'Like the wind': The making – and breaking – of Mark Cameron

Let's open at the final chapter. At a Gabba so grey that Mark Cameron jokes he was releasing the ball from above the clouds.

It is the last day of October, 2010.

Cameron, the Blues tearaway who good judges say could be anything if only he can stay on the park, is about to be something.

The 29-year-old hasn't featured in a first-class game since February 2009. Three weeks ago, he got through nine overs in a one-day match, marking his competitive return.

Now here he is, donning the whites.

"I wasn't even supposed to be playing," Cameron tells cricket.com.au almost 15 years later. "The plan was to play white-ball cricket until Christmas. They were trying to look after me, to come back through slowly.

"But Stuart Clark had a kid, and that left a spot. I remember having a conversation with (then NSW coach) Matthew Mott. He was like, 'What do you think? It's not the plan'.

"I said, 'You're kidding? I'm playing'."

It is late on day one. Cameron holds a shiny red Kookaburra in his hand. The Blues have 262 on the board.

"I remember thinking: that's so many," he smiles. "I was watching (the ball) move as much as it did, and I just felt that Queensland were bowling too wide."

The past 21 months have tested Cameron in new and profound ways. But he feels like he has finally reached the other side. That, amid all the rehabilitation and the soul-searching and the therapy, he has found a simple answer to the complex questions he was asking.

"I was putting too much pressure on myself," he says. "That's what the whole thing was about: how do you learn to let go, and just play?"

Now he stands at the top of his mark at the Stanley Street End. And it is all he has to do: run in, and let go.

"Well, he bowled like the absolute wind," recalls Chris Lynn, who was batting at four for Queensland in that match. "I was not out overnight, and I remember coming out the next day thinking: Jeez, he's really bowling gas."

Trent Copeland, who was bowling at the other end, remembers similarly.

"I can confirm," he says, "that he was bowling a million k's per hour."

Cameron has already accounted for both Bulls openers when play resumes on day two. A third wicket is moments away.

"First ball of the day, I've nicked it to first slip," Lynn says. "And that was the start of our downslide."

Queensland are routed for 75. Cameron has taken 6-22 and is barely warmed up. Blues skipper Nathan Hauritz sends his opponents straight back in, and they're 2-16 at lunch. Lee Carseldine falls twice in a session. It is utter carnage at the Gabba.

After the interval, the hosts again fall like ninepins – all out for 96 – and the match is over before tea on day two.

Cameron has bowled with extreme pace and used his outswinger to devastating effect. In 20 overs, he has match figures of 11-52 – still the third-cheapest haul of 11-plus wickets in Shield history.

"That's as good as I've faced in Shield cricket for a while," Queensland captain James Hopes tells reporters after play. "He got the perfect conditions, but he used them perfectly.

"I think people forget that a couple of years ago he was knocking on the door of Australian selection. If his name's not thrust forward again after doing that…"

But this is the final chapter, remember?

* * *

Beginnings.

Cameron's first-class debut, in 2003, just so happened to be in his hometown of Newcastle. It also happened to be a Shield classic.

For the late January fixture, New South Wales and Western Australia each fielded nine internationals (past, present or future), ranging in age from the 37-year-old Waugh twins to 19-year-old Shaun Marsh.

A see-sawing battle ensued across the first three days, before Blues trio Mark Waugh, Michael Clarke and Brad Haddin put the foot down on the final morning to set WA a target of 299 from 72 overs.

Justin Langer's side went for it, and were cruising at 4-272 before they fell apart at the death, losing 6-24 to surrender the contest by two runs with four balls remaining.

Cameron, 21, was the last man picked, and probably most adjacent to any real action; he didn't take a wicket, and bowled the fewest overs of any of the nine front-liners in the match.

"I wasn't ready," he says, thinking back. "I just wasn't at that level."

But he was one of the more intriguing side stories in the lead-in.

A couple of years earlier, Cameron, having played for both NSW Country and Australia Country, made his way south from Newcastle to test himself in Sydney.

"I'd missed out on all of the state (pathways) stuff – the 17s, 19s, I was injured," he says. "I got injured a lot."

While playing for Manly, Cameron again broke down with stress fractures.

"Knowing what I know now about low back pain and stress fractures and the like, if it was managed a bit differently, if we had more information – which we didn't – it might have been a little bit different," he says.

"I'd get sore, have a massage, bowl again. Then you'd be sore for a bit, have another massage, bowl again."

