Native Born

Steve Waugh and his beloved cap © AFP

To understand him, see where he lives. Australia's greatest batsman of the modern era, our most successful captain and fiercest competitor, has not decamped from the modest suburban surrounds of his upbringing. He lives quietly with his wife and children on the edge of settlement, where city turns to bush. He takes his kids to the local parks to play on the swings, smiles and nods to his neighbours on the street. He could be anonymous were he not Steve Waugh.

It's a truism that fame and success are not unalloyed joys. They come with a price, the loss of privacy being the most obvious. But they have their compensations too. Wealth, privilege, status - even some small measure of power - are all attendant on his office. Others in Waugh's position have availed themselves too readily of the rewards, investing in the fastest cars, most expensive houses and, more ruinously, in the fastest, most expensive women.

Waugh, it seems, is cut from plainer cloth. He understands the value of a dollar. It is to give your kids a chance in life. But once you've done that there's a level of material wealth which is unseemly to behold. Waugh is not a poor man. He has provided for his family's future in a way that the players of yesteryear can only marvel at. But he has also said that having achieved that, money is not important to him.

There is even an element of his character that remains uncomfortable with the riches he has earned. That guilt at living so large on the profits of what is, after all, only a game, may lie behind the energy he brings to his charity work on the subcontinent. For years he would not even discuss this part of his life, lest it be seen in an uncharitable light. But as his playing days draw to a close and he contemplates the lives he might yet change, we can expect to hear a lot more of his other great mission.

From someone else it might appear to be noblesse oblige, the duty of a better man to those born to a lesser station. But that is not Waugh's nature. Again, to understand him, look at where he lives, where he grew up.

The outer suburbs of Sydney are not home to a transplanted gentry. They're considered a wasteland by a significant proportion of the city's inhabitants, the sort who can be found nursing four-dollar-lattes within a few miles of the Opera House. But the burbs are Waugh's homeland, where he came from and where he has stayed. Life in a place like Bankstown is lived more simply, with infinitely less hysteria and bullshit, than it is in, say, Double Bay or Toorak.

The abiding respect in which Waugh is held in suburban Australia, in those vast tracts of mega-malls and takeaway strips, has as much to do with the way he embodies the spirit of millions of ordinary punters as it does with his on-field performance. Waugh is everyman, raised to heroic status.

Steve Waugh: more time to spend with the family © Getty Images

When his form failed him, as it did on several occasions in the past few years, the cries for his head did not come from the crowds surging through the turnstiles at the Gabba or the MCG. He had earned their loyalty a hundred times over. No, the whispers and knives were always found among former players, some commentators and writers, and most tellingly among the game's administrators. Having turned cricket into a global business, they seemed hellbent on proving they could be as ruthless with their workforce as any Nike executive running a sweatshop in Vietnam.

Waugh gave them exactly the same stone face he turned on generations of West Indian fast bowlers, Indian spinners and English pretenders. And the game's overlords quietly hated him for it. He could stare them down because behind him stood millions of fans and admirers. Tens of millions if you looked beyond his home shores.

It seemed at times that the board and selectors were so desperate to see him gone that no amount of Test victories could safeguard his role as captain, especially if his form with the bat was anything less than brilliant. And so for the last few seasons Waugh played for his sporting life, in the same way he had often played to save his team, cementing his reputation as the man you'd want to bat for your own life.

The punters loved him all the more for it. His epic hundred against the English in the last Ashes series at home was celebrated not just as a national triumph over the old foe, but as a win against the forces conspiring against Waugh from within his own camp. He'd snatched down the sword of Damocles and run the bastards through with it.

With his passing dies the last connection to the worst of times in Australian cricket, the dog days of the 1980s, when even New Zealand could lick their lips in anticipation of taking the field against us. Part of Waugh's appeal lies in his mere survival of that awful time. So many players were found wanting that any who made it though attracted a sympathy vote; a bit like Eddie the Eagle on the ski ramp, or that African swimmer who almost drowned in the pool at the Sydney Olympics.

Another Steve Waugh special - the red rag © Getty Images

The fact that he struggled so hard and so obviously at times, but never once gave up, set him apart from many of his team-mates of the period. The tungsten bonds that bind the current team under Waugh's leadership were tempered in the fires of that era.

Waugh vividly recalls the 1980s as a time when the Australian dressing room was characterised by a Hobbesian war of all against all. He has said that when he was first selected nobody but Allan Border felt secure in their position. The outcome, almost inevitably, was that a few of his team-mates wanted him to fail, so that their own dubious claims to the baggy green cap would be strengthened.

Some of his problems with former players may well stem from that experience. Waugh was never one for holding up a bar until the wee hours, crapping on about the glory days with some faded star of yesteryear. He now concedes, somewhat ruefully, that he might have had an easier run of it if he had paid his homage.

Unfortunately he was focused on survival, and the only real help he got was from Bobby Simpson, then coach. The schisms of rebel South African tours and World Series Cricket completely disrupted the process of transferring knowledge and memory from one generation to the next. More than one living legend of the previous decades proved themselves less interested in helping to rebuild Australian cricket than they were in hacking away at the reputation of young men like Waugh, on whose shoulders the task would fall.

