The Stars are born

"This might be a good gimmick, that's how it might be seen by some. It might be a bit of extra pocket money for you guys, but we're a sporting club and we're here to f---in' win. Let's get that right from the get-go. Whatever's required, we'll put in. I'm not wasting my time, I've got other things to do in my life and so have you guys. We want to win, we want to get the best crowds in, we want to win financially, we want to win spiritually, we want to win with facilities, we want this to be one of the best cricket clubs in the world from day one."

It's preliminary final week in Melbourne and Eddie McGuire is revving up his troops. But the young men in front of him in the lounge at the Westpac Centre are not Collingwood footballers.

Instead, cricketers stand around in sharp, dark suits and open-necked shirts, listening to the chairman of the Melbourne Stars talk about the kind of club they want to create. At this stage, they are a team on press release only; the Victorian cricketers in the room have pledged their allegiance to the Stars rather than the Melbourne Renegades, based down the road at Etihad Stadium, but the team is unfinished.

The players mingle with board members — Cameron White and David Hussey talk footy with Essendon Football Club chairman David Evans, while Alex Keath, the impressive young all-rounder who inked his own contract with the Stars rather than using a manager, speaks comfortably with MCG Trust chairman and influential corporate advisor John Wylie, who has also joined the board. Big Bash League project owner Mike McKenna talks to the players about Cricket Australia's reasons for scrapping the state-based Twenty20 competition for a city-based league with eight teams and funky new names. Cricket risks losing relevance, he explains, unless it wins over a new audience, and the BBL — in its third incarnation in CA's planning after previous attempts were abandoned — is the great hope for prosperity.

McGuire says he's prepared to shake up the cricket establishment. "There's no history. There's plenty of rules but we'll break the rules," he says. "When I was CEO at Nine I was desperate to get T20 on TV. We've got two years with Foxtel ... and that should be seen as being on Broadway. Welcome aboard, welcome to the Melbourne Stars."

THE SET-UP

Coach Greg Shipperd says picking players was "like dividing your children".

"Essentially our Victorian squad was going to be split in two and it was about filling the gaps," he says. Captain White and Hussey aligned themselves with Shipperd and the Stars, while Brad Hodge and Andrew McDonald sided with the Renegades, coached by Shipperd's Bushrangers' assistant, Simon Helmot. Mates stuck together, and awkwardness prevailed as overtures were made in the Hugh Trumble Cafe at the MCG. One day, Clint McKay held a meeting with Helmot on one side of the room, then walked across and spoke to Shipperd on the other. "There was a couple of difficult weeks there," Shipperd says. "The coaching staff had great empathy for all of our players, having worked with some of them for years. Let's be honest, [Aaron] Finch, [Glenn] Maxwell and Hodge, McDonald, everyone would want them, and for them to come to a coach that worked with them day in, day out and say, 'I'm going in another direction', it was an emotional tear."

Shipperd and White used specific criteria to target players from interstate and overseas. They wanted experience with room for growth, people who could adapt quickly to a new environment and leaders who could share their knowledge with Victoria's established Twenty20 stars. Tasmania's George Bailey, Queensland's Chris Simpson and Western Australia's Adam Voges, for instance, had captained their states. Shipperd also went looking for all-rounders, hitting up James Faulkner [Tasmania] and Luke Wright [England], and seamers who could step up when Test stars James Pattinson and Peter Siddle were absent, signing tattooed England seamer Jade Dernbach.

Shipperd didn't splash money around, spreading the million-dollar salary cap as evenly as possible. "I reckon the players look left and right. It's a bit like the Geelong [Football Club], they know that in another market they could get 20, 30, 40, 50 thousand dollars more, but they've made a choice to play in a group they are comfortable with, that they think they can achieve success in, and [which] they think will bring an opportunity down the track to earn more money in qualifying for the Champions League or a chance to play in the IPL. If that happens, it's been a wise investment."

One place was kept aside, with the initials SKW pencilled in.

DECEMBER 11, 2011

Six days before the first game, all the Stars players, with the exception of Siddle and Pattinson, who are on Test duty in Hobart, are together for the first time, but they are huddled in distinct groups. On one side of the MCG home change rooms, Victorians White, Hussey and McKay sit together; in the middle of the room interstaters Bailey, Voges [who's just stepped off the red-eye from Perth] and Simpson sit on a massage bench with Englishmen Wright and Dernbach. On the far wall, an armchair is marked with a cardboard sign that says "WARNE".

