Last Monday morning, a couple of weeks after the most taxing season of his career, Liam Hatcher decided to finally put his feet up.
Buoyed by his beloved Newcastle Knights springing an upset win a few days earlier, and still savouring a breakout 44-wicket Sheffield Shield summer, he was feeling pretty content as he flicked on the telly in his Ermington apartment.
A self-described sports nut, Hatcher zeroed in on day five of the Sheffield Shield final. As Victoria’s season unravelled in the space of an hour and South Australia celebrated back-to-back titles, one thought crystallised in his mind.
There’s nothing I want more than to win a Shield final with New South Wales.
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Hatcher’s overnight Shield success has in fact been more than a decade in the works. Let’s mark it at August 2015, when his 6-24 for Australia U19s against England U19s prompted Andrew Flintoff to label him “the ginger Siddle”.
Ever since, the trajectory of the right-arm quick from Premier Cricket club Fairfield-Liverpool, who averages in the mid-130s but topped out a rapid 146kph this summer, has followed a painfully familiar narrative.
Hamstring injuries. Stress fractures. Yada yada yada. And when Hatcher was fit, he was no guarantee of a start; even when the Big Three were with the national side, he still had to squeeze into an XI that contained, at various times, Sean Abbott, Doug Bollinger, Gurinder Sandhu, Trent Copeland, Harry Conway, Chris Tremain and Jackson Bird.
Ten pretty handy quicks. Nine-and-a-half years of frustration; 19 first-class matches snuck in around the edges. And while three of those came in the COVID-19-addled summer of 2019-20, when NSW did in fact claim the Shield, it seems for Hatcher that the abbreviated nature of that campaign only fanned the flames of desire.
“We finished top of the table by a long way that year,” he says. “So we got a little taste of it, but we got robbed of playing a final … there’s nothing more I want – and the rest of our team wants – than to play in a Shield final and win one.”
Watching from his couch as a handful of New South Welshmen helped South Australia to another title, he could’ve been forgiven for pondering the greenness of the grass in Adelaide. If he did, it isn’t something he’s willing to admit. For while he has skipped across the border to play for Melbourne Stars in the Big Bash, there is blue blood coursing through his veins.
“I’ve never really wanted to leave New South Wales,” he says. “It sounds cliché, but growing up, I only ever wanted to play for New South Wales. They were the guys I watched on TV – Brett Lee … I was in awe of what he was able to do.
“And I’ve loved playing for New South Wales. I think I’ve been here for almost 10 years now and it very much feels like home.”
Perhaps with the realities of modern sport in mind, Hatcher does add a caveat to that statement: “A lot of things can change very quickly, and you never know; you can’t rule anything out.”
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Hatcher thinks back to his childhood and the long days outdoors when he and his older sister, Olivia, put their parents “under the pump” with all their sporting commitments across Sydney’s west.
Dad Wayne, a mad Parramatta supporter who still insists Liam “jumped ship” after the Knights accounted for the Eels in the 2001 NRL grand final (Hatcher insists it was more a case of following his favourite player, Andrew Johns – today he wears the NSW No7 shirt in tribute to the Newcastle legend), held down two jobs to make ends meet for the family. Mum Liz was a taxi service for the kids, ferrying them wherever was required as their passions and abilities grew.
“I was playing baseball, softball, swimming, cricket, footy,” Hatcher smiles. “Even my grandparents were helping out, taking us to sport and all the other things we were doing.
“I had a great childhood. Both my parents were very supportive, and still are now; they sacrificed so much for me – time and effort – and I love them very dearly.”
He remains fiercely Western Sydney, and grins when he speaks of the “fake westies” who head to the city’s affluent east at first opportunity. He’s a member at Twin Creeks Golf & Country Club (handicap six) – which, from his apartment, is halfway to Penrith. From his apartment balcony, he can see Cricket Central, the relatively new home of Cricket NSW that neighbours Silverwater Correctional Complex amid the city’s sprawling western suburbia.
Hatcher lives there with his girlfriend of three years, Stella Campbell, who will be familiar to plenty of cricket fans as another fast-bowling product out of Sydney. Campbell’s career has contrasted Hatcher’s in her rapid elevation to Baggy Green, but mirrored it in terms of injury interruptions since.
They share a mutual understanding of the frustrations that accompany their line of work, but it doesn’t tend to dominate their conversations. Cricket chat, typically, is infrequent between them.
They also share a workplace at times and Campbell is one of many in that building who has witnessed the toil behind Hatcher’s arrival as one of the most effective first-class bowlers in the country.
“I put a lot of work in the last couple of years to try and get my body right,” says Hatcher, who this summer bowled more than twice as many deliveries in first-class cricket than he has previously.
“I’ve sort of been building up to this, I think, for a couple of years.”
