Hamish McLachlan: Mark Howard says run-in with David Warner still haunts him

Mark Howard has interviewed some of the biggest names in sport, but it’s a run-in with David Warner that haunts him.

Fox Sports presenter Mark Howard with his wife Erica and two children Skye, 11, and Mack, 9, in Barwon Heads. Picture: Rebecca Michael

In an industry that has a habit of fostering insecurity, and being heavy on alpha males and retired players, there are exceptions, and Mark Howard is one of them.

Low key, generous on air, self-effacing and a complete team player.

We spoke about falling into the media industry, a run in with David Warner, a doctored CV, living on $17 a day, a debacle with Michael Schumacher, Kelly Slater and stir fries, embracing failure and working hard, the genesis of his podcast The Howie Games and lessons along the way.

HM: Did you know where Tyers was when you were heading there?

MH: I had no idea! Mum and Dad said we were moving there, and when I looked it up on the map I saw a place called Lake Tyers. That was about 300km away from where we were going to live, so even when I looked it up, I was still 300km off!

HM: You grew up in Sydney, and your old man landed a job for a paper mill?

MH: Dad was an engineer, and he was progressing to become a mill manager. When various mill managers around the country took long service leave, he was the fill in guy. We’d go to Perth, then to Melbourne, then Sydney for three months, then back to Perth. We were in Sydney for about five years, then Mum said, “We’re moving to Tyers in regional Victoria”.

HM: What was the mood?

MH: It was a bit like “Really? Another move!” Their big selling point was I could get a motorbike, and my sister could get a horse. I didn’t get a motorbike, and she didn’t get a horse!

HM: Do you think either are coming?

MH: (laughs) It would be a late make good! My son is obsessed with motorbikes, he wants one because a few of his friends have smaller ones. Now I can understand why my father never let me get one!

HM: You went from a public school in Sydney, wearing sneakers and a t-shirt, and end up having to get on a bus at 7.20am for an hour and fifteen to get to Gippsland Grammar – in a tie and a blazer.

MH: It was a massive adjustment! In Sydney I was a kid that would take his school shoes off on the train on the way to school to wear his sneakers and play handball all day. Suddenly, I’m up in the morning wearing a suit and a tie, an hour and a half to school and another hour and a half home. That has led me to be someone now that hates wearing ties, pants, or leather shoes. It was a real shock not knowing people, but that’s when I discovered how big of a connection sport is. If you can bowl a ball, or kick a footy with an ounce of skill, you aren’t the last picked on the team.

HM: You talk about sport. You became a devoted member of the Tyers Cricket Club, and by the time you were 15, you were playing in the A-Grade with the men.

MH: Something city kids don’t get the opportunity to do as much, or get, is the immediate interaction with adults when you’re playing sport growing up. I played a few cricket games last year before the season started, and my son Mac was the sub fielder with me. It was the greatest sporting experience of my life. If you were 13 and you could hold a bat, you played C grade, if you could bowl you played B grade, and if you could do a little bit of both, they put you in the A’s and you were playing with men. I was 15, and about as high as the stumps! They made me open the batting, and at that height everything was a bouncer, and everything went over my head, and I couldn’t hit it off the square. At the end of the match, they’d take you to the pub, and you’d sit in the corner having a lemonade while they’d tell stories about their girlfriends, their work, their cars; it was a massive eye opener. I don’t think the city kids get that, so it was a cool part of growing up.

Howard interviewing Lewis Hamilton.

HM: Is that when you became a conversationalist?

MH: I think more so when I started to travel around the world, and I realised how little I knew about it. At 21 I’d be sitting at a youth hostel in Columbia or Zambia or Israel, and there’d be people having breakfast who had these fascinating stories, and fascinating lives. I had this desire to know more about them and ask questions, to find out how life was in their part of the world, what adventures they’d been on, where they thought I should go. That’s when I started pestering people with questions, and I’ve never really stopped.

HM: You travelled when you finished university?