The players gather in a meeting room and chief executive Clint Cooper gets started. "We need to make sure we're producing amazing experiences every time we represent the Stars. The team down the road can be anti-establishment, graffiti, skateboards, but we need to be leaders, put the fans first," he says. He tells them the Stars' sponsorship with Jenny Craig could lead to some tricky questions about a clash with tournament sponsor KFC, and that a partnership with the Transport Accident Commission will be announced the following morning. "Any speeding fines, drink-driving offences, it's over," Cooper says.

The Stars' media manager, Jess Cook, talks about building an open, resilient relationship with the media. "When you're speaking to a journalist, introduce yourself, shake their hands, use their names," she says. "Show your personality, have some fun. Be confident, not arrogant. Have a gripe at the team down the road."

Then she moves on to crisis management. "If an incident happens on the field, off the field, even if it's 3am in a nightclub, let us know." In a first for cricket, the change rooms will be open to the media for a designated time after games. "So there's a few things to be aware of, one of them is nudity," Cook says. She encourages the players to use social media, "but don't tweet while boozing". A player pipes up: "What if you only tweet while boozing?" He gets a laugh.

Warne has organised a private room at his new bar at Crown Casino for drinks and nibbles that night, and says the team can use that as an after-match venue, too. "Do we want to stay in the dressing room for hours and hours and sing songs and tell each other how good we are and then go out for a drink? Or do we want to go out straight away?" he asks.

Team manager Ben Robertson talks about the importance of bonding socially, as so many players have come from different places. "There's a lot of talent in this room," he says, "but if we don't gel it's about as useful as tits on a bull."

THE PLAYERS

James Faulkner is posing for a publicity photo outside the change rooms, and looks a bit like Luke Skywalker, holding his bat out in front of him like a lightsaber. The young Tasmanian's decision to represent a Melbourne team in the BBL "didn't go down crash hot" in Hobart, he says.

"Back home, we have a really tight little bubble and it was hard to tell them what I was doing, but I think it's a positive move. I've always said I have no alliance with Hobart, I'm from Launceston. So if there was a Launceston team I would have looked into it," he explains.

"I just looked at who they [the Stars] were looking to sign and playing at the MCG was obviously a massive attraction. It's good to get out of your comfort zone and experience life as a cricketer in another state."

Faulkner says he doesn't feel like an outsider. "I've been hanging out for this week to start. We've got a good vibe, even though we haven't spent that long together."

Bailey is jogging past the change rooms bouncing a football. A month earlier he and Hussey were involved in a heated incident in a Tasmania-Victoria Sheffield Shield game, when Hussey refused to accept the wicketkeeper's word on a contentious catch, but now they are teammates. There has been no explicit burying of hatchets but last Saturday they teamed up as doubles partners in tennis, winning a "battle of the codes" tournament. "I still think I was in the right and I'm sure he still thinks he was in the right," Hussey says. "The umpires made the call, we moved on, and we get on very well off the field. You play pretty hard but once that's done and dusted everyone is pretty decent fellas."

Bailey's motivation for joining the Stars was both professional and personal; his girlfriend lives in Melbourne, but the shield-winning captain also wanted to hear a different voice, experience a different dressing room. "For this competition to work, it needed a lot of [player] movement ... And if this works the way I think it will, that will actually make Tasmanian cricket better. We know what works down there and if we come away with one thing we can add to that, that can only be a good thing. To come to a new team and help to set up a bit of culture from day one is going to be quite exciting."

Inside the dressing room, players sit on couches, flicking through an induction booklet that contains Warne's 20-point guide to Twenty20 success, penned after he led the Rajasthan Royals to victory in the inaugural Indian Premier League. Warne is in the coach's room with Shipperd, pointing at a whiteboard, and the players are called into a meeting to discuss tactics for tonight's opening game against the Sydney Thunder. They are starting to look like a team.

"I couldn't be happier with the way they've organised themselves over the course of this week," Shipperd says after a final training session yesterday, with the dressing room banter at a steady buzz. "They've got a new team, they're making new friends and they've got new loyalties now. Their loyalties for this seven-week period are with the Melbourne Stars."