Hello Ian

Hi Small Talk.

You've just published a collection of stories from your career. How did the book come about?

I started to make a few notes, I guess 20-25 years ago. At the time I was reading a lot of Ring Lardner, a lot of short stories, and I thought, "I've mixed with a lot of characters, I'd like to try my hand at writing short stories sometime." I was making all these notes on scraps of paper, beer coasters and all that sort of stuff, throwing them in the bottom of the drawer. I opened the drawer fairly recently and there was this bloody mess and I thought, "Jeez I'd better tidy this up. Why don't I write a story or two and see how I go?" Because it was such a diffferent style of writing to what I'm used to, I quite enjoyed it. Before I knew it there was a book there.

Have you always done your own writing or have you ever used a ghostwriter?

No. I was doing a bit of magazine writing, probably around '73 – and Eric Beecher whose magazine it was, asked me if I'd like to do a bit of newspaper writing. I said, "Yeah I'd like to have a crack at it." I went in to see a guy called Graham Perkin and we talked, and he said, "Yeah righto, now what about a ghostwriter?" I said, "Look, the little bit that I've done I've done on my own. I'd like to try that, and if you're not happy we can talk about a ghostwriter." He said, "All right, in six weeks we'll have another chat", and we never had that chat. I think if you're going to take the cheque you should write the column.

Did you always want to write more when you finished playing?

When I stopped playing I'd had this writing experience, and suddenly there was an opportunity to do television commentary as well. And I fairly quickly thought, "This a good balance." The thing about television is, the entertainment is there, it's out on the field, and your job is to add to it. But with writing I always used to say, "You put a piece of paper into your typewriter, and there's nothing on it. Whatever comes out – whether it be good or whether it be crap – at least it's your own work", and that was one of the things I always enjoyed about writing.

Who's your favourite cricket writer?

From an Australian point of view, the two I admire most are Ray Robinson and Jack Fingleton. He was an amazing guy, Robbie. He was still writing a bit when I was playing. The guys, even in my side, loved him so much. He couldn't drink beer – he drank scotch by then because he was a diabetic. In those days we didn't have scotch in the dressing room, only beer. Rodney Marsh found out that he could drink beer so long as it was a warm beer; for some reason or other it didn't cause him the same problems. So every day at tea Rodney would grab one of the bottles out of the fridge and put it in his locker, specially there for Robbie. We just loved talking to him. Of the English guys, I haven't read as much Cardus as I'd like. Robertson-Glasgow and Arlott I've enjoyed. They're the main ones. Of the modern guys, Roebuck I always enjoyed. Also Atherton, Pringle and Selvey. They're cricketers who've become very good writers.

Do you have a favourite cricket book?

Arthur's Mailey's 10 for 66 was a very interesting book. In fact I should go back and re-read the damn thing. Warney's always says he's written more books than he's read. I went to his 40th birthday and I said, "Mate I know you don't read books. I've bought you a couple of books and I want you to promise me you'll read them." I've always found Warney is the sort of guy who, if he tells you he'll do something, he'll do it. So I bought him Tiger and I bought him 10 for 66 and I said, "Mate, read these. They're a couple of old-time leggies, I think you'll find them very interesting." Anyhow I was talking to him the other day and I said, "Now listen you bastard, have you read those books?" He said, "Aww, no mate." I said, "You promised me you'd read them. Now get off your arse and read them will you?" I hope he does because I think he'll get a lot of enjoyment out of them – particularly O'Reilly. O'Reilly and Warne would have got on famously. They were both very aggressive spin bowlers.

How are Australia shaping up for the Ashes?

Well, if you see me betting on Australia against England you'll know I'm wearing someone else's pants. Certainly in England. If England lost that series they'd need their heads read. If Australia get their best attack together it'll be a damn good attack – that's one area where we are strong. But getting them on the field has been a problem. I don't think we'll have Cummins, but if we have Pattinson, Starc, Siddle, that's the basis of a pretty decent pace attack. I think Jackson Bird will bowl well in England. Pace bowling won't be a problem, but our batting and our spin bowling, there's not much depth there. Young batsmen, that's been the big problem. You look at the 28- to 30-year-old debutants in the last few years; that's something that just never used to happen in Australian cricket. Now it's the norm.

Yet 20 years ago you had so many great batsmen who couldn't get a game …

There were players who didn't play any or many Tests: Siddons, Bevan, Lehmann, Love, Stuart Law, Brad Hodge. Australia would kill for players like that now as 21-year-olds. We've lost a generation somewhere. I saw the under-19s play in the World Cup and I wasn't overexcited. Whatever we're doing to produce batsmen we should rub it out and start again because it's not working.

What do you think of squad rotation?

