Australia’s spearhead is sending them down as quick as he ever did; only now he’s learned to do it without going full throttle
Peter English18-Nov-2008
Lee’s big hands and long fingers are equally adept at bowling at 155kph and playing the guitar © AFP
At the end of each day’s play Brett Lee sings and writes music in his hotel room. For a couple of hours he forgets about cricket and thinks like a performer. “It’s a great outlet for me,” he says.Before being introduced to bands, Lee hated music, but it slowly started to own him. Now it’s part of every night, and he is passing on his tips to Mitchell Johnson and Shane Watson, who practise on the acoustic guitars that tour with the team.Lee has big hands with thick, long fingers that are ideal for plucking at a bass. He won that role in the band Six and Out, which was formed with a group of New South Wales cricketers, and quickly became addicted. His fingers look too chunky for the piano, which he plays too – but not on tour.The end-of-day writing is part fun, part business. Lee has already had a hit song in India with “You’re the One For Me”, an English-Hindi love ditty (look it up on Youtube, and you won’t call it a song or ballad either). And he has suffered for his new art. At the Allan Border Medal in 2007 he was interviewed after the film clip was shown. He said: “It was something I always wanted to do.” Everybody in the auditorium, apart from Lee but including his wife Liz, laughed. He knows it sounds naff, but he believes in what he’s doing, loves the music, is concerned about letting down his “brand awareness”, and realises the commercial aspect could be huge.He says the original song was written in “26 minutes to be exact”. “Who would have thought, eh?” On the India tour in October he was working on more, including crafting songs for the soundtrack of , a Bollywood movie that was filmed during the 2007-08 Australia-India series. Lee has an acting part, but wants a greater role.”We’re in the process of getting that across the line,” he says. “There is so much to do – ways to promote it, royalties, who owns the song. You don’t just write a song.” If his music gets in a Bollywood film he says it will open up an audience of three billion people. The singing starts to sound less silly.Lee is resting the day before Australia’s second Test, sitting in the swankiest hotel in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh. It’s an outpost on the cricket circuit, and not somewhere mainstream musicians would end up. While the current series retains his focus, he is happy to peek towards a contest still almost a year away.”It’s hard not to,” he says of the Ashes. “We’ve got the old cliché, concentrate on the job at hand right now. We’ve got the series here in India, which is pretty much the equivalent to the Ashes. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say playing against the Poms is where it’s at.”Outside the hotel, horses still pull carts and pedal rickshaws bump along the pot-holed streets. Flat roads do exist in India – on cricket grounds – and it’s where Lee, the form bowler of the past year, has spluttered. In the drawn opening Test, Lee’s first in India, he learned how hard things can be for a skiddy, shorter fast bowler – he’s 1.87m – against batsmen who show such strength at home.During the second fixture in Mohali, Lee was involved in unfamiliar ways. On the second day he split the webbing between two fingers on his right hand while fielding, requiring two stitches, and on the fourth morning, when India were building towards a lead of 516, he wasn’t used before lunch.Michael Hussey, who is too casual to be a part-timer, and the debutant Peter Siddle were preferred, along with Mitchell Johnson and Cameron White. The arrival of Hussey sparked a rare moment of anger in Lee, who clashed with Ricky Ponting and demanded a bowl. He lost.In Australian country music there’s a joke that if a song is played backwards the man gets his wife, job and dog back. Lee was not contemplating changing off-field genres, but he just wanted his old responsibilities. By the end of the match, which Australia lost by 320 runs, he had four wickets for the series at 59.25, and had dropped from being the attack leader to disgruntled fielder, strumming the pain in his fingers. Team-mates defended his right to stay in the side after 70 Tests and 293 wickets – the fourth most in Australian history.” I understood that when I was playing with Glenn and Jason Gillespie, it’s almost like you have to earn your stripes. I was biding my time. With Glenn and Shane gone, I have to do a lot more bowling for the team, and I enjoy that extra responsibility” Lee on his transformationLee’s situation didn’t improve during the rest of the series and by the final match, with Australia heading to a 2-0 defeat in Nagpur, he had a stomach