Leg Spinner

I remember the first time I wrote about him: the leg spinner. The editor of the paper, Clive Holder, asked me, “Who is this new kid they picked for the state team?” Clive was a cricket fanatic. I told him the debutant was a leg-spinning all-rounder.

“A species presumed extinct,” he said, and added, “Are they picking him to bat at six or seven?”

“Genuine all-rounder,” I said. “Picked him to bat at seven.”

I’ve been watching him play for Waverley for two seasons, up at the oval on Bondi Road. The boy is exceptional. Simon Heath is the real deal. He’s got wickets and runs; the runs coming at the handy average of 56.22 and he’s only eighteen; don’t have the bowling stats at hand but they’re brilliant; bowls a googly, flipper, big spinning leg-break. Bowls right handed, bats left handed and can destroy an attack like David Warner did in his pomp.

“We haven’t seen that kind of thing since Benaud and at sixty, I’m even too young to have seen Benaud play but I’ve seen the tapes.”

“Funny you should say that, Clive, because young Heath wears or doesn’t wear his shirt the same way. Big and loose fitting with four buttons undone showing off the chest, just like one Richie Benaud, and no he hasn’t got tickets on himself. He’s a humble kid but when he crosses the boundary line … I don’t want to pump the boy up too much but I’m writing an article on his New South Wales debut as we speak.”

“Do me a favour,” Clive said, “don’t write about him, not yet. Just write something like, much is expected of young debutant, Simon Heath, but that’s it. Let’s see how he goes in the first innings then write the big story. I want you at the SCG for the full five days. See how he fields, bats and bowls and check his enthusiasm and how he gets along with the other blokes. I have this idea we might be able to track his rise, if it happens, right from the start of the five-day state games and into the 20-20 and the fifty-over game. If he’s a genuine all-rounder he’ll be playing across the board.”

“You’re the boss.”

“One other thing. Completely off the subject. How come we can’t make great sports films like the Americans do? You’re a bloody sports writer.”

I couldn’t give him an answer. I’d often thought about it. The Natural with Robert Redford; Kevin Costner and Field of Dreams; Paul Newman in Somebody Up There Likes Me, and if you think pool is a sport then The Hustler and The Colour of Money. A gentle film like Bull Durham or the opposite of that in Raging Bull. It pissed me off too. There was an Australian film released in maybe 2008 or 2009 called, ah, the title escapes me, but it was about rugby league in the seventies and eighties and how tough a game it was and it was more than good but it disappeared without a trace and it shouldn’t have. The Club is a play not a film and I think the great Australian sporting film has to be about cricket because it wouldn’t divide people like the football codes do.

You know what. I think it’s the romance of sport. I’m not sure we have it like the Americans do or maybe we just can’t express it in film properly, too much machismo not enough romance. But I was going to be following the stellar first season of the young leg spinner and, stick with me, it was beautiful and tragic and wonderful. Leg spinners are the artisans of cricket. Listen in now, while I tell you about Simon Heath.

I chose to sit in the O’Reilly Stand, I was after all there to see a leg spinner and like “Tiger” Bill O’Reilly, I was a journalist but humble enough to know that I would forever stand in his shade. I had played cricket at club level and once-upon-a-time I might have said if you have played club cricket and I mean district cricket level then you know something of how a Test cricketer feels. Just imagine the bowler is faster at Test level, more skilful, more attacking, more able to … but it doesn’t work. Some of us write about it; the players at state and international level, they do it.

I was pleased when Alan Fontaine, the New South Wales captain, chose to bowl. How long before the leg spinner would come on? Generally it’s felt that after the fall of the second or third wicket the time is ripe for the leggy to come on. State games were now played over five days and even district cricket was played over four days. It was to get cricketers ready for Test cricket, which in the past ten years had regained its place as the pre-eminent form of the game. The crowds in India who went to 20-20 had now returned to Test cricket as well. So, if a young, new batsman from Australia or England had a debut at Chennai then he knew there would be 90,000 Indians baying for his blood.

