“Everything was a battle royal,” says John Hollioake, recalling his two sons, Adam and Ben, going hell for leather at the family home in Melbourne. “They’d play every sport known to man. They used to fight like hell, even in the kitchen. They had the competitiveness I had in spades. I just wasn’t bloody good enough to make the most of it.”
Windows were broken, ornaments smashed, some of which John and his wife Daria have kept to this day as mementos of a time when their gifted young children were exploring how far their talent could take them.
By the summer of 1997 they would become the first pair of brothers to make their Test debuts together in the 20th century, representing England against the country of their birth. Adam was 25, Ben, at 19 years and 269 days, was England’s youngest male Test cricketer since Brian Close in 1949, capping a landmark summer which saw him heralded as the new golden boy of English cricket.