The reception of new players into the current side is a thousand miles removed from the grim Darwinism of the 80s. Waugh insists on making each player feel welcome and valued; no small feat in a team recognised as the best in the world since well before he took over.

It's a generosity of spirit that doesn't extend to competitors. One of the darker ironies of Waugh's captaincy has been the way in which one of cricket's most humane and selfless individuals has run one of the most ruthless, unforgiving and often graceless operations in professional sport. Natural competitiveness has frequently become the crude ugliness of sledging and personal abuse.

Under Waugh's leadership we have witnessed some of the worst examples of bad sportsmanship since Bodyline. Even more damning, there is a perception that Australia has become a bully, all too willing to dish it out but completely incapable of taking punishment in return. Glenn McGrath's explosive confrontation with Ramnaresh Sarwan last May is one of the more egregious examples.

Waugh has often defended what he calls the use of "mental disintegration", a euphemism for personal abuse, often of a sexual nature. It doubtless works on some, but the best way to break a man down at the crease is simply to keep getting him out, as Shane Warne did to the South African Daryll Cullinan virtually every time they met. With Mike Gatting, Warne needed only one ball to effect a total disintegration, dismissing the Englishman with a massive legbreak which completely shattered Gatting's confidence in a way that insulting his wife or mother couldn't hope to achieve.

The tactic has even backfired at times. India's captain Sourav Ganguly has pointed to an attempted sledge by Waugh in the Kolkata Test of 2001 as a turning point in the series. Australia led 1-0 going into Kolkata. In the book Ground Rules, Ganguly explains what happened next:

"Just before tea on the final day when they were only three wickets down, I dropped a sharp chance off Steve Waugh at backward short leg. Maybe if he had said nothing, the game would have drifted to a draw, the result that appeared to be its natural conclusion. But Waugh could not resist the chirp: `You just dropped the Test, mate.' Sometimes sledging can work against you and, on this occasion, it had the effect of geeing up the Indians. Immediately after tea, Harbhajan Singh got Waugh out and Rahul Dravid gave him a send-off from slip asking who had given away the Test match now."

Australia fell to pieces and lost the series 2-1.

It may be that with Waugh retired and a new generation at the crease, players like Adam Gilchrist will recapture some of the grace with which Australians played in less hard-bitten times. But again, the intriguing thing about Waugh is that the Australian public, for the most part, do not seem to care about his rougher than usual handling of the opposition; at least, not so much as purist cricket writers and some former players do. You could see that as evidence of a coarsening of the public mind, or perhaps a weakness of Australians for a bit of spirited banditry, in the style of Ned Kelly or Cap'n Moonlight.

And there is something timeless about Waugh. His thin, hawkish features would not look out of place on a convict ship, either above deck with a whip and a musket, or below, in pyjamas with arrowheads dyed on them. He looks like he'd be just as much at home sinking a shaft on the goldfields in the 1850s, peering up the sheer cliffs of Gallipoli in 1915, or spruiking mobile phones in the 21st century. He has an Australian face, the lines drawn slightly too long by centuries of peering into a baking emptiness, the eyes squinting into a blinding sun.

Everything about him looks hard and chipped and unforgiving. If you were casting him in a movie you wouldn't go to a professional larrikin like a young Bryan Brown. You'd have to go with Hugo Weaving, who played England's Bodyline captain Douglas Jardine long before he became Agent Smith in The Matrix. The utter ruthlessness, the obsession with victory and the unnatural will to power with which Weaving imbued both characters would be familiar to any of Waugh's opponents of the last 10 years.

The secret of Waugh's appeal possibly lies in the fact that he brought Jardine's attitude back to the field, without the Englishman's loathsome tactics. For even though the Australians stand accused of being some of the worst sledgers in the game, they are by no means alone. The West Indians of the 1980s, for example, were well known for their racist abuse.

And Waugh's real achievement has been to harness a pitiless attacking style of play without resorting to the physical intimidation of his foes. Having worn the livid bruising of encounters with the West Indian pacemen, he would no doubt argue that a few harsh words are meaningless in comparison.

Waugh and his team have swept all before them because they have dedicated themselves to dominating every facet of play in every conceivable playing environment. They play for results, not draws, bringing the action of one-day cricket to the five-day game.

While Waugh has to pay due deference to his predecessors, Mark Taylor and Allan Border, for rescuing Australia from its tribulations, neither of those men can claim to have revolutionised the game like him. Border, a scarred veteran of the darkest losses, was inherently conservative. Taylor followed his lead. But Waugh was not satisfied with crushing the life out of an opponent on the last day when he could beat it out of them on the third.

Under his leadership, aggression became the Australians' defining characteristic. It found an admittedly negative expression in sledging but, on balance, the game is still better for Waugh's captaincy because of the hyper-accelerated style of play he championed.

A hundred years from now he may be recognised as the man who saved Test cricket.