MH: Yeah, in 1995, me and a mate of mine, Timmy Harris, got on a plane after working for three months to save some money. He’d never been out of Victoria, I’d never been out of Australia! We were heading to South America, we landed in Buenos Aires, and we couldn’t speak the language! It was brilliant.

HM: What was the daily budget?

MH: It was a year that turned into two. In two years of travelling, the average budget a day for everything, food, accommodation, travel, transport, flights – was $17. 1995 and 1996. If there was a bus from Sao Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, you would always go on the overnight bus, because as well as getting your bus ticket, it was a free night’s accommodation. I lived on bread and tomato paste for two years!

HM: And you haven’t put on any weight since!

MH: (laughs) And it was hard coming home because you got used to being such a tight arse! I spent more on one night out with my mates, than I spent in two months in East Africa. It was a real adjustment to the mind and the wallet!

HM: When you came home, was your first job working in Eccleston’s Formula One Tour?

MH: I applied for a lot of jobs that I got nowhere with, and I was a bit flat about it. I’d just travelled for two years around the world, I’ve hitchhiked, I’ve looked after myself, been in tricky situations, and I’m an independent person, yet I couldn’t get an interview with Hockey Victoria as an assistant. So, I lied on my resume … I put on my resume that I’d worked at the Calgary Stampede. I’d been there, but never worked at the Stampede – the Stampede wasn’t on when I was there! I can still remember the phone call I got from a fellow called John Harnden, who ended up heading the Grand Prix, ran the cricket world cup, and built the new Adelaide Oval. When he got me in, he said, “The reason I got you is because you have experience at the Calgary Stampede”. To cut a long story short, my mate who I travelled around the world with, Timmy Harris, was getting married in Argentina. I convinced the blokes that were in Melbourne working on the Grand Prix that if I could get myself to Argentina, I could go to the wedding and do five days’ work for them in Sao Paulo. I did that, as a rigger – someone who pulled camera cables around the track. That was my first insight into the world of sports television, and I spent nearly four seasons on the F1 World Tour.

HM: You went from lying on a CV, to working on the F1 world tour for three years, pulling camera cables around the track, building TV studios, and in time, you end up on the production side. Was your first interview with Michael Schumacher?

MH: It was … and it was a disaster. What I’ve learnt in life is when someone asks you to do something, just say yes, and then figure out how to do it. They said, “We need someone to interview the drivers at the pre-season launch event. Can anyone do it?” I thought, this sounds more fun than what I’m doing now in the England winter, logging camera tapes, so I went with a cameraman to Maranello – the most famous Ferrari venue in the world. It was the big launch. It was with Michael Schumacher and Eddie Irvine, and because I was working for Bernie, it was my job to ask the first two questions. I’m 22, hair down my back, Kurt Cobain style, and I had to get in front of 500 journalists and ask the first two questions to Michael Schumacher.

Mark Howard at the F1 racing.

HM: Having never asked a question in public before ever?

MH: Never. I stood up, my hand was shaking, the microphone was making that screeching sound, and I called him Mr Schumacher. The first question – “You must be excited about the season ahead?” He said, “Sorry, I can’t understand your accent. Can you please ask the question again?” I repeated the same question, and he said, “I still don’t understand your question”. The moderator said, “OK. That is the end of your question time, please sit down”. That was it!

HM: You asked the same question twice, didn’t get an answer, and you’d flown around the world to do it.

MH: We flew from England, had three nights’ accommodation, we’d done all the tours, spent all our money on pizza and beer, and that was it. The second part was I had to interview Eddie Irvine, who was his co-driver – a mad Irishman. He wasn’t quite the calibre of Schumacher, so I got to do a one-on-one. Every second word of Eddie’s was “Fook”. Fook this, fook that. We couldn’t use it! I flew back to base in England, and it wasn’t a Michael Parkinson style start by any stretch of the imagination.

HM: How did you fall into TV?

