Look who's stalking

If England's batsmen thought Glenn McGrath was over the hill then they must think again. Dileep Premachandran meets Australia's unbreakable backbone

McGrath, though, didn't even class the spurs as an injury. For the country boy who liked to take aim at a wild pig or two in his free time, they were more like red badges of courage. "There were three spurs, two on the front and one on the back of the ankle," he says. "They got so big that I found it hard to put my front foot down while bowling. The first one was removed so successfully that I ended up snapping one of the front ones off myself."

The healing process took close to a year, and he missed series against India - the absence of his two bowling talismen, McGrath and Warne, ruined Steve Waugh's farewell series - and Sri Lanka, before donning the whites for the return series against Sri Lanka in the northern cities of Darwin and Cairns. The exciting Shaun Tait was waiting in the wings in case McGrath fluffed his lines but once the thin layer of rust had been scraped away, it was like he had never been missing. Decisive bursts in India a couple of months later, including a magical delivery to clean up Rahul Dravid at Bangalore, gave Australia the initiative that they never relinquished in the most eagerly awaited series of the year. He followed that with a devastating career-best spell of 8 for 24 to humiliate Pakistan at Perth. He finished the series with 18 wickets at 14.44. At an age when most fast bowlers shun the hard yards and look longingly at a hammock on a sunlit beach, McGrath, who is 35 in February, is bowling as well as ever. And in his mind, the enforced lay-off was the best thing that could have happened. "I had eight to 10 months off, and I enjoyed the time at home with Jane and the kids," he says. "I came back feeling rejuvenated, probably similar to Warne after he had 12 months off. A little bit of time away from the game makes you keen, makes you fresh again. I think it could lengthen my career by a year or two."

More than anything else, that should set alarm bells ringing in England, with the fate of the Ashes depending once more on the English batsmen's ability to see off McGrath's relentless probing outside off stump. If the hairband and the Mexican Bandit moustache were Dennis Lillee's leitmotif, McGrath will be remembered for his dark-corridor bowling that taunted a whole generation of batsmen.

Winning mental battles has been McGrath's stock-in-trade from the moment he emerged as a viable replacement for the injured Craig McDermott on the historic tour of the Caribbean in 1995. Interestingly, he claims that his habit of singling out the opposition's stars for special treatment was inspired by the antics of the legendary West Indian sides of his childhood. "They always seemed to target the captain of the opposition, give him a hard time and didn't let him score too many," he says. "It stems from that. If you can target the opposition captain or the best batsman, and get on top of him, it can have an effect on the rest of the team."

Unlike some trash-talkers though, McGrath chooses his prey carefully. Once he does, a few none-too-subtle soundbites to the media start the process that culminates in a duel across 22 yards. "Some handle it a lot better than others," he says. "When it gets built up before a series that it's me versus Lara or me versus Sachin, then it's got that batsman thinking about me. He may forget a little about the other bowlers in the team. And if I bowl well enough to get that batsman out once or twice in the first Test, then all of a sudden, it's in the press that McGrath has got his target. That piles on even more pressure."

Chit-chat in the middle intensifies that pressure - what Steve Waugh famously referred to as mental disintegration. McGrath has frequently led the line in that arena too, culminating in that angry stand-off with Ramnaresh Sarwan in Antigua, when cricket came perilously close to being a contact sport. There's a half-smile when he offers up his defence for sledging, indication that answering such queries comes as naturally as pitching one just short of a length outside off stump. "I think all fast bowlers have to be aggressive, they have to have a bit of mongrel in them," he says. "At the end of the day, if the bowler's out there smiling and skipping around and bowling half-volleys, he won't be out there very long.

"A lot of people call it white-line fever. So-called nice guy off the field, and then you turn into a monster when you cross the line onto the field. I'm giving a 100%, doing the best I can for myself and the team. But once you come off, everyone's friends again and you enjoy each other's company. But out in the middle, it's a real challenge, and I sometimes feel that if I took it easy on the batsmen, they'd be disappointed."

The Sarwan incident remains a touchy subject, understandable given what he was going through at the time. "I still get quite angry when I see people talking about that and writing about it in the wrong way," he tells you. "That was just poor timing more than anything else. What was said ... if that was said at any other time, it wouldn't have worried me at all. But the fact that my wife Jane was going through secondary breast cancer and things were pretty tough, that was the only reason it affected me. It had nothing to do with cricket, it was only to do with my wife suffering from cancer."

Michael Vaughan was another to take on the McGrath mouth, during his halcyon southern summer in 2002-03. "I think Vaughany made more of that than anything else," says McGrath. "It was a bit of fun. I didn't have to target anyone in that series because he came out and said that I'd be targeting him anyway. I think he took it upon himself to get me going. He wasn't shy about saying things to me, and it was funny because at one stage I thought he could only say two or three words - it was the same every ball."

