Nambucca Boy

And all of those thousand thoughts

That could be in the back of your mind

Looking at the dressing room door

Am I good enough to don these whites?

It’s the SCG

But the nerves are bilingual

Often settled by a single

Just hit the damn ball

Yeah the game is that simple

Jitter the fear of a cheap dismissal

On the walls hung the accolades

The names that have been engraved

The Bradmans, the Benauds, the giants of the game

That rose up like a fig tree out of Saturdays

The kid was seeing them like basketballs

The summer that he had been recalled

Feet moving and a better balance on the shorter ball

Scoring freely and barely getting caught at all

He was brought up Nambucca River way

Town of Macksville young kid begins to play

The way he wields the willow outside off

No matter what was throw at him well it would bounce right off

Runs came in fifties and tons

Ever since he was young

Save your legs, Phil, it’s four more runs

Baggy cap was not a match for the Australian sun

Next to noses got burnt but the emblem on the front

And the write up in the local paper

But this time not in the back of the sports pages

A local lad had cracked the Shield side

A couple of years after the Ashes of ‘05

Raised his bat that much that he got his baggy green

Flying across the Indian Ocean with the Australian team

Number 1 ranked opposition, Dale Steyn at the peak of his powers

Debuting against him in a nerve wracking hour

He failed at first, caught by the keeper

But it was the second innings of the match that he featured

Second Test of the series a century in both innings

The youngest to do it at twenty, no longer a secret

And it had all gone to plan

But his destiny was never that simple

Cause simple is rare

A temporary member in and out of the Test

But soon enough a permanent threat

But there, they’re in the middle that November night

Let the groundsman turn on the lights

Radio reports saying the batsmen died

So let the groundsman turn on the lights

And all of these thousand thoughts

That would be in the back of their minds

There walking out the dressing room door

Solemnly and side by side

So let the groundsman turn on the lights

Grown men crying at traffic lights

And every day there were bats outside

So let the groundsman turn on the lights