From the perfect vantage point of the WACA scoreboard, and through the twin lenses of his trusty binoculars, Brad Brider soaked in every moment of a historic chapter in Western Australian cricket.
For the first time since 1999 – since Brider was one – the Sheffield Shield was headed west.
And Brider, part of Australia’s national blind men’s cricket team and wearer of many hats, had been there to witness it.
“It was an awesome moment,” he tells cricket.com.au. “It’s been a long time. I mean, me and my friend Steffan (Nero), who’s in the (Australia blind) squad as well, he lives in NSW now but for a long time we’d message each other at 7:30 in the morning when the games are started over east, and we’d 3-40 or 3-30 or worse and we’d go, ‘Here we go again’.
“It was good to finally have some joy.”
The grand WACA scoreboard during this year’s Shield final // Getty
Brider might be a lucky charm; the 23-year-old only began working in the scoreboard this season, one in which WA’s men won both the Shield and the One-Day Cup, while the Scorchers did the double across the men’s and women’s BBL competitions.
He singles out Scorchers star Beth Mooney’s Big Bash hundred as another favourite moment from his special viewing platform, where he says his older crew of colleagues make him feel welcome, and seem to enjoy “having another cricket nuffy in there to chat with”.
But Brider’s cricket obsession also extends to his own playing ambitions. And as he eyes Australia’s forthcoming clash with New Zealand in Brisbane, he believes the time is now for him to turn his potential into performance.
* * *
Brad Brider is on the train, heading back from the gym to his home in Joondalup in the north of Perth. Beside him, as is typically the case, sits his gold Labrador guide dog, Jaxx. The pair wait patiently to arrive at their stop.
Brider is in a buoyant mood; in a few days’ time he and three of his state teammates will fly from Perth to Brisbane for a camp with the Australian squad, which will serve as preparation for this New Zealand series.
It has been a meandering road for him to reach this point, and some of it he has helped pave, a young trailblazer with a clear vision for his – and others’ – future.
Back when Brider started playing for the national team, the WACA didn’t have a blind squad. As well as plying his trade with Australia – as a 16-year-old, making him the country’s youngest-ever blind representative, no less – he linked up with Queensland, South Australia and the ACT. It pained him though, because his heart was always with his home state.
“My whole family’s actually from South Africa, including my oldest sister, but I was the first in the family to be born in Perth, and I really love it here,” he says.
“It’s quite an interesting one because there were a few times where I’d watch cricket and I’d feel more passionately for WA than I did Australia. Like, obviously, I want the Australian guys to win, but you feel closer to the (WA players).
“Australia’s a big place, and in WA you’ve got your own sort of culture, I guess … we’re probably a bit ‘west verse the rest’ sometimes.”
Times have, however, changed. With Brider, his step-dad Tony, and Nero serving as key driving forces, the state body came to the party, and in 2018 the first WA state blind cricket team was formed.
“We put a lot of work in,” says Brider, who also holds down a position as vice-chairperson on the Blind Sports WA board. “And the WACA were good in that space as well, they really helped us.”
In this current Australia squad, Western Australia are represented by a record four players: Brider, Ryan Honschooten, Michael Berg and Matt Cameron, who also happens to be Brider’s housemate.
It is a three-bedroom apartment the young allrounder bought with his little brother, Richard, who has the same type of vision impairment.
The siblings were born with Fraser Syndrome, which can reveal itself in different ways. For Brad, it means he has no lens in his left eye and no eyelashes, which in turn caused a seven-degree tunnel through his right eye. The condition meant he was also born with webbed hands and feet, which were separated via surgery when he was a small child, and then again via “a touch-up” in his early teens.
“It all works fine now,” he says. “I’ve got a few scars on there, but it’s all good.”
Additionally, Brider has nystagmus, which is an involuntary shaking of the eye, and he is night blind, which is the consequence of a lack of clarity in the tunnel he does see through.
“When I look straight,” he explains, “it’s through like a seven-degree pinhole. And overall, I’ve got 2:60 – so every two metres I would see as clearly as you’d see 60 metres.”
