The man with the plan

Michael Hussey walked into the room sporting a bright smile and moved swiftly through, his eyes looking for the table with his name on it. We were at the Australian team's open house - the customary meet-the-press session arranged for the local media to get acquainted with the visitors - in Hyderabad. Once in his chair, he sat erect, hands clasped before him, smile intact, ready to chat. His demeanour was no different from the one he displays on the pitch: he had read the situation and had his mental checklist ready. He was here to get on with the job.

My first question was about how his role had changed over the years. He responded with a chuckle: "Your role doesn't change too much: it is to score runs. I don't want to change too much from that, really." If anything changes, it is the situation. "Each individual needs to assess the situation and his role might change day to day, depending on what the situation of the game is."

Already on this tour Hussey has been in a couple of tight situations on the field and has emerged shining. He is the only Australian batsman to have scored two centuries on the tour so far, and both landmarks arrived at critical moments. In Hyderabad, against the Board's President's XI, Australia were on brink of a follow-on when Hussey stepped up and cobbled together a 96-run stand with the last man, Stuart Clark, bringing up his first hundred of the series along the way. Next, in Bangalore, Hussey showed patience and resilience, coming in at No. 4 and staying till the end, putting on vital partnerships with Brett Lee, and most significantly, 91 runs with Brad Haddin, taking Australia to a position of strength.

Did he have a strategy for India? The key, Hussey said, was to not complicate things too much. "There are definitely things to consider: conventional swing, reverse swing, and then there's spin. But also, if you get in and get settled then there's great value for your shots from the fast outfields. If I stick to my game plans then I can have some success," Hussey had said.

Nose to the grindstone
In 1997, Wayne Clark, then the Western Australia coach, asked Ryan Campbell, the wicketkeeper-batsman, to open with Hussey after Mark Lavender, the regular opener, was injured on the morning of their second Shield game, against Victoria. Campbell had no clue what to do. Hussey, who had been opening for a while, came to his rescue. On day one, he produced a checklist for his partner. It read: "How we are going to build a successful partnership: run well between wickets, keep talking to each other, make sure you play your natural role while I play the sheet-anchor role."

Campbell was astounded. "He had it all prepared. I wanted to keep it very simple. I told him, 'Mate, let's try and get to 10 as soon as we can.' That's probably why we did well: we were complete opposites." The pair ended up becoming Western Australia's second-most successful opening combination. "Mainly because Huss prepared so well for both of us" Campbell, who is now with the ICL, recalled.

"His work ethics singled him out," Clark, who quit as WA coach two years ago, said. "The thing that he did after every season was assess what he'd done, and if he believed he needed to work on the cut shot he would do that. Early on he was quite defensive and was a worker of the ball. Each year he got better as he added the cut, the pull and then the sweep, and now he just looks natural."

Hard work has been a touchstone for Hussey from a young age. His father, who was involved in athletics, got Hussey to build up his fitness by making him run on sand dunes through water. That base came in handy and helped Hussey develop his limited skills further when at 17, aspiring to be a first-class cricketer, he joined Ian Kevan, his coach at Wanneroo, the local district club.

The pair would hit three or four times a week. Each session involved at least 1000 throwdowns, where Hussey would work on just one stroke to get his technique as perfect as he could. "Essentially it came down to a lot of hard work and determination from Michael to get himself as prepared as he could be to get into first-class cricket," Kevan said.

Hussey's fierce desire to learn only gained momentum when he started to play for his state. Once Allan Border suggested that if Hussey had to get himself ready to bat a full day, he needed to train for at least six hours. Hussey immediately sought out Kevan.

"We had this interesting session where we started at half-past eight in the morning, and went on for two hours before a 40-minute lunch break. We then trained for the next two hours, followed by a 20-minute break for afternoon tea, and ended with another two-hour session. By the end of it I was very, very tired and fell asleep leaning against a railing. When I woke up, someone told me he'd left 30 minutes before for a run.

"I asked Border if he had really suggested training for six hours. He said he had but didn't really mean it!" Kevan recollected.

Hussey's desire to make it to the top may have been deep, but he didn't wear it on his sleeve. "He kept that very private," Kevan, who started coaching Hussey around 1991, said. Kevan didn't know Hussey had written to Steve Waugh asking him how to become a Test player - a detail Hussey revealed in Mr Cricket, his biography, which was released earlier this year.

The desperation to wear the baggy green got to the point where it became something of an obsession. "When he got his first contract, he upped the ante: he gave up his teaching and went full-time, and he really overworked in a way. He put himself under so much pressure that he eventually lost his contract," Clark said.

When he did return to the side, Hussey was wiser, more relaxed. "I'm still going to work hard but I'm also going to enjoy myself and I'm going to have things outside of my cricket." Not that he's going to change completely. Asked if he is methodical in his life outside of cricket, he readily replied: "Very."

Adapting, relaxing
In three years Hussey has captured the imagination of the cricketing world, managing to largely fulfill the promise of his extraordinary start, where he made three hundreds in his first five innings. Thanks to his Bradmanesque stats, he is probably the most important batsman in the Australian middle order after Ricky Ponting, but he has learned to go easy on himself. Do the expectations spur him on? "Not really. I don't want to think I've to go out to do more and more. I just want to do my job, continue doing my thing, and hopefully that'll have a positive influence on the team," Hussey said.

The first lean patch arrived earlier this year when he failed in the West Indies and his average dropped below 40 for the first time in a full Test series. In the old days it would probably have made him go out and spend hours training. Not the new, equable Hussey. "You've just got to try not to go out too high when things are going well and also not ride too low when things going poorly," he said.

In the series before that, against India at home, Hussey had played what he described as his most satisfying innings. On a turning SCG pitch both teams were involved in a battle of attrition. Australia, still behind India, had lost a couple of quick wickets when Hussey, along with Andrew Symonds, pulled the advantage back with a hard-fought partnership. "It was a fourth-day pitch, turning quite a lot, and we were playing against two good spinners - so to be able to get through that tough situation and get our team into a position of strength and to score a hundred was really, really satisfying."

It's just not the top and middle-order batsmen Hussey combines well with; he has impressive figures when he bats in the company of the tail as well. Who can forget his rearguard in the company of Glenn McGrath, when the two of them frustrated South Africa in Melbourne in 2005. His average is a revealing 42 when he bats with the tail (No. 8 onwards).

Hussey's adaptability has a lot to do with this skill. "Michael assesses the situation very quickly and carefully," Clark said. "If he's got the player going at the other end, he gives him the strike, and if he needs to be the aggressor he now has the experience and the confidence to do that. He is one of the best players in the world to play to the situation."

It is a talent Hussey developed early. A catalyst was being drafted in to play one-dayers for Western Australia. "That changed his career. He batted at six and it just gave him a different approach to his batting. He had to improvise, and in fact that helped him in his four-day game, especially in his attacking," Clark said.

Campbell said the reason Hussey is probably the best Test batsman in the world today is because he waited for it so long. When he finally made the step up he knew just what he had to do and was prepared. "What Michael Hussey does better than most people is to make runs.

"Sometimes younger players get given too many opportunities when they haven't worked for it and they don't appreciate it. Huss appreciates every second because his journey to get there took so long and was very painful along the way. But when he got there, he wasn't going to give anyone else a second chance, and that's why he is such a great player."

Hussey himself has remained realistic, careful not to take anything for granted. Kevan recently spoke to Hussey about next summer's Ashes and asked if it would be possible to get some tickets. "Look, I might not even be on that tour," Hussey said.