17 years on, Bryce McGain remains “incredibly proud”.
Just days shy of his 37th birthday, the Victorian leg-spinner hailing from the seaside suburb of Mornington in the state’s south-east became Australia’s second-oldest post-war Test debutant.
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A beaming smile after being presented with a cherished baggy green cap – and some encouraging words – by the great Ricky Ponting on the Newlands outfield, with Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain silently watching on in the distance, told of a boyhood dream fulfilled.
“It was an overwhelming emotion, I’ve got to tell you,” McGain, now 54, told foxsports.com.au this week.
“You pop the cap on and everyone’s giving you a hug.
“Your mind goes to all the parts of the journey – starting as a 10-year old at Mornington, the wet feet on a Saturday morning when the grass is too long and you’re trying to bowl leg-spin, and all those fun things with your mates when you’re a kid.
“And then into performance stuff as you get a bit more advanced.
“It was overwhelming pride of getting an opportunity to represent Australia.”
The tumultuous five days that followed in Cape Town, for what would prove McGain’s only Test, have largely disappeared into the mists of time.
But it’s only one chapter in an extraordinary story of perseverance, dedication and self-belief – with some sage advice from Shane Warne thrown in – worthy of any Hollywood underdog script.
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It wasn’t until well into his 20s that McGain first emerged into the public eye.
At 28, he became one of the oldest ever to earn a spot at the prestigious Cricket Academy in Adelaide.
At the time, McGain was a full-time employee at ANZ in the IT department, studying a university degree in marketing and psychology, and managing the demands of parenthood, with son Liam having just been born.
“I’m 28 – every other spin bowler in there (at the Academy) is 18, 19,” McGain told foxsports.com.au.
“I went to a spin week and Terry Jenner was the headline there for the leg-spinners, along with Kerry O’Keeffe.
“They’re all looking at me like ‘who is this ancient guy at 28 coming to this spin week?’
“But after three days, they said, this is your video analysis, this is what you need to do. These are the technical things you need to do.
“And I went oh, thank goodness.
“That moment changed my life, because 18 months later, I played my first games for Victoria.”
And when the soon-to-be 30-year old made his Sheffield Shield debut for Victoria against NSW at the SCG, his two wickets included the scalp of a young Michael Clarke.
“CAN YOU COME TOMORROW?” A SHOCK OPPORTUNITY
If Jenner and O’Keeffe – both Australian spin-bowling royalty – had set McGain on the path to success, it was a King who first opened the door to higher honours.
As the nation learned of Shane Warne’s imminent retirement in late 2006, midway through a 5-0 trouncing of England, Victorian selectors were starting to panic.
“It was a bit of a shock for everyone,” McGain recalls.
“I was on holiday in Yarrawonga with a bunch of mates and still happily playing Premier Cricket, still doing well and performing well. I’m with my son, Liam.
“And Cricket Victoria rang me and said, well, can you come to training tomorrow?
“So it was quickly ‘Look, I can’t make it tomorrow. I need to pack the tent up and do all that, but I’ll be back down in a day or two.’
“And I ended up playing that Shield game at the SCG after the New Year’s Test.”
With Warne retiring and all-rounder and captain Cameron White called up to the one-day squad, the timing couldn’t have been better.
McGain’s took six second-innings wickets to spark a remarkable comeback, and for the next few years, his status as Victoria’s No.1 spinner was secure.
And with spinners finding the going tough at Shield level in the post-Warnie era, the Australian icon was commissioned by Cricket Australia to scour the country looking for slow-bowling talent.
“He’d go around and basically do a caravan tour of Australia – go to all the states, bring the young spinners in, the Shield spinners, all the spinners from the state, go through it and test them,” McGain recalls.
“The last stop was back in Victoria. So he’d been around the whole country.
“He’d come down to a training session at Victoria – Warnie would turn up in his jeans and T-shirt, just sort of dag around and have a bowl with us.
“Warnie would just be asking me questions: what are you thinking here? What are you doing?