Which is where the binoculars come in handy at the cricket. But more contemporary technology has also made Brider’s life easier. Zoom text on his phone allows him to read without an issue, and on occasion he’ll utilise a screen reader. He hasn’t learned braille, simply because he hasn’t felt the need.
Complicating matters through his childhood was a cholesteatoma in his right ear that went undetected for several years. It was an ailment unrelated to his Fraser Syndrome but one which caused him considerable pain through ear infections, and resulted in a significant percentage of the 35 operations he estimates he had as a kid.
His brother Rich, too, suffered through the same fate, and Brad thinks back to that period with appreciation for his mum, Belinda, who was there every time to ensure they were always at the “millions of appointments” they needed to attend.
The challenges only make their achievements all the more remarkable; while Brad is excelling on the cricket field as a right-arm pace-bowling allrounder, Rich is currently attending the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts as something of a prodigy on the piano.
“He’s played since he was about three,” grins Brad, “so he properly knows what he’s doing in that space.”
And while Brider is fortunate to have avoided any heart issues that Fraser Syndrome can sometimes bring with it, the most difficult aspect of his condition is the way it affects his lungs.
“It’s been a bit of an issue,” he says. “I bat with a runner. Generally, it’s something I have to work quite hard on to get to a level where it’s not as big of a problem.
“It’s probably, out of all the things I have, the one that I wish would go away; with the vision and the hearing you can sort of work things around it, but yeah, it’s a bit debilitating sometimes.”
Brider’s quite visible visual impairment left him prone to bullying at school. He puts a positive spin on it now as having equipped him with a steely resolve, though equally, he concedes he wouldn’t want others to experience the same.
“In early school, it was pretty hard to deal with,” he says. “But I don’t really look back at it too badly, because I think I’m a much stronger person now.
“I obviously wish I didn’t go through that … it’s helped me be a stronger person, but it wasn’t nice.”
The turning point socially for Brider came towards the end of year 10, when the operations finally ceased and he was able to get some more continuity with his attendance at school. Falling in with the right friendship group then allowed his affable nature to reveal itself.
“I had that good core group of friends, and I sort of settled down a bit as well, without the operations,” he says. “Personality-wise I sort of came into my own as a bit more of a relaxed kind of guy.
“That core group of friends can really make a difference. I’m still friends with a few of them now, and yeah, they’re great guys.”
Doubtless his mates would say the same in return, because there’s more to Brider than his cricket.
* * *
In the kitchen of a little French patisserie in Nedlands, about a 15-minute drive east of the famous Cottesloe Beach, a young pastry chef is whipping up his signature dish – gluten-free lemon ricotta cake.
It is just another string to Brider’s bow, one that has provided him with not only a regular income but a way into a workforce which, he explains, others can have trouble accessing.
“The job market can be quite a struggle among people with disabilities,” he says. “But once I got in, it’s been good. My boss has been really good. He hires quite a few people with disabilities.
“You definitely have to be competent in your job – I’ve copped a few lectures over the last couple of years – but he’s a good guy.”
It proved a foot in the door for Brider, who then proceeded to throw himself through, adding to his already hectic timetable by taking on a position as a project offer for a non-profit called Blind Citizens WA, where he works on expanding opportunities for vision impaired people in regional areas of the state.
“Recently I went up to Broome, later in the year I go to Karratha,” he says. “We show people sport, music, the different technology adaptations they can use, things like that.
“A big thing for a vision-impaired person is not just knowing the technology exists, it’s doing the education to learn how to use it effectively.
“When we went up to Broome we spoke to people there about what’s available to them. Even things like playing a video game – if you’re fully blind braille user, and you want to have fun and play a game with your friends, there’s not many that are voice-reader accessible.
“So just finding some of them and teaching them how to play it can make a real difference to their lives.”
Inevitably for Brider, sport has been another means through which he has been able to better the lives of his vision-impaired peers. Through his and others’ work on the Blind Sports WA board, a wider range of sporting options are becoming available.
