The Pink Report

Real Pros

How good are those Aussies? No, no, no, not the Ashes team (er, definitely not the Ashes team at the moment... and far be it for us Kiwis to poke fun at their struggles). I’m talking about the ones fronting for the Yahoo!Xtra Northern Knights.

David Hussey and Brad Hodge have made the job of the freelance cricketer look easy in the last couple of games. Joining a largely unfamiliar team to play against largely unfamiliar opponents to play a high level of pressure cricket in another country on strange wickets hardly sounds easy to me, but Brad Hodge top-scored with 35 off 39 balls against the Stags last week to give his new pink mates a scrap of pride and then nonchalantly knocked off the winning runs with 37 not out off 25 at Auckland on the weekend.

Hussey, his enthusiastic Victorian team-mate, was at the other end, fresh (or so he made it look) from flying across the Tasman, taking a catch and hitting boundaries before he’d even had a chance to learn all his team-mate’s names.

Brad had been on that big TransTasman bird as well. After the match at Seddon Park last week, he’d flown back to Melbourne at 6am the next morning, played the next day for Victoria, finished that game at 6.30pm on Saturday night, driven the 90 minutes it took to get home, got to bed at midnight, got back up at 3.25am to get the plane to Auckland, and then travelled straight from the airport to Colin Maiden Park to pour on the pink threads and play.

What really impressed me was that he did this minus a thumbnail that until Saturday had been perfectly well attached. Victoria was playing at Geelong, a where the deck is pretty average. The ball had bounced off a length, reared up into his throat and bent his thumbnail right back as he instinctively brought up his hands to assure the ongoing viability of his trachea. The thumbnail was sticking out at a 90-degree angle and had to be removed, so under his batting glove on Sunday in Auckland was a raw thumb with a few pieces of cloth tape stuck over where the nail should have been.

I winced just looking at it, and Brad admitted it had been "pretty painful" when it happened. In fact, at first he thought he’d broken the joint - he’s got cricketer’s hands, fingers at all angles from old fractures - and there followed an anxious few hours on both sides of the Tasman as medical reports and updates were passed along to ND. He reckoned it had settled down by the time he reached the park on Sunday. “A few painkillers and a can of Red Bull off the plane and I’m fine!” he chuckled.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m a wuss at the best of times and, even if I were a bloke, I’d be none too keen on facing up to a bowler like Chris Martin knowing that one wee glance on the thumb would have me in a heap of public, excruciating pain. I don’t think it was just Brad’s good Aussie toughness coming to the fore, either, but the commitment that these itinerant pros have to delivering their absolute best, to not letting anyone down when they’re brought in as the exciting hired guns.

Brad didn’t know much about the Yahoo!Xtra Northern Knights when he signed to play for them, other than that it was Dan Vettori’s team - he’d shared a few beers with Dan after IPL games. He looked on this website, found out the team had won flags in both the four-day and one-day comps and saw the pink colours. At which point his wife had a good chuckle.

He was able to meet and join the team for one training session the day before the Hamilton match, and recognised that they were a skilful side, but it’s still not the same as the innate confidence that comes from having played with people through thick and thin for years.

“One of the hardest things is joining a team where you don’t actually know what the other players can do,” he says. “As a batsman, you don’t know whether to go hard or control the innings because you’re not sure what’s behind you. So even though we were chasing a modest total in Auckland, it was nice for me to have ‘Huss’ there, too. I know exactly what he does behind me, we’ve batted 100 times together before, so it was a nice touch.”

Because no matter their stature, every overseas pro in the world feels the extra pressure attached to the job. The pressure to stand and deliver, the expectation on you not to fail - even though your preparation for the role is, by geographic necessity, highly unconventional.

Said Brad, “No one likes to fail, but Twenty20 does tend to be a little bit hit and miss, so it happens - it’s either your day or it’s not. I’ve got two more matches and hopefully I can make a big score in one of them. That would be good fun.”

Yep, that would be fun all right. But just in case, Brad, you’re labouring under some illusion that you haven’t been a big hit already, rest assured that our estimation of Aussies has only gone up. Hope that thoroughly gross thumb is looking and feeling normal again soon.