bug that limited his effectiveness again. The upshot was eight wickets at 61.62, and a desperate desire for a bouncy pitch at the Gabba in the first Test against New Zealand on Thursday.A year before, Lee was about to start the first Australian summer since Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne retired, and there were doubts over his ability to lead the attack. As a support bowler he carried immense value, but could he cope when the new-look attack was his? For nine Tests, Australia barely missed McGrath as Lee steamed and swung, bounded and blasted. The boy with the movie-star smile had become a truly A-list bowler.Sixteen wickets and a Man-of-the-Series performance against Sri Lanka were followed by 24 victims against India and the Allan Border Medal for Australia’s most valuable player. “People always ask what I’ve done differently, have I changed my action or my run-up?” he says. “The way I look at it, it’s opportunity. Now I’m the strike bowler for the Australian team, take the new ball, get the choice of ends, something that I’ve always wanted as a kid.”I understood that when I was playing with Glenn and Jason Gillespie, it’s almost like you have to earn your stripes. I was biding my time. I knew at some stage it would happen. With Glenn and Shane gone, I have to do a lot more bowling for the team, and I enjoy that extra responsibility.”When Australia beat West Indies 2-0 in the Caribbean in June, Lee had 58 Test wickets at 21.55 since the SCG farewell of the champions at the end of the 2006-07 Ashes. McGrath or Warne would have been happy with a return like that. It was almost as spectacular as his Test entry in 1999.”To average 17 with 42 wickets in seven matches is unheard of,” he says. “You take it while you can. Then I hurt my elbow and had some problems with my lower back. The doctor said I’d never be able to bowl again. My arm was pinned because it had completely snapped in half.”His first series back was in England in 2001 and while the speed returned, he couldn’t regain the magic. “Two thousand one was hard for me,” he says, “I didn’t take a lot of wickets.” He stayed in and around the team for the next couple of years until undergoing ankle surgery in 2004. On regaining fitness he couldn’t get a spot in the XI, and spent five Test series as 12th man behind McGrath, Gillespie and Michael Kasprowicz.”It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever been through,” he says. “Eighteen months away from the team was not a feeling I liked. That was a really tough period. Why am I doing all the hard work? I can’t get a game. Looking back, it makes you a stronger person and you definitely want it more.”The wait finally ended on July 21, 2005 at Lord’s. He’d been told he was playing in the series that would reinvigorate the game in two countries and lost Australia the urn for the first time in 16 years. Despite carrying a desperate desire to avenge the defeat, Lee loves talking about that contest.”Two thousand five was a lot of fun, even at Edgbaston, where we lost by two runs,” he says. “It’s probably my favourite game of cricket – even though we lost. Just because of what we had to go through, the way that we fought back.” He can now laugh with Kasprowicz, who was given out caught behind, about the failed last-wicket chase.
“I love the way the stumps fly. I love seeing a batsman a bit apprehensive, or seeing the gloveman behind the stumps taking the ball high” © Getty Images
“The cricket was great, but the relationships we built with the players, particularly Freddie Flintoff, was… that moment… for him to come down and shake hands [at the end of the Edgbaston Test], and the photo that came out of it, that to me is the spirit of cricket.” Thinking back creates such excitement that his thoughts bounce back and forth.”It would be easy to say my favourite moment was when Australia won the World Cup or something else, but that was one of my favourite games,” he says. “I might sound like a massive suckhole, but it was done in the right way. It was fierce out there, it was full-on. Every person was going at each other out there, but after the game we appreciated the hard work that had happened.”The brutal, gripping spell to Kevin Pietersen at The Oval, when confirmation of the urn’s departure was about to occur, is not one of Lee’s fondest occasions. He appreciates that it was exciting “seeing him jump around” and “when he pulls one and it goes 15 rows back”, but it was nothing compared to Edgbaston.Taking back the Ashes with a 5-0 win in 2006-07 did not ease the previous defeat. “The way I look at it, yeah we play the Ashes every two years,” he says. “But the Ashes I look at is playing England in England. That’s my Ashes: 2001, 2005, 2009. It was great winning the Ashes back a couple of years ago, but playing them on home soil is