Interview with Shane Bond
We’ve been fortunate to have some great guests on the podcast already, and recently we had the privilege of spending an hour with Shane Bond for a feature-length interview covering his early days, including his club-cricket battles against Lippy, right through to his international playing and coaching career. Shane was incredibly candid and generous with his time and we know you’re going to love hearing from him. Below are a few snippets from the interview, which will be available on our podcast feed from Wednesday 11 December. Enjoy!
Lippy
‘Thinking about first-class cricket in New Zealand at that time, even now really, how is it to go from that kind of a scenario to then walk straight into the MCG? I imagine it was pretty packed, can you even describe what that was like?’
Shane Bond
‘Oh, it was just exhilarating. Hobart was chilled, it wasn’t a big crowd there. It was pretty cold. And then we went to Perth and there were a couple of sensational days where Warnie got his 99 and I reckon there were about five streakers that ran across the ground. It was packed, it was hot, the crowd was juiced up. I was copping heaps of grief down on the boundary. It was just a real fun day. Warnie slogged out at the end of the day and everyone was abusing Mark Richardson. It was one of those days I’ll always remember.
I was lucky, I got to play at Melbourne and then the SCG and Adelaide, which are amazing grounds with big crowds. I remember the MCG pitch feeling like it was 35-metres long, thinking “My God!” The energy, and obviously we won, so the excitement of winning the first three games against Australia [In the VB Series]. We went out and you came back and you just couldn’t sleep because of the adrenaline that was running through your body and the excitement you had from those games.
I grew up watching the one-day games that we [New Zealand] played over there [Australia] and we didn’t win much. So to go over and be part of that series, that you’d grown up watching year to year and loved the World Series cricket, and then to be winning, game after game, was unbelievable. I just loved it. I remember sitting on the sidelines with Brendon McCullum, who was picked for that series as well, and we were looking at each other going “Can you believe we’re here?” and he’s going “Nah, bro, this is unbelievable!” We’re having a laugh after every game about how the hell did we end up doing this stuff. It was just sensational.’
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Binksy
‘You mentioned you were focused on stats – did you ever focus on the speed gun? Were you looking at Shoaib? Were you looking at Brett Lee? And looking at the gun and thinking “I want to be quicker than those guys”, or does that not come into it?
Shane Bond
It was all about the speed gun! Because I’d never seen myself bowl, or been measured, until my first Test match. I think I did a fast-bowling competition when I was 19 at Lancaster Park bowling on the outfield and it was 131 [kph]. So the first time I knew what I was bowling, was that first ball of the first Test that I played. I might have got up to early 140s – 143 or something – and as the summer went on I was going “there’s 145, there’s 147”. I got to Adelaide – 151 – and that created a real buzz at home when someone was bowling 150, so it was really the drive for me to try to keep bowling faster. I never felt like I was on the Shoaib/Brett Lee level – they were a level above. They bowled 160 and bowled 5ks quicker than me, and were probably consistently quicker than me, but I knew that at 145, there weren’t many of us, and my biggest threat was that I swung it and swung it late, which created problems, particularly with the new ball.
So, yeah, I wanted to try to get into the 150s, and there were days that you weren’t measured that I thought “Sheesh, this is genuinely fast!” and I would have loved to have measured those. That’s the difference now when you’re coaching and people come up to you and say “he bowls 130s, 140s”. Yeah 140s is quick, but when you’re into the 150s it’s a whole different kettle of fish. You see that now with the Archers, the Fergusons, the Starcs, there’s not many guys who bowl that quick. But when they get it right, particularly in short-form cricket, they’re devastating, and it’s always fun to watch those guys bowl.’