MH: When I came home, I was producing for Channel 7 on a show called Sportsworld. Through that, I started doing some interviews. The first person I interviewed was Kelly Slater. Then Channel 10 said, “We have some potential for you to do some work on V8 Supercars”, which I knew nothing about! “And in the meantime, when you’re not at the V8 Supercars, you’ll be in the newsroom as a news reporter”. I’d had no training, no background, nothing. There I was, starting two jobs, the V8’s which I knew nothing about, and reading the news, which was really serious. I was doing the cut up pre stories because they couldn’t find anywhere else to put me!

HM: How did that play out?

MH: I figured that news was about entertainment. I was doing stories about a bloke who’s got a concoction that would fix Nathan Buckley’s hamstring, or a UFO sighting in Murrumbeena. They had a morning show, David and Kim, and they thought, this bloke on the news does things a little bit differently, let’s make him our travel and lifestyle reporter. I was doing more and more, then Channel 10 brought out One HD, which was a 24-hour sports channel. That’s when it really became crazy, because my boss David White would say, “Go and cover the Red Bull Air Race weekend”, or “Go and commentate on some Ironman”, or Moto GP, the V8 supercars. Every week it was different, all things I hadn’t done! I just kept saying yes, and that’s what your boss wants. If you say yes, go and ask someone how to do it, figure out how to do it from their experience, and then you become reasonable value to an organisation reasonably quickly.

HM: And then Triple M called to do some football calling, and then the Big Bash started up.

MH: Lee Simon from Triple M was the first. I’d never thought about calling the footy at Triple M. I did a practice game with Ash Chua, who was the main statistician. Ben Amarfio was the boss at the time. Unbeknownst to me, Lee sent the tape onto Ben, and Ben called me into his office. He said, “I listened to your tape … you’ve got a lot of work to do”. I was bad at footy commentary, but my big break was when Channel 10 got the Big Bash. That was a massive change in my life.

HM: The cricket has been outstanding for you, so much so that Fox cherry picked you from 10. At what point did you feel like there was an opportunity to do some long form interviews? Was it on the back of a Lewis Hamilton interview which was outstanding, but only saw five minutes of airtime?

MH: Spot on. I was at Ten, the cricket was going well, and we were covering Formula One which was something I did know about. I sat down with Lewis, had a chat for 25 minutes, and with the way commercial TV works, only four minutes went to air. I was complaining to one of the producers, Jarvis Hunder “There’s 20 minutes of this bloke which isn’t getting to air. It’s such a waste!” We’re talking about tyre compounds, and Lewis Hamilton is talking about being one of the biggest sportsmen on the planet. He said, “Mate, you should do podcasts with these people”. That was five years ago. I remember saying to him, “What’s a podcast?”

HM: He told you, and you did one. Who was your first?

MH: Dennis Cometti. I remember sitting in the surf thinking, I haven’t thought of a name for this. The Olympic Games? The Hunger Games? I came up with The Howie Games. It was a terrible name, as Dennis told me at the time. Dennis showed me how to do it as we sat there in his hotel room, so I must thank him for that. He is the one that put me on the right path!

HM: There are two men that have had an unbelievable influence on my career. One is Bruce, the other is Dennis. When you are as good as they are, there’s no insecurity issues, so they help people like you and me to get better.

MH: Absolutely. Dennis was fantastic. I’ve had so many people like that throughout my career that I have learnt from where I’ve watched how they’ve done it. I sat on the boundary of Triple M Football for seven years, every Friday, every Saturday, and every Sunday. I would listen to James Brayshaw, Garry Lyon, Brian Taylor and Danny Frawley. Born entertainers. Those blokes taught me that sport is an entertainment business. If you produce and cover sport now, you’re competing against Netflix, all these streaming services. If you broadcast and cover sport, you’ve got to entertain.

Howard talking with Kelly Slater.

HM: Knowing you a little, you would have done Den, had no idea who was next, no idea how you were going to distribute it, or make it commercial?