After his first bout of rehab, Cameron engaged in some remedial technical work at Manly with (former NSW academy) coach David Patterson, who helped transform him from a promising young quick into a sudden force on the Sydney grade scene.

For days on end at Manly's Graham Reserve he toiled hard, building up his body and rebuilding his action.

"He was quick, raw and all over the place," laughs Patterson, who also coached him with NSW Colts. "But he was a rough diamond. With a bit of polishing, we thought he could be something pretty good.

"And his work ethic was brilliant."

The dividends paid quickly. In the first half of the 2002-03 season, armed with a helpful, seam-proud Kookaburra ball and some friendly home decks at Manly Oval, Cameron collected almost a half-century of wickets.

"I still remember having a conversation with 'Stumper' (Steve Rixon), who was New South Wales coach," he says. "It was me and a couple of other quicks that had done OK in grade cricket. He said, 'There's positions after Christmas (when) the Australian team goes away'.

"He looked me in the eye and said, 'Forty-nine wickets before Christmas is really, really impressive'. I didn't actually realise what he was saying: he was basically telling me, 'Mate, you're going to play'."

Cameron was working as a store manager at Mike Pawley Sports on Sydney's Northern Beaches when he received a phone call from Cricket NSW telling him to jump in his car and head to Newcastle.

A day later, he was strolling along Newcastle Beach beside Steve Waugh, whom he had just met. Waugh was less than three weeks removed from his legendary last-ball Ashes hundred at the SCG. Cameron was a week short of his 22nd birthday.

Across the four days that followed he took an innocuous 0-87 from 27 overs, but at least one player noted his potential.

"I do remember 'Scud' (Cameron) bowling in that game, and thinking: This bloke's got something," says Matt Nicholson, who was with WA at the time but later moved to NSW and became a mentor of Cameron's.

"I was always a keen watcher of the other fast bowlers. He was quick. Bowled outswingers. Skiddy. Strong at the crease. And he was just no-nonsense."

Six weeks later, Cameron flew to Brisbane for 24 hours to join the Blues for the opening day of that year's Shield final.

"Rumour mill was that Steve Waugh had said, 'Bring the next young bloke up – let him see what it's all about'," he says. "But it was rainy, and I don't remember much else about it (laughs)."

And for four years, that was that.

Cameron, by his own assessment, was a young man who lived cricket ("I'm not a guy that fluffs about," he says, "I either do something as much as I can, or I don't do it at all") but after that momentary foray into the elite level, he tried to be philosophical.

"I remember having a beer with 'Phelpsy' (NSW teammate Matthew Phelps) and I said, 'Look, I've played a game – if that's all it is, then that's all it is'," he says.

"He was like, 'That'll change'."

* * *

Cameron still didn't have a bowling average when he took the ball in the second innings of his second first-class match against WA in Perth, in February 2007.

He was 26 by then, and far from wallowing over a cricket career that might have passed him by, he had instead gathered some life experience, marrying his childhood sweetheart Katie and working his way through an Applied Science, Exercise Physiology course at the University of Sydney.

None of which meant he didn't want that first wicket really badly.

"I remember thinking that something had to give," smiles Cameron, who had taken 0-21 from just two overs in the first innings. "Like, at some point I've actually got to do well.

"Then I got (WA No.3) Dave Bandy out and I felt very, very relieved. And it was probably the first time that I tried something – I came a little bit wider, and that worked.

"And then once I had some confidence, it was nice."

Cameron took three of the final five wickets to fall and ended the Blues' win emphatically, breaking a stump in knocking over WA tailender Ben Edmondson.

It capped off a fine performance of 4-37 and offered just a hint of his potential.

"I think it took me a little while," he says, "to get over that overwhelming feeling of playing for your state."

Two games in and an intense Cameron was holding on tightly to the emotional highs and lows of his fledgling career. He bagged his first five-wicket haul a month later in Hobart but has vivid memories instead of feeding Michael Di Venuto's favoured pull shot amid a contest in which NSW trailed throughout.

"There was that little moment where you think, we can win this, and then my first ball (of the final innings), Di Venuto pulls me (for four) over midwicket," he says.

"At the end of that game, I remember sitting in the changerooms thinking that I'd cost the team the game. I was bitterly disappointed with myself."

But the wickets were coming. During his four years out of the game, Cameron had worked hard. First, he went back to Patterson to hone the technical elements of his game.

