Neser reflects on a career spent 'on the other side'

Michael Neser felt a pang of nostalgia as he sat in one of the Wanderers' towering stands watching Australia play the second ODI against South Africa last month. The paceman had flown over a few days before the Test squad convened to watch the match with his sister and her children, who live less than a kilometre away from the iconic Bullring.

As a kid, Neser watched international matches at Centurion, less than a 10-minute drive from his childhood home in Irene, between Johannesburg and Pretoria. "I used to hate when the Australians toured," he tells cricket.com.au, "because Shane Warne would tear through us and traumatise the South African batters."

Neser recalls how he and his brother Franky would ruin their carefully manicured back lawn in Irene during endless games of cricket and golf. They broke so many windows that they not only found where the replacement cut-outs were kept, but then also learnt how to insert them without their parents noticing anything had happened.

It was usually Franky who had hit the balls that broke the glass. "He basically forced me to bowl to him – hence why I'm a bowler," Neser says. "I wasn't as good a batter as him, so I'd bowl to him for hours and hours. But we loved it. We were in the backyard for as long as I can remember."

Had things been different, Neser could well have gone on to win a Proteas' green baggy cap instead of the Australian one he now treasures. Like his long-time state and national teammate, Marnus Labuschagne, Neser was 10 when his family moved to Australia, by which point the young allrounder had already made local junior representative sides.

The youngest of four siblings, his transition was fairly seamless from the Highveld to the Gold Coast; one even easier, he suggests, than Labuschagne's own move to Queensland given Neser's first language was English (Labuschagne's family was Afrikaans-speaking).

From a cricket perspective, the most striking difference was the regression from using hard leather balls in South Africa to the soft 'incredi-balls' used Down Under in junior matches.

That is not to give the impression that the Neser romanticises a hard-edged past – far from it, given the specific medical expertise his spinal surgeon father, Chris, imparted on the craft his youngest son pursued.

In Michael's second year of high school, Chris recognised the symptoms of a lower-back stress fracture. Michael did not bowl seam-up again until he was well into his teenage years.

Such was his talent that he was picked for Queensland's Under-19 team as a specialist batter. When he did bowl again in front of state selectors, he was fast-tracked into the Bulls senior squad.

He had lost none of his pace; following a slow, loping approach, Neser would explode at the crease, sending the ball towards the batter with extreme velocity. It was eye-catching, effective – and unsustainable.

"That first year playing with the Bulls, I didn't know where they were going," he says. "I was always this impact bowler and I tried to bowl as fast as I can – and I kept getting injured. It was doing my head in."

Neser credits then Queensland bowling coach Ashley Noffke with re-routing him away from the express-pace path and onto the one that would make him one of the Sheffield Shield's – and eventually the Test team's – most consistent bowlers.

"He was like, 'I see potential that you can be more like a line-and-length-type bowler – a holding bowler – so maybe drop your pace back a bit'," Neser recalls of one of those formative conversations with Noffke, himself a Bulls bowling legend who played three times for Australia. "So I worked on that and developed myself into a different style of bowler."

In his first six seasons with Queensland, Neser played more than two Shield games only once, while he averaged 35.83 with the ball from his first 21 games. The 2017-18 summer was a turning point; he played all but one Shield match and finished as the competition's second-highest wicket-taker (with 39 scalps at 21.84) as the Bulls claimed the title.

Since the start of that season, no Australian fast bowler has claimed more than his 387 first-class victims.

But in an era of Australian fast bowling dominated by three younger men in Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood, the bar to become their peer has, remarkably, been higher still.

Neser had dominated domestic cricket, both in Australia and the United Kingdom with Glamorgan and Hampshire, but the knock on him was that his pace would drop during a match or at the tail-end of a long season.

These were marginal reductions but to be any shot at a regular Test berth, he had to make another leap. Leading into last summer's Ashes, he worked closely with Queensland assistant Hamish Bennett on shorter, more intense training sessions while overall decreasing his volume of balls bowled.

"It was more about maintaining speeds around 130 (kph) and above," says Neser, who bagged 15 wickets at 19.93 in three Tests – the first time he had played more than one match in a series. "Naturally I'd bowled a lot of overs over the years, and that's when your ball speed can drop just from the sheer amount of bowling.

"So we managed the amount of bowling I did in training and then also in a game … it's definitely helped with maintaining that speed."

Old habits die hard, however. Neser's predisposition to bowling for hours on end can be traced back to those backyard battles with his brother in Irene. "I've always been a bowler who's just trained and trained – repetition and volume's always been my thing," he says. "It's part of what's made me successful.

"So trying to look at it the other way and going, 'OK, hang on, I've done all that. I'm not going to lose my skill by doing less, because I've done all the hard yards already'. That was probably the trickiest part, was changing my mindset."

There are other things Neser will never change.

During those early years with the Bulls, when he was still a tearaway quick trying to find his way, he went back to Africa with three of his close friends (a cousin from South Africa and two Australians).

From Johannesburg, they jumped in a Toyota Landcruiser and stayed at backpackers' and "dodgy hostels" while heading north: through Botswana where he has family that run a nature reserve with elephants, giraffes and other wildlife; all the way up to Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwe-Zambia border; then back to Cape Town on South Africa's east coast.

Neser, who realised a dream when he played an ODI at Centurion in 2023, anticipates his family will be torn if he plays against the Proteas over the coming weeks after he overcame a calf injury to make the tour.

He is comfortable in declaring that "there will always be a part of me" that remains South African, and in sporting contests with countries other than Australia, he still supports his birth country.

"It's kind of surreal now to be here," he says, "but on the other side."

Qantas tour of South Africa 2026

All matches to be broadcast exclusively in Australia on Kayo and Fox Cricket

First Test: October 9-13, Kingsmead Stadium, Durban, 6:30pm AEDT (9:30am local)

Second Test: October 18-22, St George's Park, Gqeberha, 7pm AEDT (10am local)

Third Test: October 27-31, Newlands, Cape Town, 7:30pm AEDT (10:30am local)

South Africa's first Test preliminary squad: Temba Bavuma (c), Marques Ackerman, David Bedingham, Corbin Bosch, Gerald Coetzee, Tony de Zorzi, Simon Harmer, Marco Jansen, Keshav Maharaj, Aiden Markram, Wiaan Mulder, Senuran Muthusamy, Anrich Nortje, Dane Paterson, Kagiso Rabada, Ryan Rickelton, Tristan Stubbs, Kyle Verreynne

Australia Test squad: Pat Cummins (c), Scott Boland, Alex Carey, Cooper Connolly, Cameron Green, Sam Harper, Josh Hazlewood, Travis Head, Josh Inglis (second Test onwards), Matthew Kuhnemann, Marnus Labuschagne, Nic Maddinson, Nathan Lyon, Michael Neser, Matthew Renshaw, Steve Smith, Mitchell Starc, Beau Webster