A creator of magic moments and marvellous memories, Australia's 'Picasso in Pyjamas' was also a complex cricketing figure
Arrival of 'The Finisher': Michael Bevan joins Hall of Fame
"Well, it's kind of synonymous with Michael Bevan, right? It sort of made me, and became a moment in one-day cricket history that people remember. And look, at the time, I was forging my way as both a one-day and a longer-version player, and it probably irked me a little. And then, as my career started to wind down, then finished, I became pretty comfortable with it, and understanding of what it meant for people."
In the judging eyes of the public consciousness, few sporting careers have been as definitively boiled down to a single moment as Michael Bevan's.
Five years before Cathy Freeman, a decade before John Aloisi, Bevan's last-ball four at the Sydney Cricket Ground instantly entered the country's sporting zeitgeist, and catapulted the man himself into household name status.
Yet Hall of Fame types – which the two-time World Cup winner today becomes, as the 66th inductee to the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame – are seldom made with a single swing of the bat.
And while his legacy as one-day cricket's original finisher was crystallised in that iconic moment, Bevan's career was in fact layered in complexity and contradiction: the coolest head on the field in a run chase, the loss of his wicket could also trigger the hottest of heads off it; ranked the world's best one-day batter for three-and-a-half years straight, he was dropped from the Test team four times in three years before he turned 28, never to return; a methodical domestic run machine whose Sheffield Shield average exceeded 60, he was forced to confront mental frailties that threatened to derail him.
Almost two decades after calling time on his career, Bevan is comfortable talking candidly about all of it. At 54, he looks back at the young man who was half his age with wisdom long acquired.
"I wasn't ready to play Test cricket," he says of those early years. "I had my own demons."
* * *
Michael Bevan was doing Michael Bevan things long before anyone had heard of Michael Bevan. Put it to him that his cold-blooded composure at the crease for Australia was forged from the crucible of early 1990s domestic cricket – in which he appeared in no fewer than nine finals before the age of 24 – and he offers up an alternate theory.
"I mean, possibly," he begins. "But I felt with the one-day game, I always did what I did – I had the ability to win close games, and that was always there. It wasn't something that I learned or had to go through, it was really just intrinsic, which is kind of a bit weird.
"I remember a few innings in grade cricket where I played that role. I didn't really think about it, I didn't really change, I was just matched with the finishing role and the number six in one-day cricket.
"I'm not going to say 'it felt easy', because it didn't, but I felt aligned with being the reliable, dependable person in a pressure situation."
Had his back held up, none of this finishing business might ever have happened. A tearaway fast bowler during his youth in Canberra, Bevan's spine twisted from his whole-bodied efforts and left him with no option but to pursue life as a batter instead.
It was an ironic entryway given he would later become renowned as a leader in cricket's fitness revolution. Cricket Australia senior men's program manager Brian McFadyen, who was alongside Bevan at the Australian Cricket Academy in 1989, recalls him having "muscles before anyone else even knew what muscles were in cricket".
As was the way in those days, Bevan was snapped up by South Australia as one of the Adelaide-based Academy's most prodigious young talents. Picked for his first-class debut at the WACA in December 1989, the 19-year-old left-hander came to the crease at 5-63 and, against a strong WA pace attack, spent the next six hours grinding out 114 from 282 balls.
He looks back on that maiden innings and suspects he "didn't realise how difficult it was at the time … I felt really relaxed and comfortable".
Three months later Bevan top-scored in each of his first two one-day matches for SA (in a semi-final and final, no less) and his debut knock of 55 from 58 balls against a star-studded NSW likely played a role in his recruitment by that state the following summer.
And so it went for a young Bevan. In a Blues team stacked with internationals, he cemented his spot sensationally in the back half of that 1990-91 Shield season, peeling off scores of 106no, 20 & 104, 153no, 121, 136.
Those five hundreds in six innings quickly had the 20-year-old being regarded alongside Darren Lehmann and Damien Martyn as one of the most exciting young batters in the country. But for the man himself, it didn't translate into the dominance he craved even then.
"I suppose it gave me a bit of an understanding about what I was capable of doing, and how good I could potentially become," he says. "So when it happened, it was great, but it also didn't help me achieve that belonging or consistency that I longed for as a cricketer."
At the time, too, there was an early indication that Bevan's temperament might not match his talent. As well as the infamous 'Bev-attacks' – some form of equipment or dressing room destruction that would routinely follow a dismissal – it also became apparent that, for quite an introverted character, such a rapid rise wasn't resting easily on his shoulders.
"I suppose it's something you have to accept at this level if you're playing well," he told reporters in October 1991, "but I could certainly do without all the hype."
