Damien Martyn emerged as perhaps the most watchable batsmen in world cricket in the early 2000s. In 2002, he was a Wisden Cricketer of the Year.
Damien Martyn continued to be among the most elegant batsmen in world cricket until his sudden retirement during the 2006/07 Ashes. He played in 67 Tests, scoring 4,406 runs at 46.37
Of all the Australian cricketers who swatted aside England during last summer’s Ashes series, Damien Martyn was easily the least well known. Others, such as the Waugh twins, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, had been plying their golden standards of Pommie torture for years. Yet Martyn, and in particular his graceful and uncluttered strokeplay, seemed to arrive almost without warning.
To be bracketed among such elite company is the apogee of praise, even in Australia. It may have helped that England’s bowlers were rarely at their best as a unit, but Martyn made the most of his opportunities, scoring his maiden Test century in the opening match at Edgbaston and adding another in Australia’s shock defeat at Headingley.
In a rubber Australia took 4-1, he finished the series with 382 runs and an average of 76.40. Yet impressive as his figures were, and they were pretty eye-catching, it was Martyn’s back-foot cover-driving that was the sight of the summer, each stroke a perfect marriage of minimal effort and maximum timing. Because he was brought up on the true, high-bouncing pitches of Perth, his instinct is to stand tall and hit through the line, an action that, despite a distinct lack of footwork, brought him sundry boundaries in the arc between cover and mid-off.
This facility, as well as his impressive nose for a partnership, gave many in England the impression that here was a fully-fledged batsman arrived from thin air. In some senses, the perception was accurate. Although he was not some strutting stripling a year out of school – though the description could have applied nine years previously, when Martyn made his Test debut at Brisbane against West Indies – the player himself had been reborn, following a turbulent period when he almost gave up the professional game for good.
Racy lifestyles will always be correlated with performance, and in the second Test against South Africa, early in 1994, his critics got their chance to establish a link. It was the middle match of the series and Australia needed 117 to go one up. Instead a parochial Sydney crowd saw them lose by five runs. Martyn’s role in the failure was centre stage. Having scored just six runs in an hour and three-quarters, he succumbed to the pressure, lofting a loose drive to cover with just seven runs needed. As mistakes go it was a howler, but the six-year snub that followed cannot have been entirely due to the stroke. He had, after all, scored 59 in the first innings.
A period of self-pity began, and it was during this interval, as his form for Western Australia declined, that he set up a travel company and almost quit the game. Fortunately, a double-century against Tasmania in March 1996, along with the careful cajolings of Wayne Clark, then the Western Australia coach and now in charge at Yorkshire, rekindled his desire. When he did get picked again for Australia, for the 1999/2000 series against New Zealand, his mother had to rummage around in the attic to find his baggy green cap. On the form he showed last summer, it should be some time before it goes back there.
