Chasing garbage trucks and terrorising batters: busting the Cathryn Fitzpatrick myth

She’s a legend, shrouded in myth. 

One of those myths was busted when Cathryn Fitzpatrick sat down with Women’s CricZone for a chat at the Junction Oval in Melbourne ahead of the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2020. I had heard that Fitzpatrick gained her incredible fitness – allowing her to bowl at speeds of up to 125 kmph, and play until she was 39 – by training at ungodly hours in the mornings by ‘running behind the garbage truck.’ It sounded like the perfect interval training routine, so the story made perfect sense.

It never occurred to me that she might actually have been one of the people who picks up the garbage. 

“That was probably my first proper job,” says Fitzpatrick. “I started Uni, then deferred, and never went back. I got a job working for the local council, ‘running behind garbage truck’. I was picking up the bins five days a week.” For our non-Australian readers, every home and apartment is supposed to put their garbage bins on the street-front once a week. A truck then rolls down the street, with workers loading the bins on to the hydraulics of the truck. “So, pulling the bin behind the trucks, setting it on the hydraulics, then putting it back."

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“I remember my first day behind the garbage truck, I got so sore, my neck and arms. You're picking bins and you're turning them around and many of the times you might lift the bins, if one was only half full you would empty them into the other. So (it was a) very physical job.”

“If I'd played cricket on a Sunday and bowled 20 overs in the day, to get up the next morning and run behind the truck was tough, but if I don't work I don't get paid.”

Fitzpatrick later worked with Australia Post, delivering letters on a bicycle (before they later gave her a motorised bike). “Both those jobs had me finish work latest at two in the afternoon. So I could go home, finish my domestic chores then go to training.”

Stories like hers, where elite cricketers have to manage ‘regular’ jobs, are becoming less commonplace. But they only add to her legend. “They were physical jobs. That helps, or helped towards building (fitness).”

Yuval Noah Harari, the author of ‘Sapiens’, attributes Homo Sapiens’ domination of earth to the ability to create common fictions, and use them for cooperation. Fitzpatrick cooperated with fiction aplenty, gaining a name as a bowler to be feared.

“As soon as you get a reputation, you kind of buy a few wickets on reputation alone rather than a batter playing the ball on its merits. Possibly someone not moving their feet and being a bit tentative.” And that is one of the reasons why she accumulated 180 wickets in 109 ODIs, and for a decade remained ODI cricket’s highest wicket-taker. For perspective, Jhulan Goswami took 153 games to overtake her. 

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Fitzpatrick has now been inducted into the ICC Hall of Fame. But hard as it is to believe, Fitzpatrick wasn’t always an automatic selection in the Australian team. She describes her career as a tale of two halves. “When I first started there was myself and (fellow Aussie quick) Charmaine Mason. It seemed to be that only one of us was picked at a time. Playing for your spot constantly puts you under a bit of pressure.”

“Then there was a shift in the coach and the philosophy, and he said ‘I want them both’. That became a lot more comfortable. That helped. You become more embedded in the side, you relax a bit more and you play better.”

Her stats say the same. In her first three calendar years, Fitzpatrick took seven wickets in nine matches at an average of 30.42. Since 1997, which was also when Mason played her last game and Fitzpatrick took on the role of spearhead, she averaged 16.24.

“(In the second half), the better coaching I got, the more control I had, and just my tactical nous got a lot better. And I had access to vision. I was a student of the game, so if we were playing a particular opposition, then I’d work out how to set them up for the next game. Initially I got better as I got smarter as a player.” That career saw her be a part of two World Cup wins and three finals, besides many Ashes wins.

Fitzpatrick played international cricket until she was 39-years-old. Her last tour was to India, in Chennai, for a quadrangular tournament. I was a part of the India A team that played a warm up against two of the visiting teams. Unfortunately, my team didn’t play Australia. One of my roommates opened the batting for the side that did, and she came back with fearful stories of Fitzpatrick knocking back her stumps with sheer pace. Even nudging 40, she clearly had it. Even though she had her share of injuries in her career.

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“Most of my bigger ones (injuries) were back. It was discs. I was never diagnosed with a stress fracture as such. But we didn't really look for those. Nowadays players get sent off for scans and they get diagnosed and rightly so. I got asked if I wanted to play in the Bushfire relief game but I can't, I still have to be careful.”

“I had a couple of knee surgeries, but that's not something you feel is going to go structurally. The back is something that I needed to consider every day.” A clearly defined off season (“three months of not bowling”) and large turnarounds between games is something that helped Fitzpatrick extend her career as long as she did. “If you look at how many deliveries a quick bowler would bowl nowadays because of the schedule, it would be rare for a player to do that now.” 

One of the biggest tragedies for those of my generation and later is that we never got to see Fitzpatrick bowl, hardly even on the internet. There are a few clips available on YouTube, plenty of stories, and a bagful of wickets. As I turn off the recorder, I share this regret with Fitzpatrick. She tells me that somewhere in Melbourne, in the immense databases that Cricket Australia and Cricket Victoria maintain, are hours upon hours of video footage of her bowling. I hope those are made public someday, so we can bust a few more myths about Cathryn Fitzpatrick. I have a feeling the facts will be even more impressive than our collective fictions.