1) Merv Mania

There was a joyous and hopefully life-affirming moment for Mervyn Gregory Hughes last Sunday night on live, primetime Australian television. He wasn’t making a guest appearance during Channel Nine’s broadcast of the Tri-Series final, instead he was across on the Ten network being introduced as a cast member of the Australian branch of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here.

There, amid breakfast radio hosts, barely-recognisable beauty pageant winners and even a blogger (I’m not making this up, one of them literally was a blogger), he was that rare contestant who actually justified the show’s title. Unlike most of his colleagues, everyone immediately and quite happily knew who Swervin’ Mervyn was without having to engage in any awkwardness or whispered detective work.

“Merv”, just like Viv, The Don and Serena, doesn’t even require a surname.

Actually, to be completely truthful Maureen “Marcia Brady” McCormick didn’t appear to recognise Hughes, but then she might have just been projecting her frustration with the procession of nobodies who’d just walked up to her, squinted and gone, “oh…yeah…”. Such an indignity would rarely befall Merv Hughes. I’m digressing slightly here, but if you lasted until episode three of this terrible blight on human civilization, you will have also now seen pop culture’s unlikely new low: an eating contest between Marcia and Merv.

Merv though, is man who requires no introduction, even if you don’t remember the 212 wickets in 53 Tests. If Merv Hughes hadn’t existed, Australian cricket would have needed to invent him. He was big, hairy, macho, moody, lippy and fast; perhaps the definitive big dumb fast bowler, but behind the cartoon image lay the giant, ever-beating heart of Australia’s bowling attack in the Allan Border era.

In its mid-80s doldrums, Australian cricket needed players with talent and chutzpah. Merv had both in spades. Only Merv could be offered £25,000 to shave off his iconic handlebar moustache on live TV and turn it down. Only Merv could inspire the most famous act of audience participation in the history of cricket. Only Merv could pose as the Terminator and look less ridiculous than normal. Only Merv could stick his tongue in Allan Border’s ear and live to tell the tale.

Then there was best-selling author Merv, Merv on the beer ads, Merv selling tacos and Merv the unlikeliest national selector of all time. Is there a danger though that over time, the beer-swilling, pizza-destroying, mid-pitch-farting, bot-bellied larrikin caricature of Merv has dwarfed Merv the cricketer and his supreme on-field achievements? Should Merv get more love alongside the McGraths, Lillees and Lindwalls?

Hughes’s former coach Bob Simpson, never one to lavish praise, called him “one of the most underrated bowlers in the history of the game,” an “unstylist” who underpinned many of the massive gains Australian cricket made under Border. It wasn’t all beer and pizza after all.

2) Before Bay 13

Nothing about Hughes’s rise to cricket stardom was straightforward. Not for him the careful and welcoming passage through present-day “pathways” systems. As a directionless teen Hughes first worked as a lapper, cutter and presser at a clothing factory. They retrenched him after three months and didn’t last much longer themselves. A cocksure Hughes had left Werribee High School after Form Five, but the aspiring fast bowler quickly discovered that his lofty sporting dreams counted for little in the real world.

Next up was a stint as a menswear salesman as he developed his bowling at Melbourne district club Footscray. That job clashed with a Victorian Under-19s trial so he lost it. He didn’t get picked in the cricket side, either, but a call from Victoria’s senior selectors eventually came. For the three years until cricket stardom finally arrived, Hughes kept himself clothed and fed selling plastic trucks and He-Man dolls at a toy store.

At Hughes’s size, and hailing from the western suburbs, he could only have ever made his mark on the sporting world as a fast bowler or an Aussie Rules footballer. For a while he combined both, mitigating weight gain during his winter breaks by roaming the backline as a key defender for VFA side Werribee, one step down from big-time league football. At one point he even trained with league side Geelong but by the time he’d tallied 95 games for Werribee in 1985, cricket commitments forced him into early retirement.

