Former Australian all-rounder Shane Lee still chuckles at a mistake his champion brother Brett Lee made prior to a remarkable Test debut against India in Melbourne 25 years ago.
Having decimated a Western Australian team featuring Adam Gilchrist, Damien Martyn and Mike Hussey days earlier, the younger Lee was added to the Australian squad for the Boxing Day Test.
The 23-year-old had bowled with fire and fury in the Sheffield Shield game at the WACA, breaking former Test quick Jo Angel’s arm on the way to man of the match honours.
In a chat with Fox Sports during the pandemic, Lee confessed that even now he is not particularly comfortable with the events that preceded his call-up for the Australian team.
Wanting to impress the “who’s who” of Australian cricket playing in that match, with the Test captain Steve Waugh standing in slips alongside stars of the sport, he unleashed on WA.
“There was a moment which I’m not particularly proud of,” Lee said.
“(I warned Jo), ‘You’ve got two options here, mate. Either tread on your wicket and get out, or I’ll come around the wicket and break your arm’. I felt horrible.”
But it did the trick.
Steve Waugh approached national selector Geoff Marsh at the WACA after the Shield game and told him to get him into the team because “the Indians will hate it”.
The following day, Lee was photographed outside the WACA after confirmation that he would join a team that had thrashed India in Adelaide for the second Test in Melbourne.
Shane Lee, who had featured in the Shield match that led to Lee earning his first baggy green, grabbed a couple of close mates from home and headed down to Victoria.
Before touching on the pride he has for a younger brother whose “pies” he once belted around the backyard as boys back in Wollongong, the older Lee sibling still laughs about a mishap that Brett experienced ahead of his Boxing Day debut.
“A funny memory of that is that he had tried to put some highlights in his hair to blond his hair up a bit — he was trying to impress the young ladies back then — but his hair went slightly orange, so we gave him a bit stick about that,” Shane Lee told Fox Cricket’s The Follow On podcast.
When relayed that tale last week, Angel had a laugh about it.
Between breaking the Western Australia’s arm and the ‘hair-tastrophe’ prior to his debut, Lee had broken bread with the big man in hospital in Perth and there was never any bad blood between the pair.
“He always liked to be a pretty boy, I think, Binga,” Angel said.
“If you muck around with that sort of hair dye stuff, you are guaranteed to come unstuck at some stage. But that would be a good stage to do it on, before your first Test. You are going to make sure you get noticed, aren’t you?
“But when you can bowl that quick, and swing the ball like he did, people are going to notice you, so I definitely wouldn’t have thought you were going to need highlights in the hair.”
A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
Brett Lee was a bundle of nerves on the morning of the Boxing Day Test.
Fresh from bowling more than 150km/h at the WACA, Lee had posed for photoshoots leading into the game, with the expectation that he would be unleashed against India.
In a recent chat with The Follow On podcast, Lee said he was still not sure whether or not he would get the nod ahead of Michael Kasprowicz to debut until the morning of the match.
That is understandable, for the friendly ghost “Kasper” had snared seven wickets against Pakistan in Perth during late November when preferred to the newcomer from New South Wales.
“Probably just the whole build up, there was a lot of expectation and a lot of conjecture around, ‘Would I play or not?’” he told The Follow On.
“Michael Kasprowicz was looking to get the nod ahead of me and then I found out on the morning of the match that I was playing, so all of those memories flicking back to when I was a nine-year-old kid flooded in and all the hard work, the sacrifices, the injuries, overcoming adversity, the people saying I was not good enough, those (thoughts) flashed through my mind in that instant.
“I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve worked so hard to get here, let’s just have fun and enjoy it’. And that is exactly what I did.”
But those who had watched Lee in the Sheffield Shield match a week earlier were far from surprised, with Australian wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist saying his quality demanded a debut.
“It was just dynamic. We all knew at that point in time that Australian cricket had an unbelievable talent on their hands,” he said.
“It was just a matter of when he would make the transition from state cricket up to the biggest stage. And there is no bigger stage than the Boxing Day Test match and he looked very comfortable right from the start.”
So rapidly was Lee bowling, Mark Waugh was forced to stand further back in the slips cordon than ever before in the Sheffield Shield match and was certain he would play.
“We knew how good he was,” he said.
“He had done well for New South Wales and when you are bowling 150km/h and you can swing the ball as well — he could swing the ball and a couple of his deliveries did swing away from the left-handers and back into the right-handers — and he had the intimidation factor as well.”
Angel, who played the last of his four Tests for Australia against England in 1995, could testify to that.
“It was no real surprise because he bowled beautifully in Perth. He bowled quickly but he swung the ball. And he did the same in Melbourne in that Test match against India,” he said.
“When you can bowl that quick, that is one thing, but when you are swinging the ball, it is just a double-edged sword. It is a bit like when Mitchell Starc is at the top of his game. That is when he is swinging the ball, because he bowls quick enough, but then you have to factor in the swing as well, and it makes it very hard.
“Binga bowled brilliantly in Perth and he just carried it on in the Test match. They got him in while he was doing well and he went from strength to strength from there.”
THE PUPPY DOG UNLEASHED: “HE WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE A HANDFUL”
Lee may have felt nervous but he had time to settle after Australia batted first at the MCG, in a weather-interrupted innings as they sought to further their dominance of India.
While none of Australia’s star-studded top order made centuries, several scored heavily as the hosts batted through to the third day on the way to a first innings total of 405.
Michael Slater top-scored with 91, while Gilchrist made 78 and Ricky Ponting 67 batting at No.6.
