Lifting the statute of limitations on sources

On Glenn Maxwell, broken legs and breaking yarns

The first steps of Glenn Maxwell’s long journey back to Test cricket began this week in a four day fixture for the Victorian Second XI at the Junction Oval.

Maxwell launched the first ball he faced for a six that sounded across social media before falling for 14 in the first innings. It was pretty much crickets from the cricket after that. There’s no scoreboard at cricket.com.au or cricinfo for the game, but I found one on this website and another here.

Maxi of the IPL and World Cups playing in the Vic Second XI is a bit like the night Mick Jagger played at the Corner Hotel (I was lucky enough to be there, incredible gig as you can see from this).

He was out for 10 in the second innings, so in terms of a journey anywhere this one began with, in classic Maxwell fashion; a stubbed toe and a grazed knee.

The obscurity of the match is not the point so much as the interest in Maxi and his journey. He has just done a book with Adam Collins called The Showman (a nod to the onerous early mantle he had as The Big Show). The book focuses on an extraordinary 12 months in which he broke his leg but recovered to play one of the most audacious innings ever played.

It also includes the frightening and curious incident when he knocked himself out by falling off a golf cart.

Glenn’s career has been cricket’s best approximation of Chaos Theory.

He told a small group of us the tale of the broken leg as we sat on the bedroom floor of a hotel in Ahmedabad last year. It was a genuine horror story that had us squirming in relayed pain and his recovery from it is quite remarkable.

The possibility of him being recalled for the Sri Lanka series next year brought back some memories of the time he was snuck into the XI to play the second Test in Abu Dhabi in 2013, and a rather uncomfortable encounter at cricket’s, ahem, night of nights.

Indulge me here.

It is fair to say that Darren Lehmann was pretty annoyed; we were standing toe to toe, in suits, at was called the Allan Border Medal in 2015. He was clearly agitated.

“If I ever find out who told you about team changes in the UAE they will never play cricket for Australia again,” he said and he was coming across as deadly serious.

I liked Boof but didn’t like this situation for a number of reasons.

I loathed the AB medal because these events are so formal and underwhelming, but was forced to cover it because it was my job. Cricket Australia insisted us hacks wear suits and would then locked us in a small room away from the function itself. To be honest, I was relieved not to sit through the evening in the main room, but cranky as all get out about having to frock up. I think they even asked us to wear ties.

We were drip fed embargoed information only after signing an agreement. There was even some vague notion about us being accompanied to the bathroom by a watcher. They didn’t want us standing by a player at the urinal and feeding information back to the room.

I didn’t want to be standing at the urinal with players. Or go the toilet with a “watcher”.

And, at the end of the very long ceremony we’d have to drag our sorry arses to the press conferences where the winners got up one by one to add quotes to what we’d written. It was painful and it was late and they’d had a few drinks, but we’d been studiously abstemious.

When all that was done the choice was stark: go to the after party and mix with players letting their hair down and partners making the most of it, or go home. Once or twice I’d reluctantly opted to stay, but hung well back. It was their time and they did not need us around. After a few of these events, however, I could not wait to escape and leave the players to their own devices.

I can’t remember where we were the year Boof berated me, but I reckon I was a long way from the partying players when he approached. He wasn’t so much angry at me as angry at who had been talking to me.

I tried to shrug him off he re-emphasised the threat, insisting he was serious and this was a big deal. They would ‘never, ever play for their country again‘. I reckon he may have seen me do a nervous swallow.

He wasn’t going to let me duck out of this one easily and it was pretty hard not to be on the back foot.

He had every right to be annoyed.

The Australian team had played a two Test series against Pakistan in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. It had not been fun and the side had got itself in a funk. They’d been outclassed in the first Test. David Warner scored a century, but the Pakistan batsman were too good for the Australian bowlers on a wicket that offered little.

Attention turned to Alex Doolan who failed twice batting at first drop. His career consisted of just three Tests in South Africa earlier that year in which he had scored a solid 89, but done little else of note. A hundred in the tour match for this series seemed to have been erased when he’d been run out and then trapped LBW for next to nothing in the first Test.

Michael Clarke, however, was backing him publicly to stay in the side.

"I'm certainly not going to sit here and say that he can be out of form," Clarke said in the presser ahead of the second Test. "He just made an unbelievable hundred in the tour game.”

"Dools will be fine. He's a very good player. He knows his game really well. He's showed he can bat in these conditions. You don't lose class overnight.”

"I'm confident that come this second Test he'll probably make another hundred."

There were suggestions, however, that he had not been so supportive behind the scenes. There were tensions between selectors and the skipper at the time.

There was a push on for a bit of X factor and X tends to mark the sport where Glenn Maxwell is positioned. He can bowl, he can make big runs against the white ball in conditions like this.

There was also a lot of love for Doolan who was a popular player. He and Clarke got on and Phil Hughes, who was on the tour but not playing, was also close to him.

Hughes was doing everything in his power to get back into the XI. I can recall two exchanges with him. We were out in the garden area one night and he was drinking coffee while everyone else was having a quiet beer.