Hughes won his first-class cricket debut as early as 1981, appearing for the first time against South Australia in a match broadcast by the ABC. It was an inglorious beginning. Having thought Hughes the culprit when he received a 5am wake-up call, Victorian captain John Scholes changed “M. Hughes” to “M Hill” on the official team list, an announcement of which meant that Hughes bowled his first delivery in first-class cricket to howls of laughter. No matter, it was a wide anyway. Thinking her son had been dropped from the side Hughes’s mother had already switched off her TV in disappointment.

Grabbing the attention of national selectors took a little longer but in post-Lillee desperation and after a strong showing against the touring Indians of 1985-86, Hughes vaulted himself into the Test squad for Adelaide. Again, trouble followed. On the morning of his debut a story spread quickly that, eager to impress his superiors, Australia’s new quick had initiated a titanic drinking session with national selector Greg Chappell at the bar of the team hotel. In reality, an anxious Hughes had downed two beers in the early evening and in the absence of a room-mate and the need of company, nervously sipped at soda water until midnight.

Australia didn’t bowl for another 40 hours regardless but a big drinking session couldn’t have made things any worse; 47 wicketless runs came off Hughes’s first seven overs in Test cricket. 123 for one wicket off 38 overs was the final analysis to go with a much-criticised verbal stoush with Kapil Dev and Hughes would have to cool his heels for a year before he’d get another chance to show his wares.

3) Perth 1988 – the legend is born

When Hughes took on the strutting, domineering West Indians of 1988-89, he remained a flaky prospect at best. Lacking the control necessary to be a constant threat at international level, he was not required for the away Tests in India in 1986 and his 10 wickets in the following summer’s ill-starred Ashes campaign had come at 44.40 apiece. In that instance his inexperience proved costly, but a five-wicket haul against Sri Lanka in Perth to finish off the ’87-88 summer at least proved that progress had been made.

There was no reason to predict what lay on the horizon. Hughes had just 21 wickets in his first seven Tests and doubts remained that he had what was required at international level. The Australians received a nine-wicket walloping at Brisbane and had right to be fearful of something even worse at the hands of the Windies quicks in Perth. After earning a reprieve at the expense of Craig McDermott though, it was Hughes even more than Malcolm Marshall, Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh or Patrick Patterson who produced a masterclass of aggressive, relentless and spiteful fast bowling.

Then it all fell into place. In the first innings Hughes ripped out danger men Desmond Haynes and Richie Richardson. After a back-breaking stand between Viv Richards and Gus Logie, he kept steaming in for 37 tireless overs, never missing an opportunity to dish out short stuff and eventually cleaning up the tail. Of his five first-innings wickets the last two – claimed in different overs but off successive balls to remove Ambrose and Patterson – had put him on a hat-trick.

Not that Hughes was focused on anything else at the start of the West Indies’ second innings other than avenging Geoff Lawson’s broken jaw. That blow was suffered at the hands of Ambrose, who later coolly and wordlessly posed for a photo with Lawson and his wired mouth. There was tension and booing from the crowd, but in all honesty Australia’s fast-bowling pair had started it themselves, engaging in what veteran cricket reporter Mark Ray described as “guerrilla warfare” in the West Indies’ first innings, raining down bouncer after bouncer.

Then Hughes got his hat-trick. Rapping Gordon Greenidge on the front pad dead in front with the first ball of the second innings, he became only the second man in history to achieve the feat across three separate overs. What followed cemented one of the great fast-bowling displays in Test cricket.

Where the tourists might have cashed in on Lawson’s absence and the resultant fatigue throughout the rest of the attack – 181-2 was their first-innings score at one point – eight of the nine wickets to fall in their innings belonged to Hughes. It left him with a match analysis of 207-13 from a staggering 73.1 overs in the energy-sapping Perth heat.