"At the time, he wasn't strong enough to hold his back-foot landing position," Patterson says. "And he had speed, but his technique couldn't hold together – the back-foot landing issue meant he'd fall away, which created back issues, and it also meant he lost his wrist (position).

"So we made a couple of technical changes, mainly with his front arm, and then he worked really hard in the gym as well, and became really powerful."

Cameron set about strengthening his body to withstand the rigours of fast bowling. He delved deep into the rapidly developing world of sports science, partly for his studies and partly through a genuine interest.

"He would have been the strongest player in the gym by far in terms of his squat numbers, and his strength around the areas that you need to be safe as a fast bowler," Nicholson says.

"He knew he had the athletic ability to have severe impact on games, so he really left no stone unturned."

Cameron had a willing ally in strength and conditioning coach Stuart Karppinen, who had become NSW's first full-time employee in that position (he credits Karppinen with adding "probably around 10kph to my pace"). It was a time when research and information in that area of the game was beginning to be mined for data with an eye to better understanding players' – and particularly fast bowlers' – workloads and injuries.

Karppinen utilised Cameron's nous and enthusiasm for data collection and the pair began playing catch-up with other sports, leaning into the expertise of their neighbours, the Sydney Swans, as they finessed a rudimentary database using an evidence-based approach.

"I had all these ideas around research in terms of workloads, and player monitoring more broadly," Karppinen tells cricket.com.au. "Mark helped me with the databases and the monitoring systems that we started to put in place. He was very, very clever with all of that."

Together the pair built a page for each player in the NSW system and packaged it up, effectively creating a basic early version of the Athlete Management System that Cricket Australia began using a few years later, and still use today.

"I am actually pretty proud of that," says Cameron, who went on to start a small company called Elite Monitoring, which he worked on for several years. "That was just me sitting in my spare room in Narrabeen, punching out some VBA code in Excel.

"I guess being injured gives you too much time."

* * *

At times, injury wasn't the only thing keeping Cameron at arm's length from the action.

Through the duration of his career, the NSW production line of fast-bowling talent was the envy of every state. Often, Cameron had to hope that his latest injury comeback, or a promising run of form, didn't coincide with the return from national duties of the likes of Brett Lee, Stuart Clark, Doug Bollinger or Nathan Bracken.

In consecutive years (2007 and 2008), it was precisely that scenario that cost him a place in Shield finals. In between, at the front-end of the 2007-08 summer, a similar scenario unfolded. Cameron had arrived in Perth for the Blues' opening round of one-day and Shield matches against WA. He was fit, strong and ready to unleash.

Yet he was also tense. Though he was, in a way, almost five years into his career, the one-dayer that preceded the Shield match was in fact his List A debut.

"Look, if there was one criticism I had of Mark, it was that he was so determined, so focused and so invested in what he was doing that he sometimes blocked himself a little bit," Nicholson says.

"If he could just let all the demons of the past go…"

After NSW were asked to bowl first, Cameron had 0-20 after 2.3 overs. It was then that he recalled some sage advice that Nicholson, who was in the last summer of a wonderful career, had offered in the hours leading into the match.

"I was definitely prone to getting nervous," Cameron says. "He said to me: 'You've done all the work. You're like a sniper. You're in the right position. You're laying down, you're still, you've got the target – all you've got to do is pull the trigger'.

"And it was at that point in my first spell that I remember thinking: I've actually got to pull the trigger here. You can't just keep bowling medium pace.

"I ran in and really let one go for the first time. It swung and knocked over Justin Langer, and I was like: Oh, this is how I've got to play.

"I had to play with a bit less fear. I had to actually let go."

Those 10 overs – and the invaluable lesson – proved the perfect warm-up for the Shield match. Karppinen had travelled with the Blues that week and recalls being excited about what his fit-again quick might unleash on a spicy WACA Ground deck.

"I'd seen at training that he'd been getting better and better each week," he says. "Just the consistency of what he was able to produce in terms of the combination of pace and movement."

Cameron had the one-day match to lean on for confidence but he also had the experience of bowling his side to victory at the WACA Ground eight months earlier. In the build-up, the bowling group again discussed keeping the ball fuller and straighter on the famously bouncy Perth pitch, in the hope that it might also offer some swing.

"And it swung," he grins. "I got an early wicket, and then I ran through their top order."