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Hatcher was surprised and sad to see Blues head coach Greg Shipperd and many of his support staff moved on. He feels a debt of gratitude to Shipperd – the mentor he says cares more for his players than any other head coach he has seen – and bowling coach Shawn Bradstreet, who has helped him unlock his potential.
“The last couple of years under Shawn, I’ve leant a lot more into the data side of things,” he says. “He was very big on that, and all the stats with our analysts.”
At the beginning of the summer, Hatcher and Bradstreet put their heads together, analysed the data and statistics at their disposal, and worked out how he could be most effective for a NSW side shorn of the skills and experience of Bird and Tremain.
They landed on a strategy that required Hatcher to make a couple of significant changes to how he goes about his craft. One of those was a change in line and length.
“When I was younger, I remember talking to Moises (Henriques),” he says. “He loved the amount of times I hit the stumps as my biggest strength.
“But I felt like when I did that, if I get it right, then it’s good, but I’ve got such a small margin for error, and my misses end up on the pads and leaking runs.
“So I made a conscious decision this preseason to lean more into the channel, and it probably helps that I was able to get a bit more movement this year than what I had done previously.”
The other change concerned making the most of the new ball, should the opportunity present itself. That happened for the first time last summer against Queensland in Sydney, in early December, and he never looked back: in five matches opening the bowling, Hatcher collected 26 wickets at 20.92.
“When I first came into the Shield team … and then even in more recent years … I was coming in, trying to be the aggressor, the enforcer: bowl fast, bowl those ugly spells, for lack of a better word,” he says.
“This year I had an opportunity to step up, alongside Jack (Edwards), as a new-ball bowler and a leader in this attack. It was really pleasing to end the year how I did, taking the new ball and being effective with it … I wanted to lock down that position and make that my own.”
Those pre-season tweaks also fit into the bigger picture of his intelligently devised injury rehabilitation programs, which effectively doubled up as technical work; as his body recovered and strengthened, his skills improved.
“I did a lot of drill work and a lot of stuff off half-run, three-quarter run (up) to try and improve my skills, because I felt like I would play a different role in this team to what I have done earlier in my career,” he says
“The outcome of that has been getting myself in better positions, to actually get down the back of the ball and swing the ball more.
“There were times this year where I was still struggling a little bit because I haven’t been a massive swinger of the ball, and I was trying to work out between (bowling) wobble seam and swinging it to different batters.
“That’s still something that I’m learning. Hopefully I can build on that in the next year or two, but it was nice to add those things to my repertoire.”
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No-one took more than Hatcher’s 44 wickets in the Shield this summer. And – as fraught as these comparisons are nowadays amid talk of juiced-up pitches and frazzled T20 techniques – no right-arm paceman has ever taken so many wickets so frequently (every 32.86 deliveries) in a Shield season.
That’s how big 2025-26 was for the 29-year-old. And while he hasn’t heard a word from national selection chair George Bailey – and nor is he expecting to despite a stint with Australia A in 2023 – he does have some grand plans swimming around in his mind as he looks ahead to a new Blues era under Brad Haddin.
“I know this year was a big jump forward for me, but there’s no reason I can’t make the same steps again next year,” he says. “I want to be a leader in this group and this bowling attack.
“I’m a competitor. When I’m bowling at my best, I’m in the contest and it’s literally just me against the batter. I’m not worrying about anything else. Almost taking it personally.
“I could get fiery at times when I was a bit younger, and lose my head a bit, and that was detrimental to my performance. But now I’m older and hopefully a bit wiser … l feel like I can contain those emotions a bit more, and channel it into executing.”
Lifting the Dean Jones Trophy this summer meant plenty to Hatcher and his teammates. But they also know they have been circling a Shield final for too long. For the first time this century, the Blues have gone six summers between lifting the Shield. There has been plenty of talk about the decline of a powerhouse.
Hatcher sees it differently, pointing to the trajectory of the side from an historic low only a few seasons ago.
“(Shipperd) came in at a spot when we hadn’t won a Shield game for 15 games or something,” he says. “We were getting battered from pillar to post, and rightly so in some eyes.
“But he took over then, and he took us … from what some were saying was the lowest point in Blues history, to knocking on the door of Shield finals the last couple of years. So to be able to win the one-day comp this year was extremely special.
“He was great, and not just him – all of our coaching staff – they were all exceptional with the feedback (we would receive) and postgame reviews on what we could have done better, the key moments.
“From the time (Shipperd) started to now, we definitely got better at that, and I think in the future, hopefully we keep building on that and successes will come.
“One thing I do know about ‘Hadds’ (Haddin) is no-one loves Cricket NSW as much as him, and he’ll want to take us back to Shield titles, one-day titles, Big Bash titles.
“So we’re excited to have him around and the coaches that he brings in. They’ll bring a new set of eyes … and if we all lean into that, like I know we will, there’s plenty of talent in the room to get us back to winning trophies.”