“In a net session, I’m not worrying one bit about technical things. I’m worrying about getting really good at competing against batters and getting them to play how I want them to play.
“And Warnie said ‘You know what? I’ve been around the country over the last two months to every state, I’ve probably seen every spinner from 15 up to first-class spinners. Not one of them has said that.
“‘They’re all worried about a technical thing – how I’m going on, I’ve been a bit closed off. I’m not using my front arm. I’m doing all these things.
“‘And here you are in a net session. You’re bowling just to batters. You’re there tuning the hardest part of spin bowling, competing in a game, practising and working that over.’
“And I said, wow. Surely other people are training that way and they’ve worked out how to train best? And he said ‘No.’”
“Sometimes that’s all the role of a good coach needs to be – not getting there and tinkering around too much. It’s merely a step back and (going) ‘What you’re doing there’s right.’
“And that’s as simple as Warnie would be with some things.”
McGain’s rapid progression, ending the 2007/8 Shield season as the leading spin bowler with 38 wickets, earned him a ticket to India with Australia A.
And with the national team set to play four Tests in the same country immediately afterwards, it was an audition in all but name.
“I could not believe how supportive these wickets were of spin balls. It was a dream,” he said.
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“Actually going to experience the dusty clay and the red clay at (Bengaluru’s) M. Chinnaswamy Stadium was just remarkable – and all the things that I’d sort of learned as a spinner were all coming together.”
McGain took three first-innings wickets in that unofficial ‘Test’ – and still loves to tell of how he ripped a few past the outside edge of a young Virat Kohli.
“I just wonder, if I’d taken that edge and nipped him out for not too many, whether that would have been the end of his career as he was trying to break into the game,” he said.
But on the brink of Test selection, disaster struck: McGain strained a muscle in the back of his armpit.
Having returned to Australia for rehab, then back to India for his first Test tour, his desperation to rubber-stamp a near-certain debut led to a fateful moment.
“I put everything into the training session and ended up tearing that muscle off the bone,” McGain said.
“It was just one of those things. It was a not-yet moment.”
“READY TO SHOOT THE BAZOOKA”: HOW MISSED FLIGHT CHAOS UNFOLDED
Another strong Sheffield Shield season earned McGain a second Test tour – this time in South Africa.
But things could scarcely have got off to a worse start.
“I wish it was a cooler story – I bet Warnie would have had a much better story,” McGain laughed when recalling how he infamously missed his flight out of Melbourne to link up with the squad.
“I probably just left home a little later than I needed to – at the time, they were redoing the whole of the Monash Freeway. I just got caught in traffic.
“When I checked in, it was half an hour before the flight left, and they said no, no, check-in’s closed.
“I’m standing there in an Australian blazer with bags with my name all over it, looking the full Australian cricketer, and I said ‘No, I need to get on this flight. You don’t quite understand.’”
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McGain’s pleas fell on deaf ears – and making matters worse, the next QANTAS flight to Sydney had been cancelled.
Analytical skills honed from years working in a bank came to the fore as McGain worked out a solution off his own bat.
He’d fly to Hong Kong first, before getting a connecting flight to Johannesburg, five hours later than the rest of the squad.
It was that pragmatism that he believes smoothed out some rough edges when he linked up with the squad for what he remembers was an “icy” reunion.
“There was a big group – captain, vice-captain, Michael Clarke and Ricky Ponting, and team manager and coach,” McGain said.
“The coach was more than upset with it all, and so I just explained what had happened.
“When they said ‘You better get on to Cricket Australia and thank them for sorting that out for you’, I said, no, I sorted that out. I did that myself.
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“(They said) ‘Well, how do you do that? How do you know how to do that?’ Well, that’s what I do. I solve the problems. I’m worldly.
“I think that bit struck a chord with Punter, although the others were left a little lost. Ricky went ‘You did what? You organised your own flights to go to Hong Kong, to then go there and solve it, get the first available flight.’
“It was Ricky who just said ‘Oh, okay, now we understand that’.