where the Ashes is at.”It’s the hype, the media interest, them saying Australia haven’t got the right side or England aren’t going to be good enough. As players we love all that. Then you get out, play the first game at Lord’s and you can hear a pin drop. It’s so different.” He’s told the first Test of 2009 will be at Cardiff. “No worries.”Lee is wearing a Monte Carlo Sailing Club t-shirt that looks like part of his body. A gold bracelet hangs slightly more loosely from his right wrist. He’s so fit that it’s a bit intimidating sitting opposite him: biceps like steel, smooth arms and those big, guitar-playing fingers that tap occasionally as he speaks. Lee turned 32 during the fourth Test against India, and his body will determine whether he can maintain his speed until the 2011 World Cup, an event he wants to be part of. Torn ankle ligaments prevented him from taking part in the 2007 victory. Overtaking Dennis Lillee’s mark of 355 wickets, the only record worth knowing for a bowler when Lee was growing up, is another aim.”The reason I’m in the team is to bowl fast,” he says. “As the years go on usually the pace comes down slightly. But as each year has gone on I’ve got faster and faster. I know that will stop at some stage. I train on the principle of an Olympic sprinter. Most sprinters don’t reach their peak till their mid-30s. If they can do it, with the right training and the structure we have here, with the fitness trainer and the physio, and I can get my body in the right shape, there’s no reason why I can’t get quicker. I want to bowl faster and faster.”Through the pain of injuries, the ankle that has been operated on four times, the heat and the training, he thinks of one thing. “What keeps me going, the reason I’ve never even thought of being a spinner, is I love the way the stumps fly,” he says. “I love seeing a batsman a bit apprehensive, or seeing the gloveman behind the stumps taking the ball high.”There are no plans to downgrade into a medium-pacer to extend his career, but he has learned to vary the speeds of his spells instead of operating at full capacity every ball. “I used to try to blast the batsman out all day, which doesn’t work,” he says. “You’ve got to build your patience up.”At 100% effort he used to be able to deliver at 155kph, although his record is 160.8kph in front of the generous speed cameras in New Zealand. “If you’re bowling at the maximum every ball, physically, no matter how fit you are, your body can’t hack it,” he says. “So I had to work out: how can I bowl 155ks but not at 100%”If you’re bowling at the maximum every ball, physically, no matter how fit you are, your body can’t hack it. So I had to work out: how can I bowl 155ks but not at 100%”On the need to get the best out of his body”I had to get stronger and fitter and more efficient through the crease. Now I’m bowling at 85-90% to get those 155ks, or 150ks at 80%, so when I want to bowl that quick yorker at 155, I know I’ve got that in the tank.” He mentions Stuart Karppinen, Australia’s fitness trainer, and the physio Alex Kountouris, but not Troy Cooley, the bowling coach. Cooley, the reverse-swing hero of England’s sweet success in 2005, was unable to keep up with – or pass on – the tricks of India’s fast men.Another factor contributing to Lee’s downturn was the split in August with Liz, his wife of two years. The pair has a one-year-old boy, Preston, and Lee says there’s no easy way to be on tour while children are at home.”Obviously what I’ve been going through recently, with the marriage break-up and stuff, and with Preston, it’s obviously terrible,” he says. “It’s really hard and you miss him when you’re on tour, but you’ve got to somehow keep in contact and speak to him every day.”He says Adam Gilchrist and Warne could have continued playing for another three or four years, but they wanted to spend time with their families. He knows one day in the next four seasons it will happen to him too.There is a music studio at the bottom of Lee’s Sydney home, with egg cartons on the walls for sound-proofing, his instruments and a computer for recording. It’s also the place where he keeps his special cricket memorabilia. The main item is the image of 2005. A disbelieving Lee, crouched down in shock at getting so close to victory at Edgbaston, stares into the eyes of Flintoff, who is shaking hands with his right and caringly touching the batsman’s shoulder with his left.”I put it up before I came away to India,” he says. “I don’t want to hang shirts in my house – I want to keep it private – yet I still want a little room, which is locked off, that I can go to, to appreciate stuff and the friendships that I’ve made through cricket.”The photo is signed by Flintoff with the message: “Any danger of you getting out. Well batted. Looking forward to the next battle.” Lee is too.