The keeper-batter came into international cricket at a time when Australia were at a low ebb, and it took a toll on his mental health
Shannon Gill28-Jan-2022When South Australia’s Alex Carey slipped on the gloves for his debut Test earlier this summer, it felt like the natural order. He was nurtured in A squads and blooded in white-ball cricket, but his selection was never assured. Still, there was no doubt about the role he would be playing if a baggy green was presented, and about the support behind him.It was vastly different the last time South Australia had a wicketkeeper play more than a single Test for Australia. Wayne Phillips rode a roller coaster of uncertainty for 27 matches, 18 of them behind the stumps as an accidental gloveman. His was one of Australia’s finest debuts but he was soon left exhausted and disenchanted with the game. It was only many years later that he really understood what he had been going through.Phillips, “Flipper” to everyone in cricket, grew up in the 1970s loving the game. He would bat wherever they asked him, and at school he’d even take the keeping gloves if need be. He was willing to give anything a go because it was more about having fun with his friends than any pretensions to a cricket career.His talent and thirst for the game took him into the South Australia team. A middle-order batter, he was willing to open when a spot came up, and helped pilot the side to the 1981-82 Sheffield Shield title, becoming one of the hottest young batting prospects in the land in the process.Related
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By 1983-84, generational change was imminent for the national team. An early-season Shield double-century gave Phillips an opening berth for Australia against the visiting Pakistan side. (The previous season, he had toured Pakistan with Australia, playing two tour games.)”I was in pretty reasonable form, but it was daunting to walk into a dressing room with icons of the game – Marsh, Lillee, Chappell, Hughes and Border,” Phillips says.Daunting, you say? In his first Test, in Perth, he ended the first session with 66 not out to his name, and his batting had all the fuss of a game of backyard cricket: If it was pitched up, he whacked it back down the ground. If short, he lathered it through point.It stands as one of the most remarkable Test debuts ever by an Australian cricketer. Phillips is one of only five men to open the batting and score a century on debut for Australia and sits with Charles Bannerman as the only Australian to walk out to bat for the first ball of a Test and score a century.”I trusted my game and Pakistan didn’t know too much about me, so there weren’t any obvious plans once I got a start,” he says. “I had nothing to lose, so it probably looked carefree.”Eventually out caught in the deep for 159, he fell six short of Bannerman’s score, still the highest on debut by an Australian. In keeping with the laid-back exterior, Phillips had no idea about the record’s existence. “I wasn’t aware of those intricacies at the time but 159 has become a bit of a calling card – 1:59pm will be the starting time for my funeral!” he laughs.Phillips bats against Somerset in one of the tour games on the 1985 Ashes. He made 62 in the match•Adrian Murrell/Getty ImagesTall and handsome with flowing locks that flourished at the front and ran narrowly down the neck, Phillips in 1983 looked like he could be fronting a pop band on the TV show . As a bunch of ’70s icons came up to their curtain calls, he looked to be a face for the changing times.”To come in and score those runs in the first Test and go through the series acknowledged as part of the future of Australian cricket was wonderful,” he says. “It was a comfortable tag to lug around – opening bat for Australia.”The legendary Bill O’Reilly applauded Australia’s new find and concluded in the that “Phillips has come to stay”. But he couldn’t have foreseen the years of chaos around the Australian team that were to derail the prediction.As was so often the case for opposition teams through the ’80s, it was against West Indies that the trouble started.Phillips had barely picked up a keeping glove since playing first-class cricket, but the selectors knew he had dabbled behind the sticks as a teenager, and their eyes lit up when he top-scored with 76 in the second innings of the first Test, in Georgetown.”Roger Woolley had been selected to take over from Rod Marsh and done everything right, but horribly for him, he broke his finger in the lead-up game to the first Test and I was the dubious back-up keeper on the tour.”I wasn’t a keeper at all, I was just an emergency replacement who had kept wicket as a kid. I hadn’t kept regularly since I’d been at school. I didn’t even have keeping gear on tour.”Phillips’ batting led the selectors to think they had found someone who would allow them to play an extra bat or bowler, so they kept him on in the role for the series. “If Roger didn’t break his finger, I would never have been asked to keep wickets at all in my career,” Phillips says.There was anything but stability in the role as he bounced between opening and batting in the middle, usually dependent on the form and fitness of others. But Phillips wasn’t about to rock the boat. “I’m in my first year of getting a game for Australia, it can’t get any better than this. I was happy to do whatever they asked me to do.”Phillips (right) with team-mate Glenn Bishop during a Sheffield Shield game against New South Wales in 1984•Fairfax Media/Getty ImagesIn a series that was not televised back home, he produced a 120 in the third Test, in Barbados, that remains one of the great lost classics of Australian batting. correspondent Peter McFarline wrote that Phillips’ innings was fit to rank alongside anything that the likes of Barbados greats the three Ws, Garry Sobers and Seymour Nurse had produced. “He may some day strike the ball as well. But he will never do it with more confidence, timing, power and placement,” the report said.Phillips strode to the wicket at 263 for 6 and produce a mixture of power-hitting and tail-end shepherding that took Australia to 429.”I’ve seen some bits of it on replay and Marshall, Garner, Holding, they all went for six,” he recalls. “I understand it has been acknowledged as one of the better innings of the time, so I’m immensely proud of that.”But in the second innings the team folded for 97. The dam walls had broken. West Indies would dominate the rest of the series, and the return series, months later down under.Australia were flailing through this stretch, so to have one of the country’s best batters also keep wicket was irresistible for the selectors, and the Phillips keeping experiment became a long-term fix. For the man himself, it soon took a physical and mental toll, and it was hard for him to ever feel as if he was best prepared to make runs – his chosen vocation.In the field during a Benson and Hedges World Series Cup game against New Zealand in 1986. Six of Phillips’ 27 Tests and nine of his 48 ODIs came against New Zealand•Fairfax Media/Getty ImagesAmidst the growing pressure there was a flirtation with the South African rebel tour, as much for career stability rather than financial reasons before he opted against that trip and took the gloves for the 1985 Ashes tour and regularly performed rescue jobs on wearing pitches.”I got 90 in the first Test, had a decent partnership with AB [Allan Border] to save a Test, hit a six at Lord’s to get us in a position to win a Test, so with the bat I thought I was making a genuine contribution.”He remains the only Australian wicketkeeper to ever score 350 Test runs in an away Ashes, but in a losing team there was a reliance on his batting of the sort no other Australian keeper before or since has had to deal with. He played 15 one-day or first-class games in addition to the six Tests on that tour, taking the gloves 12 times, and customarily batted in various positions. In Phillips’ words cricket was “getting big on him”.”Not having that regularity of knowing what I would be doing did start to affect me. Yes, I was playing for Australia, which was fantastic, but boy, I reckon it would have been a bit less challenging if there had been some structure and support around what I was doing. There just didn’t seem to be any thought about how this dual role could work best.”The season to follow was the nadir of Australia’s mid-eighties slump, punctuated by two series losses to New Zealand and two draws against India, one of them lucky. For Phillips, two years of pressure of doing double time in a team that kept losing was about to reach the point of no return. He was back opening the batting, but his form and confidence were slipping.