“They were ready to shoot the bazooka at me, and really blow up at me, and do all those things, but he sort of defused it pretty quickly once I explained it.”
“DIDN’T KNOW AT ALL”: BAGGY GREEN SHOCK
For the first two Tests, McGain was on 12th man duty as Australia stunned the Proteas to take an unassailable 2-0 series lead.
His opportunity came on the morning of the third Test in Cape Town.
North, who had served as the team’s primary spinner as selectors opted for a four-man pace attack, was struck by illness – ironically, McGain himself had been laid low by a similar bug in the early stages of the tour.
“I turned up to the game, and figured I’d be 12th man – there’s no reason to change a winning team,” Australia’s 410th Test cricketer told foxsports.com.au.
“This is an hour and 15 before the first ball gets bowled in a Test match … and they said, someone’s going to make their debut.
“And I’m thinking, wow, interesting they’ve changed the winning combination. Maybe they’re rotating the quicks.
“They handed the calf to Ricky (Ponting) and he said ‘OK, well, Bryce …’ – it was an overwhelming emotion, I’ve got to tell you.
“He said some really nice things about deserving where I am, it’s a lot of hard work, it’s years of dedication. I do recall hearing all of that part.”
McGain’s mother, who passed away in 2019, had been in the stands earlier in the tour, before returning to Australia before her son’s big moment.
She, and the rest of his family – including nine-year old Liam – only found out about his debut when it was announced on television coverage back home.
“Mum didn’t know until that happened … the word got around, I suppose, pretty quickly,” McGain said.
“A few mates got together from Melbourne, cricket mates and mates outside of cricket, a whole lot of them got together and caught up late into the evening, and watched the Test and how it unfolded.”
Fortunately, a lucky chance meant McGain had friends in Cape Town at the perfect moment.
“Some friends had just, on a whim, come over for the third Test,” he said.
“One of them was my under-14 coach at Mornington, Tony Stocker. Peter Buchanan, who was coach of Mornington, was there, and another good friend, Mark Dunsford, as well.
“The three of them had just flown over and said ‘Look, we’re just going to go anyway. If he plays, he plays. He probably won’t, but let’s go and see a Test match. And they happened to be there in the crowd.
My now wife, partner at the time, Georgie, was there as well. And she’d done the same thing. She went to the second Test and came over and continued on to the third Test.
“So to have those four people in the crowd and give them a hug in my warm-up gear with a baggy green on was pretty surreal.
“But I pretty quickly realised ‘Oh, I’d better get warmed up here!’”
“THEY WERE COMING AT ME”: HOW DEBUT TURNED UGLY
With the benefit of hindsight, McGain has come to realise he “wasn’t quite right” in Cape Town.
The injury that had cost him a debut in India had healed enough for him to contribute at Shield level, but a smarting Proteas team featuring AB de Villiers, Jacques Kallis and a recalled Ashwell Prince was quite another matter.
“I was limited with the pace variation that I could bowl,” he recalls.
“I probably was lacking a bit of power to bowl the higher end paces, up into the 90s.
“It took a bit of armoury away from making it harder for the batsman, as the ball and the change of pace was going to be critically important.
“That’s not necessarily saying you’re bowling flat and quick – it’s being able to change your pace with your flight, but being able to do that really quickly. That’s what made Warnie so good.
“Starting the next season, I had all that back and realised then that that’s the pieces that were missing at that time.”
Surrounded by a strong, Johnson-led pace attack, the Proteas’ mission to target the spinner led to one of Test cricket’s most brutal introductions.
McGain’s second ball was hammered for six.
Seven more would follow in 18 overs, with his figures swelling to 0/149.
At the time, they were the worst by an Australian in Tests, though fellow leg-spinner Mitchell Swepson has since surpassed them.
“I understood they were coming at me – every team would do that against a starting off spinner,” McGain said.
“When spinners get hit, they talk about thick skin and all those sort of things.