MH: That’s an astute observation – I had no idea!

HM: But you had a handy rolodex.

MH: That was critical. I hadn’t realised at the start how many people I’d been lucky enough to work with. I could call Adam Gilchrist, or Ricky Ponting, or Mark Webber, and ask them to come on the podcast, and because I’d worked with them, they felt sorry for you, so they’d say yes. At that stage, they didn’t even really know what podcasts were. We put Gilly out as the first episode, Dennis was the second episode we put out, and after a week, we might have had 40 downloads. After a month we got to 100. I remember having a beer thinking, this is incredible. 100 different people in the last month have listened to Adam Gilchrist on the podcast! That was where it kicked off. I must stress, especially at the start, the ability to be able to have these wonderful people on your show is what started to develop the momentum. It wasn’t that I had been doing anything remarkable, it’s that I was lucky enough through work to speak to some remarkable people in long form conversations, which the modern world doesn’t have, Hame. When we get people on radio and telly, you’re lucky to speak to them for four minutes, so when you get people like Mark Webber on for an hour and a half and speak to them about what it’s like to drive a Formula One car, it started to capture people’s attention.

HM: You’ve also got to realise people will say yes to you because you’ve been a good person all your life, and they can see something in you. If you hadn’t been a good person, or diligent, the answer is, “I’m busy”.

MH: That’s true I guess. I always say to people at the start of every podcast, if there’s anything I ask that you’re not comfortable with, or that you answer and you don’t think it came out the right way, tell me. We are not about trying to get you on the front page of the paper with a controversial statement. We are about exploring how you have achieved success, positivity, and motivation. When you sit there and say to Cadel Evans before an interview, “I’m not going to ask you about Lance Armstrong, or drugs in your sport”, it’s like he’s a different person. You can see the weight come off his shoulders. I do get people saying, “Why didn’t you ask Steve Smith about what happened in South Africa?” I’m not a hard journalist, that’s not what I’m wanting to speak to Steve Smith about. If he can’t answer the question, it will put him on the back foot for the rest of the interview. I’d rather find out what makes him a brilliant batsman.

HM: When you got to 100 downloads, you had a beer and were happy. What’s the number now?

MH: Overall, the show is at around 55 million downloads. It’s extraordinary. Everyone says, “You must be making a packet out of it” The answer is no! The most downloaded episode would be Luc Longley’s. I couldn’t believe when “The Last Dance” was released and they said Luc wasn’t on there because he isn’t a good story teller! He is the best I’ve heard!

HM: Which, for whatever reason, was the most surprising, or rewarding chat?

MH: The one I am most proud of isn’t representative of the podcast at all, it’s a guy called Jack Jones, who played in three premierships for Essendon in the 40s — Sarah Jones’ grandfather. He passed away recently. He fought in Papua New Guinea in the Second World War. His descriptions on mateship, and fear in the theatre of war, just left me speechless. To sit there and chat with a man, to me, the greatest Australian I have ever met, was an absolute privilege. The other was Paul Kelly. To sit there with a bloke that is the soundtrack of so many Australians lives, and hear about him writing songs about Bradman, Warne, or the famous Leaps and Bounds, I got a real thrill out of that. Without sounding like I’m name-dropping, in the space of the last three weeks I have sat here in my spare bedroom in Barwon Heads, and I’ve spoken to Jess Fox, Curtis McGrath, Jimmy Anderson, Paul Kelly, Kevin Parker from Tame Impala, Cate Campbell, Steph Rice – and that’s off the top of my head. What a privilege it is. There cannot be a better job in the world than being able to speak to these elite performers and find out what makes them tick. It’s taught me three or four things in life that I didn’t understand that I am trying to pass on to my kids.

HM: What have you learnt that you are now trying to pass on to Skye and Mack?

