Chris Rogers is a former first-grade rugby player
CHRIS Rogers makes an unlikely looking Test opening batsman, so he would have made an even unlikelier-looking first-grade rugby player and yet, unlikely or not, that's what he was.
Rogers chuckled last week when he read in The Australian Gideon Haigh's apt description of him walking to the middle "with brisk, short steps, carrying his bat like a businessman carries his briefcase".
He knows that at 177cm and 80kg, there is nothing physically imposing about him and so, while he continued to believe he might establish himself as a Test cricketer long after just about everyone else had given up on the idea, he was realist enough never to envisage himself one day wearing the gold jersey of a Wallaby.
That said, the highlights of his career as a first grade rugby player in Perth are indelibly printed on his memory, perhaps because there were so few of them; games, that is. Well, highlights too.
After leaving Perth's Wesley College in 1994 as the best and fairest player in the school's First XV, Rogers played about 50 grade games for the University of Western Australia before reluctantly quitting the game in 2001 to concentrate on cricket.
Although he made a handful of appearances off the bench in the firsts, only once was he selected to start in first grade and it turned out to be his final game of rugby.
"I had been picked to play first grade (at fullback) and I wasn't going to get a (cricket) contract with WA. They'd told me I wasn't going to get one so I was just going to play rugby union and get a job and stuff," Rogers recalled yesterday. "And then Brendon Julian retired and they gave me a contract so I had to go ask them if I could play this last game of rugby."
Fortunately, Warriors coach Mike Veletta granted him a dispensation because what followed provided Rogers with one of his happiest rugby memories.
"My (older) brother (Dave) was on the bench and he came on at halftime on the wing, right on the opposition supporters' side at Perth Bayswater. And he had a couple of clangers and dropped a couple of high balls and then kicked one out on the full so they were all into him.
"We'd been on top and then they came back but we got a scrum right on their 22, right in the middle and all the big dogs lined up on the left and they kind of said: 'You and your bro, go stand on the right, just draw a couple of defenders over there'.
"But he ball came out badly from the scrum and the halfback threw it to me. Two blokes were running at me but I wasn't going to pass it to my brother because he wasn't going to do anything, so I stabbed it through and their winger fell over and Davo ran past him and scored in the corner to win the game. He and I were arm-in-arm running down the line of opposition supporters, giving it to them."
All good training - not that he realised it at the time - for one day sledging Englishmen at the height of an Ashes battle.
And anyone who witnessed the astonishing diving catch he took at another Perth sporting ground a short distance to the south, the WACA, to dismiss Tim Bresnan on the afternoon Australia won back the Ashes on December 17 would have no trouble believing Dave's claim that his little brother was as good in the air as Israel Folau.
Well, perhaps a little difficulty, but nonetheless a number of sources have confirmed Rogers' ability to soar above the pack to take the high ball and then keep going to the tryline. Only, however, if the tryline was less than the length of a cricket pitch away.
As Rogers constantly is reminded every time he runs between wickets with opening partner Dave Warner, speed is not his strong suit. The first time this liability became apparent, however, was when he intercepted a pass 40m out from his own tryline at Nedlands. "It was open to the tryline," Rogers recalled, "but the opposition prop ran me down. I stayed around for the presentations after the match and they gave the prop an award for running down the opposition wing."
These days, of course, all that matters is his speed over 20.12m (22 yards), and as the English fieldsmen would attest, he covers the distance quickly enough with those brisk short steps of his.
Still, how distant those future cricketing glories would have seemed back then. With his previous cricketing season for WA having been, as he put it, "an absolute shocker", Rogers was content to keep plugging away at an English degree majoring in journalism at UWA, while earning some spare cash driving the collection and delivery van for his mother's nappy service. "Interesting times and you get used to the smell after a while," he laughed.
"I enjoyed playing but first grade was too much for me. They were too big. I was smaller then. I didn't go to the gym."
Even the smallest of the current Wallabies, halfback Will Genia, weighs two kilograms more than Rogers did back then, so there was never any likelihood of him becoming the third rugby union-cricket dual international for Australia.
He did, however, have a peripheral connection with one of the previous two, making his Ashes debut in the Trent Bridge Test in July in which Ashton Agar and Phil Hughes broke the record for the 10th wicket set by dual international Johnny Taylor in company with Arthur Mailey. (The other player was Queenslander Otto Nothling, who played his one cricket Test at No.7 in the batting order in the 1928 Test against England at the SCG, taking the place of the man who had scored only 18 and one on debut in the previous Test in Brisbane, one Don Bradman.)
"No, I was playing rugby in Perth where the standard wasn't great," said Rogers, discounting the outlandish suggestion that he might have been eyeing the gold jersey every bit as covetously as he had the baggy green cap. "I was a tiny kid and I knew my physical capabilities. But I loved my rugby. I got a bigger buzz playing rugby than I did playing cricket at the time. It was great fun and a good social thing as well.
"But in that (final) game, too, I tried to tackle the opposition hooker and couldn't feel my shoulder for about 10 minutes so I thought, yeah, it's probably time to pull the pin. And then that was my breakout year for WA and I've never played a game of rugby since and that's been a bit of a disappointment. I'll probably play a bit of veterans rugby when I finish."
After scoring centuries in his past two Tests, Rogers has the look of a Test cricketer who intends to be around for a long time yet. He might never have met the Springboks on a rugby field but the Proteas are scary enough, most especially the man who surely will be targeting him, Dale Steyn, the world's fastest bowler.
But Rogers' schoolboy rugby coach John de Bes has never had any doubts about his courage, whatever sport he is playing. "As a halfback at school he was like the dog that ran out onto the freeway and worried about the consequences later," de Bes said. "Chris was tough and very skilful. That's one thing he probably learned on the rugby field, how to stand up to the big guys."
Happily, as an Ashes-winning cricketer, the only crash tackles he does these days tend to take place late at night during post-Test victory celebrations. He dropped Warner with a beauty the night the Australians completed their 5-0 clean sweep at the SCG and enjoyed it immensely. "Any time I get to take Davey down, I'll definitely do that," he chortled.
