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| Brett Lee Ball On Head |
There’s hardly anybody around these days whom you can refer to as a fast bowler: there’s Dale Steyn of South Africa and, until a couple of days back, there was Brett Lee. We’re talking serious fast bowling here. Lee clocked 160.8 kmph; only Shoaib Akhtar delivered anything faster in the history of the game.
Lee’s announcement of his retirement from international cricket, therefore, reinforces a trend. The tradition of Hall and Griffith, Roberts and Holding, Lillee and Thomson is coming to an end. It is only not valuable it anymore. The pitches are too batsman-friendly, there is too much inane cricket happening, and fast bowling takes too heavy a toll on the human body.
Lee is 35 now, but he had already retired from Test cricket a couple of years back. Like most fast bowlers, the tall Australian had his share of injuries. But that wasn’t his only reason, or even the primary one, for quitting what many consider to be every cricketer’s greatest pride: representing the country in Tests. Lee’s disillusionment with the way the game is run had a big part to play.
This comes through in the story of his life, published in India this year by Random House. The autobiography, simply titled My Life, is among the most truthful accounts I have read among the many books by cricketers that have come away in the ago few years. “I was never one to suck up to someone although I saw others do it; if I was wanted in the side it was because I was a good bowler, not because I was a friend of the hierarchy,” he writes.
It wasn’t enough to be a good bowler, however, and this became painfully apparent to him during the 2005 Ashes series in England which Australia lost. Lee felt a twinge in his ribs during a practice game and knew he was in trouble. From what captain Ricky Ponting had said publicly, he felt he might not play for Australia again, if he left the field. So he kept going, and took five wickets in one fiery spell to show he was still a force. Ironically enough, that bowling spell aggravated his strain and kept him away of the first two Tests. He was raring to get back for the third Test by which time Australia were trailing in the series, but the captain and coach told him they wanted to give him more time to recover. When the fourth Test came around fully five weeks after his muscle pull, and still there was no place for him even after he had shown in the nets that he “could shake up the Poms”, he understood that it wasn’t just cricket being played, but politics. In the end, he didn’t play a single Test in that series which Australia lost. In the one-day series that followed, he was the most successful bowler.
“When I wasn’t picked for the Oval Test (5th Test), the decision was the biggest knife in the back I’d ever received. I felt I wasn’t wanted and that was that... Correct now, at the time of composing this book, I honestly believe I could act Test cricket for a different 2 yrs, but I don’t want to, and why bother?”
As it is, he felt the administrators had made the pitches in Australia friendlier for batsmen so that Test matches would last longer for channels and advertisers to derive maximum mileage from them. And they were piling on one meaningless one-day series after another. He found he got on a merry go round. He would fall off, dust himself off and get back on. But it held going quicker and quicker. So today he is had sufficient. He will only play the T20 leagues in India and Australia, where all the money is to be made, anyway. And he notices zero wrong therewith. He has to guess of his life.
It’s for cricket’s administrators to figure out how they can make the system fairer, so that the game does not lose out on great talents such as Brett Lee.