MH: To embrace failure. Every single person that has been on the podcast, in 140 episodes, they have failed along the way. Knocked over for a duck, fallen out of their kayak, they’ve come last in a swimming race, they’ve done a hamstring, and they’ve had that thought – “I’m not sure I’m going to succeed here”. But they have. I’ve learnt that failure is a part of any journey. The other thing I’ve learnt is those who work the hardest achieve the most success. I asked Jimmy Anderson just last night, “Why is Joe Root so good?” He said, “Because he is in the nets longer than anybody else”. The same as Steve Smith. Sure, you need natural talent, but you need to work hard. I’ve tried to explain that to my kids, to embrace failure, and to work hard. If they do both those things, they’ll have success in whatever it is they want to do. It’s funny though Hammer, my girlfriend at the time, Erica, now my wife, sat me down on our first trip together in Costa Rica. She gave it to me, in a loving way! She thought I should take my career more seriously and work harder. I told her, “It’s not really a career babe, it’s a dream come true that I get paid for. It can’t last so I’m just having fun!” She simply replied, “You’re right, with that attitude it won’t last! Have a real crack at it.” So to be fair, it was my awesome wife that taught me about working hard.

HM: Do you think speaking to the 140 guests you’ve had has shaped the way you live, the way you work, and the way you go about your craft?

MH: Definitely. Especially with the podcast, be it all forms of my professional and personal life, I just work hard at it. It has affected the way I have approached my professional life, and in my personal life, it’s taught me that I need to be able to switch off and find a balance.

Howard sleeping in a train station.

HM: The most prepared broadcaster I have ever seen is Bruce, by so far. There are those that prepare, then there’s Bruce. What surprised you most about him when you spoke with him?

MH: That as a younger man, he could have gone one of two ways. He was working in the public service, he was punting and enjoying a beer, and he said, “I could have gone heavier on the punt, and gone down that pathway and spiralled”. I didn’t know that about Bruce. It wasn’t so much about what he has achieved, the thing I learnt from Bruce is that you can be in any situation, but if you make the right choices, things can go your way.

HM: You chatted with Paul Kelly recently. It was sensational. Is that what The Artist Series is? Chatting to artists on how sport has shaped them?

MH: It starts with sport. Wil Anderson and I grew up playing cricket and footy together, so that’s where you start, but then you start to talk about what led to him to become one of the world’s most famous comedians. Dan MacPherson was a triathlete, so we’re talking about him being a triathlete, then how he got to Neighbours, and how much work he needed to do to become a world class actor. With Paul, his obsession with cricket and footy, how it’s worked its way into song. How he wrote a song about Bradman, sent the song to Bradman, and Bradman’s response. It involves sport, but then, how that has crept into people’s creative world. You don’t necessarily think that Kevin Parker from Tame Impala, this psychedelic rock musician who sells out stadiums, loves footy. He loves Fremantle, and he loves Nat Fyfe – to the point where he wrote a theme song for the Dockers.

HM: I’ve heard you say calling Test cricket is a dream – but you didn’t find it comfortable the start?

MH: All my childhood memories were watching test cricket, my heroes were all Test cricketers: Allan Border, Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting. I had so much respect for the game that when I started calling test cricket, I was tentative. I knew I wasn’t the bloke that I’d grown up listening to. I wasn’t Richie Benaud, I wasn’t Tim Lane. I tried to be other people rather than myself, because I’d never heard anyone like me call test cricket before. I’d never heard anyone with a horrible nasal twang in their voice who gets carried away with the game. It wasn’t until last season when we had the Indian series, and my boss Steve Crawley said, “You’re only going to get so many years of doing this, you are going OK, but you could do better. Be yourself and trust yourself”. Shane Warne had said the same thing to me. “Mate, you’ve done enough cricket that people enjoy listening to you, and respect what you’ve got to say. Just go out there and be yourself, like you are in a game of Big Bash”. That was a massive turning point for me. People will love or hate you either way, but for me, that’s when I felt like I started to get the hang of Test cricket. It’s a good lesson. You must be yourself when you are on the television because it shows if you’re not.

