Former Oz pacer Rodney Hogg tips South Africa to clinch World Cup 2015

Melbourne For one of the more aggressive fast bowlers of his time Rodney Hogg smiles a lot But in the former Australian pacers own admission an aggressive fast bowler can be a nice person off the field tooRodney HoggSixty threeyearold Hogg came to India with Kim Hughes team in 197980 and endured a frustrating sixTest series in which he could claim only 11 wickets at 5373 It was his first overseas Test tour after a stupendous start to his international career in the 197879 Ashes at home where he claimed 41 wickets He was part of the host pace attack when Sunil Gavaskars team toured Australia in 198081 so India was a familiar opponent to Hoggmidday caught up with the Melbournebased gregarious Hogg who played 38 Tests for Australia from 1978 to 1984 He first played for South Australia before switching to VictoriaExcerpts from an interviewWatch out for South AfricaI think its the weakest World Cup Ive seen At the moment everybody is saying Australia and South Africa with New Zealand being a bit of a smokey ndash in the last six months theyve won 70 of their ODIs and obviously playing at home now But the other teams just seem to have weaknesses They dont bat long enough and dont have a spinner or quicks Is that an indictment on cricket I dont know I like the look of New Zealand but South Africa have the two best players in the world in Dale Steyn and AB de Villiers and they havent won the World Cup so they are the ones to watch out forDhonis didnt have a good attackI was just shocked that then Test skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni gave it away in the Test series though Im a fan of Dhoni He tried a lot of things People criticise his captaincy but I thought he was having a go He was trying hard but he just didnt have the attack The bowling was never good for the first couple of days and then it got better as the Test match went on They didnt bowl well in the first innings but seemed to bowl well in the second innings every timeYour bowling seemed inconsistent The last time Umesh Yadav was out here he hurried our batsmen a bit and bowled a fast outswinger ndash I loved that But then I looked at how many Test matches hes played since and its not many Someone asked me why doesnt India produce fast bowlers If you want to produce fast bowlers put a bit of grass on the wickets and encourage them You are never going to have fast bowlers in India because theres no grass on the wickets Luckily some of the bowlers have found some reverse swing In 197980 you could put a key in the pitchToo flat and dryThe first day of a Test match should have a fair bit in it for the bowlers It should not be rock hard The pitches now are like threeday wickets Bhuvneshwar Kumar on the first day in Sydney must have bowled his first over and said Im not going to get any wickets here because the ball didnt seam or swing It was flat and dry Usually the ball swings around in Sydney When it didnt swing at all ndash and Kumar doesnt bowl fast enough ndash hes got to have swing and seamNo fan of dropin pitchesIt takes the flavour away from the game The Gabba in Brisbane is not a drop in and grass grows beautifully up there Its a pretty good pitch Im not a dropin guy because I want to see each Test match centre have its own character You go to Sydney and it spins You want to play your semifinal in Sydney dont you If India are going to make the final thats where you want to play your semifinalShare of publicity Hogg covered on major publications in the late 1970sIndias batting is excitingIndia really have a batting line up that looks like its going to be pretty exciting for the next six seven eight years Earlier you had a Sachin Tendulkar Rahul Dravid and Virender Sehwag and now youve got a young Sachin a young Dravid and a young Sehwag So youve got them coming through After all you blokes love Sachin and he averages what 53 5378 I think to myself whats Dravid average 5231 Now when you compare Don Bradman and our next best batsman Greg Chappell ndash Bradman 9994 is right up there and Chappell 5386 is way below So if Sachin is Bradman then who is Dravid Hes not far below him But Sachin has steered India through some hard times and in life you need someone to believe inPacers dont run enoughWe are lucky in Australia We probably have the best fast bowlers Australias ever seen ndash 10 really good fast bowlers They have all been injured a bit but if they all stay fit and have a bit of luck youll have quality fast bowlers for Australia When Mitchell Johnson dropped away a bit and went to Dennis Lillee Dennis said to him Run 10 lapshellip how long would it take for you to run 10 laps And Johnson said We dont do that many So Dennis said come back to me when you do it in a certain time Nowadays young fast bowlers train differentlyRodney HoggThey must have the core strength but I dont think they do too much running Then when you get a young fast bowler you get excited by him and push him You want to play him here and there There are three forms of cricket now so theres a fair bit of more When I played I had