Ah, well, I can understand that you've got to give the fast bowlers a breather every now and then, but to rest batsmen is bollocks. And what I really have a problem with is that the players get no say in it. If Don Bradman came up to me and said, "Son you need a rest", I'd think about it. But if Pat Howard (Cricket Australia's general manager) came up to me and says, "You're gonna have a rest", I'd say, "Piss off mate, I need to bat." Even if Bradman told me... I'd be saying, "Look, Don, I really think I need to be playing." I have a major problem with resting batsmen. The other thing I find difficult to understand if that you've got players who are resting for Australia and then they're playing IPL. I find that incongruous.

A fair few English people don't rate Peter Siddle after the 2010-11 Ashes. Is it fair to say he's a different bowler since Craig McDermott's spell as a bowling coach?

For a definitive answer you'd have to ask him but I don't think it's a coincidence that he became a better bowler when McDermott was coach, and that's because he pitched the ball up more. He's always had the big heart, but, mate, he's a much improved bowler. He is swinging the ball again. I think England would underestimate him at their peril.

And he's your attack leader?

Ah yeah. If he wasn't before, and I think he probably was, he certainly was after the Adelaide Oval against South Africa. That sort of courage, I might have seen it from Lillee, and that's about it. That was a herculean performance.

How would the Kevin Pietersen business have been resolved in your day?

The thing about the system back then was that the only people you had to satisfy were your team-mates and your captain. If the manager of the team had started to stick his nose into it we'd have told him to piss off and mind his own business. My approach as captain would have been to say to Kevin, "Mate, I want you in my team." As far as I'm concerned – and this is not just Kevin Pietersen, this is all players – I'm only going to ask one question: can he get me a 100 runs or can he get me five wicekts? If the answer to that is yes, put him in my team and now it's up to me to make sure it works with the rest of the team. That's my job as a leader. If it gets to the point where it's not working, well eventually you've got to cut a fella adrift. But if he's a player who can get me a hundred, particularly if he can get me a hundred quickly, he'll have to piss me off greatly for me to cut him adrift.

To me that was part of leadership – everyone talks about it being a team game, which it is, but it's a team game played by 11 individuals, and to me the fun part of captaincy, and the challenge, was having all these different personalities and trying to make it fit together. You've got to let guys be individuals, because that's part of what makes them very good cricketers. If I'd told Dougie Walters that he couldn't drink and he had to go to bed at 9 o'clock, I'd have lost him immediately as a team man and also I'd be trying to make Doug Walters into something that he's not.

Did you cut anyone loose?

I dropped Doug in England in '72, but that was purely on form. I probably cut one guy loose – I won't mention any names because the guy's still alive – on the basis that we had a real struggle on our hands during an overseas tour. We had a real battle on our hands, and I felt I had to give everything I had to the XI I thought could win.

What makes a good captain?

You've got to earn their respect. That's why I've always liked the Australian system where you pick the best XI and then you pick the captain from that XI. You've got to then earn their respect as a captain and maintain respect as a player and a person. You've also got to give them honesty. Bear in mind there was no Players' Association then; if there was a fight to be had with the board, it was down to me. You get bad news as part of the game, but players can cop bad news if you give it to them honestly and face to face.

I also felt – and I think this is overlooked a bit – that it was your job to make the cricket interesting for the players. In doing that, you get the best out of your best players. If you make it dull and bloody boring for them, they'll just go through the motions. You're trying to win from ball number one. If you get into a Test match and you try to get into a position where you can't lose before you go hard for a win, to me that's a crap way to play cricket. I had a fan come up to me after a day's play, before I was captain, and say, "Jesus Christ that was a boring day's cricket", and I'd say, "Shit mate, you think it was boring for you, at least you can get up and go to the bar or go home. I had to stay out there."

You must be enjoying watching Michael Clarke as captain?

Yeah, I think Clarke's a very good captain. Of the recent captains we've had I've got Mark Taylor as our best by quite a margin, but on his early showing I'd have Clarke second. He's got a lot of Mark Taylor's traits about him – he's another one who goes out to win the game from ball number one. If Australia are to win in England, a lot of it'll have to go down to Michael Clarke.

He's very good mates with Shane Warne. Has he learned a bit about positive, instinctive captaincy from him?

It's in you. The only way to learn captaincy is to do it. It won't matter if you talk to someone else. Okay, Graeme Smith played in the same IPL team as Shane Warne, and he said, "I learned a lot about captaincy from Shane Warne." Well, I haven't seen it on the field. He's got an aura about him, and he's a terrific leader in the clubhouse and in terms of getting players to follow him, but I don't see much tactical imagination on the field. If the guy's got those instincts, you can perhaps help him but … I always used to say, if a cricketer's overconfident, I don't mind that. You can knock a bit out, but you can't put it in, and I'd say exactly the same about imagination as a captain.

Who do you rate in the England side?

