The handshake was noticeably strong, which was unsurprising given that his England team-mates used to call Graeme Hick “Arnie” — after Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Hick was always fitter and stronger than your average cricketer. He looks no different these days at the age of 51. Indeed, he appears as though he could still be playing rather than coaching the Australia batsmen.
Imagine him in the Indian Premier League auction last weekend. He played some T20 at the end of his career, but not in his prime.
Hick scored 41,112 first-class runs at 52.23 with 136 centuries
“I wish I’d had a chance of playing a few years of IPL,” he says with a laugh. “It would have been fun.”
It is the only time in the course of our interview that, unprompted, Hick mentions his career. It is not that he doesn’t want to talk about it — 41,112 first-class runs at 52.23 with 136 centuries (not forgetting 40 List A hundreds) should always be worth talking about, even for such a modest and unassuming man as Hick — but rather that he is tired of answering the same question: why did he not crack Test cricket in the same way?
Just six hundreds in 65 Tests at an average of 31.32 is not exactly the same level of butchery that county attacks suffered year after year.
“I don’t find it difficult talking about it, it is just that I have answered the question so many times,” he says in wholly good humour. “I sometimes feel that the article is written before the question is asked. I just find it boring as to why people want to keep talking about it. It’s history. It’s 20 years ago.”
Indeed it is. Its only relevance now is that he thinks it helps him in his role as the Australia batting coach.
“In a way my real mixed experiences have helped me in some of the advice I am able to pass on because I have been through quite a bit, good and bad,” he says.
The greatest players do not make the greatest coaches and all that. Indeed there was a delicious match-up in the recent Ashes when Hick and Mark Ramprakash, two of England’s greatest unfulfilled talents on the Test stage, were the opposing batting coaches.
“I did have a chuckle at that,” Hick says. “But it was nice to see him. We had a catch-up. I like Ramps. It was interesting to see him working. You are often close to each other in the nets.
“In these roles you have to draw on your experiences, whether it was what you have done or what you see other people do or say. You put it in your toolbox and say, ‘That’s interesting, I’ll use that.’ ”
For the reason why Hick, a Zimbabwean who made England his home for so long, has ended up in Australia, we have to look to the influence of his children, Lauren and Jordan. And the XXXX Gold Beach Cricket series around the time of his retirement from first-class cricket in 2008.
Hick’s children played a big part in his decision to move to Australia
“I was playing beach cricket over here and in the second year my family came out,” he explains. “We brought the kids — they were 12 and 9 then — and after about ten days living on a XXXX tab the kids turned round to us at dinner one night and said, ‘Why do we live in England?’ And that was it. That was literally how it started. It hadn’t crossed our minds before that.
“We packed and said, ‘We’ll give it a go, see if I can find a job, and see how it works.’ ”
Off they went to Queensland but Hick did not travel specifically to coach. “I had done very, very little coaching back in England,” he says. “I did my level-four coaching award. If you had asked me when I was playing whether I would have ended up coaching, I would have said no.
“I didn’t really think about what plan B was going to be once I finished. But when I came to Australia I knew I had to use cricket as a way to get into work really. I didn’t know much else.”
So what happened?
“By pure chance I bumped into someone I had met many moons before, playing in a benefit game, and he was coaching one of the Brisbane grade sides and he said, ‘Come and give me a hand.’ I did. And that was about six or eight months after we had arrived here.”
The club was at Dauth Park in Beenleigh, Brisbane. Hick was clearly happy to start right at the bottom of the ladder. “Once I got into it here and the more I did it, the more I enjoyed it,” he says. “I was very fortunate where I started off in a grade side, and then I got a job under Troy Cooley at the national cricket academy in Brisbane.”
At first that job was only three sessions a week depending on the availability of Stuart Law, the high-performance coach, but then in 2013 a turn of events higher up the chain gave Hick his first real break in coaching.
Mickey Arthur was sacked as Australia coach. Darren Lehmann, then the Queensland coach, took his place and Law took Lehmann’s position. Hick took Law’s job as high-performance coach. He was on his way.