HM: Bruce’s best advice to me has been – do preparation, don’t wear anything you’ll be uncomfortable in because you’ll be distracted, and don’t try and be someone else, because you’ll be a bad version of them. Just be the best version of you.

MH: Play your role. At the end of the day, they don’t turn on Triple M football, Fox Footy or Fox Cricket, to listen to me. I am part of the show, but they tune in to listen to Jonathan Brown, Shane Warne, Jason Dunstall or Wayne Carey. My job is to do what I must do, say what has happened, and then shut up and let the experts speak. If the experts aren’t speaking, ask them questions to provide them with the greatest opportunity to shine. I learnt that with Ricky, Gilly and Mark Waugh early doors. If you play your role, understand your role, don’t get carried away with your role, and set a platform for the real stars of the show, then the broadcast will go well, and eventually that will reflect on you and help you in your career. That’s my most valuable piece of advice that I could give anyone in the media, know your role, understand your role, and play your role.

HM: Who’s the one athlete you’ve struggled to get on that you want on?

MH: When I started the sports podcast, I wanted Kelly Slater on, and now I’ve started the Artist Series, I want to get Bono on. It took me four years to get Kelly Slater on the show. Four years! Going back and forth, and occasionally I’d get a message back from him three months later, and I’d be that excited that I got a message from him …

HM: How’d you get his number?

MH: I got it from Trevor Hendy, who’d been on the show and is a surfing mate. I wanted to frame Kelly’s text messages! Eventually, he came on, and there’s two things that happened with Kelly Slater, and I learnt why he was such a good athlete, but so psychologically strong and tough on his competitors. I said to him at the start, “Please call me Howie, only my mum calls me Mark”. I hit record, I say, “Welcome to the show, Kelly Slater”. And he says, “Hey Mark … how are you, Mark?” He had me psychologically destroyed right from the start of the interview.

HM: Do you reckon he deliberately did that, or was it an accident?

MH: I think that’s Kelly Slater. He wants to be in control.

HM: He wanted to own you.

MH: He owned me early! We were about an hour in, and he’d said he only had about an hour to spare. I had so many more questions to ask him. His beautiful partner started cooking stir fry in the background, and I can hear through the podcast mics that she is cooking, banging away in the kitchen. I didn’t know whether I should pipe up or not. I knew that people were going to hear it in the show, and it won’t sound that flash. Do I say to Kelly, “Mate, can you please ask your partner to put dinner on the backburner for a while?”. But at the same time, I’m thinking, he’s done the hour, he’s hungry, we are out of time. A lot of people listened to that, and I had all these messages of people saying, “Kelly was a bit rude cooking while you were doing the podcast”. I didn’t want to say anything in case he shut me down! It lasted 45 minutes, the longest stir fry cooked in the history of stir fries!

HM: We have all had moments on air we’d love back. Which is yours?

MH: I’ll give you two. We were covering the Red Bull Air Race in Perth, and there was a guy called Paul Bonhomme, who’d been trying to win the world title for a decade. He’d come second plenty. He completed his loop in the plane, he lands, gets out of the plane, and the producer says to me, “That’s enough. He’s just won the world title”. I go up to him, grab him, and I say, “Paul, 10 years, your lifetime of work, you are the Red Bull Air Race World Champion. Congratulations”. It’s too much for him. He is in tears, and he starts dedicating it to his mum back in the UK who has been really sick with cancer. It’s emotional, everything you want on TV – victory, emotion, and tears. Then the producer says, “Howie … we’ve got the calculations wrong. He’s come second by a point”.

Sarah Jones and Mark Howard at the Fox Cricket launch. Picture: Brett Costello

HM: No …

MH: “You need to tell him”. I had to say to him, “Actually, there’s been a miscalculation. It hasn’t gone your way”. He thought I was joking! That was terrible. That took me a month to get over. And he’s never won a world title since!

