Tasmanian Matthew Wade is one of the biggest names in Australian cricket. We caught up with him in the midst of the Big Bash League, where he plays for the Hobart Hurricanes.

Where did you grow up and where do you live now? I grew up in Lauderdale and spent about 18 years there with my parents. At the footy club, at the beach, playing backyard cricket – really that was most of my childhood. Life started for me there. I’m in Lindisfarne now and I’m finishing renovations on our house there. Exciting times!

You like living near the beach? Yeah it’s great. Obviously Lauderdale is really flat so as a kid being able to ride bikes around was great. I grew up around my cousins and Nan and Pops. You couldn’t ask anymore for a child than to live down there. I still like visiting – my parents live in the same house, which brings back good memories.

What was it like growing up in a family of sportspeople? I loved it. My old man played a lot of statewide AFL footy and my cousin Jeremy Howe as well, who is now playing for Collingwood. We’re ultra-competitive, it’s probably where I get my competitiveness from! All the games of markings up and cricket going on in my household and my extended family. It was good to have a really tight family, we spent a lot of time together.

When the whole family comes together, do you all get competitive about everyday things? We do! It doesn’t matter, generally someone’s got a basketball ring at their house, and if we shoot around it gets competitive and it turns into two on two, three on three. Anything that we do within our family tends to be a competition! It stems from myself and Jeremy the most. We turn everything into a comp and I’m sure the rest of the family rolls their eyes at Christmas time when we get into it again.

You’ve mentioned basketball and footy, but was it always going to be cricket? Nah, I wanted to follow my old man. I grew up in an AFL family and yeah, the cricket was always on, and the old man loved cricket from afar, but I was hellbent on playing Australian Rules pretty much up until I was 17. I was in a couple of drafts. Then cricket started to take over. I started playing cricket competitively at 14 or 15, but it was never really in the forefront of my mind, I was more focused on playing footy, and enjoyed playing that. Cricket was just something I did in the summer to be honest.

So you played cricket in the summer, and you just got good at it, and then you decided to pursue it professionally? Yeah, basically! Cricket took over footy, performance and ability-wise. I got the most out of what I had for footy and it wasn’t going to happen. Cricket started to take over around 15. I started to concentrate on cricket more after playing 1st grade for Clarence.

Amazing how that happens. Look at you now, you’re one of the big cricket names. Yeah, I’m very grateful. Seeing my cousin go through AFL, it’s a brutal sport, so I’m thankful I got to play cricket for as long as I did.

How are you preparing for the Big Bash League (BBL)? I played four or five one-day games in Tassie, and went to Abu Dhabi to try to get some T10 in there and the rest was prepping with the team, getting some practice games in, starting to get the ball rolling. It’s a very exciting time, everyone puts in the work this time of year to be ready to go for game one, and we’ve certainly done that down in Hobart so we can pull it all together this year.

How do you keep up the stamina, being out in the sun for that amount of time? It’s just years of growing up playing cricket, you put the foundations in and you just go out and do it. We don’t think about it too much anymore. I think from afar people certainly wonder why you’d stand out in a field for six hours a day and play cricket but our bodies have just been conditioned to it now. It’s certainly a different kind of fitness to stand up for that long, with the pressure on your back, that’s a thing people don’t take into consideration.

You recently announced your retirement from international cricket. Tell us a bit about that decision. It must have been huge. Not really, to be honest! I was playing every World Cup and every game for Australia and I knew the opportunities were going to be less and less at the age I was getting. It naturally happened through conversations with Australian head coach Andrew McDonald and selector George Bailey. I knew pretty much where I was at. It was really fast-tracked. I got the opportunity to do some coaching for Australia and one of the requirements was I couldn’t still be an active international player, so that’s why I made the announcement.

What are your goals with coaching? Over the next two or three years I’ll start to dip my toes in the water a little more with coaching around playing the BBL. Until the end of February, I want to concentrate on making sure I’m in the best possible condition to play BBL. Just so I’m ready to go. But outside of that I’ll have a few opportunities to experience coaching a little bit more. Eventually I’d like to be a head coach but I’m a massive realist in this and understand it’s going to take a long time, there’s a lot of steps to follow. Over the next few years I will start to experience different environments and see where it takes me.

What’s one thing about being a cricketer you think most people don’t know about? Probably the amount of travel that we do gets taken for granted. It’s really easy to watch a game of cricket, wherever it is in the world, and not understand the sacrifices all the players make, particularly with family. To head on the road for six to eight months of the year, sometimes more for guys playing franchise cricket, is probably something that doesn’t get recognised enough. We’re certainly not traveling for two days to play an away game, and then back to our beds. We’ve got some guys, guys like Tim David, who’s spending about 250 days away a year, so I think some people don’t have the consideration on the travel and how hard it can be on your body. To turn up every single day with the amount of travel we do is quite hard.

It’s like when a band goes on a world tour. I can only imagine how exhausting it must be. Especially when you have to be in peak performance when you go play. Absolutely. It takes years to get good at it. It’s certainly a skill in itself.

Looking back on your career, is there a favourite memory? The World Cup in 2021 is my fondest memory as a player. To grow up, wanting to play World Cups, to go on to win one, and the first one ever for Australia, is really special, so that’s a great memory.

A lot of top Australian players come from Tasmania. What is it about Tassie that produces good cricketers? I think it’s the environment. Nearly every cricketer or sportsperson that I’ve met from Tasmania have this ultra competitive edge about them and it’s kind of us vs the rest of Australia kind of attitude that we grow up with. Especially the ones that get to the highest level and are really successful in their field. So I think that’s a character trait, almost playing with a chip on their shoulder a little bit.

What do you like to do with your time off? Now it’s spending time with my kids and wife at home. As I said earlier, we’re finishing renovations in Lindisfarne. I like to relax and have a good time. And if I get an opportunity to play some golf or go fishing, I like to sneak that in between spending time with my family as much as I can.