The thought of playing in such heated Ashes contests did not even occur to the teenage McGrath who could barely get a game at home in Narromine. "I didn't play a great deal of cricket because our captain at the time - who was a year older than me - thought I couldn't bowl. I never got a bowl in the under-16s, so I went off and played golf and representative basketball until I was 15 or 16. When he was too old, I got my chance." Narromine in New South Wales is not noted as one of the great cricket nurseries, and it was a chance encounter that changed his life. "I played my first representative game when I was 17, then played in a match where three New South Wales players came down and played for two local teams," he says. "In my team, there was Mark Taylor, Greg Matthews and Steve Small, and in the opposition there was Doug Walters and Mark Waugh. It was then that Dougie Walters mentioned my name to Steve Rixon, who at the time was playing for Sutherland, a club in Sydney. He asked me if I'd like to come down and play.

"I was 18 at the time and I moved to Sydney when I was 19 to give cricket a go. Played for Sutherland, played a few games in second grade, moved up to first grade in 1992 and in '93 I attended the academy in Adelaide. Rod Marsh was then the head coach. In January '93 I played my first game for New South Wales and played my first Test in November that year. It moved along fairly quickly once I got to Sydney."

The building blocks were already in place by the time Marsh and Lillee set about shaping the edifice, and the biggest among them was a control over line and length that still evokes awe from those that watch him. McGrath insists that his greatest gift was something that came naturally. "It's not like I spent five or six hours in the nets daily bowling at one specific mark," he says. "My action's quite natural and I didn't try to copy any of the bowlers I watched while growing up. My body settled on an action that was most comfortable, and I just ran in and hit the deck. I landed it pretty well, and got steep bounce but the accuracy came naturally."

Some of his peers offered far more to the purist - Allan Donald with searing pace and movement, Wasim Akram with beguiling variety - but no one has matched McGrath when it comes to taking out the best batsmen, day in, day out. When asked what sets him apart, he cuts to the chase with the same lack of frills and preamble that has always characterised his bowling. "I think it's more my accuracy than anything else, being patient and building up pressure. When I run in and try to bowl too fast, I can sometimes lose the bounce that I get. So I just run in, hit the deck, aim at the top of off stump. "It always helps if you have someone at the other end who can also build up pressure and that's why I've bowled pretty well with Jason Gillespie at the other end, and very well with Shane Warne. When you have two people creating pressure, things happen, and that's when I like bowling."

The `unrelenting pressure' mantra has served him well even on days when the ball doesn't leave the hand with quite the usual menace. "When I'm bowling at my best, I'm not thinking of my action or anything else," he says. "I just have a song playing in my head. So when it's not going well, I try to relax and think of a song I like listening to. I sing that to myself as I run in to bowl."

He had no need to sing to himself in the recent series against Pakistan who were blown away 3-0 with McGrath at the helm. One of those to perish in front of the machine-gun-like assault on off stump was Inzamam-ul-Haq, whose Test series encompassed only 15 balls, and one run, at the Waca. A full two months before the game, McGrath talked of targeting Inzamam. "He's a pretty slow starter," he had said. "Seems to come out half-asleep sometimes. I always like to go for the yorker or really full ball early on to get him lbw or bowled, or even the bouncer. But once he gets in, he's got all the shots - plays the hook well. So you have to attack him early, and go back to building up pressure if that doesn't work."

Such thorough planning has been a feature of his bowling, even to those he counts as his mates. When asked to analyse the great opening batsmen of our age, he focuses attention on Matthew Hayden, with whom he has enjoyed a few domestic skirmishes. "He's a guy that likes to dominate the bowling," he says. "There's been a few days when he's hit me for quite a few runs and occasionally I've knocked him over as well. The last few games we played were one-dayers and he likes to bat on off stump when I don't have many people on the leg side. Bowling to left-handers, I try and hit the deck and if I get any movement, it's away from them. I'd hope to get enough movement to have him caught behind. He's not your normal batsman though, he's just so big and strong. On his day, he can muscle you out of the attack. A tough guy to bowl to."

Another to win the McGrath seal of approval is Graeme Smith, whose muscular approach to run-making is quite similar to Hayden's. "We've had a few run-ins in the past," says McGrath when asked about Smith. "He's a tough guy with a real good attitude. Aggressive, even a little cocky at times. It's a bit like bowling to Matthew in some ways the way he approaches the game."

With 47 wickets at 18.46 from his last 10 Tests, the likes of Smith and Vaughan may have to contend with McGrath for a while yet. Twilight may have set in, but this homing pigeon still has no difficulty finding his destination.

This article was first published in the February issue of The Wisden Cricketer.
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