Ash Gardner on the feedback which annoyed her and how she improved

In a wide-ranging interview with the Keegan and Co. podcast, to be released on Sunday, Gardner also details how her fitness had been well short of international standard early in her career, outlined her challenging mental road back from a string of concussions, and how gaining insight into her psychological profile helped stop her from “bickering” with her now wife.

Gardner, a two-time winner of the Belinda Clark Award as Australian female player of the year, said that responses she had received from a coach two years ago had stung the all-rounder.

“We do a thing called elite player qualities with ourselves and one of the coaches within the cricket environment, and basically they rate you out of five on all these qualities,” Gardner said.

“One of them, which probably burnt me the most, was the coachability and feedback piece. And a couple years ago, I got rated like three, and I was like, and like three is average, out of five,

“So then I had to deep dive into that. I’m like, ‘OK, when she tells me what I things I don’t want to hear, it’s actually coming from a good place’ and it’s coming from it’s not critical, it’s just being able to work towards a goal and not actually taking it to heart, which I probably did.

“And I feel like I’m quite sensitive when people say things towards me, I actually get quite cut by it, which really annoys me, because I’m like, ‘why am I getting so defensive or so hurt by that when you know it’s not actually that bad?’”

The world’s top-ranked one-day international all-rounder, Gardner said she had also been chastened early in her Australian career after unflattering results in a 2km time trial.

“We obviously do a very simple test of a 2k time trial, and we have benchmarks, and I was very far off those benchmarks,” Gardner said.

“And it sounds really stupid that that’s kind of what spurred me, but it was like, if I know that I’m fit enough, my body’s going to be OK back up game after game. That’s kind of where I need to be. And, yeah, I just started to get fitter, stronger. And then the other stuff kind of takes care of itself, because, you know that you’ve got trust in your body to be able to go out and perform.

“It probably was a backhanded compliment, actually, from one of our physios back when I started, I’d run my 2k time trial. I’d PB’ed at the time. I maybe just got under nine minutes, which is so far off the mark. And she was like, ‘good job on basically PBing but you’re so far off the mark still.’ So I’m like, OK cool, I’ve done something good, but I haven’t quite done enough. And it was probably that moment where I’m like OK ‘If people are thinking that what are they saying about me outside?”

Gardner said working on understanding what made her tick had helped her not only in the sporting realm, but also in dealing with her long-time partner and now wife Monica.

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“Ultimately, it helped my relationship with my now wife, because that she was the person that I was just bickering with all the time over nothing. It was just like, ‘that is brown. No that’s not brown.’ Why are we even talking about it, it’s just so irrelevant.”

Gardner suffered a string of concussions early in her career, leading to a perception that she had issues against short-pitched bowling. The Sydney Sixers gun said being associated with repeat head injuries remained a source of frustration.

“It’s just one of those things where people kind of associate that with me, which is disappointing, but … it probably happens less and less now.”