I was captain but lads didn’t want to play
New Ireland skipper Balbirnie has had a tough schooling in the art of leading
‘AT 25 YOU JUST DON’T EXPECT YOU WILL NEED HIP SURGERY’
ANDREW Balbirnie will be somewhere over the Atlantic when he’s celebrating his 29th birthday. Ireland are scheduled to fly out to the West Indies on December 28, ahead of the Dubliner’s first duties as the new Ireland cricket captain.
Rory Best wasn’t the only longstanding Irish skipper to stand down in the past few weeks. William Porterfield also relinquished his responsibilities with the cricketers after a remarkably successful 11 years in the role that saw Ireland compete in numerous World Cups and finally attain the much-sought Test status. A few days after, Gary Wilson stood down as T20 captain, leaving Balbirnie in charge of all three times.
‘The most common question I’ve had to deal with in the past few weeks is how I am going to fill William’s shoes,’ Balbirnie concedes. ‘He has been Ireland’s most successful captain, captained us in our first Test match, captained us at World Cups. I suppose there has been no other captain in the professional era.
‘But I’m not going to try and be the next William Porterfield, I’m just going to try and be a captain in my own way, and put my own stamp on things,’ Balbirnie (below) says.
In some sports, captaincy is little more than a ceremonial role. But that’s not the case in cricket. Captains shoulder a lot of responsibility for on-field strategy. It’s a lot to take on, but Balbirnie is excited by the challenge.
‘Usually when we go on the pitch, all I had to worry about was my own batting, but now I have to think about the pitch, how it will play on the first day, what partnerships we should have, the toss, all those things.’
And when Ireland travel to Sri Lanka next spring, there will be increased media duties. ‘There are all of these considerations, but I think the leadership role can hopefully take my game to the next level.’
He’s had the role before. He skippered Ireland Under 19s and also Middlesex second team during his five years with the English county.
‘I was captain of the Middlesex seconds at 22, which was interesting. It’s hard to know what to make of it. When you are told at the start of a county season that you are captain of the second team but you want to get into the first team.
‘And it’s a strange team to be over, because most of the players don’t want to be there. They want to be playing for the first team. They are playing for themselves, because they want to prove themselves. And then you have some senior and established pros who have dropped down to the second team, so you have to manage their personalities too. It was good grounding, I suppose.’
Even though he didn’t play as much county cricket as he wanted, Balbirnie spent five happy years with Middlesex, learning from Angus Fraser, who was director of cricket, and living in London with Paul Stirling, a close friend since they played together for the Ireland U13s.
‘And I was going to work in Lord’s every day, the home of cricket. That’s not too bad,’ Balbirnie recalls of walking through the Grace Gates each morning.’
He left Middlesex in 2016, around the time that it was confirmed that he would have to undergo surgery to correct a hip problem that had left him in excruciating pain during the T20 World Cup and made it difficult for Balbirnie to even walk around his house.
Still, the news left Balbirnie reeling. Hip surgery. At the ripe old age of 25. His entire career appeared to be in the balance.
‘Before I went for the surgery, I was told that there was a chance that I wouldn’t get back to playing top level sport again. But I just thought it was something that they had to say. I never allowed myself to believe that I would never play cricket again. I always felt that I would get to the same level,’ he remembers.
‘But, of course, there were dark days. Being told that you need hip surgery is not something you expect to hear when you are 25 years of age.’
Kieran O’Reilly, physio with the Dublin footballers was working with the cricket side at the time, and he put Balbirnie in touch with Cian O’Sullivan, who had similar surgery at the same age.
‘Cian was very re-assuring and gave me real confidence that I would be able to come back from this. I remember that he rang me the day before the surgery, and we were on the phone for more than 40 minutes. He was very re-assuring. And I saw that Cian came back from the surgery and went on to win All-Irelands and All-Stars, so it proved to me that it could be done.’
Balbirnie became only the third Irish cricketer in history to hit a double century, after Ed Joyce and Eoin Morgan, when he scored 205 not out in an Intercontinental Cup game against the Netherlands two years ago. It underlined a talent apparent in the Sandymount native from his formative years.
Even though he played a number of different sports growing up, ‘cricket and tennis in the summer, rugby and hockey in the winter,’ Balbirnie recalls, he was always most talented with the bat in his hand. There was a time when rugby underscored his ambitions.
‘I played rugby all the way up to sixth year and then I got the call to go to England. You can’t really juggle cricket and rugby after that,’ he remembers. ‘I was a real old-school out-half in that I avoided contact at all costs and kicked the ball as much as I could. I always had a centre covering me too if there was a big fella running down the channel at me.’
There are plenty of former rugby players in the Ireland squad and when he first came into the team, a game of tag was often a way of warming up before training.
‘It was the young lads against the older guys. It would get fairly competitive, I remember Alex Cusack, who was this tough lad from Brisbane, he took no prisoners in tag, would be dropping the shoulder when making a tackle.
‘Funnily enough, it was John Bracewell, a Kiwi, who stopped the games of tag rugby and we went back to football to limber up.’
Balbirnie is taking over the captaincy at a strange time. While Ireland have been invited into the exclusive test match party, many of the sport’s golden generation, such as Joyce and Niall O’Brien, have left the stage. There is a sense of transition around the team.
And part of what the new captain will do is helping these younger players settle into international cricket.
‘I remember coming into the Irish team and learning my craft from the likes of Niall and Ed. That was a great thing, And hopefully, in a few years, those younger players that come in can do the same and learn from myself, Paul Stirling or Kevin O’Brien,’ says Balbirnie.
‘This is the toughest year ever for Irish cricket, in terms of the schedule. It is very much sink or swim, there is no sense of being eased in. It is about seeing what these young guys can do.’