Bevan stumbled in the Shield that summer but a match-winning 93 for NSW against Tasmania in the domestic one-day cup semi-final and a fine 115 against the touring Indians ensured the rave reviews kept coming. One newspaper report described him as "possibly the most exciting NSW batting prospect since Doug Walters".
Looking back, Bevan sees that his younger self had many boxes ticked – talent, work ethic and a laser focus among them. But he knows too, that such blind ambition cut both ways.
"I was motivated in a lot of ways, particularly in terms of fitness, in terms of the amount of practice I did," he says. "But realistically, I struggled to learn and improve as a young player.
"There were a lot of guys – I recall now – who were saying things that I just completely dismissed, so there was an element of stubbornness there as well."
In January 1992, national selectors noted Bevan's potential in including him in Australia's 20-man preliminary squad for the forthcoming World Cup. While he missed the final cut, it was across the next two years that he began to truly realise that potential.
By the end of the 1993-94 season, he had shown himself to be a match-winner for NSW in the final of the one-day competition, had 15 first-class hundreds to his name – including one in the most recent Shield final – and was averaging 53.88 from 54 matches. By then, an ODI debut for the 23-year-old was only weeks away. A first foray into Test cricket would come six months after that.
At New South Wales training, Steve Waugh had been a keen observer of the emergence of the young star, watching on with a mix of awe and intrigue.
"In the nets, he was a guy to admire: he would literally invent strokes to fuel his search for greatness and his desire to attain new levels of excellence," Waugh later wrote in Out of My Comfort Zone.
"Prior to his Test debut he was fearless, uninhibited and purposeful at the crease in all forms of cricket. To those in the know a long and fulfilling career in the five-day game appeared a given.
"His only danger was himself."
* * *
Four times out of 10 in his first seven months of ODI cricket, Bevan played the types of innings that would become his trademarks. Three came batting first as he pushed Australia to competitive totals, one got them across the line with a couple of overs to spare, and all four were unbeaten scores between 36 and 53.
The Australians spent much of the middle chunk of 1994 on the subcontinent, and Bevan made his Test debut in the three-Test series against Pakistan that October, scoring 82, 0, 70 and 91 against a home attack that boasted Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis in their pomp.
It was a stellar introduction for a man who had been tasked with filling the shoes of Allan Border, though neither his runs nor his obvious one-day prowess spared Bevan from the axe during the home summer that followed.
A lean run in the first three Ashes Tests, in which he didn't pass 35, put his place in Mark Taylor's side under threat. Yet the true problem lay in the way England's quicks successfully attacked him with the short ball. In one interview at the time, Bevan identified it as "technical problems rather than state of mind".
Bevan says now he doesn't feel as though he was harshly discarded, either in 1995 or in 1997, when he was again dropped three Tests into an Ashes series after under-performing.
"I averaged 60 in Pakistan against some of the best fast bowlers in the world, who could bowl bouncers," he says. "And then came back (to Australia) against England, who weren't quite as talked up as an attack, and averaged 10.
"I just don't think there was space for someone who didn't really know their game, or was so inconsistent. If I'd averaged even 25 or 30 in those Ashes series, then fair enough, I probably would have had an extended period (in the side).
"But I just was nowhere near the mark."
Waugh later detailed his recollections of the way his younger teammate's once unblemished clarity dissolved almost before his eyes.
"He was a very harsh judge and expected nothing less than complete success, so failure wasn't contemplated," Waugh wrote. "But perhaps even more damaging was his eternal quest to better his game … 'Bevo' tinkered with his methods at the wrong time.
"I vividly remember him during 1994-95 asking me about playing the short ball and then listening to him saying that he wasn't sure about hooking. I told him I believed it had to be a personal choice but I appreciated him sounding me out, though not convinced he was clear in his own mind what to do."
The 1994-95 Ashes axing, and his subsequent tagging as a batter who struggled against the short ball, had devastating consequences on Bevan's Test career. Here was a 24-year-old, whose vertiginous rise had known virtually no setbacks, suddenly on the outer. Greg Blewett debuted in the next Test, scored centuries in his first two matches, and was picked along with Ricky Ponting as the young batters to tour the West Indies.
Bevan meanwhile, jettisoned from the ODI set-up as well, was left to fixate on where it had all gone wrong.
"I was far too hard on myself," he says. "Placed too much pressure on myself."
Speaking on former teammate Shane Lee's podcast last month, he elaborated on the way his perceived short-ball issues impacted him, and how they in some ways began as exactly that – a perception versus a reality – before in his muddled mind it morphed from one to the other.
"For me it was kind of like a version of the 'yips'," he said. "It was probably a loss of confidence or a pessimistic way I viewed it that cost me a lot of time and worry, and hours trying to play the short ball, and never really quite making peace with it.