The New South Wales team came onto the field led by Fontaine. I looked for Simon Heath and saw him jog onto the SCG just behind his skipper. He had short black hair but not the fashionable one or two razor cut, he had the old-fashioned short back and sides and somehow it made him more masculine than the others. More of a man. He was an athlete; you could see it in the way he moved so fluidly across the ground and when he threw the ball I was reminded of baseball players from the American Major League.

The opening bowlers were getting the treatment from the Victorians. It was 0 for 60 from ten overs. This is the way the modern game is played, the best of 20-20 taken to Test cricket; and then it was 0 for 80 and Fontaine tossed the ball to Simon Heath. He strode to the crease, handed the umpire his cap and gently walked out his run-up. He came back to the stumps and indicated he wanted fielding changes. Fontaine hadn’t expected the new boy to … but he just went ahead and did it. Brought mid-on and mid-off in. Brought the man in from covers to sit right under the nose of Colin Cooper, the Victorian opening batsman, who was already 40 not out. Fontaine didn’t argue with him. Heath strode back to the top of his mark. It was a short run-up but he pushed through the crease hard and had a strong delivery action and it was a genuine leg spinner, quickly bowled, and it got past Cooper but he just smiled. The next three deliveries were all like the first. Quick leg spinners. Heath signalled to mid-wicket to come in so he was placed halfway to the boundary and not on the boundary. The next delivery was thrown up high, above eye level, and Cooper went for it but he skied it to, yes, mid-wicket, and Heath had 1 for 0 and didn’t he celebrate. The four buttons undone down the front of his shirt didn’t seem so show-off now. He walked the walk. I’d like to tell you it went like that all day, the young leg spinner running riot through the Victorian team. But no, he finished with 3 for 100, after Mitchell, a tough old Victorian player, hit him all over the SCG, but everyone knew, they’d seen enough to know he was the real deal and that’s how I wrote it and after I’d sent in the piece Clive rang me and said,

“I want you to just add that you’re going to be following the boy through his debut season. We’ll make a big deal of it on the website and in the print version. And if you just think ‘Walkley Award’ you’ll do fine, son.” And I hung up on the smart bastard.

In that first match he also picked up 4 for 80 in the second innings and he made contributions of 35 and 22 with the bat but I felt like he restrained himself from his usual hard-hitting style. I’d seen him destroy Matt Truman at Waverley Oval and Truman had played half-a-dozen Test matches and bowled for New South Wales for eight years and he clobbered him and that’s what I wrote and Fontaine rang me and said,

“What’s going on? It’s only his first game.”

And I said, “Come on Alan, Heath isn’t just another player. We both know that.” And he hung up the phone, or closed it. The curse of the modern journo-writer. No one slams down phones any more. It’s a bit tough with a five-centimetre cell phone.

Heath just kept getting better and better, a joy to watch. It was his bowling that was working for him. Batches of three and four wickets in each innings of his first three state games but I knew when he just started to belt the bowling around like I knew he could then the bandwagon would get louder and louder for his inclusion on the Ashes tour to England and the first of the 20-20 games was coming and I wrote in an article before the first game, If you think young Heath can bowl wait until he explodes with his batting. No pressure.

New South Wales selected him to open the batting in the first 20-20. They batted first. The game was played at the WACA. I was sitting in the Lillee-Marsh Stand and it was a cool night for the opening 20-20 of the season but my palms and underarms were sweaty as I watched Heath walk to the wicket, chest out, buttons undone. He took the first ball, of course, and flat batted it over mid-wicket for six. Game on. He made an even 100 off 46 balls and as they say, a star was born. Not only that, he bowled his leggies with bravery, tossing balls up and then sneaking in the flipper for a memorable first 20-20 wicket. And more importantly he was accurate. The West Australian batsmen couldn’t score off him. Other sportswriters were going ballistic, comparing him to Freddie Flintoff, Garfield Sobers, Keith Miller and Benaud but this was a new age, those guys might not have prospered here. Big call, but I was happy to make it. His batting truly only brought to mind Warner or Adam Gilchrist with the brutality of a Viv Richards or Hayden.

