Second life as a Test batsman allows Matthew Wade to pop the suffocating cricketing bubble
Working as an apprentice carpenter during his time in the international wilderness gave Matthew Wade a broader perspective on life, and cricket.
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The first question to any athlete who has ever made it back to the top of their game after a period of banishment is always the same.
“Did you think it was all over?”
For Matthew Wade, the fact he had re-entered the workforce as an apprentice carpenter 18 months ago says it all about his remarkable journey back to Test cricket.
Wade had played 22 Test matches as Australia’s wicketkeeper, but the Tasmanian tough man looks back on that now as an entirely different career.
As he prepares to celebrate his 32nd birthday on Boxing Day, Wade says braving the freezing-cold early mornings on job sites around Hobart reincarnated him as a cricketer as much as the mountain of runs he scored for Tasmania in the state arena.
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A second life in Test cricket as a specialist batsman has yielded two Ashes centuries and an absorbing moment of sporting theatre in Perth last week where he went toe-to-toe with Kiwi quick Neil Wagner and allowed a barrage of bouncers to cannon into his arm and torso as if he were wearing body armour.
The apprenticeship might have been put on hold, but Wade says letting go to enter the real world of blue collar work has given him the tools he now needs to thrive in the spotlight better than he ever did before.
“Yeah, I probably had to remind myself more to continue to think like that and not try and grip so tight onto what I’ve got now,” Wade told The Sunday Telegraph earlier this summer.
“Just let it all happen and let myself play the way that I have played (in domestic cricket) over the two year period I was out of the team and then things should take care of itself.
“I think the danger when you get into the team is you start trying to hang on, start trying to get one more innings to keep yourself in the team.
“It certainly feels like the start of my international career, again.
“My first 22 Tests were as wicketkeeper/batter. Now I’m playing as a batsman.
“It feels like I’ve started again which is nice, it’s nice to refresh and reboot and go again.
“I feel if I just let myself play like I did in England than the results will come. If I get the opportunity to keep getting picked, I feel like my game is good enough to produce scores.
As he prepares to blow out another birthday candle, Wade is in a situation where a patch of poor form could cost him his place to a younger up-and-comer.
But it’s this subliminal pressure that Wade is feeling far less of after his experience as an apprentice chippy.
During his stints in the team as a wicketkeeper, the cricket bubble suffocated him on occasions, but the father of two young girls is now of a mindset where he knows his world won’t end if his cricket career does.
As it stands right now, Wade is going nowhere in a hurry, with the quality of his two tons in England — in the first Test and the last — defining him as a Test player of real substance.
“I think the first one was probably the one I felt emotional about. I’d done a lot of hard work and sacrificed leaving Julia and the kids at home to go over and do that. That was probably the most emotional hundred,” Wade said.
“I trust my game. I back it, that if I do the same things over and over again the scores will come. The second hundred in the fifth Test was a classic example of just hanging in there.”