Recalling the 1999 tour of Sri Lanka where a scary collision with teammate Jason Gillespie resulted in injuries to both and landed them in the hospital, former Australia captain Steve Waugh said it was the backdrop to his moment of realisation as a skipper.
Waugh, who had taken over from Mark Taylor earlier that year and had just captained the side to a drawn 2-2 result in the Caribbean, said it is in Colombo where he felt the need to have an honest conversation with himself whether he has truly justified his tag as the leader of the pack or not.
"At 33 it still probably took me 6-12 months to realise my style. I was still probably leading by consensus a bit early on because I’d been mates with these guys (teammates) for a long period of time and all of a sudden I was the leader," Waugh told Damian Barrett on a recent episode of the AFL journalist’s podcast 'In The Game', according to Fox Sports.
"So having to separate myself a little bit from the rest of the guys was a challenge. I finally realised that when I was in a hospital bed in Colombo with a broken nose and Jason Gillespie had a broken leg. I was sitting there in a hospital bed thinking, ‘If I never get to captain again, have I done myself justice? Had I done it my way?’ And the answer was, no I hadn’t."
“From that point on I said just trust my gut instinct and do it my way. And that was probably the turning point in my captaincy career," Waugh added.
"I wasn’t a certainty to play the next Test. I had compound fractures of my nose and … all these other broken bones, so I was thinking maybe I’m not going to play the next Test and if I don’t, somebody else will be captain and I might never get the chance to do it again. That was the moment where I sat down and thought, ‘OK, from now on I’ve got to do it my way’ — and listen to a few people but not listen to a lot of people."
Waugh said he understood with the time the need to only listen to a select few voices which he could trust before arriving at decisions.
"I think the problem is, or one of the hard things about captaincy is, you get a lot of advice from a lot of different people and they all want to tell you how to do it. You’ve got to work out who are the people you trust and stick to the ones … you really respect."
"At the end of the day you’ve got to look in the mirror and make those tough decisions yourself and that was one of those moments where I thought, ‘I’m not doing it the right way, let’s turn it around and do it differently’. My leadership was about getting the best out of people. I really enjoyed seeing people fulfil their potential."
“One thing I didn’t want to see as a leader or a captain was the team to be complacent and not realise how good they were. For me it was always about trying to raise the bar. If that came across as cold-blooded and ruthless that was fine, but I was just maximising our potential. That’s all I was trying to do," Waugh concluded.