In reply to the Blues' 268, WA fell to 6-38, and were all out for 99. Cameron was the destroyer, taking 5-33 and adding the scalps of Langer, Chris Rogers, Adam Voges, Luke Pomersbach and Luke Ronchi to his growing collection.

It was just his fourth first-class match but his second-straight five-wicket haul. He was averaging 25 and striking at 38. On the scorecard at least, there would be even better days to come, but Cameron thinks this might have been the peak of his powers.

"I feel like that was almost as good as I was," he says. "Fast 'outies' (outswingers), roughly knew where they were going, I was 26, physically in really good nick."

It is a standout memory for Nicholson, too.

"On days like that, when he did unleash the pace and the swing that he was known for, it was pretty special to watch," he says. "They had a strong batting line-up and he was making very good players look silly, just with sustained pace and movement.

"I remember I was fielding in the gully … and the way he bowled – 145-150kph outswingers – that was as good as anybody can bowl, really."

Nine days after that Shield match in Perth, NSW began another, this time against Queensland in Sydney. Cameron, in the form of his life, was dropped to make way for the returns of Clark, Lee and Bracken.

"The hardest thing is there are guys who've just played a fantastic game in Perth, virtually won us the game, who are a big chance of missing out through no fault of their own," coach Matthew Mott said at the time.

"It does create a little bit of an issue. We've addressed it at length and said we really need to embrace it; it's just part of playing for NSW."

Cameron found himself the unlucky man out across the next five Shield matches (then missing a sixth with a side strain). Instead he made another six white-ball appearances, including his T20 debut.

It was around this time that Western Australia – who had suffered at his hands the most of any state to that point – began showing interest in securing his services. Simultaneously, Cameron was negotiating a longer-term deal with the Blues.

"I wanted to play for New South Wales," he says. "I felt loyal to the joint."

And so he set about channelling his frustrations in Sydney grade cricket. That February, during one particularly quick spell for Sydney Uni against his former Manly side, he broke his old pace partner Shane Cleary's jaw – reportedly in six places – with a brute of a short ball.

"He was too fast for club cricket," recalls his former NSW teammate Greg Mail. "Just scary quick."

It was enough to make state selectors take action. A week later, Cameron delivered the goods in his maiden appearance at the SCG, taking 10 wickets against Victoria, including the scalps of Cameron White, Matthew Wade, Brad Hodge and David Hussey.

Twelve more wickets came his way in his next two Shield matches as the Blues stormed into the 2008 final. Nicholson remembers Cameron "cutting a swathe through every state he came up against" to the tune of 27 wickets in four matches at 17.51. He was striking every 35.59 deliveries.

Then the Blues' Australian contingent returned ahead of the decider. Cameron, despite having just taken a 10-fer against their opponents Victoria, again found himself a victim of circumstance, as Lee, Clark and Bracken were chosen ahead of him.

That summer his Blues teammate Dominic Thornely publicly labelled Cameron a "future Australian player", and the former NSW pathways coach Patterson has no hesitation that was the case.

"He definitely could've played for Australia," he says. "I know he was on the radar, and he was good enough to play international cricket – there's no doubt about that."

And it might well have been closer on the horizon than anyone realised. With a two-Test Caribbean tour looming that autumn, national selectors were looking for a fourth quick for the 15-man squad alongside Lee, Clark and Mitchell Johnson.

"And they were scouting how fit I was, is my understanding," Cameron says.

There was however, a problem. For the back half of the season Cameron had been putting up with considerable pain in the form of a stress fracture in his left fibula.

"I was icing it as I slept," he recalls. "But it was really painful. It would throb … and I remember thinking: I'm not sure how long I can deal with this. But I got through the year."

NSW physio Pat Farhart took Cameron to a specialist, suspecting compartment syndrome in his shin. A brief test was required for confirmation, but the specialist opted not to do it, insisting it wasn't the issue. Consequently, Cameron underwent ankle surgery, which didn't fix the problem.

"That really annoyed me, that I had to have an operation then," he says. "I found out later I did have compartment syndrome … I had surgery at the end of the next (season), and I never had the problem again."

With Cameron laid up, selectors added Queenslander Ashley Noffke to their touring party.

"I felt like I was close," he says now. "Maybe not to playing, but I felt like I was close-ish to the (Test) squad at that point."

* * *

Another game. Another time.

Cameron is flat on his back in the home dressing room of Newcastle's No.1 Sportsground, working his way through a familiar pain.

He is now six years – but just 11 first-class matches – into a career which, in this very moment, has come full circle.