six months off and six months on So up until coming to India in 1979 I used to have the winter off so my body used to repair and Id start training again But now theyve got to get used to playing for 12 months of the year so they are obviously breaking downWe bowled faster than emI dont think they bowl any faster than us We werent coached so you had to be streetsmart Bowlers now get their hands held and are directed by bowling coaches They dont think for themselves Having said that the way they analyse batsmen is great now They work out the batsmans strengths and weaknessesIf I played again I wouldnt bowl another short ball at Viv Richards You will be pitching it up outside offstump with your field set accordingly I wouldnt allow Gordon Greenidge to square cut because hed kill you Probably bowling on his legstump wouldnt hurt you So all that stuff is analysed and fed to bowlers Thats good but they do get their hand held arent streetsmart and dont think too much You got to physically learn how to get people out and I think sometimes when they are pushed through they dont learn thatThey pushed Cummins too hardWhen they tried to get Pat Cummins back they made him play in the U19s in April Now here the summer is from September to March so why is a kid who has played for Australia made to play an U19 game in April I didnt understand that logic People who run cricket here are not fast bowlers but they are in charge of fast bowlers Im not saying Craig McDermott Australias assistant coach ndash he was a sensational fast bowler ndash but the hierarchy above who run the show just pushed Cummins and hes not getting a game now Then Josh Hazlewood came along and he had a bad back a couple of years ago but hes jumped ahead of him Peter Siddles not getting a game which is very sad because he is a great bowlerHughes death was a freak accidentLook if youre driving a car and someone runs up under it its very sad so Im not sure if I should feel sorry for Sean Abbott When you bowl short you dont know thats going to happen We look at that as a freak accident but if it happens again then the hierarchy will have to look at the game a bit differently But you cant take the bouncer out of the game The game of cricket is about bowling bouncersDidnt mean to hit ShahidI hit a chap when Australia played a zone team in India Mohammad Shahid batting at No 5 for Central Zone in Nagpur he retired hurt for four in September 1979 and knocked his teeth off I went down to see his teeth and I cried on the way back This poor fellow retired hurt It was 1979 so there were no helmets I was sad but he came back two days later and was nice to me I didnt really mean to hurt him but its just part of the gameThe batsman is your enemyI hit a kid on the head in U13 cricket You dont think you just run in The batsman is the enemy He is human when hes walking down the street but when he has pads on and a bat in his hand he is the enemy and no one shakes hands with the enemy No one is nice to their enemy because if you are nice to your enemy your enemy will get you belt you Did anyone feel sorry when Viv Vivian Richards was hooking us out of the fence for 10 sixes in a row Will anyone come down and say Im sorry Hogg or mate youre alright there NoAggression makes you bowl fastFast bowlers need to be totally aggressive on the ground but you can be a nice person off it It might not be easy but you do find someone like Brett Lee or Pat Cummins who are nice blokes off the ground But as a fast bowler you have be aggressive else youre wasting your time Aggression gives you that extra yard of pace makes you fasterPaul Harveys caricature of Rodney Hogg who was in the fruit business for a while Courtesy The Whole Hogg Published by Wilkinson Publishing Pty LtdWhen I swore backI remember we played Test match and then a onedayer in Colombo in 1983 and this guy had a flag in the stands and was giving it to me The best form of sledging in the world is when you cannot understand the other guy Arjuna Ranatunga Javed Miandadhellip you couldnt understand them so I swore back at this guy badly and then realised that the Sri Lankan president was just eight rows backIts all very well to have neutral umpires but I think you must have umpires who can understand the dialect If you dont then for example someone like Kohli or Dhoni can say whatever they want The other day at the MCG Warner was trying to tell Rohit Sharma to speak in English and they made a big deal out of that He Warner wasnt sledging him but he got fined So you should have umpires who understand the language of both sides If that was the case earlier then Javed Miandad might have been the biggest sledger the game has ever seenSwore a lot in IndiaI was not as big a swearer as Lenny Pascoe or Merv Hughes but I did swear a lot I swore a lot in India I predicted Shane Warne would take 500 wicketsI was writing for The Truth newspaper and faced Warne in his second district game The moment I faced him I had no idea I thought this is seriously good bowling Shane bowled three balls to me and those were as good deliveries as any I had faced from a legspinnerSo I thought this