When the late Dean Jones marked his guard with that exaggerated scrape of his spikes, everyone else seemed to recede into the role of walk-on extras.
Oscillating between genius, belligerence, and chaos, sometimes within the space of a few balls, you could not take your eyes off “Deano”. Even when he supposedly shunned the spotlight 30 summers ago, Jones couldn’t help being the story.
In 1994, Jones retired from international cricket in a huff. He couldn’t find a way back into the Test team after 18 months, and now he’d been dropped from the ODI team. Yet just weeks after that emotion-charged decision, rumours swirled of a second Australian team to be added to the World Series Cup the next summer. Jones hedged his bets when talking to The Sunday Age’s Linda Pearce.
“If there’s a B team going ahead this year, which I’ve heard is 50-50 at the moment, and if I was captain, I’d play,” Jones said.
Victorian teammate Damien Fleming recalls that once an Australia A side was announced “he was itching to get back in.” So began a seven-month saga that resembled an awkward teenage romance rather than professional sport.
Jones said he was available if the selectors wanted him. The ACB said he was a retired player. Jones responded by saying he would only reconsider his decision if the selectors guaranteed a role because he’d had a “gutful” of having “egg on his face”.
With typical bravado he wrote in his newspaper column that the selectors “have my phone number.” Officially though, Jones was still retired to the quiet life of state cricket. Yet Jones never did sedate.
Pearce, who covered the Victorian team in the era remembers the larger-than-life persona.
“He had that swagger and charisma,” she says. “He wasn’t afraid to chip people, and he had an ego, but I found him a reasonable person to deal with. There was just a different environment in the team when he swanned back in, because state cricket didn’t always have that.”
Jones also brought a mountain of runs. In the opening month of the season there was a century and a 76 in one-day cricket, and 94, 103 not out, 126 and 76 in Sheffield Shield games. Fleming was at the other end when Jones reached a Shield ton against Tasmania.
“The thing with his batting for Victoria after he came back, he was just in control,” Fleming says. “In control of his game, and in control of the match situation.”
Momentum grew. Bugger the A team, fans thought, Jones should be back in the Australian Test team.
In the form of his life, Jones clearly now regretted his hasty retirement, but there was a complicating factor; a testimonial game in his honour was approaching. To “un-retire” before you stage a money-making game at the MCG would have been a difficult public relations exercise.
It was a signal of Jones’ magnetic pull that not only did cricket greats like Allan Border, Dennis Lillie and David Gower take part, he also had AFL luminaries Dermott Brereton, Jason Dunstall, Stephen Kernahan and Doug Hawkins put the pads on.
Even the notoriously reclusive Gary Ablett Sr phoned to ask if he could play in the game that also featured Plucka Duck and Molly Meldrum, as 30,000 Victorians turned up to pay homage.
Days later, as the Australian team started its Ashes campaign in Brisbane, with testimonial duties completed, Jones held a press conference in Melbourne in a wicked piece of ambush marketing. He was now available for selection again.
“On runs alone, he would have well and truly been in the Australia A team,” Fleming says. “But once he made the retirement decisions it made it hard.”
That he’d provided a running commentary on selection along with releasing an autobiography pinpointing where he’d been let down could not have helped either. The following week he was absent from both the Australia and Australia A one-day squads.
While Jones’ quirks could routinely amuse, perplex or infuriate administrators, selectors and teammates, the unpredictability made him a magnet for fans who found the Dean Jones Experience thrilling. In Victoria, they were apoplectic and wrote to newspapers in their hundreds.
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Stuart from Belmont said he should be reinstated to the Test team. Nicole from Berwick called for the selectors to be replaced “with fair and honest people”, while Greg from Cobram said it “would be just too embarrassing for our selectors to let Dean Jones display his rare talent in the A Team.”
“It was bit of a circus there for a while,” Pearce says.
Less hardier souls may have shrunk at the snubbing. Jones just kept piling up runs.
“For a sometimes erratic personality, a bit like Warnie, on the field they were in control,” Fleming says.
While current affairs programs screened features on the Jones selection conspiracy, he totalled up a nation-leading 1216 Shield runs, won the player of the season award and led Victoria to the one-day title, boldly and bizarrely wearing shorts in the field.
There was also one last great riposte to the selectors; a gargantuan 324 not out at the MCG at the tail of the summer. It was enough to move opposition captain and former teammate Jamie Siddons to declare “it’s the best I’ve seen Dean Jones play.”
“He’s just dominated the domestic competition and should probably be in the Test side,” Siddons said.
Later in life Jones would say his red-ball batting got better after he was axed from the national team. That summer was its apex.
In the same week as the triple-ton, John Howard emerged from the wilderness to lead the Liberal Party again. Pearce likened Jones’ comeback quest to Howard’s unlikely return. Howard would go on to be prime minister for 11 years.
Jones, despite having the popular vote, would not get his wish. Yet there were small wins.
After the triple-ton the cover of The Sunday Age’s sport liftout featured Jones with arms aloft, while the Australia team wrapping up the Ashes in Perth were relegated a few pages back.
Just like last month when his name was posthumously immortalised on Australia’s one-day domestic trophy, Jones owned the spotlight even when he was gone.
