How Steve Waugh unleashed young Brett Lee in Boxing Day Test

Former Australia pace Brett Lee has confessed that he wasn’t particularly happy with the events that preceded his call-up to the Test team and what Steve Waugh thought he could do to India. A 23-year-old Lee made his debut against India in the 1999 Boxing Day Test, and much of it was down to his performance against Western Australia where he breathed fire and broke the arm of Jo Angel.
With who’s who of Australia’s Test team playing in that Sheffield Shield game, Lee recollects all that he wanted was to impress Waugh. “There was a moment which I’m not particularly proud of,” Brett Lee said. “I warned Jo, ‘You’ve got two options here, mate. Either tread on your wicket and get out, or I’ll come around the wicket and break your arm’. I felt horrible.”
But it did work for Brett Lee in the end as Waugh informed then Australia’s chief selector Geoff Marsh to include the pacer in the Test side as “Indians will hate facing him”. And playing the Test, Brett Lee recounted how wanted to enjoy the moment of playing in front of 90,000-plus fans at the MCG.
“It is weird, because being an Australian and having 100,000 people there — 90-odd thousand were barracking for Australia — and being the new kid on the block, I think a lot of people want to see that young kid do well,” Lee said.
“People, I think, appreciate fast bowling. It wasn’t a hard sell for me. I wanted to make sure I delivered and hopefully get some wickets. But personally, and looking at the calibre of players I had around me — Steve and Mark Waugh, Ricky Ponting, Justin Langer, Matthew Hayden, Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath — I could not believe I was in the team, to be honest. It was the most surreal, unbelievable feeling.”
Off his fourth delivery, Brett Lee knocked down Sadagopan Ramesh’s off-stump and a star was born.
For Lee’s brother Shane Lee, the other most interesting incident from the Test is the mishap that his younger brother encountered. “A funny memory of that is that he had tried to put some highlights in his hair to blond his hair up a bit — he was trying to impress the young ladies back then — but his hair went slightly orange, so we gave him a bit stick about that,” Shane Lee told Fox Cricket’s The Follow On podcast.

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