Left and right: Casey-South Melbourne batsman Michael Hansen enjoyed a strong season with the bat after considering retirement from Premier Cricket level in the off-season. 23544By Marc McGowan
MICHAEL Hansen is the first to admit he had a forgettable Premier Cricket season in 2007/08.
The veteran Casey-South Melbourne batsman inherited the captaincy in one of the proudest honours of his esteemed career before that summer, but suffered through a difficult year.
The Swans struggled mightily on the field and he had little impact with the bat – even missing six games at one stage due to a broken finger.
A training accident also left him with a split lip.
It’s little wonder that Hansen, 38, was seriously considering retiring from Premier Cricket at the end of the tumultuous season.
But fast forward to the end of 2008/09 and he is a very different man.
Hansen enjoyed a resurgent summer sans the captaincy, scoring 525 runs at an average of 35 with two tons – the ninth and 10th of his career.
“It’s been reasonable, especially when you compare it to last year,” he said.
“I would have liked to have scored between 600 and 700 runs, but I had a few low scores – three ducks for the season don’t help.
“It would have been good if I had converted them a bit more.”
Hansen’s wife of five years, Jo, is also expecting the couple’s first child next month.
“I have got no idea what it’s going to be like – I’ll probably have even less time!” he said.
“We have about eight or nine nephews on both sides and the statistics say it will be a boy, but it would be good to make history – it’d be the first girl if it was to happen.”
Hansen, who is a project manager for a recruiting company, also racked up his 250th first XI match during the season and is enjoying the new vibe at Casey Fields under coach Mark Ridgway.
“I was pretty down after last season. It took a few pre-season sessions to get into this year and start enjoying it,” he said.
“But all the recruits we got were fantastic and ‘Ridgy’ has been excellent and is setting a foundation for the future that the club has never had before.
“I was definitely considering retirement (last season) and was looking at maybe just playing subbies or something like that.”
Retirement is still an option for the former St Mary’s Cricket Club junior, but he plans on playing somewhere next summer.
Hansen spent a year-and-a-half in the Victorian squad in the early 1990s and was once 12th man in a clash with Western Australia.
He remains disappointed that he was unable to play for his state at senior level – as he did in the under-17s and under-19s – but admits it was an extremely tough side to break into.
“It would have been great, but I try not to think about that too much because it gets depressing,” Hansen said.
“The times I was not making runs was when I needed to and the times I was making runs there were no availabilities.
“At the end of the day, I didn’t make enough runs consistently over the journey.”
But Hansen is proud of his association with Casey-South Melbourne, where he has spent most of his career on top of stints at Dandenong and Sydney district clubs Sydney University and Sutherland.
“It’s been brilliant. (Mathew Hawking and I) shared the old days at South and have a long history playing with each other,” he said.
“We share a few stories and we’re really the only ones associated with the old South Melbourne.”
