The Nash equilibrium: From Bulls battler to Windies wildcard

November 26, 2009. Brendan Nash feels like he is living in a parallel universe. As he trudges back onto the Adelaide Oval for the second time in the day – having retired hurt a couple of hours earlier – he is suddenly the central character in a story he never imagined would be written. 

Waiting for him at the top of his mark is his former Norths teammate, now Test off-spinner, Nathan Hauritz. Nash welcomes the gentle reintroduction to the middle, but against Ricky Ponting's Australians, gentle never lasts long. 

A handful of overs later, the man who struck him a painful blow on the right forearm just before the lunch break – who also happens to be another former Norths teammate, as well as his ex-roommate in Brisbane – removes his cap, loosens his shoulders, and prepares to steam in from around the wicket. 

Mitchell Johnson.

Nash hears the wisecracks start up from the cordon. 

"A few of the senior players reminded me that I was a bit soft, which is why I couldn't make it in Australia," Nash tells cricket.com.au. "Then they asked Mitch to try and hit me again – see if I'd go off crying again."

After seven seasons in the Sheffield Shield, he has heard much worse, although when the barrage is being led by a legend, it does carry that bit more weight. He switches his focus to the next ball, and settles back in, a diminutive leftie keeping the giant Daren Sammy company through the remainder of day one. 

Johnson does hit him again, but Nash goes to stumps unbowed on 44, and as he exits to warm applause from the Adelaide crowd, the West Indies' number five thinks: How the hell did I end up here?

* * *

As Jamaicans set about dominating the world in athletics or looked to emulate the feats of George Headley and Lawrence Rowe on the cricket field through the middle part of the 20th century, Paul Nash was bucking the trend.

Blessed with a powerful physique and pushed by the competitive instincts of his four brothers, Nash swam his way to fame on the Caribbean island in the 1960s, becoming Jamaica's first Olympian in the pool at the 1968 Games in Mexico City.

The son of a Panamanian boxer, Nash also excelled at football and water polo, representing the country at the Commonwealth Games in the latter as part of a team that also included three of his brothers. 

"It was, 'Nash, passes to Nash, goes to Nash," laughs 46-year-old Brendan from his Brisbane home. "But Dad was a real legend in Jamaica, and Mum (Andrea) was very well known too – she toured the world with the National Dance Company.

"They were a bit of a celebrity couple, I guess, in the Jamaican world."

Nash Sr was Jamaica's Sportsperson of the Year in 1969, just three years before Rowe made his West Indies debut, with the great Michael Holding following soon after. The island nation became captivated by cricket in the years that followed, with the success of the region on the world stage a source of immense pride for every man, woman and child from Kingston to Kensington. 

Running alongside the cricket pandemonium however was political and civil unrest. Tensions in Jamaica were high, and the streets weren't always safe. With an infant daughter and another child on the way, the Nashes made the difficult decision to leave the reggae nation and follow some family to Perth, Australia, where they settled in 1977.

Christmas came early for the family that year, with the arrival of Brendan on December 14, and before the decade was out they had headed back to Jamaica to essentially settle their affairs and make the move Down Under a permanent one. 

Eventually, and again having followed family, they wound up in Cairns, where the tropical climate, and the mangoes and lychees and soursop offered them a literal taste of home. 

"It gave them that little bit of a softer transition, I guess, to life here, and culturally how to move into Australia," Nash says. "They're both very proud Jamaicans, they loved living in Jamaica and they made a hell of a sacrifice for me and my sister, that's for sure. I mean Australia is a great country but when you consider it from their point of view, it was a massive move to make."

In the 1980s the Nashes bought a multisport complex in Cairns from the Maher family, whose son Jimmy would later captain and open the batting with Brendan for Queensland. It was another quirk of fate on a road littered with them.

Like Maher, who is almost four years his senior, Nash impressed in his teens as a small but punchy left-hander, and his parents made another life-changing call when they sent him to boarding school at St Joseph's Nudgee College in Brisbane, where they hoped greater opportunities awaited him.

Eventually they followed him south, moving to the Queensland capital themselves and, whenever the West Indies toured, receiving visits to their home from luminaries such as Courtney Walsh and Sir Garfield Sobers.

Nash was 17 when Queensland broke through for their maiden Sheffield Shield triumph, ushering in a golden era in which they appeared in 10 of 12 finals, winning six. 

Never the most dominant player among his contemporaries, he nonetheless worked his way from Norths into the state set-up, debuting for the Bulls in both formats as a 23-year-old towards the end of the 2000-01 season. 