was amazing And with newspapers you exaggerate a bit and I exaggerated But as it turned out I was wrong because I wrote 500 and he went on to get 700 wickets Warnes a freak of the game Hes the Bradman of bowling Then two days later I was sacked I didnt think much about it then because Warnie had played just one Shield game So at the time I got sacked I wasnt thinking about whatever I wrote I think the paper went broke two years backIndia tour of 197980 was a hard oneI was 27 when I made my debut and I had four or five bad back spasms because I am not a big bloke After India 1979 I came back with a bad back and that was a pretty hard threemonth tour Even though I didnt get many wickets I was proud of the fact that I kept going and I was always trying When I returned my back gave up but eventually I fought back So it all started at 27 and finished at 34 and probably had three bad backs along the wayMadras was unbearableI got 41 wickets to be precise and they were really bowlerfriendly pitches There was a lot of seam and swing on those pitches It was a lot easier to bowl on them than these pitches this summer So when you have such a first good season you start thinking you are pretty good I started to strut around as if I was a star and then I went to India and had a bowling average of 55 or so I am still annoyed that Andrew Hilditch dropped a catch off me in Kanpur else I would have got a fifer Sunny Gavaskars bat was very wide and then when we played the first Test in MadrasI dont know how Dean Jones made those runs 210 in first innings of the tied Test of 1986 at that time because bowling even two overs in Madras just drained you So how do you bowl fast there and yet when the Poms went there in February 1980 it was a green top and Ian Botham took 13 wickets So it depends on what time of the year you tour India too I saw that green top where Botham took 13 wickets in BombayDidnt think of Test cricket until 1978I didnt get a game till I was 27 I wish I had a slightly different direction when I was younger but I didnt believe in this stuff I wasnt thinking of playing Test cricket till I hit Clive Radley on the head in October 1978 And while I was going home I remember a billboard that said Hogg blasts Poms I had been only been thinking Shield cricket till then I just didnt think I was capable of Test cricket There was Lillee and Jeff Thomson and to me that was Test cricket I didnt think I was in their leagueI got booed in BangaloreI can see it like it was yesterday I wasnt experienced in getting booed off the ground by so many people I was at the nonstrikers end and I do remember Karsan Ghavri going over the line that much four inches I like Karsan He is a good bloke and we got along really well because we played youth cricket together But in Bangalore he was going over that much and when I was bowling this great big huge umpire Kasturi Ramaswami kept noballing me So I kicked the middle stump out of the ground I kicked the top and it flicked out and went right between the umpires legs It would have made a very good photo The crowd just booed me and threw rocks at mePatil batted like he was in HollywoodI got him the first time in Adelaide and he didnt go down and then Len Pascoe got him I think I hit him near the shoulder and shook him up a fair bit but he didnt go down I remember his coverdrives the ability to drive the ball which wasnt full I havent seen too many people bat like Patil I thought his coverdriving in Adelaide was spectacular Usually the ball has got to be somewhere near the foot to be driven through covers but he would drive the ball out in front of him His coverdriving was superb I thought Patil batted like he was in HollywoodClive Rice was the hardest cricketer Ive played againstNo regrets whatsoever for touring South Africa in 198586 I enjoyed the cricket It was tough I met the hardest cricketer Ive played against Clive Rice and had the honour to bowl to Graeme Pollock Beautiful Unfortunately we didnt play Barry Richards It was obviously at the end of my career I was 3435 I wasnt going to play for Australia And I couldnt give a rats backside about the politics of it allClive RiceThats not my problem I mean we were trading with South Africa so why should we be making any sort of stance Then there was the ban because they had to look like they were doing something but it didnt worry me because I was finished Its very funny how we got out of Australia to go to South Africa We all flew to Singapore then on to Amsterdam individually and didnt go out as a team We met up in Singapore went to Amsterdam and flew down to South Africa Thats how we toured so people didnt know what was going onIm an entertainer nowIm sort of an entertainer a speaker When you are in your 30s and early 40s you cant go around telling everyone that you got 41 at 1285 in the 197879 Ashes series Theyll think youve got a big head But when you get older 5060 you can talk about yourself it doesnt matter I had a fruit shop I used to go in the market buy and sell and then bring it back I did that till I was 47 Then I got to know a few people and now I try to be an entertainer