Ryan Harris takes a charge at ending South Australia’s 29-year Sheffield Shield drought

The former Australian fast bowler has guided his home state to an elusive Sheffield Shield final in his first summer as head coach. And he’s only just getting started.

South Australian cricket coach Ryan Harris overlooking the Shield final venue Karen Rolton Oval. Picture: Brenton Edwards

There’s this unmissable honesty and humility about all things Ryan Harris. They were traits that defined him as a cricketer and are virtues that define him as a person. When he describes himself as having been a “dumb thickhead and a pisshead who thought he was a cricketer but wasn’t” at the start of his playing career though, he’s not trying to embellish or accentuate the inherent humility. He’s simply being honest.

The Harris honesty and humility come through in spades as the 45-year-old former Australian fast bowler talks to The Weekend Australian about guiding South Australia to an elusive Sheffield Shield final in his first summer as head coach. Very understandably too, considering his approach to the big task of taking charge of a team that’s gone decades without winning was built around honest and frank messaging. Alongside honest and frank discussions, and honest and frank language. Harris had if anything accepted the job, vacated by former fast bowling colleague Jason Gillespie, only on the back of his mentors insisting that he was “fu#8inready for it” despite his lack of experience at this level.

Harris wants to bring success back to SA cricket. Picture: Brenton Edwards

What he wanted to get stuck into straight away was addressing what had been “missing” in terms of South Australia coming even close to winning titles. His first honest discussion on that front, he reveals, came a year earlier when he had returned to Adelaide to become assistant coach role with the artists then still referred to as the Redbacks. That too on a pre-season camp in Darwin.

“Two or three players who’d been around a while came to me and wanted to chat. I asked them ‘what aren’t we doing that we should be’ and they said ‘we never talk about winning, whether it’s Shield or one-day cup. We just expect it. We don’t talk about how we’re going to actually do it’. For me, that was a huge thing,” Harris tells me.

“I asked them what that process looked like for them, and they spoke about wanting to break the game down better and acknowledge that we don’t need to be 4/20 or have the opposition 0/150 in the first session. That was probably the moment and when I sat down for my interview (for the head coach role) I knew this, along with knowing that this team wasn’t far away.”

After ensuring that he instilled a sense of “squad mentality” in terms of selection, the next step for Harris after officially taking over was to address the bigger concern of too many batting collapses. For this, he turned to the quirkiness of his batting coach, Steve Stubbings, while acknowledging that his strength was in “bringing passion to the dressing room” and not in “being funny”.

And he laughs when I ask him if the farting sounds that would play out during South Australia’s early season batting sessions were his way of making up for the self-confessed “lack of humour”.

“That was all Stubbo. And our issue was too often losing 4/20 or 5/30 from strong positions. So we wanted to get our batters to get better under pressure. Stubbo’s idea was to introduce stupid sounds to distract them. Or in the case of Daniel Drew, who likes a bit of dance music, we would put on slow classical music and when he’d go, ‘what’s that all about’ I’d go, ‘worry about the ball and nothing else’,” says Harris.

Believe it or not, between the farting sounds and Beethoven, the plan worked. For, the collapses have been far and few this summer with South Australia for a change having found unprecedented consistency as a batting group.

It’s also been a season where they have not just found their way into a Shield final, for the first time in nearly a decade, but instead dominated the competition, winning double the number of games as any of the other five states. This after only a few years ago, when winning even a single match was considered a big deal.

Harris boils it down to the way his team have kept fighting, and how the conversations in the dressing-room only revolve around winning, even in the opening game of the season when New South Wales left the South Aussies 389 to win in the fourth innings, and they finished 5/309 with Alex Carey scoring the first of his centuries for the summer. It’s also a mantra he believes that helped them win the One-Day Cup for the first time in 13 years.

“In fact, ‘We Fight’ is the first thing I write on the white board before every meeting and every game. For me, it was all about changing the language and then monitoring it. Whether it was what language the boys were using within the camp while addressing the group or even when they were speaking to the press. If it was being as positive as we wanted it to be.”

Harris is at the Adelaide Oval on Thursday morning when he’s speaking to me, and doesn’t hide his disappointment at not getting to play the final at the iconic venue, the state’s home of cricket.

“The politics, I don’t know what went on. It is disappointing to be fair. I think Les Burdett said it best when he said the reason we have multipurpose stadiums is for exactly that. But we have a home final. Have to make the Karen Rolton Oval our fortress for the next week.”

Harris doesn’t remember much about the last time South Australia won the Shield in March 1996 and says he was “probably at school”. But while he’s focused on not just bringing glory back to his home state while building a legacy for the future which goes beyond his team being “one-hit wonders”, he’s also keen to see how the Shield final is received in Adelaide next week.

“There’s been a lot of haters around South Australia. And fair enough, it’s been a while, but some of the stuff that I’ve read and have seen has been pretty poor on social media, so I’m interested to see what impact it has. I’m curious to see all these people who have had such a say for a long period of time, will they come out and support us, get behind the team and complement what has been a terrific season for us.”

Ryan Harris, honest as ever. Ask him about what a Shield win could mean to his own coaching legacy, and he’s as humble as ever, insisting, “I’ve had a little thought of what it would mean, but I probably am more focused on how it’s going to happen and what we have to do to make it happen.”