“That’s exactly how I did – ‘Okay, great, you’re coming at me. Terrific. I love it. You’re playing shots. I’m going to force an error here.’
“What’s the worst thing that can happen? In your first over, you get hit for six. Okay, that’s out of the way now. Get on with it.”
But as the onslaught continuing, McGain remembers a fatal mistake he – and captain Ponting – made.
“As soon as I get into a groove, they’d be attacking – it’s not always a bad ball, but it might be just a touch short,” he said.
“Hell, these are the best players going around nearly all the time. Like, they’re pretty amazing.
“I guess what I learned from that is really owning your strategy and honing in on your strategy, and believing in what’s got you there. We sort of shifted away from that.
“They’re the things that I certainly share with young spinners now: this is how I can hold. This is how we can get those guys off strike and different strategies like that.
“It was a real learning opportunity for me.”
One thing McGain remembers most is the Proteas’ show of sportsmanship after wrapping up an emphatic innings victory.
“Mickey Arthur was coaching them at the time – it was quite interesting for an opposition coach to say ‘This is just one moment. You’ll be right, have fun playing in the Ashes’,” McGain said.
The players were pretty supportive, to be honest. They weren’t about tearing me down or anything like that. They just said ‘You’ll bounce back. You’ll be right.’
Warne, too, had got in touch.
“He said ‘I went for a whole lot more runs in my first test and only took one wicket’,” McGain recalls.
“HOLY S**T, IT’S ON”: A SCARY ORDEAL
McGain might not have taken a Test wicket – but he does have a pair of Test runs to his name.
And he was also out in the middle for an incredible Australian achievement lost to history: Mitchell Johnson’s one and only Test century.
If he remained measured with the ball even while being dispatched by the Proteas’ top order, coming out to face Dale Steyn, Makhaya Ntini and co. was quite another matter.
“You’ve got to go down some stairs from the rooms at Cape Town – and I couldn’t feel my legs going down,” he told foxsports.com.au.
“Incredibly nervous. I knew who I was facing.”
A “wonky sort of a pull” off spinner Paul Harris landed him his first run in the first innings; while second time around, a South African fan activation initiative made the task of batting even tougher.
As did the fact he was coming out to face a hat-trick ball.
“Throughout the series, they played this music for each of their bowlers – and Dale Steyn had chosen ‘TNT’ by ACDC,” McGain said.
“There’s a couple of times that Doug Bollinger is singing it up in our batting room. And everyone’s going ‘f*** off, Doug, get out of here’.
“It’s nearly like this Pavlov’s dog trigger for these batters to go ‘holy s**t, it’s on’.
“The music came on when I was out there, and TNT started blaring out. I’m in the middle of the oval and understanding the triggers that it had for the batters ahead of me, how tense that makes you.”
Facing Harris again, the No.10 did his bit to survive and ensure Johnson, who had been stranded on 96 earlier in the series, reached three figures.
“He was in the absolute best form of his life – so to be out there when he made his hundred was a special little moment to share,” McGain recalls.
“And pretty consequently after that, he got that excited, he just ran me out the very next ball.”
Obeying his teammate’s push for a nonexistent second run to allow Johnson to retain the strike, McGain was comfortably run out at the non-striker’s end for a duck – a sacrificial final act in Test cricket.
“I was nowhere near it,” he said.
“And I’m sort of like ‘No, no, no’ – and he was just running at me.
“And I was like, ‘Oh, OK, well, far be it for me to just stand there and hold my ground against someone who’s on a hundred. I’d best run through and hopefully there’s a fumble’.
“I wasn’t going to be the one burning him out.”
“NIGHT TIME’S FOR SLEEPING”: THE DIG MCGAIN NEVER FORGOT
While McGain remembers most of his time in South Africa fondly, there are moments that stick in the craw even now.
Looking back, he cites several cultural differences between the successful Victorian environment he had been a part of, and an Australian team in transition – and far less well-resourced than he had expected.
“A lot of the stuff leant on a lot was visualisation,” McGain recalls.