“For the last two years, we’ve been working a lot on getting all these different sports up off the ground, because it’s really quite a passion for a few of us,” he says. “When I was growing up, there was another sport, goal ball, that was available, which is a vision-impaired sport that’s in the Paralympics, and then there wasn’t really much else that was available for a young person.
“We really wanted to change that. Now, there’s blind tennis, there’s blind AFL, there’s soccer, there’s cricket, there’s sailing – all these options that weren’t there before.
“That’s something that gives me a lot of satisfaction.”
* * *
At Cricket Australia, Brider’s blend of intelligence, competitiveness and drive made him an outstanding candidate for a leadership position. In a young Australia squad light on international experience, he was picked as vice-captain.
Now as they prepare to line up against New Zealand, the allrounder, who learned much of what makes him such a quality cricketer at the heel of former Australia captain and blind cricket great Lindsay Heaven, is enthused by a group loaded with potential.
“We’re all just ready to get stuck in,” he says. “We haven’t played international cricket since early 2018.
“It’s a young squad and we’re just hungry to improve and get results, hopefully.
“We can all talk a good game and perform at the NCICs (National Cricket Inclusion Championships) and whatnot, but it’s at the point where I think a lot of us are really unproven.
“Apart from (captain) Matt McCarthy, he’s the only one (in this squad) to have really contributed at international level for us.
“People have made scores and bits and pieces, but I don’t think any of us have really hit the mark that we want to.
“We’re all saying this series is our opportunity to stamp ourselves as international standard players, which is exciting. Hopefully we can. I haven’t been able to play too much for Australia – I sort of burst on the scene a little bit, but then haven’t really gotten to the level I probably should have, so it’s been a constant of learning to sort of get there now and I’d really like to contribute to the team.”
Brider will be borrowing from the competitive fire he sees in the eyes of the likes of Mooney and Jhye Richardson; two diminutive figures he hasn’t ever witnessed take a backward step. They are his kind of cricketer, the kind he aspires to be, and the kind he wants to inspire others to be.
It is a big part of why he loves the game. For those do-or-die moments when it is all on the line. It is then, he believes, that sheer will to win can offer a decisive edge.
“I really love the competitiveness that comes with that feeling of when you know the game is there for your taking,” he says. “You’ve got the control to be able to put the ball right there when you’re bowling, or change the game with how you bat.
“And I think that comes with confidence to be able to think you can do it, and then there’s levels to that. You’ve got to get that confidence at local level, then at state level, and then it’s a completely new level to think you can do it at international level.
“It’s such a big thing that I don’t think you can do without a good, supportive team environment; if you’re not in a good environment with your teammates, and you don’t think you can trust them, it’s a big factor.”
With this group, he isn’t concerned. Last month’s camp in Brisbane was for Brider the best squad environment he’s been a part of in his time with the national side.
He knows they are ready. And so is he.
What is the Inclusion Series?
Australia’s most talented cricketers with a disability return to the international stage for the first time since before the pandemic when the Commonwealth Bank International Cricket Inclusion Series kicks off in Brisbane on Wednesday (June 8)
All three of Australia’s National Disability Squads – blind, deaf, and intellectual disability (ID) – will play eight games each, with England sending over deaf and learning disability (LD) squads, while New Zealand’s blind cricket team, nicknamed the Blind Caps, is also touring.
Commonwealth Bank’s partnership with Cricket Australia makes cricket the only non-paralympic Australian sport to have fully funded national disability squads.
Australia’s blind and deaf squads last played international cricket at their respective World Cups in 2018, while the ID squad last played an international series in 2019, also against England.
How can I watch or listen?
All matches will be streamed live via FrogBox and on the Cricket Australia YouTube channel.
What about live scores, news and highlights?
All matches will be scored live on MyCricket. You can also follow CA’s social media channels to keep across all the news, scores and highlights, on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
Can I come and watch?
Spectators are welcome – the matches are at the Northern Suburbs District Cricket Club in the Brisbane suburb of Wooloowin. Wear your green and gold to support the three Australian squads!
Comments are closed.