Inside Australian cricket’s groundbreaking fly-on-the-wall documentary
It’s the most guarded inner sanctum in Australian sport – a lonely place for an outsider travelling with a side still reeling from Sandpapergate. This is how The Test documentary maker Andre Mauger won the team’s trust.
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Imagine witnessing every secret the Australian dressing room has to offer, yet only being able to hear the rattle of the airconditioner.
For 18 months, this was the life of Test cricket’s first ever Fly on the Wall.
A man granted permission to enter Australian sport’s most mysterious domain and shoot classified moments, such as Justin Langer and Usman Khawaja engaged in a heated altercation at training in the UAE.
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The trusted cameraman, who was allowed so deep inside the inner sanctum, that when Steve Smith got struck by a Jofra Archer bouncer at Lord’s, he was able to make himself invisible to those around him and capture the panic in the room.
A humming fridge and rattling AC unit instinctively switched off at Headingley – so as not to impact on the seven mics already set-up to capture every word of a stirring Ashes rally-cry from Tim Paine, he sensed was coming.
Meet, Andre Mauger:
The one-man-band who filmed the new groundbreaking documentary ‘The Test’ to be released on Amazon on March 12.
As much as the documentary tells the story of Australia’s rise from the wreckage of Sandpapergate, in itself, it also doubles as stunning visual proof of how Mauger was somehow able to infiltrate cricket’s famous ‘bubble’.
“I’ve wondered why they trusted me so much. The answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know how I really did it,” says Mauger, otherwise known as ‘Doc’
“Everyone said for the first two weeks they felt like, ‘there’s a guy with a camera here, this is awkward.’
“Apparently after that two week point they completely forgot I was there.
“JL’s stoush with Khawaja showed how much they trusted me. I was right in their faces, but Khawaja didn’t mind. He said to me after, ‘did you capture that?’
“I think a lot of players wanted some of this raw stuff shown and put into a meaningful context. There’s very little that didn’t make the cut.
“My behaviours were one of just being a fly on the wall. Knowing when to go a bit harder and when to withdraw, and just continually pushing the envelope more and more without interfering.”
For as long as he’s worked in cricket, Mauger has been known simply as, ‘Doc’.
Cricket Australia chief executive Kevin Roberts was keen to know the origins of the famous nickname when he met him for the first time, asking, ‘It’s Doc, because you’re making a doco, right?’
Team videographer Andre Mauger telling a joke, but no sign of any fresh Baggy Green. Australia unchanged. pic.twitter.com/OUmpOjRlif
— Daniel Cherny 📰 (@DanielCherny) October 16, 2018
In actual fact, it’s because he shares a first-name with rap mogul, Dr. Dre – a reference which went slightly over the CEO’s head.
But the quirky moniker just suits the 42-year-old, who believes a job given to him by coach Langer to tell a joke in the team huddle on game day, helped endear him to the testosterone-driven group.
On the morning of the first Test at Edgbaston, he forgot the punchline to a gag, prompting raucous laughter. But it wasn’t quite so funny a few months earlier in a “splintered” Australian dressing room at the SCG, when Mauger feared Australia were becoming the punchline to their own documentary.
“I was quite paranoid. There was a few question marks around like, ‘OK, what’s the point of this doco if we keep losing? Is this going to be a fall and fall story?’” he says.
“By that stage Australia had not won a series in 12 months. It just felt like everything had gone to shit. It was the lowest of the low.
“My feeling was if they never turned it around … who is going to agree to that?”
Mauger was very nearly not sent on the one-day tour of India which followed. It became the moment when Australia turned its fortunes around and the documentary ignited.
“Thank God.”
It was the missing piece in the puzzle that linked all the drama Mauger had filmed over the previous 12 months, to the World Cup and Ashes to come.
“Aaron Finch allowed me to go home with him after an ODI at the MCG … and he talked about his form and how he was cooked. He allowed me to film all this. I just bided my time and waited for these opportunities,” says Mauger.
“After Headingley when they lost in that tragic fashion, I was really amazed by how Tim Paine handled it. He has a few words and that’s amazing. You get chills there.
“I’m sitting there going I can’t believe I’m filming what I’m filming.
“The World Cup ends with Khawaja in tears, JL in tears, Maxwell in tears, his mother in tears … they allowed me to film them like that and that means a lot to me. It’s easy to show guys winning, that’s easy. But the hardest part is showing tragedies and poor endings.
“It was Justin Langer, Tim Paine and Aaron Finch, who didn’t treat me any differently because I was recording.”
Mauger used to work for hotels where he was paid in bottles of crappy champagne, and endeared himself to the playing group in some part because, “I’m not a fan boy of cricket,” he says.
“I wasn’t excited by being next to them, I could just appreciate them as the people they were.”
But most importantly, Mauger says the project worked where others like it have failed – because he was entrusted to be a single-man operation.
“The fundamental basis of being able to shoot this kind of content is having one person in there. Not a producer, not a boom operator,” says Mauger, who even stopped setting up remote cameras in dressing room because he felt it was sneaky.
“Because then it’s really difficult for the players to accept.
“I was allowed to make my own decisions and that’s because of the support from CA crew Adam Goldfinch, Richard Ostroff and Adrian Brown, who understood the sensitivities.
“They put me on this platform where it was my playground.”