November 1988, a hot Brisbane Saturday at the Gabba. West Indies, having rolled the home team for 167, have ambled to 135-0 on day two when Steve Waugh – playing his first test against the Caribbean machine, his twenty-second overall, still without a century to his name – lands a couple of punches, nicking off Desmond Haynes and Carl Hooper. At 162-3, out sways the West Indies’ captain, Vivian Richards, playing his 100th Test. Steve Waugh, future Professor Emeritus of Mental Disintegration at the University of Baggy Green, is pumped, and greets the Master Blaster with a series of I-don’t-give-a-shit-who-you-are-mate bumpers, just on the pedestrian side of medium pace but dripping with attitude.
Scott Oliver talks to the key players at Nelson CC and beyond about Steve Waugh’s season in the Lancashire League, when he stared down Viv Richards and plenty others besides.
This was the thick of Waugh’s short-lived phase as a bona fide all-rounder – the period of Bill Lawry’s giddy assertion that he was “surely the best all-rounder in the world right now” and Ian Chappell’s timeless retort: “Mate, he isn’t even the best all-rounder in his family” – and one of the bouncers even caused Viv a flicker of concern. But it was the follow-up, a back-of-the-hand slower ball, that discombobulated the great man, Waugh missing his length by several metres and causing Richards, who had lost the flight path, to avert his purple-capped head, the ball hitting him square between those middleweight’s shoulder blades.
Waugh’s response to his borderline beamer was to bellow an appeal at the umpire, look bewildered when it wasn’t upheld, and decline even a cursory apology to the now bristling legend at the other end: precisely the attitude that would lead Australia to knock Windies off their perch seven and-a-bit years later. On this occasion, though, Viv made a 78-ball 68 and West Indies won by nine wickets.
“I was working in a paper mill, doing a night shift,” recalls Garaghty. “We’d sold the butchers by then. About three in the morning, my boss came to me and said there’s a phone call for you. I said, ‘No-one calls me at work’. He says, ‘It’s a guy called Steve Waugh. From Australia’. Steve was being interviewed on the radio about his book, so I ended up talking for three or four minutes on Australian radio about his time with us at Nelson. I said, ‘He was a great teammate, a great player, but I was just taking my forklift truck driving licence and if you don’t mind you’ve gone and interrupted me’.”
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