"I didn't think that situation would crop up in my career, so at the time I couldn't really rationalise it or understand what I was going through. So it ended up being a confidence thing as opposed to a technical thing, or a skill thing, and I didn't realise that until probably halfway through my career.
"I went back to first-class cricket, worked on the short ball technique-wise for hours and hours and hours, only to get back to Test cricket for the same thing to happen.
"So I learned a lot about myself, my confidence levels, and I was hard on myself – I used to put a lot of pressure on myself to play it perfectly, rather than giving myself a break.
"By the time I'd figured all this out – that it was probably more about me than the cricket – I was 27, I was halfway through my career, I'd had a couple of cracks (in Test cricket), and the Australian team at the time was very strong, so I was probably never going to get another shot."
What Bevan couldn't have known through those low days of 1995 was that greatness was only an innings away. And it would arrive one day into the new year.
* * *
Four weeks before he played the innings for which he is most remembered, Bevan wasn't even in Australia's most recent one-day squad. His selection for that home summer came at the controversial expense of David Boon, but three unbeaten innings – 32no, 44no, 18no – in five days before Christmas quickly quelled the critics.
The last of those offered a bite-size sample of what was to come on January 1. In the closing overs against Sri Lanka at the SCG, Bevan took the contest to the wire before dispatching off-spinner Kumar Dharmasena over mid-on for the winning boundary with two balls remaining.
Then came New Year's Day. By now we all know the story, but it is worth restating just how dire the situation was for the hosts on that rainy night at the SCG: chasing 173 to win from 43 overs, they had slipped to 6-38. If ever a reputation was to be made, it was then.
Having come in at 4-32, Bevan lost five partners along the way but kept his head, turning ones into twos and trusting first Ian Healy and then Paul Reiffel to play key support acts. Through two-and-a-half hours at the crease he composed his most famous symphony, hitting just five boundaries until the final-ball crescendo from Roger Harper whistled straight down the ground and into the boundary, leaving him unbeaten on 78 and handing Australia an unforgettable one-wicket win.
As Bill Lawry lost his mind in the commentary box, Bevan, arms aloft and smiling broadly, became the toast of the 37,000-strong crowd and Australian cricket more broadly.
He was 25, and with his second ODI fifty in his 17th innings, he had provided both the blueprint and the benchmark for a role that was now undisputedly his: the finisher.
For the next two years in particular, Bevan wrestled with how he felt about that mantle and what it meant for his Test aspirations. Few doubted his potential for success in both formats, while the man himself had by then come to understand that his issues lay between his ears.
"What I need to do," he told The Age in May 1997, "is get to the stage where I feel the same amount of anxiety about Tests as I do about one-dayers, which is none at all, and then I'll be OK."
Around the same time, there was another mantle he was far from enamoured with. As national skipper Mark Taylor sought to find a way to include the undeniable talents of his state teammate in his Test XI, he landed upon the idea of including Bevan as what effectively amounted to a bowling allrounder.
Picked to bat at No.7 and bowl his handy left-arm spin in the Adelaide Test of November 1996, Bevan cleaned up the West Indies with 10 wickets and added a fine 85no to be player of the match. It was a remarkable all-round performance, yet for Bevan, it put his Test career on an unwanted trajectory.
"I'm not giving up on batting," he said at the time. "It is my passion ... I want to be a Test batsman but if Australia requires me to bowl, I'll bowl.
"I'm aware that if I'm not careful, I might end up doing nothing."
On a cracked WACA Ground pitch in the next Test, Bevan, elevated to No.6, halted an Australian collapse and a rampant West Indies pace brigade on day one, teaming up with Mark Waugh for a 120-run stand and ultimately top-scoring with 87 not out.
Years later, Curtly Ambrose, who took 5-43 that day, remarked of Bevan: "It amazed me that he didn't play many more Test matches."
* * *
Across three World Cups from 1996-2003, Bevan was a pivotal figure in a golden Australian generation. From a fringe player he was recast as a focal point, the Mr Dependable in the middle order even – or especially – when all else was crumbling around him.
"He has managed to put aside the frustrating urgency that overwhelmed him when he was trying to regain his Test batting spot," wrote John Benaud in May 1999, "and has emerged a better-equipped player mentally."
Twice in World Cup semi-finals he played innings that helped push Australia through to the final. First, his 69 in a low-scoring classic against the West Indies in 1996 helped rescue Taylor's side from 4-15 and an on-song Ambrose and Ian Bishop. Three years later, he was last man out against South Africa, having made 65 to guide Australia to 213. On both occasions, the totals were just enough.
But that was Bevan. Measured, composed and constantly assessing his side's situation, he preferred to use all 50 overs to set a total than go out in a blaze of glory; nor was he ever fazed about leaving a run chase to the final moment.
