Former Test spinner Bryce McGain hits 50 – and he’s still wheeling away in Victorian Premier Cricket

Bryce McGain turned 50 today. Tomorrow he’ll play in a Fourth XI final for the club he’s called home for more than 20 years, Prahran.

Bryce McGain lets go with a leggie for the Prahran fourths last Saturday. Photo: Hamish Blair

It’s just after 11.10am at the Righetti Oval in Kooyong and the covers have come off for a Victorian Premier Cricket Fourth XI match.

Monash freeway traffic heading for the city flashes past.

Dogs and their owners are going at a more leisurely pace around the oval on a sunny Saturday morning.

Trees encircle the ground, bench seats tempt bottoms, and the tops of one or two tall buildings can be glimpsed in the distance.

“Good day for it,’’ Prahran official John Zarb says as he sets up a table for the scorers.

Players from the Prahran team emerge from the pavilion for a warm-up before the toss, and out trots a familiar face, a cricket ball and baseball mitt in hand.

For the next 30 minutes or so he does a few exercises, bowls at a set of yellow stumps and fields the ball as teammates get the feel of full-tosses on their bats.

The pre-match limber-up done, he heads back to the changerooms to take in his captain’s talk, listening as intently as the teenagers propped around him.

Kit at his feet, former Test player Bryce McGain is ready for another game of cricket and to land his leg-spinner.

Bryce McGain bowling against Carlton last Saturday. Photo: Hamish Blair

McGain turned 50 today.

Tomorrow he will bowl in a finals match for the Prahran fourths.

Has he made a comeback?

Not exactly. McGain never retired from cricket; selectors just stopped picking him, starting with the Test team, Victoria and Prahran, the club he joined more than 20 years ago and from where he emerged as a slow bowler of first-class and then international standing.

He’s now Prahran’s director of cricket.

Midway through this season the club found itself lean on numbers for its fourth team.

There were Covid casualties, and the later-than-usual start to the school cricket competitions made quite a few young players unavailable.

McGain had been doing some bowling in the nets in preparation for a Masters tournament (since pushed back) that had been planned for March and April in India.

Of course he was happy to fill in. BE McGain showed up on the Prahran team sheet in Round 12 against Carlton. He took 1-15 off nine overs and made 30 from No 10.

Bryce McGain gives the ball a flick ahead of a Prahran match in Colac.

One match turned into a few, and last Saturday he was back bowling against Carlton in a semi-final. He nabbed 4-38 off his nine overs in a 20-run win.

Carlton stalwart Les Petsinis, who has played more than 500 games for the club, was one of his victims.

Petsinis saw a spinner “still fit and cagey’’.

“When we played them before the finals I told my guys after the game who he was,’’ Petsinis says.

“And they’re like, “Wow, I just faced an Australian leg-spinner’. They were absolutely stoked to know that. Great experience for them.’’

Yes, Petsinis confirms, some of the young Blues didn’t pick who McGain was (and they might have struglled to pick his wrong ‘un)

“Mind you, you could name a Test cricketer from five or seven years ago and they’d go, ‘Oh, did he play for Australia?’’

McGain says: “I guess in an ideal world I’d be handing over to the younger players, there’s no doubt about it.

“But through necessity and need, here I am.’’

He was also a fill-in for one Third XI match last season, and for three Fourth XI games the season before.

Big cricket came late to Bryce McGain. He was just short of his 30th birthday when he was called up to debut for Victoria, and he was almost 37 when he played his only Test match.

It was against South Africa at Cape Town in March, 2009.

Ricky Ponting’s team suffered an innings defeat and McGain suffered at the hands of three century-makers – Ashwell Prince, Jacques Kallis and AB de Villiers. He took 0-149 off 18 overs. He never played Test cricket again.

McGain thinks of the match “from time to time, just when it drifts in there’’.

Watching leggie Mitch Swepson debut against Pakistan and wanting him to do well set him to reflecting on his own Test experience.

Bryce McGain gets a handshake from Mike Hussey after receiving his baggy green.

He says he looks back at the Cape Town Test “quite fondly’’. “I’m not ashamed or embarrassed of playing for Australia and giving it my best shot,’’ he says.

“It wasn’t quite as I’d dreamt. But I’m still really proud to have made the journey and got selected in the best 11 cricketers in the country. They only pick one spinner, so for a moment, a brief moment, I was possibly the best spinner in Australia. That’s pretty cool.’’

It was a rugged start – and finish – to Test cricket for the Mornington-born and raised McGain.

There was one innings of bowling and the South Africans were in full sail when he was brought on.

“I’d had a little bowl before stumps, then waited a fair bit the next day to get going,’’ McGain says.

“The South Africans had denied us for some time and they were set and ready to go. Prince jumped at me pretty much immediately. Then I might have had a bit more of a break, and then by that stage Kallis had settled in. He got a hundred, Prince got a hundred and at the back end of it AB de Villiers got a hundred. They were three pretty fair cricketers I bowled to when they were mostly set.’’

Umpire Steve Bucknor signals a six from AB de Villiers off the bowling of Bryce McGain.

McGain thought he didn’t bowl too many bad balls.

But – and he later explained it to Ponting – he’d had surgery to correct a side injury five months earlier and was without the strength to summon his normal range of paces, one of the qualities that had made him effective in Shield cricket.

“It was taking my maximum effort to bowl just above my normal speed,’’ he says.

“Generally I’d be able to go 10 or 15kmh quicker. That’s a big part of how you can deceive the batsmen, even if the wickets are really flat. You have to have different gears and be able to drift and drop the ball and curve it in the air. I felt I was good at that but in that Test I couldn’t adjust the speeds.’’

Six months later he had regained his strength and in the 2009-10 season he believed he bowled as well as he ever did for Victoria.

Was he disappointed he wasn’t granted another Test?

“Internally I felt I had a bit more to offer than one day that didn’t quite work out, but in cricket and other sports, others make those decisions,’’ he says. “So that’s how it went. I accepted it, I kept working hard and I kept causing headaches for the Victorian selectors because my fitness, my preparation, my performance were still pretty steady.’’

Bryce McGain has a laugh during his only Test.

By October, 2010, he had played his last game for the Vics.

He saw the end coming, sensing the national and state selectors wanted to have a look at left-arm spinner Jon Holland, who would later push up for Test honours.

McGain kept plugging away at Prahran, piling up 40 wickets at an average of 12.1 in 2010-11.

What about in 2012-13? He turned 40 that season and snaffled 54 wickets.

Eventually, as he did with Holland, he had to make way for younger spinners.

Two he helped steer through the grades, Blake Parsons and James Boyce, played in Prahran’s First XI premiership last season.

McGain finished with a club-record 436 First XI scalps for Prahran (and another 97 for Frankston Peninsula).

But he didn’t retire from first-class or Victorian Premier Cricket.

“They just stopped picking me!’’ he says.

He kept turning up, and turning the ball.

And tomorrow, at the age of 50 and at the Beaumaris Secondary College grounds, he’ll be out to pluck a few more wickets for the Prahran fourths.