Steve Waugh, regarded as one of Test cricket’s greatest captains, has recalled how a brutal collision with teammate Jason Gillespie – when he feared if he’d ever lead the team again – ended up becoming the turning point of his captaincy stint.
Waugh, who led Australia in 163 international games, took over as captain from Mark Taylor on a full-time basis in 1999, leading Australia to a tour of the West Indies which was soon followed by a series in Sri Lanka. On day two of the Kandy Test, Waugh and Gillespie, in an attempt to take a catch, suffered a sickening collision, which left both of them hospitalised – Waugh with a broken nose, and Gillespie with a snapped tibia in his right leg.
“At 33, it still probably took me 6-12 months to realise my [captaincy] style. I was still probably leading by consensus a bit early on because I’d been mates with these guys [teammates] for a long period of time and all of a sudden I was the leader,” Waugh said on the podcast In The Game, as quoted by foxsports.com.au.
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“So having to separate myself a little bit from the rest of the guys was a challenge. I finally realised that when I was in a hospital bed in Colombo with a broken nose and Jason Gillespie had a broken leg.”
Consigned to the hospital bed, the injury gave Waugh time to introspect, helping him understand that he’d have to “make those tough decisions yourself”.
“I was sitting there in a hospital bed thinking, ‘If I never get to captain again, have I done myself justice? Had I done it my way?’ And the answer was, no I hadn’t. From that point on I said just trust my gut instinct and do it my way. And that was probably the turning point in my captaincy career. I wasn’t a certainty to play the next Test. I had compound fractures of my nose and … all these other broken bones, so I was thinking maybe I’m not going to play the next Test and if I don’t, somebody else will be captain and I might never get the chance to do it again.”
Steve Waugh wasn't yet captain of Australia during the 1996 World Cup.https://t.co/o8aBeUv12b
— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) June 30, 2020
After a ten-day break, Waugh was back into the team for the Galle Test – in all, he went on to captain Australia in 57 Tests, winning 41 of those, including their record run of sixteen consecutive Test wins, leading the side in 15 of them.
“You’ve got to work out who are the people you trust and stick to the ones … you really respect,” Waugh said. “At the end of the day you’ve got to look in the mirror and make those tough decisions yourself and that was one of those moments where I thought, ‘I’m not doing it the right way, let’s turn it around and do it differently.’”