Two days after his 28th birthday, the back spasms have seized him. Forced him from the field and onto the cold, hard concrete floor.

"I couldn't touch my knees," Cameron says. "But it was like, 'I gotta get back out there'."

It has been a rough summer. After touring India with Australia A for a one-day tournament in September, Cameron is plagued by his compartment syndrome issue, and manages just four wickets in three matches before Christmas. Yet through that time, there is another furious flash of brilliance: in a Second XI match at Bankstown, playing alongside teenagers Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood, Cameron is the headline act, taking 6-12 from 10 overs to rout Tasmania for 41.

In January, he is part of the Blues' title-winning Big Bash campaign, and the month draws to its close, he returns to Newcastle with the Shield squad for the first time since his debut.

Which is where we find him, on the cold hard concrete floor of the dressing room. It is tea on day four of a match NSW must win to stay in the hunt for the 2009 Shield final. At 5-135, Tasmania are too far away from their target of 351 to win, and so Tim Paine and Luke Butterworth are digging in for the draw.

The Blues brains trust talks with Cameron. They know one good burst from the tearaway can settle the contest. And so they load him up on painkillers and send him back into the fray.

"That was good short-term, but maybe it had some long-term effects," he says. "Certainly it had some long-term mental effects on me."

Cameron removes Paine soon after the resumption. Two more wickets fall. Then he returns to the attack, and accounts for Butterworth as well. Eight balls later, he knocks over Gerard Denton, and the Blues have won.

In the newspaper the next day, the quick's match-winning performance will be labelled "lion-hearted", as his captain, Simon Katich, sings his praises: "I didn't think he was probably going to bowl again … he probably won't be able to move for the next two months, but it was a great effort from him."

An hour or two after play, with the venue now all but empty, Cameron walks unsteadily to his car beside his coach, Matthew Mott.

"I couldn't think straight – they'd just flooded me with painkillers," he says. "All legitimate, and fine, but it was … yeah.

"'Motty' said to me, 'Can you drive?' And I said, 'I don't think so'.

"I remember walking back into the hotel room. It was about seven o'clock, and I just thought: I need to go to sleep. And I went to bed."

Cameron sleeps like the dead. When he wakes, he is soon confronted with a new reality: it will be 21 months before he plays another game of cricket.

* * *

Endings.

Cameron never did play a Shield final. Nor did he ever get a chance in the Indian Premier League with Kolkata Knight Riders, with whom he had signed in the lead-up to that Shield match in Newcastle. When he thinks back to that day, the whole episode rests uneasily with him.

"Look, at the time, I was proud of myself because I felt like, with how many injuries I'd had, the perception was that I was a bit soft," he says. "So I was happy that I pushed through and did something for the team.

"But at the same time, (it's) not the fondest memory; looking back on it, it was the start of a pretty long low point of my career at a time when things were going my way."

What followed was a lengthy period of introspection. Through much of 2009 and 2010, as his back continued to let him down, Cameron weighed up pulling the pin on his cricket career altogether.

"There's only so many times you can keep doing the same thing," he says. "By that stage I was pretty disciplined in terms of rehab; I got told what to do, and I did it as well as I possibly could.

"I was the guy who could do all the exercises in the gym, but I couldn't bowl."

The sentiment is eerily similar to that described by another young Blues quick, whose first-class career began the summer that Cameron's finished.

"I felt like I was literally a workload number – a diary entry for a full year," Pat Cummins told cricket.com.au back in 2021 about his yearslong lay-off with back issues. "Then at the end of (2013) I got injured and I had no cricket to show for it. That was when I felt furthest away from getting back."

Nicholson, who was a bowling coach with Cricket NSW during that time and oversaw both Cameron and Cummins, sees it like this. 

"'Scud' (Cameron) just didn't get identified in the same way that Pat Cummins did," he says. "If he had, he may have followed a similar route, and we may have seen that return on investment in his mid-to-late 20s."

Cameron understands one aspect of the comparison, but feels the other draws a long bow.

"I think Pat's (injuries) mirrored mine very closely right at the start," he says. "But he was much better than me, let's be frank, and (because of that) everyone wanted to pick him all the time. It took a little while for people to work out that he was a kid who hadn't really played much, and so he needed to come back really slowly.

"I remember having a conversation with him. I was like, 'Mate, just come back really slow – you've got more time than you think'.

