Before he pulled on the whites for Albion last month the 29-year-old hadn’t played for more than eight seasons.

“I felt like I wanted to play again. I missed playing,” he said.

He played a lot of cricket growing up and at a high level, donning the blue in age teams alongside the likes of Moises Henriques, Daniel Hughes and Chris Tremain.

It was a pathway that inevitably took him to Sydney, where he plied his trade for a couple of years in grade cricket with Hawkesbury and St George.

But feeling a bit burnt out and like the game was beating him he “went away from the game for a bit”, focusing instead on work.

“(But) I felt like I was getting in a bit of a rut,” he said.

“I wasn’t doing too much other than working.”

“I like what cricket brings to the mind. It is such a hard game mentally.”

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When talk around town turned to the [then] upcoming Twenty20 competition it lit the fuse again for Cady. 

And while the drive of his younger days is still there, he spoke about wanting to succeed and not let the game beat him again, he is enjoying the more relaxed and social atmosphere of playing in the country.

Not that he is a stranger to the country lifestyle, spending his formative years in Bathurst. 

He moved to Gunnedah about eight years ago to take up a job in the mines as a mechanic.

These days he juggles his work commitments between his mechanic repair business and a cotton farm around Emerald Hill.

“I’ve got full-time staff working for both businesses. I just float between the two,” he said.

Batting at the top of the order, he has been a handy pick-up for Albion and shown little sign of the rustiness you might expect after so long out of the game.

In his first knock he top-scored with 40 as Albion claimed the one-day silverware, although he was in his assessment “very one dimensional”.

“I felt like I was seeing the ball alright but I couldn’t play my shots,” Cady said.

He backed that up with another solid contribution, 31, against Mornington last Saturday, although he was “disappointed” to get out when he did.

“I was just trying to get in and bat and build an innings,” he said.

He’ll have a good chance to do that over the next two weeks as Albion take on Kookaburras at Wolseley Park in the penultimate round of the two-day competition. Mornington face Court House at Kitchener Park in the other game.