Nathan Ellis’ long and winding road to international cricket, past the Starc-arc
Nathan Ellis’ long and winding road to international cricket, past the Starc-arc: Nathan Ellis has worked as a landscaper, construction worker, furniture remover, teacher’s aide at a high school, and worked many shifts. It is to make ends meet on his way to representing Australia in Twenty20 Internationals and taking a hat trick in his debut.
He has only been in a small number of games for Australia, but since making his debut with Hobart Hurricanes in 2019, the 27-year-old has risen to prominence as one of the country’s best death bowlers.
His performances in the Big Bash League and for Australia earned him a position as a traveling reserve in Australia’s successful T20 World Cup campaign as well as a contract with the IPL’s Punjab Kings.
Switching jobs to pay his bills
Nathan Ellis, at 22 years old, left New South Wales for Tasmania so he could make a living as a professional cricket player. Even though he was unemployed and without a contract, he kept going out of a desire to disprove his doubters.
When I was 22, I uprooted my life and traveled to Tasmania from New South Wales in an effort to realize a lifelong dream of playing professional cricket. Ellis said on Cricket Australia’s YouTube page, “I didn’t have a contract then and I was moving out of home for the first time, so there were a lot of expenses that came with that.”
I worked five or six jobs at the time to make ends meet. Ellis reflects, “I first got a job in landscaping, but I had to quit since they insisted I work on Saturdays, which is when the cricket was on.”
I also helped move and assemble furniture, but I had to stop because it conflicted with my soccer games. I also worked in construction, but it was too taxing on my health, so I had to stop doing that.
He says that after trying several different occupations to make ends meet, being fired from a door-to-door fundraiser for the World Wildlife Fund was the lowest point of his life.
They presumably pay you only to knock on doors for eight hours a day, but I found a job doing it and I’m doing well. At six in the morning, you are waking people up, and they used to smash doors in my face. He says with a giggle, “It was one of the lowest points of my career.
Then, luckily for him, Nathan Ellis found a great work as a teacher’s aide at a high school, which did not conflict with his match days.
In retrospect, I cannot explain how I pulled it all off. It was a rough few years during which I had to work several various shifts and was frequently laid off from employment. “It was challenging at the time, but it turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life,” he said happily.
Giving up on the game
New South Wales native Ellis is not the first cricketer to find success on the international stage after relocating to Tasmania. He now ranks with such notables as Jackson Bird, Ed Cowan, and Jason Krejza.
Ellis, despite his best efforts, was never able to make the Tasmanian senior team. In 2019, he pondered a move back to Sydney, he claims.
The 26-year-old claimed, “I had played two seasons in Tasmania, and I had done pretty well at grade level cricket, but I hadn’t received an opportunity in the state squad.”
I wasn’t saving any money or really creating a career, so it was time to start the next chapter of my life,” he continued.
After a phone call from then-Tasmania coach Adam Griffith, he decided to return for a second season.
I told Griffith I can’t do another season here, and that was the end of it. My financial situation is currently untenable. But he encouraged me to continue, and I said, “What the heck, just one more year!” And it was the year I really began to shine. After that, things moved very rapidly, with my call up to Tasmania and the Big Bash deal,” Ellis remembered.
Ellis’s world was changing.
In only his fifth game at the domestic level, he got five wickets against a star-studded New South Wales team.
His economy rate of 8.31 in his first BBL season was good for sixth-best in the league. He finished with 20 wickets. Following his dream Twenty20 International debut, Ellis received his first call-up to the Australian national team.
To this day, I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t lingered in Tasmania for an extra year.
To put it simply, I had everything I needed to return home in my backpack. Now that I have some distance, I can say, “Wow!” What a brilliant move on my part,” he exclaimed.
When Mitchell Starc, another of the NSW quicks and an incumbent starter, handed out Ellis’s first international cap to him in Mirpur last year, it felt like the world had come full circle for him.
To paraphrase what Ellis said, “they’re such a strong state with a lot of depth,” and “he was one of the reasons I had to go” to Tasmania.
Soon after Australia won the ODI series against New Zealand, Mitchell Starc complained of knee pain and was replaced by him for the next tour of India.