His form in the five-day game also prospered. He was now, in his first season, the first player picked. His batting improved and he was unstoppable, and then it came. After a game between Victoria and New South Wales he was arrested for assaulting a man in a nightclub in South Yarra. The story was the guy had been baiting him all night and Heath had laughed him off, then as it got more abusive Heath had asked the guy to step up to the plate, in front of his girlfriend, and the guy had hit him. The word was Heath didn’t even blink, he just threw a big right hand and broke the guy’s jaw and sent him sprawling over tables and some prick had got it all on his camera phone. Heath was suspended for three state games and the remaining 20-20 games. The Ashes dream appeared to be over. Cameras and reporters followed him everywhere, even the paparazzi guys were tailing him so what he did was he just shut up shop. Didn’t go out after six at night. Played club cricket for Waverley, and whenever he left the field all ten of his team-mates got in front of the cameras and paparazzi guys and there was no way through. That was the thing with Simon Heath. His team-mates respected him, they weren’t jealous, you couldn’t find (and I tried) one guy who he had played with or against who had a bad word to say about him. Soon the ban was over and he had three further state games to prove he was worthy of all the hype.

I hoped they’d pick him for the Australian team to tour England. It would be for the good of Australian cricket, not just for the young man. And he performed. He set records for the fastest domestic 50 and 100 runs. His bowling was unfairly compared to God himself: Shane Keith Warne. He was picked for the Australian side to play the Ashes tour to England. I was the one and only reporter who was granted permission to interview him. The expectations of the cricket public were huge. But Heath had crossed over. He wasn’t just a famous cricketer; he was famous. And it all happened in the summer of 2021-22, the long hot season of cricket when he made his debut. We hadn’t won an Ashes series for fifteen years. The public was crying out for success and Simon Wade Heath was the messiah. He was offered a contract for two million dollars to play one season of six weeks in the Indian Premier League. He turned it down because he wanted to be ready for the Ashes series, further ingratiating himself into the bosom of his adoring public.

And in England something beautiful and wonderful happened. I imagine, and I can only imagine, that it was like in 1948 when Bradman and his invincibles went on the six-week voyage to England by boat and didn’t lose a game and Bradman averaged over 100 and people came, whether English or Australian, just to watch Bradman play.

This time they came to watch Simon Heath play. Not immediately though. He performed below average in the lead-up games but the cynic in me suggested in an article I wrote that he might have been saving himself. Whatever went before simply didn’t matter after that first Test match. He took 7 for 84 in the first innings and destroyed England who were all out for 200. The Australians batted and were on the ropes at 5 for 50 and then Heath arrived at the wicket and blasted England to and over the boundary from the very first ball he faced. Simpson, the Aussie fast bowler, clung onto his wicket, to help Heath get his first Test century in his first match and together with his wickets it was the most stunning debut ever. And after that the crowds grew and grew. I could only compare it to the impact that Ian Botham had against Australia at Headingley in 1981.

And Simon Heath continued on through the whole Test series breaking records and delivering the beloved Ashes back to Australia. It was the most remarkable cricket I had ever seen or will ever see. He did not fail once with the bat or the ball. And then it was over; finished. He quit the game and I did the final interview with him.

He said, “How could I ever top this year just past?” (That’s how he spoke, timeless.) “Let it be for me one golden summer; one winter beyond my wildest dreams. I’ll never be forgotten if I stop now. People will always wonder why I quit and I don’t want the press, the public attention. Let me be a recluse but a loved recluse who pokes his head up every now and then to go and watch cricket with his wife and children.” For he had fallen in love in England too and the girl had become pregnant and the paparazzi and the cricket press wanted him but he turned away from it all.

We know now that every couple of years he goes to India to play in the IPL for a cool two million a season and his wildly successful forays bring up the same old question time and time again. Why did he quit? Quite simply I think it was for love; for a simple life. In retirement the press would wonder about him, write silly articles and discuss how good he could have been but mostly the cricket press left him alone as he knew they would. Let us just remember, as he said; one golden summer, one winter beyond my wildest dreams.

And Clive, my old editor, has passed away now but his question about why we can’t make great sporting films like the Americans remains. Simon Wade Heath’s story waits to be told by someone with far greater skill than me and not in this modest short story form but on the big screen.