Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

were going off to play in England. When it came to making a decision between the two, I chose hockey.’ It was that choice that effectively ended his cricket career. Not only was 1980 another Olympic year but the Champions Trophy, introduced in 1978, now became an annual event, taking him to Karachi in early January, where Australia won the bronze medal behind Pakistan and West Germany. Although his priority was clear, he had enough pride to regret he ‘never got any momentum’ that might have given him more centuries in first-class cricket: ‘I suppose when I look at it that was the frustration and then I finished playing when I was 27: I could have been playing another five or ten years.’ There was also a hint of disappointment that he was always regarded as a slow, defensive batsman. He knew he had the capacity to play in a more aggressive way. He had hit sixes on most club grounds in Perth and even scored the fastest fifty in grade cricket in 1976 – in going from 100 to 150 in 27 minutes – against Mount Lawley. But his fluctuating involvement made him unsure whether he could have batted in the same way in first-class cricket. He could have had no similar uncertainties about his hockey. Thirty-three of his peers would eventually rate him, by a large margin, the greatest Australian player of the twentieth century. The Oxford Companion to Australian Sport enthused: The hallmark of his play was outstanding stick work and a mastery of individual skills: the body swerve, the dribble, the feint, and the ability to beat opponents on either side of his body. On field, the short, sturdily built Charlesworth was noted for his determination, aggression, and high work rate. Ric himself had no doubt his success was based on hard work. In a statement that was both an implicit commentary on what he would demand as a coach and an explanation of how his cricket had suffered from lack of similar intensive preparation, he wrote in 2001: I know there were many more gifted players than me, yet I believe there were few who prepared and practised as assiduously in every part of their game. Sometimes, just sometimes, I surprised myself with what I could do. There were moments of sheer exhilaration but they occurred as often at practice as in matches. In many ways they were the drug to which the perfectionist became addicted and by practising the 46 1976-1981