I raised an eyebrow at his choice of beverage and he shrugged, admitting that it was actually decaffinated coffee - which he said was essentially “shit tasting milk”.

It may have been the same night that I said to him I was hearing he was a good chance to play the second Test. He dismissed the idea totally saying he didn’t want to play because that would mean his mate “Dools” would miss out.

He was serious and that told me something about Phil’s character.

The team had not been released the morning of the second Test and I think it may even have come down to a meeting of selectors, coaches and captain before they boarded the bus to the ground.

Apparently questions had been raised when the hotel had put me on the same level as some as the team. It shouldn’t have happened and wasn’t comfortable for any of us, but team manager Gavin Dovey figured I wasn’t going to do any harm and I was left to put up with the smell of mouldering cricket gear. I was only made aware of this later.

Funny thing was that Rod Marsh and his wife Ros were in the room right next to me. Jokes were made about putting a glass to the wall to eavesdrop, and that was deemed amusing at the time.

A couple of us reporters were meeting in the foyer to catch a car to the ground on the morning of the second Test, but before we left I found out that Maxwell had indeed been brought in to replace Doolan and Mitchell Johnson for Steve O’Keefe.

The others realised I was on to something because I was sitting alone and typing the story up while we waited for a car.

I apologised to the other journos because it’s not much fun when someone else gets a yarn, and even less fun when they rub your face in it by knocking it up in front of you. It was a reasonably good story, but truth be told everyone was going to find out at the toss anyway. In an age where exclusives last seconds it wasn’t so bad to have one that might last an hour.

Events quickly overtook my breaking yarn.

Australia lost that Test too and the only strong memory I have of that game is Younis Khan, who’d scored two centuries in the first Test, approaching his 200 on day two. The Sheikh Zayed Stadium is, like everything in those parts, plonked in the middle of a desert with sand lapping up against its walls.

The manual labourers and drivers in those parts (transport is one of the few cheap things over there) are almost all immigrants from South East Asia who are worked like slaves, but get Saturday afternoon’s off.

Word had got around town about Younis’s efforts and from lunch waves of Pakistani men began to swarm across the sands toward the ground and line up at turnstiles. The milestone was imminent and hundreds of impatient Pakistani men in flowing robes began to just climb over the fence to get in. It looked like a human wave had crashed against the walls and cascaded into the stadium.

Later, at the AB Medal I found myself having to bluff Boof.

Hey, I could have got it by eavesdropping on Marsh’s room, or I could have got it in the brief journey from my room to the foyer, or, as is often the case in these situations, via a text from someone who knows the players involved and has been given a heads up. I told the steaming Australian coach that trying to guess a source was nonsense and blaming a player was just not on. They could have told their barista who could have told me.

There was not a chance in hell I was admitting where it came from. You can’t do that no matter what it costs you.

Lehmann was frustrated that night, but not as frustrated as the board and the head of communications at Cricket Australia had been for years before this. Around the time the Not So Big Bash was coming into existence I ran a series of articles with direct information from board meetings and even details from an executive off site conference.

It had driving then chair Wally Edwards mad. Presumably it had promoted a sense of mistrust among board members who would have wondered who was the leak. The magnificent Peter Young (RIP) was head of communications in those days. A lovely man who wore a bow tie, painted water colours and looked completely out of place in cricket. He was, however, very good at his job and a person who treated the media with respect.

You could hear the pain in his voice when I’d call him and mention that this or that was on the agenda, or that their budget figures weren’t great or that the board really had its work cut out selling this T20 competition.

Much of the reporting highlighted concerns around the cost and concerns around the impact of the domestic franchise model which has now proven so successful.

Young set up a meeting between me and Edwards where the chair kind of looked at me the way Larry David does when he is trying to catch someone out in a lie, but it was all to no avail.

Those were golden days for me. I had a treasure trove of information - a direct pipeline of sorts into the board room and the meetings between CA and the states.

The statute of limitations remains on most things, but this deep throat is one I am happy now to give up: it was Google.

I’d been quietly trawling through the internet one day when I came across a report from the CA off site mentioned earlier. It was an orphan document sitting somewhere out there in cyberspace and was full of fun stuff. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I don’t know much about the web, but I knew enough to see that there could be more of this and more kept coming. Every time the board met the agenda items would be posted there. Sometimes the minutes popped up. Other times reports on the meetings. I even began to anticipate when they’d drop.

It became clear that one of the state associations was making a mistake when posting things on an internal server and they were making their way to the back rows of the world wide web.

I felt a bit sneaky, but it’s hardly hacking if you can get there using the Google search engine, is it? Anyone could enter a couple of search terms and get the same result.

Alas, after some time - I think it was a coupe of years - Cricket Australia introduced a computer system which brought all of the states under the same umbrella and the posts disappeared. I’d sometimes go searching again to see if anything was there but my source had dried up.

Interestingly enough Cricket Victoria have apparently signalled they will no longer be participating in this central system.

Maybe I’ll start firing up that search engine again.

I won’t, however, be revealing my source for the Maxwell selection story just yet. Who knows, they might come in handy should he make the side in Sri Lanka.