WHERE THERE'S A WILL

GH on the retirement of Will Pucovski

Australian cricket reserves a special place for unheard melodies . There are names frozen in time like Archie Jackson, Karl Schneider and Jim Mackay.  There are the war dead, like Norman Callaway, Ernie Parker and Ross Gregory, and the sudden misfortunes of such as Robert Rose and Paul Melville. Stand by, of course, for the tenth anniversary of the tragedy of Philip Hughes.

To these names now, in all probability, add Will Pucovski.  His is only a professional death, as it were: he appears to have retired aged twenty-six.  But this has its own particular cruelty - his tale had dragged on agonisingly, as the relentless toll of his concussions has been tallied.  Even now the situation is clouded: the situation may be permanent or just temporary.

Perhaps the nearest analogue among the foregoing names is that of Mackay: ‘Sunny Jim’ averaged 112.8 in the 1905-6 Sheffield Shield, then was run down by a motorcycle in Boksburg, near Johannesburg, emerging from a coma to find his eyesight badly impaired.  Doctors assured him it would improve.  Sydney Mail’s Short Slip reported: 'He says there is nothing the matter with him now. It is only a question of nerves.’  He was appointed coach of the Melbourne Cricket Club by acclamation.  But it was soon clear that his powers were gone, and he returned to his family in Uralla, never to play again. The Referee’s JC Davis felt that Mackay would have ‘won a reputation with the bat greater than Victor Trumper’.  We will never know, as we will probably never know the heights Pucovski might have scaled.

Nor, it seems, will Pucovski.  He has been a drawn-out and enlarged version of post-innings brooding on dismissal, the abiding good-delivery-or-bad-shot dilemma.  Talent, opportunity, money, a supportive family , a circle of boosters : the admixture could hardly have been more perfect.  So what went wrong, and whose fault was it?  It’s interesting, actually, that all the names we invoke in this context are batters: there is something about a premature departure that echoes premature dismissal.  Perhaps the solution, then, is to think in cricket terms.  Life has bowled Pucovski the proverbial unplayable ball, because, hard as it must have been, it feels like the right decision - for him the uncertainty of the last few years, coming on top of the earlier burden of expectation, must have been unbearable.

I confess a certain personal feeling here.  Will endeared himself to Cricket Et Al when we met at the Sydney Test in 2022, first of all by asking whether Pete and I were brothers, and by having told Justin Langer that, no JL, The Shawshank Redemption was a shit film.  Yes, yes, a thousands times yes. 

In November last year, Will accepted an invitation to the Yarras to launch a book I’d written, and could hardly have been a more gracious guest, fitting right into our very grassy grass roots.  You wanted him to do well.  At the same time, you also had a curious sense he’d, somehow, be all right, even without cricket.  He was sensible, mature, interested in the world round him.  He would be a loss only to cricket, and cricket is, after all, a pretty tiny and certainly limited world.  

In that spirit, I commend you to our recent podcast which, uncannily, we recorded yesterday, before Will’s announcement.  The story of Trent Keep has remarkable parallel elements.  Trent was a gifted cricketer and footballer from a strong family on a pathway to success, until concussions in both sports took their toll.  For nothing is so predictive of concussion, and as exacerbating, as previous concussion.  In Trent’s situation, the concussion also interacted with a pre-existing anxiety disorder to create a harrowing range of physical and mental symptoms.  Trent is now on the board at the Concussion Legacy Foundation, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard an athlete speak with such candour and in such detail about their condition. As with Paddy McMartin a few months later, Trent’s career was ended last year by a seemingly trivial accident - he was not even batting, but walking out of the nets, when a ball from another net came through a hole.   

But you know what?  It’s a great chat.  I’ve chosen as a title one of the great Fall singles

it feels like Trent’s vistas have actually widened as a result of his challenges.  He’s been a support worker for the NDIS, an emissary of Scott Watters’ Life Changer Foundation, is about to take on a role as Daniel Drew’s assistant coaching the national men’s blind team , and you won’t find a nicer guy in a day’s march.  My hope is that Will, too, will see retirement, if and when it comes, not the end of something but the start of something else.  Don’t forget that Keats assured us of the sweetness of heard melodies too.