Not three weeks after his maiden first-class appearance, he was playing a Shield final, experiencing the extreme hostilities of a bitter Queensland-Victoria rivalry, and getting his hands on the silverware.

It was his fourth first-class match, and just five games and 12 months later, he was a two-time Shield champion, scoring a second-innings 96 and experiencing the sort of success some players go entire careers without, all inside his first 10 matches.

"I was very fortunate at the time when I was coming through that a culture had been built by some of the senior players," Nash says. "Stuart Law was a big one, Andy Bichel, Michael Kasprowicz, those sorts of guys. 

"I never got to experience being coached by John Buchanan, but he had set that up a few years beforehand and those guys had built on that. I'm not sure what it was like before my time, but I'd heard stories that as a new player, you weren't potentially always welcome to the group very easily – you had to really earn your stripes. And I understand that's what it was like in that era, but I think it was a little bit more – I don't want to say 'easy', it definitely wasn't easy – but it certainly was more accommodating, where we were all going for the same common goal, in that we wanted to win."

He scored his maiden hundred against South Australia in February 2002, adding 157 amid a monster 296-run stand with Martin Love (202) – still the highest partnership by a Queensland pair in Adelaide.

Later, some of his best performances for West Indies would come with the cool-headed Shivnarine Chanderpaul at the other end; on reflection he suspects that, with Love and Chanderpaul the prime examples, his propensity for the jitters during an innings was eased by those unrufflable partners, subsequently bringing the best out of him. 

Queensland played in at least one final in each of Nash's seven seasons with his state, with the versatile leftie appearing in four of those (three Shield, one one-day) and winning two. Through those years he played 66 matches across the two formats, and in a state boasting regular Australia players such as Matthew Hayden and Andrew Symonds, and later Shane Watson and James Hopes as well as a number of fringe internationals, he routinely danced in the liminal space between anonymity and the A-list.

The closest he came to Test cricket through that period was as a substitute fielder at the Gabba in Australia's 2005 match against – yes – the West Indies. He was sharp and impressive, and then returned to the relative obscurity of domestic cricket as quickly as he had appeared. There he valued the camaraderie of the Bulls and loved constantly testing himself against elite players.

"The environment was really good, even though there were really strong personalities," he says. "I wasn't always fitting in with the bigger boys – they were just a different level – but I kind of knew my place, and I think I handled it pretty well. 

"I know it sounds a bit strange but I didn't expect too much – I never thought I was going to be one of those big boys, so I was just happy to listen, to take what I could from it, and just enjoy training at the Gabba, and facing guys like Kasprowicz and Bichel and Joey Dawes every day in the nets. As much as I wanted to be playing … even if I wasn't, I was learning a lot in the environment."

* * *

November 27, 2009. Nash walks back out onto the Adelaide Oval. It feels like a lifetime ago that he scored his maiden first-class century here, while the memories of yesterday are much fresher, and told through the pain still running through his right arm. 

Sammy falls early, but another giant of a man, left-arm finger spinner Sulieman Benn, hangs with him for more than an hour, frustrating the Australians. Nash moves past his half-century and when Benn departs, Kemar Roach follows quickly, and the end of the innings appears nigh.

Second gamer and No.11 Ravi Rampaul has other ideas. Nash trusts him with the strike, and he quickly repays the faith, adopting the role of aggressor and crashing a series of boundaries to take the score well beyond 400. 

Nash clips and cuts and flicks his way towards three figures. The partnership takes the score towards 450, and the Western Australian born, Queensland raised, Jamaican international closes in on his second century for the West Indies.

On 92, and after a record 68-run stand for the final wicket, he is knocked over by an off-cutter from Johnson. 

"We were mates, we'd played in the same club side, we'd played for Queensland together, and we'd lived together," Nash smiles. "But when I was on strike, everything was either around my nose or at the top of off stump – there were never any freebies, that's for sure."

* * *

Nash was standing on his own, a little self-consciously, before a trial match for the Jamaican national side in 2007, the proverbial fish out of water. 

"I could see for the majority of the other players there was a bit of unease about, 'Who is this fella? Where has he come from?' he says. 

"Then Chris Gayle strolled in. He was greeting everyone, people were chatting to him, and – I'll never forget it – he made a beeline straight for me. I'd never spoken to him, never even met him, and I'm thinking, OK, what's happening here?

"He said, 'I hear you're Nash?' I said, 'Yep'. He said, 'You're one of us now. If anyone gives you any trouble, you let me know'. And he walked off. 

