For all the Newlands scandal stories and back and forth about reverse swing, one of the most telling tales captured in Faf du Plessis’ new book Through Fire captures the distasteful heart of a bygone international era.
It’s a period of time that the tale’s main protagonist, Mike Hussey, now admits he is happy to have seen the end of.
Man of the match: Faf du Plessis after his match-saving century in Adelaide in 2012.Credit:AP
A decade ago, Australia and South Africa were engaged in one of their many ding-dong battles, a series in which the hosts could rise to No.1 in the world rankings with a victory. Du Plessis made his debut in the pivotal second Test, in Adelaide, and helped Graeme Smith’s side scrounge a draw with a stupendous second innings century.
He recalled the nature of the sledging he had received from the Adelaide Oval members before he even got to the middle: “They knew who I was and that I was making my debut: ‘You’re shit, mate’, ‘Don’t f*** it up’, ‘You’re going to lose your f***ing wicket’, ‘There’s a walking duck if I ever saw one’, ‘You’re a wanker’. There were some really funny (unprintable) chirps too.”
Prior to his first Test, du Plessis had taken part in the IPL for Chennai and built a rapport with Hussey. Having watched du Plessis’ 376 minutes and 466 balls of defiance with a combination of irritation and admiration, Hussey quietly chose to hand his Chennai teammate a bottle of red wine as a token of congratulation.
“I was called to the door, where Huss had been waiting for a while,” du Plessis wrote. “He handed me a bottle of red wine with a handwritten note on the label: ‘Congratulations on your Test debut. I know you’re going to have an amazing career. Proud of you!’
“The two of us already had a good relationship after playing together for Chennai in the IPL, but he was Mr Cricket and I was just a debutant. He didn’t have to make that gesture, but he did. And he’d waited outside our changing room until we’d finished our celebration.
“It was the most precious gift anyone had ever given me in my life. This wasn’t the beer talking. I’m reflecting on it now, a decade later: I still consider it the best gift I had ever received.”
The wine, itself, was to be inadvertently consumed by the du Plessis family’s dog-sitter seven years later, but it had another consequence, after the debutant happened to mention Hussey’s gesture in a press conference before the deciding Test in Perth.
Mike Hussey facing South Africa in 2012.Credit:AFP
Back then, Australia was still very much in an era when “fraternising” with the opposition during a series was frowned upon – humanising opponents was not considered appropriate since it made sledging them much harder to accomplish.
Walking out to bat in Perth, du Plessis expected to be the target of the aforementioned sledging, and had not bargained for what he actually heard.
“I was expecting another salvo of abuse to be aimed at me … just another day at the office Down Under,” he wrote.
“But the Australian cricketers directed their sledging at their teammate, shouting, ‘Hey, Huss! Here’s your best mate again. Why don’t you suck him off?’ Australia is a tough place to play cricket, and not only for visiting teams.”
Ten years on and working as an assistant coach for England at the Twenty20 World Cup, Hussey confirmed the story to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, recalling his intention to make the gift to du Plessis private and his sheepishness at teammates finding out he had done it.
“I copped a lot of stick about that,” Hussey said. “I can’t believe he mentioned it in the press, because I sort of snuck in quietly, none of the boys knew that I had slipped him a bottle of red and snuck into their dressing room and handed it over.
“I didn’t really want anything made of it, it was just between Faf and I. But he brought it up in the press and the boys gave it to me about that. That’s a true story, I copped it more than what he did, that’s for sure.”
But Hussey, widely acknowledged as a good and fair cricketer even in the days when other Australian players had burnished more fearsome reputations, said the type of relationship he had built with du Plessis in the IPL had been the beginning of the end of that former brutishness.
“I think some of those cultural barriers have been broken down,” he said. “It started with the IPL and you just notice, you run into these guys all the time, there’s different players from different countries playing with each other all the time, and so it’s not so much that ‘us versus them’ mentality that it used to be, and certainly I felt the IPL broke down a bit of the Australian mystique and character around that.
“I remember walking into the Chennai dressing room and seeing these young Indian guys cowering in the corner when Matthew Hayden walked into the room. They thought he was this big, bad, ugly ogre, and when he comes in and goes ‘g’day boys, how you going’ and pats them on the back, the look of shock in their face was like ‘what, this guy is actually a nice guy’.”
Numerous contemporary Australian players, such as Glenn Maxwell and Usman Khawaja, have spoken about how they were uncomfortable being told not to talk to opposition players during series.
And Hussey, whose career spanned both the end of Australia’s dominant era and the early days of players such as Maxwell, Khawaja, Steve Smith, David Warner, Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins and Nathan Lyon, is adamant that times have changed for the better.
“I prefer it now,” he said. “Some of the stuff in years gone by was just nasty and probably went over the line and was uncalled for, really.
“So I think it’s better now, the game is probably played in a much better spirit now. It’s still hotly fought out there, it’s not like it’s all smiles.”
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