Aw, I think Jimmy Anderson's a helluva bowler. I saw on Cricinfo, where people put their comments, some bloke was saying it's a disgrace that people are comparing him with Dale Steyn. Well I think day-in, day-out he's more consistent than Steyn. He swings the ball more consistently, certainly when I've seen him, and he swings the ball both ways which is a bit of a rarity. Tony Greig always made the point that most blokes who try to swing it both ways generally lose one or the other – if you had a good outswinger, he'd say, don't bother trying to bowl the inswinger too much because you can lose your outswinger. Jimmy has always had both. Over the last few years I've been very, very impressed with Jimmy.

I think Swann's a helluva bowler. When they last came to Australia, I thought Alastair Cook would be a weakness – I can't get over how he's kicked on. Pietersen obviously, he's the ideal type of player at No4, because if you give him a decent foundation he can build on that very quickly. Prior's another one. When I first saw him as a wicketkeeper, crikey, he was a goalkeeper. He could always bat, but I take my hat off to him: he's improved his keeping enormously. I saw Belly as a young kid in the first year of the Academy, and I thought then he was an exceptionally good-looking young player. It took him a while to get the mental side of his game up to the level of his skill, but for the last two to three years he's been a very, very good player.

Have you seen much of Joe Root?

No, I'm looking forward to seeing him. If I see somebody's going well I'll say to Mark Nicholas, "What's he like?" So I get a bit of insight from Nicko. And Nicko was very impressed wth Joe Root. There's obviously something about him.

Do you have a favourite word, or a word you overuse?

I don't overuse it, but there was an Australian guy, John McMahon, who played county cricket for Somerset and Sussex. I met him in England when I playing in the leagues in 1963. He was an interesting guy because he loved words and poetry. You'd be getting pissed in the sleaziest bar of all time around Manchester – and there were a few of those in '63 – and all of a sudden Macca would start quoting Banjo Patterson or something like that. Most Australian guys called blokes by nickname – Dougie rather than Walters, Rodney rather than Marsh – but Macca would always say to me, "How's KD Walters going?" or "How's RW Marsh going?" He used to use the word 'amass'. He'd say, "How many did KD Walters amass today? or "How many did RW Marsh amass today?" So every now and then when I'm writing a column, I'll always stick in an amass every now and then. And every time I do it, I think, "There's one for you Macca."

What would you put in Room 101? [Small Talk hastily explains the concept]

Well, it would be the word awesome. That is overused. I hate that bloody word. That or legend. Everyone nowadays seems to be a bloody legend. Some kid'll came up and say, "Can I have your autograph, you're a legend." Mate have a look at this – see, two arms, two legs, I'm not a legend, I'm the same as everybody else.

Is 'great' another example of that?

Aw yeah. If you call Bradman great or Sobers great, who else gets in that category? Not many. But great doesn't grate on me the way that awesome does.

What's your favourite film?

Off the top of my head, The Gods Must Be Crazy. I got a helluva laugh out of it. It's an African movie – it was about this Coke bottle that fell out of a plane, and it either KO'd a guy or it landed next to him, I forget which, and the whole thing went from there. It was bloody hilarious, and I guess funnier for me beacuse I'd been to Africa a lot. It was very much the African sense of humour. It was a pretty brave movie in those days, because apartheid was still around, and it was taking the piss. I like As Good As It Gets – I'm a bit of a Nicholson fan. I like Crazy Jack. I don't think he acts at all, I think he just plays himself. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, I'd have to put that up there. I thought that was bloody brilliant. De Niro I like, and Billy Crystal, I think he's pretty talented.

Favourite TV program?

As a young kid I used to love watching The Untouchables, and it was because of The Untouchables that I had this desire to go to Chicago. There's a program called Rake, it's had two series over here.

Rake?

Yeah, Rake as in rakish characters – you know, a bloke getting pissed and making a clown of himself in front of people. Misbehaving basically. It's based on a lawyer in Sydney, who apparently used to get into drugs a bit and who was very, very funny in court. It's an extremely well-written series, really well acted, and it's believable. It's not a bullshit thing.

What about comedy?

I love the English sense of humour, I was a big Goons fan. I think Monty Python is bloody hilarious.

What's your favourite drink?

When I was playing I pretty much drank beer only, because I knew how I was gonna wake up on beer. I still love beer but I don't drink anywhere near as much as I used to – I'm more red wine now. It's mainly to do with sleeping. I find that if I drink a bit of beer I'm up having a piss after three hours and I can't get back to sleep. Whereas if I drink red wine [laughs], I usually get at least five hours and I can go back to sleep. I'd probably narrow it down to Shiraz, and particularly South Australian Shiraz.

Thanks for your time Ian

Thanks Small Talk.

Chappelli: Life, Larrikins and Cricket is available now through online retailers and as an eBook. For more information, visit randomhouse.com.au