Lesser men would have buckled under the physical strain of such a lengthy shift. Even the supremely fit Tony Dodemaide was only asked to send down 41 for the game. Through visible pain and fatigue, Hughes conjured five wickets in the final session on day four, reducing the Windies from 216-2 to 331-8. It was a one-man show; Merv Hughes vs the West Indies; Merv Hughes vs the World.

It wasn’t all good news. Australia still fell to a 169-run defeat, their best punch having been deflected with depressing ease, but Hughes departed with the best figures of any Australian bowler in Tests against the West Indies and his country’s first hat-trick since Lindsay Kline 30 years prior.

In the aftermath of his personal triumph at the Waca Ground, Hughes also did something else that impressed his captain even more than the huge haul of wickets; asked to move upstairs to be congratulated on national television for his man-of-the-match effort, Hughes instead broke down at the heartache of Australia’s loss. “That is what need,” thought Border, “more blokes who get upset when we lose. When that happens we will start to win.”

In Hughes, Border knew he now had a precious commodity; a paceman who was both strike and stock bowler, just as capable of producing a fast and hostile spell to remove a well-set batsman as he was to churn through 25 overs in a day. The Australian attack had found its heart and soul.

4) Ashes glory in ‘89

If the legend of Merv was born in that Perth Test of 1988, Australia’s 1989 Ashes triumph reinforced the Victorian’s place among Australia’s great sporting exports. The figures in those Tests, as in the return series of 1990-91, were not as flashy as others but still vital to the cause. Those series hauls of 19 and 15 against England – coming either side of dominant displays against Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Pakistan – undersold Hughes’s value to the side but at least showed that he belonged.

For all the distractions of Merv Mania on the ’89 tour, Hughes provided raw aggression and speed to compliment the guile of Terry Alderman and Geoff Lawson. The trio shared between them 89 of the 105 English wickets to fall for the series. Even in the combative Victorian there was added nuance; he claimed Chris Broad at Headingley with a leg-cutting slower ball and then also looted 71 runs of his own in Australia’s 601-7 declared.

On that tour Alan Ross observed Hughes as boasting “a short-stepping mincing run-up, rather as if a lobster was nipping at his ankles” but also had him “thundering [in] like some Victorian villain, moustaches aquiver and ears cocked for hisses.” In the first innings at Lord’s he claimed vital top-order wickets on the way to a match haul of six and Australia were 2-0 up after as many Tests and the Ashes as good as won.

Throughout Hughes had established what would become a running battle with Robin Smith, the only English batsman to really call his bluff. Fast, angry spells of short-pitched bowling to match his efforts in Perth were forthcoming. To this day Alderman and Lawson take the bowling plaudits for their side’s 4-0 triumph, but in Hughes, Border now had both a reliable contributor and a dressing room sparkplug who added levity to a squad that had in previous times reflected its captain’s grumpy moods.

“If AB was ever in a bit of a corner,” said Bob Simpson, “he knew he could always throw the ball to Merv.”

“They thought Merv was a character,” said Border of the treatment his team-mate received from the English media earlier in the summer, “a real personality and all that, but couldn’t bowl.” On the last point at least, they were to be proven wrong. Hughes had the last laugh, Castlemaine XXXX beer froth dripping from his famous moustache as he stared down on England from billboards. “Australians wouldn’t give an XXXX for anything else” they said. No brewery could have found a more enthusiastic brand ambassador.

5) The Battle of the bulge

“Hughes was a notorious consumer of alcohol and food” is the rather blunt beginning of the “Personal Life” section of Big Merv’s Wikipedia profile. In these days of central contracts, rotation policies and carefully-regimented fitness regimes, you just don’t see international cricketers who look like Hughes anymore, especially not fast bowlers. To watch highlights of his career now is to be amazed by the man as a physical specimen.

The girth of Hughes was perhaps central to his appeal as an everyman, but through all the gibes from the media and from fellow players (Javed Miandad: “You look like a fat bus conductor.” Merv in response to taking Miandad’s wicket: “Tickets please.”) Hughes found a constant source of stress and worry.

