteran Allan Border as their head, and a measure of their callow quality was that Border had played more test matches than the rest of the other 19 players in the squad put together.

Coming off a shocking run of 14 tests without victory, Border felt very keenly the burden upon him to whip his young charges into shape, to make youngsters in the team such as Steve Waugh and Greg Matthews understand the difference between being selected to play a test and actually playing test cricket, where ruthless professionalism was the currency and no quarter was asked for or given.

When the first two tests against NZ were also drawn, the captain's mood was akin to that of a bear with a sore head, and a toothache.

And then came the absolute, Gawd-help-us-all, stony, motherless, rock-bottom of the fortunes of Australian cricket team in the modern age.

At the third test in Auckland, Australia suffered a humiliating defeat after being bowled out for just 102 in the second innings.


Waugh's own contribution had been one and 0, being out twice after facing a total of only seven balls.

The 20-year-old Bankstown boy sat in the dressing room with all the rest, feeling lower than a snake's belly-button, and no one daring to meet Border's eye.

The disgusted Border, who as always had bled for every run, and only ever lost his wicket at the point of a gun, was barely sure any of them were good enough.

"I've said everything I can to that bunch," he told the team bosses.

"The guys should be hurting really bad because test careers are on the line. You can stick with blokes for so long.

"I'm basically leaving it to the players. They are going to show whether they really want to play for Australia and whether they really want to play under me.

"It's reached the point where if we continue to lose, you've got to let someone else come in and see if they can do something different. The fellas are not responding to me. The enjoyment has gone out of it."

Bingo. For Waugh, who would go on to be the Australian captain and most influential player of his generation before passing the torch to Ricky Ponting, it was a kind of reverse touch-stone.

That is, he would ever after recall the feeling in that Auckland dressing room as the one he never wanted to experience again.

And he never did.

It was an approach that carried over into the Australians' one-day game, never more so than in the 1999 World Cup.

After some early losses in that tournament, the Australians played a rampant South African side with the knowledge that if they lost, they were gone.

As a matter of fact, the South Africans were feeling so cocky about it that when Waugh made his way to the wicket in a tight situation, Herschelle Gibbs, standing at short mid-wicket, dared recall Waugh's words the previous year in Australia, when he had opined that the South Africans were chokers.

Now Gibbs called out, "Let's see how he takes the pressure now." And funny he should say that.

For at the very least, Waugh and Ponting made a go of it, chancing their hand, swinging hard at the loose balls, and doing what they could with the rest.

But sometimes it really was touch and go. Never more so, as a matter of fact, than when Gibbs himself, who had scored a stunning 101 runs in the Proteas' innings, momentarily caught Waugh when he was on 56. But alas! When Gibbs instantaneously started hot-dogging in celebrations, intending to throw the ball skywards, it dropped to the ground. Could anything be worse? Yes, the voice of Waugh, crisply noting, "I hope you realise you've just lost the game for your team."

And so he had. Waugh went on to guide the Australians to a wonderful victory in that game, and the final, and the winning culture he engendered clearly has not dissipated with his absence.

The lessons learned in NZ all those years ago still apply to our benefit, even when beating a NZ side who surely must now be learning some of the very same lessons.

* Rugby writer Peter FitzSimons is a former Wallaby player.