"When I reflect on my one-day career, and get an understanding of why I performed like I did, how I was able to manage the innings, or the run rate ... I think that was sort of natural to me," he says.
"Minimising risk, understanding which bowlers to target, what types of shots to play in certain situations, and the ability to understand when to put your foot down, and when to take the foot off the accelerator as well … (were) the principles that I used."
Bevan continued to refine his method across the years, working those principles into a fine art as Australian cricket rolled into a new century. There was a classic hundred against New Zealand at the MCG in 2002 that rescued Australia from every bit as unlikely a position as the New Year's Day epic, and a pair of vital knocks at the 2003 World Cup – against England and New Zealand – that go largely unmentioned in his catalogue.
"His genius became mundane," wrote Waugh. "People were spoilt by his continued brilliance."
But the innings Bevan rates as his best in one-day cricket came in an unofficial match for a Rest of the World XI in 2000. Batting at No.4 against an Asia XI, he crashed an incredible 185no from 132 balls, missing victory by a run but winning another army of admirers in Bangladesh.
"Just in terms of how I hit them and what I achieved during that innings, without a doubt (it was his best)," he says. "I played a couple of one-day innings that have been more targeted and important … but as a snapshot of what was possible for me and how well I could hit them when I was carefree, that's an innings that stands out.
"I suppose it reinforced to me what I was capable of when I did take the pressure off myself, and enjoyed myself."
By then Bevan had long learned that lesson. He could still be intense and blinkered, as many of his teammates would attest, but his experiences in – and out of – Baggy Green had helped him find perspective.
"I was too intense and serious, I think, for a lot of my career – at least in certain parts of my career – and I kind of understood that as I progressed throughout my journey," he says.
"That was great, because I managed to become a more consistent player."
The numbers support the statement. Bevan played his 18th and final Test in January 1998, aged 27. Through the next nine years until his retirement, he piled on 8,807 first-class runs at 63.36, with 34 hundreds, including a remarkable eight in a record-breaking Shield campaign after he joined Tasmania on a two-year deal in 2004-05.
Through those nine years, Bevan knew there was much more to his game – the Test dream remained, if increasingly distant – but until 2004, when he was de-listed by Cricket Australia, he had become so pivotal to his country's one-day dominance that his talents were seldom considered being put to use in another fashion. Might Australia have been smart to consider playing him during their losing Test tours of India in 1998 and 2001, when he was at his peak?
"India has always been a challenge for Australians, and it would've been a challenge for me too," he offers. "At the start of my career, the SCG was a turning wicket … so maybe the conditions might have suited me, but you've still got to be ready to go, and feeling comfortable and confident within yourself and your game."
Episode 1 of Stories After Stumps is here! Our new audio documentary style podcast launches with the cracking inside story of Michael Bevan's move to Tasmania, 20 years ago, and the incredible campaign that followed...
— cricket.com.au (@cricketcomau) June 26, 2024
Today, permanently missing Test selection after the age of 28 would have cost Travis Head seven of his nine Test hundreds, and Usman Khawaja all 16 of his. Among Bevan's contemporaries, the comparisons are just as stark: trialled and discarded in their formative years, Matthew Hayden, Justin Langer and Damien Martyn all returned to the Test team to score 64 of their collective 66 Test hundreds after turning 28.
It begs another question. Does Bevan have any doubts he would have succeeded in Test cricket through the back half of his career?
"Yeah, there's a few doubts," he concedes. "Look, I definitely improved as a player, but I did have some scars there from Test cricket and the short ball.
"I felt from a first-class perspective, I definitely found a way to get over that, and the yips that I had with the short ball and playing Test cricket.
"So I'd like to think that I would have performed better had I received another chance … however I think there is still obviously a few question marks given the circumstance."
As an ODI master however, Bevan provided many more answers than questions. His numbers alone – 232 matches, 6,912 runs at 53.58 – put him in the conversation for Australia's greatest one-day batter, though it was moments and the creation of memories that he truly specialised in.
So special were his contributions to the 50-over game that, in announcing his induction to the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame, Cricket Australia also detailed a change in criteria that would allow players to be included "for their overall contribution to the game of cricket, whether that is across all formats, or in just one format, available in their era".
Earlier this summer Cricket Australia also announced that the country's most successful one-day domestic batter – who averaged more than 100 in tournament finals and won six from 10 – would have the player-of-the-match medal named in his honour. Together with his Hall of Fame induction, it is a sure way to ensure his legend lasts.
"I feel very fortunate," he says. "I got to play a sport that I loved … I got to play in some great teams and experience some amazing moments in a really great era of Australian cricket.
"And it's amazing to be recognised for perhaps some of the unique things that I help bring to Australian cricket, particularly in one-day cricket.
"It's been a number of years, but I look back on all those things with a lot of pride and a lot of fondness."