The Hughes literary oeuvre is more heavily littered with dieting stories than a self-help manual and weight problems remained central to the self-doubts and neuroses that stalked him throughout his career. Tales of yo-yo diets and periods of sobriety were common – for a year leading up to the 1989 Ashes he stayed dry but always felt one disastrous skin-fold reading away from the axe.

A Hughes off-season was usually an exercise in damage limitation and there remained throughout his career a causal link between weight gain and injury. During one Test at Adelaide he’d drawn the reproachful glare of his coach Simpson and team physiotherapist Errol Alcott as they set about closely monitoring his calorie intake throughout the game. Hughes’s solution was to lock himself in a toilet stall with a plate of sandwiches.

When Hughes still played football, his pre-game “superstition” was a quiet drinking session followed by an “Aussie” pizza with prawns at the stroke of midnight. Heading over to England on an Esso scholarship in the winter of 1983, he tipped the scales at 92kg when he left and 109kg when he returned and even then only after a startled Tony Dodemaide had confronted him a month before his voyage home with instructions to shed some of the new baggage.

Another patented Hughes move was to buy a week’s supply of meat and beer and demolish it all in one sitting. Post-season “blow-outs” of 8kg or more were not uncommon. Hughes’s reasoning was simple – he just loved a pig-out. With the way management jargon has infected the sports world now, there’s something refreshing about that sort of plain-speaking candour.

6) Ashes ‘93

“The other Mike Gatting ball” is how some of us know it. It’s almost unfair that a player as good as Gatt should have been decimated so comprehensively by two different bowlers in a single Test but the Merv Hughes yorker that demolished his stumps on the final ball of day four at Old Trafford in 1993 ended up feeling instructive of series in general and also Hughes’s role in it.

Hughes’s tour diary also gives an interesting glimpse of his professional regime at the time; day one of that Test was punctuated by a viewing of Cape Fear and the night before he unleashed the yorker on Gatting he’d been out drinking until 11pm and grabbed a pizza on the way home. Old habits die hard.

Of course that ’93 Ashes series came to be known more for the emergence of Shane Warne as a spin superstar and the thrilling arrival of Michael Slater at the top of Australia’s batting order, but Hughes was never less than an intimidator and a threat and the perfect co-star in Warne’s theatrics.

Again injury – this time to Craig McDermott – had forced Hughes to lead the Aussie pace attack and proved a most fitting epitaph for his career; 31 wickets from a marathon 296 overs (double that of any paceman on either side), all performed with the nagging worry that his own troublesome knee might give way at any moment and despite the fact he’d barely featured in the month of warm-up games and ODIs that preceded the Tests.

Throughout that summer, English crowds had chanted “Sumo” at the burly quick, a moniker his manager quickly had applied to a range of T-shirts to be sold at grounds. Put in wrestling terms though, Hughes’s performance was far more WCW. At Old Trafford he bagged eight English scalps in unhelpful conditions and Australia were up 1-0. When the home side crumbled to 205 in reply to Australia’s 632 for 4 (declared) in the first innings at Lord’s, Hughes had 12 wickets in three innings and England were in disarray.

The third Test at Trent Bridge brought seven wickets, five of them in the first innings. Six more victims came at Leeds and only then, with the Ashes secured again, did Hughes’s output let up. His series haul was almost four times as high as any English paceman; decisive then, to Australia’s retention of the urn. In the face of his penetrative glare just as much as Warne’s web of spin, England’s batsmen wilted.

And that was pretty much that. With his tour de force and greatest body of work over, Big Merv’s bolt was shot. He would battle on in state cricket for Victoria, go on one eventful tour of South Africa and play for the nascent Canberra Comets at domestic level, but even a warhorse like Hughes at some point had to succumb to the physical demands of international cricket. Apt that having started out amid scenes of chaos, he’d finish in glory.