Why I love cricket: Pat Cash played an accidental role in Australia's revival under Allan Border

PAT CASH: Technically I find cricket fascinating. Especially bowling, because it’s very similar to serving in tennis. In fact, serving is half-javelin-throwing and half-bowling

I played a lot of cricket as a youngster. I did a bit of everything – I was always first in the nets at school when I was 13 or 14! My father was an Aussie Rules player, so that and cricket were my two sports, and I ended up picking up tennis off the back of them, really. Tennis you can play all year. In the other parts of the year I fitted in cricket and Aussie Rules.

Cricket is just something you do at home in the summertime in Australia – it’s on the TV and you just play in the back yard. I was captain of my school team. It was the local Catholic school and I played just about every sport – that’s one of the great things about Australia and the way I grew up. I developed as an all-round athlete first, and then became a tennis player. 

Technically I find cricket fascinating. Especially bowling, because it’s very similar to serving in tennis. In fact, serving is half-javelin-throwing and half-bowling. Almost to a man, if you asked a cricketer to serve, they could serve with a lot of power. Shane Warne is a very good tennis player. You can’t step forward, but except from that it’s very similar. I had the same biomechanist who worked with Glenn McGrath and Jason Gillespie.

^{Cash alongside Tim Henman}

It was great to see David Boon at the World Cup launch party on The Mall. He was an absolute hero of mine. I first became aware of the Australia team in the great era of the Chappell brothers and Jeff Thomson. I’ve constantly followed it ever since, and often end up catching up with the guys at dinners or functions.

I was having a big debate during one dinner with Allan Border and John Fitzgerald, who won multiple Grand Slam doubles titles, was a very good singles player and won the Davis Cup. We got into a really heated argument about which sport is tougher. AB said: “Listen, I couldn’t run around the Adelaide Oval three times, let alone do it for four hours like you do.” But he also said: “As a batsman we can’t make even one mistake – you can make hundreds of mistakes in a match.” Fair point, I thought!

But we certainly have admiration for each other’s sport – the hand-eye co-ordination in batsmanship is phenomenal, and what the bowlers put through their body is incredible. Brett Lee told me his back is fine, but his neck’s a bit funny because of all the strain that got put through there. All of us old tennis players are limping too! We play on cement at least half of the year, and that’s the killer. If we still played on grass like cricketers still do, or on clay as they do in France and South America, then that would be different. That’s one of the reasons that guys like Rafa Nadal are still going. The cement is the thing that kills our bodies.

^{Cash in action at Wimbledon}

There’s many more Europeans on the tour now than there used to be, so a lot of the tennis players don’t know cricket at all, if they’re not from the Commonwealth. The locker room’s slightly changed now. Roger Federer likes it, as his mum’s South African.

There’s a lot of competition for different sports in Australia, because we’re an outdoors nation. We’re struggling to get youth to come through tennis now that Aussie Rules has really taken off, and we’re not bad at soccer now too. Aussie Rules takes a lot of our great athletes – no doubt about that.

People come up to me and say ‘What’s wrong with Australia? They can’t win anything?’ And I say: ‘Hang on, we won the Tour de France through Cadel Evans’. I think the move away from traditional sports has hurt tennis a bit more than cricket. Australians still love watching cricket: it’s on all summer. In tennis we literally have a month, a bit like Wimbledon here. People get excited about tennis, then it dies off.

I wasn’t aware at the time of Bob Hawke’s famous line after Australia surrendered the Ashes in 1986/87, and we won the Davis Cup against Sweden (“If only we had 11 Pat Cashes at the MCG we might have won the Ashes!”). I didn’t really pay much attention to it to be honest. I just managed to fight my way through a match and play well. I think what was disturbing in that series is that that Australia side didn’t seem to have any fight. I’ve seen Allan Border say that it was almost the moment when they didn’t want to be a laughing stock anymore, and he got the team going again.

This article was published in the Summer 2019 edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game

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