RE-READING THE AUSSIE PSYCHE WITH MILK TRAY AND HICK...
Back in the late Sixties, there was an advert on TV which featured a man in a polo neck jumper diving off a cliff, swimming through a school of sharks, hauling himself onto a yacht, and leaving a box of chocolates under some woman’s bedroom pillow.
They’ve recently revived it, this time moving the daredevil stuntman stuff to some Mongolian mountain, although it will presumably have to be modified for Australian audiences. Such as some chap driving along at no more than 29mph in a Fiat Tipo, plastering himself with sunscreen before getting out of the car, obediently waiting several minutes for the little red man to turn to green, before finally walking across the road to the Post Office just in time for his box of Milk Tray to catch the last post.
Australia being the nanny capital of the world, Milk Tray man has to obey the obsessive Health and Safety rules and regs just like everyone else, which is something England would do well to bear in mind for the Ashes. The Australian male may like to portray himself as the kind of chap who wrestles salt water crocodiles in his lunch break, but in reality the entire country has gone softer than melted Brie. To the point where the old bully boy routine on the cricket field has become about as intimidating as a yap from a miniature poodle.
There could be no more better example of Australian cricket shedding some of its abrasive edge as the appointment of Graeme Hick as batting coach. Dear old Hicky. A quieter, more sensitive, and self-effacing man there’s never been, and it’s hard to see him instilling the kind of in-your-face approach employed by the likes of Allan Border. On the receiving end of a mild chirp from Angus Fraser, Border gave Gus a withering look, and said: “I’ve faced bigger and uglier bowlers than you mate. Now f**k off and bowl the next one.”
An enduring image of Hick during Ashes Tests, by contrast, is of Merv Hughes stationed about two centimetres from his visor, engaging him in conversation that was as short on compliments as it was on syllables. In fact, given that Hughes’ vocabulary wasn’t quite as expansive as his moustache, if you took away the words Pommy and b**tard, there wouldn’t have been much left.
Hick, of course, was a Pom only by adoption, having first announced his talents in schoolboy cricket in Zimbabwe, where he finished his first season, at the age of 13, with an average of 216.4. At 17 he was recommended to Leicestershire, who turned him down because they already had a contracted overseas player in Australia’s Mike Haysman, whereupon Worcestershire agreed to take him because they were short of an off spinner.
His off-spin certainly came in handy for the match against Somerset at Taunton in May 1988, when he took 2-18
Hughes’ vocabulary wasn’t quite as expansive as his moustache, if you took away the words Pommy and b**tard there wouldn’t be much left
in eight overs, although this was slightly overshadowed by him making 405 not out with the bat. It would never have happened had it not been among one of the games chosen by the-then TCCB as experimental four-day matches, and in a summer in which England were wiped out by the West Indies, the bigwigs at Lord’s could hardly wait for his sevenyear qualification period to arrive in 1991. Once again, with the West Indies in opposition.
And this was the summer which confirmed rumours, circulating after his first Sheffield Shield season with Queensland, that Hick might not turn out to be quite as destructive a batsman when the quality of the bowling was cranked up to a higher level.
His first Test innings at Headingley lasted 51 minutes, and ended caught Dujon bowled Walsh for 6. He made 6 again in the second innings, bowled by Ambrose, and in the next three Tests he made 0, 43, 0, 19 and 1 before being dropped. And the “flat track bully” label rose its head again when, in the middle of these failures, an innings of 88 won the Benson & Hedges Cup final for Worcestershire at Lord’s.
In 65 Tests between 1991 and 2001, Hick made 3,383 runs at 31.32 which was in staggering contrast to his first-class tally of 41,112 runs, including 136 centuries, at 52.23. He would have had 137, had Michael Atherton not declared when he was on 98 not out in Sydney in the 1994-95 Ashes, Atherton deciding – correctly in the view from the Press box – that Hick, in his all-consuming quest for a first Ashes hundred – had forgotten England were trying to win the game.
Hick has always been a man of few words, but the total number he exchanged with his captain for the rest of the tour was not unadjacent to zero. Keith Fletcher, the coach, was wheeled out to explain matters in a prickly Press conference, in which he more or less took the fifth amendment. Q: “What did Hick say to Atherton?” A: “I’m not saying.” Q: “Is it fair to say Hick wasn’t too pleased?” A: “You can write what you want.”
There’s no doubt that Hick’s failure to make it at Test level was mental. Possibly because he never felt comfortable with representing a country he had no umbilical cord to, as I discovered when I chatted to him in his hotel room in Calcutta during England’s 1993 tour to India, at a time when he had played 17 Test innings for an average of 18.06. “I don’t understand the English,” he said. “It’s in their psyche to criticise their sportsmen. After a while, you get tired of being laughed at.”
He went on to say how different it was in Australia, where he has just taken out citizenship, and recounted a story in which one of their squash players had won a tournament and dominated all the back pages. “Two weeks later he lost to the same guy in another final, and I found it buried away in the stop press.”
In which case we can only hope that the Aussie papers end up relegating reports of their incompetent team to the small print just below the Toowoomba greyhound results, but harder to predict than the outcome of the Ashes is whether Hick and Atherton will be spotted having a beer together. Although maybe not. Hick’s too nice a man not to.