Hick played 65 Test matches and 120 ODIs for England
“With the likes of Greg Chappell and Troy Cooley I had some good people around me,” he says. “They gave me a lot of advice. They were great. It really opened my eyes. When you start coaching, you think, ‘This is what you’ve got to do,’ but it was suddenly a case of, ‘No, no, there are plenty of ways to do it.’ ”
Hick clearly learnt quickly. By 2016 he was installed in his present post after Michael Di Venuto’s decision to move to Surrey as their head coach. Going back to his career, I ask what Hick has taken from it into his coaching now.
“The main thing I draw from my playing career is, ‘Be careful what you say and don’t say too much.’ If you feel things aren’t going well, and you are hearing things from all sorts of directions, you start thinking, ‘I’ll do this to please that guy,’ ” he says. “If I look back with the benefit of hindsight I would like to have stayed firmer to what worked for me and the way I played.
“At this level — at any level really — the most important thing is the relationship. It is about having a bit of respect, earning the player’s respect and try to say less if you can. A player can get so muddled so easily.”
It is such sound advice for any coach. It is naturally in Hick’s character to do that but it still requires sound judgment to speak only at the right time. “I draw on a lot of things that I experienced but I don’t deliver them as in, ‘This is what happened to me. This is what I did,’ ” he says. “I am more like, ‘Leave the guy alone, give him some space.’
“I think sometimes the last thing a batter wants when he gets out playing a crap shot is to look for the coach out of the corner of his eye and think, ‘Ah, here comes the coach.’ At this level the guys know if they mess up or if they play a false shot. I feel they can digest it themselves and then maybe you can ask a question later in the day or even the next day.”
Hick had a distinctive style at the crease, with bat raised early. Does he preach that as a coach? “I have seen quite a few coaches try to coach people to play how they played,” he says. “I know when I started coaching I had an idea of what I thought a batsman should look like and I realised that, especially at this level, they are so gifted and talented that they do things differently.”
Hick describes Smith as a “little bit unorthodox” but adds that he “knows what he is doing”
Which brings us neatly to Steve Smith. For all the talk about his quirky technique, isn’t he in a good position when the ball is bowled? Solid base, head still, weight forward?
“He is a little bit unorthodox and very different but at the point of release his head is very still,” Hick says. “And he has a great eye and a great pair of hands. That compensates for not getting into the position of your old traditional player with top hand and bat next to pad. He’s someone you work with and you realise there are different ways to do the job.”
What is Smith like to work with, then? Tales of practice to excess are legion. “He just hits balls, he knows what he is doing,” Hick says. “He knows when he is hitting them well. He fiddles with his hands a little bit and he will suddenly say, ‘My hands are right,’ and a couple more and he might be done. Other days he wants plenty. I’d say he still hits more than anyone else.”
Hick would never take credit for Smith’s marvellous recent Ashes return — Smith mostly turns to Trent Woodhill, his former coach at the Sutherland club in Sydney — but he nonetheless enjoyed his success.
“It’s great to be able to sit in this position and watch him do so well,” Hick says. “He just adapts. That is what he does better than anyone else. He adapts to what is out there in front of him.”
Which England did not do in the Ashes. “Our bowlers made it really hard work for your batters,” he says. “The hundreds they got they had to work really hard for.”
The “your” is slightly shocking (I’m sure I played in a Test with Hick for England), but understandable. He is just doing his job. So will he be an Australian for good now? Is there any chance of a return to England, or even to Zimbabwe, where his parents, both in their eighties, and his sister and her family still live? He was linked with the Worcestershire job when Steve Rhodes departed last month.
“I never heard from them,” he says. “It would have been a tough decision but at this stage I don’t think I would have taken it. I’ve got this role until early 2020. I am really enjoying it. Australia from now on in will always be my home. We are living on the Gold Coast. The family love it. It’s just a lovely place to be. If I go back to England it will be for work and then I will come back.”
Hick loves Australia, and it appears to like him. You do wonder how that career might have panned out had he been Australian all along.
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