A specialist right-handed batter as well as a very occasional right-arm medium-pace
bowler, Slater represented the
New South Wales Blues in
Australian domestic cricket and played English
county cricket with
Derbyshire. His Australian club was the University of NSW Cricket Club, for whom he scored 3873 runs in 77 first-grade innings, with a high score of 213 not out. Slater went on to Test cricket, opening the batting with mixed success, scoring 5,312 runs and 14 centuries at an average of 42. He was generally unsuccessful in
One-Day International games, averaging a lowly 24.07 and, after a string of failures, was eventually dropped from the national limited-overs team for good in 1997. Throughout his career, Slater was susceptible to the "nervous nineties": of the 23 times he reached a score of 90 in a Test innings, he was dismissed nine times before reaching 100. Slater played for New South Wales in the 1991/92
Sheffield Shield season. He made quick progress to the Australian team, being selected for the
Ashes tour of England in 1993, when he was 23 years of age, narrowly beating Queenslander
Matthew Hayden to the opening berth alongside vice/captain
Mark Taylor, who also grew up in Wagga Wagga. In his debut match, he scored a half-century, before compiling his maiden century in the following Test match at
Lord's, famously kissing the Australian coat of arms on his helmet to celebrate achieving the milestone. He continued his good form into the subsequent home series against
New Zealand in 1993–94, netting 305 runs at an average of 76.25. In the
1994–95 return Ashes series in Australia, Slater was the leading run-scorer in the series with 623. The following season saw him notch his first double-century, against
Sri Lanka at the
WACA in
Perth. Slater's match-winning 123 against
England at
Sydney in the
1998–99 Ashes series comprised 66.84 per cent of his team's entire total. This remains the greatest proportion since
Charles Bannerman made 165 not out (67.34 per cent) in the very first Test innings of all, in 1877. Slater was dropped from the Australian Test team in late 1996 after some poor form. It took him two years to get back into the national team and things went well for a couple of years, although this period coincided with a split from his first wife and accusations of drug-taking by the
Australian Cricket Board (ACB). His Ashes tour to England in 2001 was his last international series. He started off with a quick-fire 77 in his first innings of the series, including four boundaries off the first four balls he faced from
Darren Gough. However, as the series went on, Slater’s form started to decline dramatically, ultimately leading to Justin Langer replacing him as opening batter. It was subsequently reported that Slater felt animosity towards Langer over this decision and became reclusive. It was later revealed that he suffered from
bipolar disorder. Unable to rebuild a career in limited-overs cricket, his prolonged form slump forced him out of professional cricket after 74 Test matches. ==Legal issues==