HM: Horrific … the second?

MH: I was covering the Grand Prix for Channel 10. I was asked to do some interviews on the grid pre-race, after the drivers finished their parade lap just before they jumped in their cars. The world feed was taking it. I saw a bloke driving for Haas by the name of Romain Grosjean. As you know, Hame, there is also a famous French tennis player by the name of Sébastien Grosjean. I rush in there thinking, how good is this? The world is about to see my interview with Romain Grosjean. I say, “Welcome back to Melbourne, Sébastien”. I could feel my phone vibrating in my pocket. The first message I got was from Adam Gilchrist, who was on the coverage, and all he said was – “Sébastien, ay?” With an emoji of a tennis racquet.

HM: (laughs)

MH: I have learnt in the last five years, especially covering cricket involving India, that if you make the slightest mistake, you will get an indescribable amount of abuse on social media, but you must take it with a grain of salt. You also get a lot of positivity. If you take the positivity on board, you need to shake off the negativity. I try not to dwell on things anymore.

HM: Did you have an incident with David Warner in the Australian Dressing room?

MH: How do you know about this?

HM: I just got lucky …

MH: My greatest privilege at work was being invited into the Australian dressing rooms after an Australian Test series win. I have explained to you how much I love cricket. The producer said, “The Aussies have said you can go into the rooms, live, after the match, under the stand at Adelaide Oval and interview a few of the boys”. I didn’t feel comfortable – at all. I did not deserve to be in the Australian dressing rooms. That is reserved for blokes that can bat, bowl, and keep well enough to play for their country. I was down on the ground, and I said to Tim Paine, “This is what they have asked me to do … what do you reckon? I don’t feel comfortable”. Tim is one of the nicest people in sport I have ever met, and he said, “No, let’s do it. I will take you through the rooms, so everyone knows that you are there, and you’re there with me”.

HM: Tim Paine … what a beauty.

MH: I was like a kid in a candy store. You walk in and there’s Steve Smith having a beer with his 21 cricket bats in his bag, Matthew Wade, there’s Mitchell Starc putting his spikes away, they’re all putting their baggy greens in their little individual bags with their numbers on it. These blokes are just like the cricketers I used to play with, sitting around having a beer, a laugh, and a joke at the end of the day. David Warner had made 300 – he could have gone on to beat Brian Lara’s record had Tim Paine not declared. He was sitting in the corner, and the media guy had worded up David that I would come over and speak to him as part of the live interview. We were running out of time, and then the producer said, “We have to go”. I said thanks to Tim, and Dave was sitting there with a bottle of red wine. Davey said what I thought was, “Get the cancer out of here”. I’d just had the greatest moment of my broadcasting career, probably better than the birth of my kids to be honest, Hame, and David Warner is looking at me saying, “Get the cancer out of here”. I was flat about it. I was shattered. I was so upset. Later that night, we were all staying in the same hotel. I’d had a few beers, I go to the loo, and walking out of the loo guess who walks in …

HM: D.Warner?

MH: Correct. I would not normally have said anything, but I was that upset about what he’d said that I said to him, “David, I don’t want to make a big deal out of it, but that really flattened me. I do my best to broadcast in a really positive light, I’d been talking you and all your teammates up throughout the whole summer, I don’t know why you would say that?” He looked at me really confused and said, “Howie, what are you talking about?” I said, “You said, “Get the cancer out of here” when I was in the rooms. Unbeknownst to me, after he’d made 300, Ricky Ponting had got him a bottle of Grange. He was sitting in the dressing room, with his bottle of Grange, expecting me to come over and interview him. He was saying to the room attendant, “Get the decanter over here”.

HM: (laughs) At the end of every one of your podcasts you ask athletes for their keys to success – yours are?

MH: Work hard, be positive and keep moving forward even when times get rocky.

HM: You’re a good man.

MH: Thanks, Hame.

The Howie Games is available on LiSTNR or wherever you get your podcasts.