“I’d be preparing myself – ‘if I’m bowling to them, this is what I do, I bowl this and bowl that’, so you just shut your eyes.
“I got really good at that, and I would do that in the Victorian change rooms, eyes shut, just lying there.
“As I was going through that stage of my preparation (in South Africa), making the most of that sort of environment, I get a punch in the arm. And a senior player just goes, ‘hey, night time’s for sleeping’.
“And I’m like, ‘Okay, who’s sleeping?’
“One thing that I really hold strongly is seek first to understand, then be understood … ‘Oh, help me understand what you’re doing there, oh, it’s actually visualising’.
“A lot of those things over that tour, little things like that just weren’t about understanding me as a person.
“Having said that, some of the players were terrific, and connected, and wanted to find out more about me.
“I found Michael Clarke one of those, and maybe it was because Warnie said ‘hey, support Bryce, he’ll be really good for the team, and we’ll get along’, and I know that Warnie and he were really close.
“He was really interested in me, how life was with my son, how I balance it playing professional cricket, a lot of those sort of things, so he was very interested in those things, and he took the time to have those conversations.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly in an era in which countless Australian spinners, McGain included, were tried and summarily discarded, the level of spin-bowling analysis on tour was far removed from what he’d had available even with Victoria, as well as from Jenner and Warne.
“They basically put (fellow spinner) Nathan Hauritz and I in a room – ‘yeah, okay, spin bowlers meeting, go and work out where your plans are going to be bowling to these guys’,” McGain said.
“In terms of guidance, I was a little surprised that it was a little limited, but it was probably also empowering us to go, okay, you’ve got here, how would you go? How would you go about this?
“I guess it was a little less than I’d anticipated … in terms of technical coaching, yeah, there’s none of that sort of stuff.”
The Australian team has since developed a far more professional off-field support system for its players, with Nathan Lyon a direct beneficiary.
And McGain can only help but wonder whether it’s experiences of players like him – as well as teammate and now-head coach Andrew McDonald, who played all three Tests on that 2009 tour – is a reason why.
“Who knows? It might have been the fact that Andrew McDonald didn’t have that when he played Test cricket, that he realised how valuable it could be,” he said.
“Everyone’s background shapes who they are. And I don’t think there’s a player in that Australian team that doesn’t have that, to enable their skills to best perform at the top level.”
Perhaps most galling is the feedback from selectors after letting him know he’d missed the cut for that year’s Ashes tour of England.
“They basically just rang me and said no, you haven’t been selected,” McGain recalls.
“And I went oh, okay. What do you need to see from me to get selected?
“They said you need to control the runs, take wickets, basically bowl like Shane Warne.
“So the feedback was kind of just wishy-washy. You haven’t been selected. That’s it.
“That’s how feedback used to be. It used to be keep you in the dark and manage it that way. Thank goodness that’s changed.”
“THAT’S A HAT”: KEEPING THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE
Since those whirlwind days in early 2009, McGain has given more back to the game he loves than most.
A year on from the Proteas’ merciless onslaught, his four second-innings wickets led Victoria to a resounding Sheffield Shield final win.
After being moved on in 2010 to make room for talented youngster Jon Holland, McGain returned to old Premier Cricket side Prahran, and in recent years has featured for junior club Mornington.
Most recently, he has been named to Cricket Victoria’s board, at a crucial time for the domestic game.
Throughout, son Liam has grown into a talented young cricketer of his own – and helped McGain keep his cricket journey in perspective.
“I would have loved him to experience it because I didn’t know if it was going to happen again,” McGain told foxsports.com.au of his Test debut, with Liam a little too young to grasp its significance.
“When I got back, I’m packing the bag and he’s excited to see me and all that.
“He’s sort of like, oh, that’s a hat. The baggy green!
“It gave me an enormous perspective in life and it helped me perform really well in my cricket because I had a broader perspective than just cricket is absolutely everything.
“I had other responsibilities, had other considerations. It helped me enormously to be a better cricketer by having that.”
