Mitchell Johnson experienced the lowest of lows and the highest of highs over the course of his career. In 2017, he spoke to Geoff Lemon about how he rediscovered his hunger for the game on the way to decimating England in the 2013/14 Ashes.
This first appeared in issue 149 of All Out Cricket.
“Your mind’s very clear and it just happens,” he says. “You feel free, and the ball comes out easy. You can finish a game and come off the field and you don’t feel the aches and pains as much. When it starts, you go with it. It’s very rare when it does happen like that. I guess you’re sort of fighting it through your career, trying to get that moment.
“It comes out fast, too, because your whole body is relaxed. Cricket bowling is like a catapult. Your front leg plants and that front arm pulls everything through. Your bowling arm needs to be really loose. It’s a great feeling when you get it, you just feel free in your mind.”
Mitchell Johnson is talking about speed. The pure, unadulterated stuff, not the cut-down version that a thousand would-be tough guys dish out at club and county grounds of a weekend. Not respectable pace, not brisk, not decent enough at first-class level. True pace, the kind that upends even the split-second timing and decades of muscle memory of the very best batsmen.
He speaks of how quickly he got the taste again, of how being hit over his head for six was enough to fire up the yap and the glare and the want to bowl faster. Johnson is only 35 years old. His burnout in 2011 was close to repeating when he retired in late 2015, the schedule again the culprit. He was a surprise cricketer, and looking back over his story, it increasingly seems like no one quite knew what to do with him when he arrived. It also makes you wonder whether he might have done more, played longer, had he been managed with a bit more awareness.
The physical prowess is still there, and the competitive urge burns still. At least a glimmer. “When I heard that Nathan Lyon had said that Mitch Johnson could consider coming back playing T20 Internationals, my ears did prick up at the time,” he admits. “But then I thought – I know what it’s like at that level, and the stresses that come with it, and I’ve done that. I’m done with it. There are better players out there that deserve it, they can go through it now.”