"But I don't know. Looking back on it, had I not played through 'stressies' (stress fractures) when I was a really young kid, does that make a difference? Yes, it does. That weakens the area a bit, means you can deal with less force.

"And I think that combined with the way that I bowled – I just bowled as fast as I could – and my action was such that I had quite a lot of force through my front leg, and because I was pretty locked out with my front leg, most of that force went straight into my lower back."

Like Cummins though, Cameron was relentlessly driven. The physical pain and mental torment he endured through that lengthy stretch on the sidelines made his 2010-11 comeback at the Gabba – and the spectacular 11-52 it included – that much sweeter.

It was, emotionally, a high point; a moment where all the work – physical and mental – was put into beautiful practice.

"It was really simple for me," he says. "It was just about smiling, and realising that there was nowhere else in the world I'd rather be than on a cricket field.

"I honestly cannot believe it took me until I was almost 30 to learn that lesson."

As James Hopes predicted, it also returned Cameron to the radar of the national selectors. Two weeks after that Shield haul, he was playing a four-day match for Australia A against England, hitting 148kph, claiming the wickets of Andrew Strauss and Jonathan Trott, and being widely lauded as his side's best-performed quick.

During the match, Ian Healy led a chorus of prominent voices calling for his Ashes inclusion. Cameron played it down at the time, but once again, he was close.

After that game, however, he made his way to Perth for a Shield match, where he was handed another harsh dose of reality.

"I was 12th man for that game," he says. "I remember sitting there with 'Rimmo' (Nathan Rimmington from WA) and we were both bitching about how we should've been picked (laughs)."

As it happened, his Blues teammate, Doug Bollinger, was the one called into the Test squad, and Cameron entered the second half of the Shield match. He finished with 3-33 from 17.2 overs, and again took the winning wicket.

The Blues' next match – a week later in Sydney – was the last of Cameron's career. Not long after, he broke down once again. On the eve of his 30th birthday, and with the inevitable rise of Starc, Hazlewood and Cummins, he knew change was in the air. In a sense, it had been coming for years.

"I remember David Patterson taking me to Narrabeen Sports Academy a few years earlier, to see the (NSW) 17s coming through," he says. "He pointed to this 15-year-old kid from Tamworth and said, 'That's Josh Hazlewood – he's gonna take your job one day' (laughs)."

For Cameron, there was one more twist in this final chapter of his cricketing tale. At the end of that summer, he received a phone call from then WA coach Mickey Arthur. It wasn't a complete surprise – Arthur liked what he saw in the explosive quick, and had been circling for a while – but his pitch was unique.

"He said to me, 'I've got this plan – you play at the WACA, and you play at the Gabba, and that's it'," Cameron recalls. "I just kind of giggled, and said, 'That sounds amazing – let's do that'."

Cameron was upfront about his back injury, but Arthur was unperturbed, and the deal was soon complete.

"At the same time, I'd gotten the tap on the shoulder from 'Motty'," he recalls. "He said, 'Mate, we just don't think you're going to come back'.

"And he ended up being right – I got as far as November at the WACA, and I didn't play, and I hurt myself again. That was it, I was done.

"I was pretty miserable at that point. I felt like I'd done everything in my power, and I was just sick of trying."

The numbers tell a tale of their own. Sixteen first-class matches spread across eight years. Two 10-wicket hauls. A Shield average of 23.65, and a sizzling strike-rate of 43.87 – until recently pipped by WA's Lance Morris, the best in the competition for more than 60 years (min 50 wickets).

Cameron and his wife Kate saw out that summer in Perth, then packed up and moved home to Newcastle. Fourteen years later, they happily remain in their hometown, with their daughters Emily and Mia.

"Mia hates cricket, which is great," he laughs. "And Emily loves cricket, which is also great.

"I coach (her with) the mighty Merewether Sabres – they're an all-girls team, and it's probably the most fun coaching I've ever done, which is really cool. They're an awesome team."

Cameron, now 44, helps out at times with the NSW Academy, while he also occupied a number of roles with Cricket NSW for six years and now works as a project developer with Squadron Energy.

The girls at Merewether though, have little idea of their coach's cricketing travails.

"Every now and then they'll say something silly, or someone will put something on the WhatsApp group," he grins. "But yeah, I think they think I'm just a cranky old bloke (laughs)."

His contemporaries though, know better. They witnessed it.

"I'm just happy for him that he had a couple of little windows," says Nicholson, "where he gave everyone a glimpse of how good he could be."