"Straightaway that broke down so many barriers with so many of the players that were looking at me the wrong way, because here is an idol of theirs doing that in front of them."

Nash had landed in the country of his heritage on not much more than a whim. The loss of his Queensland Cricket contract in the 2006-07 season had hit him hard. He was 29 and felt untethered, and a little lost. 

"For seven years I'd been in this bubble with Queensland Cricket, and I was now on the outside, and I wasn't going to be able to get back in – they'd told me definitively they were moving on from me," he said.

"I wasn't sure how to handle that, so I decided to head over for a holiday to the 2007 World Cup, which was on in the Caribbean at the time. Mitchell Johnson and I were pretty close at that stage as friends so he got me some tickets, and I went over, watched a few games and had a great time.

"I hadn't been back to Jamaica since I was maybe 14 or 15. And so I went, and it was like, 'This really is what I needed – I needed to just enjoy myself, not think too much about everything, just have a few rums, watch some cricket and have a laugh. 

"And so I said, 'I'm going to actually move over here, and just give it a try'."

True to his word, Nash sold his car and packed a bag, following a gut feel with the same spirit of adventure his parents had shown almost exactly 30 years earlier.

In Kingston he stayed with family friends, while he reasoned his best approach to networking and finding opportunities in his new home would be through doing what he did best – playing cricket. 

For many years prior, his godfather, who had since died, had been paying an annual membership in Nash's name at Kingston Cricket Club, in the hope his godson would one day do exactly what he was about to do. The generous forethought meant Nash's name was already in their database, affording him a streamlined registration with the club. He scored 65no in his very first match and caught the eye of a Jamaican selector, whom he had batted with. 

In the 2007-08 Carib Cup, he was Jamaica's leading run-scorer, and he rounded out an excellent first season with a match-winning 117 across more than six hours in the final win over Trinidad.

Not eight months later, and three days short of his 31st birthday, Nash found himself standing in the middle of University Oval, making his Test debut under the captaincy of his compatriot – and unlikely champion – Gayle.

"I was out there in Galle, too, a couple of years later, batting with him when he scored his 333," he smiles. "We put on about 170 and I scored 60 (laughs). That was just standard when you batted with Chris."

* * *

December 16, 2009. A 146kph rocket from Roach has hit Ponting flush on the left elbow. The 35-year-old bats on but is soon forced to retire hurt. From his vantage point in the field, Nash can't help but see the irony.

"A few of the boys when he was walking off were telling me to let him know about it, see if he's going to come back crying or whatever," he laughs. "But I said, 'No, he's got about 10,000 Test runs – I don't think I can say too much'."

The contest ebbs and flows, with Gayle thrashing a whirlwind 71-ball century, before Australia set West Indies 359 to win. At 6-245, Nash is 65no and daring – just a little – to dream of a miracle run chase. 

It isn't to be. Nash leaves one from Doug Bollinger that nips back and takes his off stump. The Windies tail wags but a controversial decision on a caught behind by the third umpire puts a full stop on a riveting contest, the tourists falling 35 runs short as Australia claim a 2-0 series win.

"There was some conjecture about the decision – I remember in the changeroom, we weren't real happy," Nash says. "Yeah we were still 30 runs short, but that last pair had already put on 40, and you just never know."

* * *

Nowadays Nash lives with his wife and two children in the north-west of Brisbane, roughly 30 minutes from the Gabba. From there he runs his business, Windies Financial Planning, which is at once a nod to his past and a sign of the direction in which his life has headed.

Today he is sitting in the Gabba outer with his parents, the people who sparked this adventure almost half a century ago. The last time West Indies played a Test here, he was out in the middle, a visitor to his former home and amid the thick of the action. 

"I remember walking out to bat, and the crowd actually clapped," he smiles. "And I didn't get many runs in either innings, but I walked off, there were no boos, I got some more claps, there were a few people yelling out 'Nash'."

The sense of a strange sort of homecoming had engulfed him though, before a ball in that Test match had even been bowled.

"For seven years I'd taken the first left into the home dressing room," he says. "To then walk past it, the realisation of what was about to happen actually hit me. I never thought I'd play for another state, let alone another Test nation. 

"The room attendant was the same one who'd been there through my time at Queensland. And because I'd left and not really had the chance to pack up my locker when I'd been let go, he rushed out to me and presented me with my 'Brendan Nash – Queensland Bulls' nameplate that was above my locker. 

"He'd kept it for those years, and he said to me, 'I knew you'd be back for this one day – I just didn't expect it to be for the West Indies'."