END OF PLAY
Nathan Bracken’s first game in his country’s canary-yellow strip was at the fabled Melbourne cauldron in 2001. At the time, the tall Aussie fast bowler had never met Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist or Andrew Symonds – only watched them on TV like the rest of us. But now he was running out behind them, into a colosseum of colour and the kind of noise that causes the hair on your arms to dance.
“Even just that first warm-up, I can’t describe it… it’s not just a fairytale, it’s more than that; standing there and hearing the national anthem at a packed MCG, you just buzz,” Bracken says with a sigh. “And the reaction when you get a wicket, the roar of the crowd, you can’t put that into words – you’ve mentally pictured what it would be like, so many times, and it’s like all you ever wished for as a kid, but you get there and it’s even better than you imagined.
“Suddenly it’s like every training session you did, every party you missed because you had a game on, you’re there thinking you’ve got something for all that sacrifice. It was worth it.”
At that moment, who wouldn’t trade places with the 23-year-old? Many of us can, and do, daydream about what it’s like to take a wicket at a packed MCG and feel lifted above normal human existence by the guttural and grateful roaring of the crowd. But only the very few ever get a chance to live that fairytale. Of course, what we – the conventionally talented masses – fail to appreciate is that most will also never know what it is like to fall from those heights, or how crushing the landing is.
“THAT’S YOUR JOB FOR SO LONG; GETTING WICKETS, GETTING THAT ADRENALINE RUSH, AND THEN WHEN YOU STEP AWAY IT’S JUST GONE – NOTHING... YOU MISS THE RUSH.”
After the fairytale faded and the adrenaline ceased to fizz, the low point for Bracken, a dual World Cup winner and one-time No. 1-ranked fast bowler in the world – wasn’t when he applied, in desperation, for a job packing shelves, only for the manager to laugh at him.
No, there would be far darker
