by David Lloyd
Yet I had no idea anything was amiss until this airport conversation with a man three years into his England captaincy. During his tenure, Atherton had worked under two managers and two chairmen and was of a belief that combining these roles was neither desirable nor practical. He did most of the talking on that car journey but my limited response was not down to a lack of interest. Although I cared passionately about the England cricket team, and that has never waned, any notion of getting involved was fanciful stuff. Quite simply, the position to suit my skills did not exist within the set-up.
There was no time to change things before that year’s World Cup, which was only a matter of weeks away, but after the disaster that unfolded in their performances in India and Pakistan it became clear that Atherton, using his influence as England captain, began lobbying for me. The embarrassingly one-sided quarter-final defeat to Sri Lanka led to inquests. No matter that they went on to win the whole damned thing the following week by shocking Australia in the final. Within days of England’s return, Illingworth had relinquished the managerial half of his job share but announced his intention to remain in charge of selection.
Then, a single move by the Test and County Cricket Board improved my chances of employment in a heartbeat. They made it public that they no longer required a team manager for England – what they wanted was a coach. So, it happened that while on Lancashire’s pre-season camp in Montego Bay in early April, I was invited to become England coach, initially on a six-month basis. I flew home to sort out the details of my contract with AC Smith, then in the final throes of his stint as TCCB chief executive. The offer – £25,000 for six months’ work – did not come without complication.
For a start, what was to happen at Lancashire in the interim and what if, on pledging my commitment to the national team until October, things didn’t work out? Where would I be in six months? In a generous act of support, Lancashire, through chairman Bob Bennett, agreed to keep my position open throughout my ‘trial’ period.
I wanted to get the England team to win. I’ve always liked the idea of teams playing cricket with smiles on their faces, but it’s pretty hard to smile when you’re losing, and England hadn’t won much for a sustained period of time. It’s hard to look happy when you’re coming second. There were lots of droughts to address – for a start there had not been a victorious Test series abroad for five years.
Illingworth proved a surprisingly supportive chairman of selectors who did not allow a challenge to his position by David Graveney – knocked back by Graveney’s employers, the PCA, due to a perceived conflict of interest – to affect the functioning of the selection committee, of which Graveney was to become a part, or the reduction in his overall responsibilities to affect his relationship with me. In fact, despite the upheaval he appeared more than happy in our working environment for the twelve months he held the position. For my part, I found his autocratic image did not match his private persona.
Dour but sharp-minded as a cricketer, he had dismissed me as an on-field adversary in his typically gruff manner during his playing days with Yorkshire and Leicestershire, but he clearly had a higher regard for my coaching credentials. I found him sociable at the end of a day’s play, and as well as open and honest, more mischievous in private than he let on publicly.
Of course, I was aware of some of his conflicts with the players in previous months, not least Atherton, and more infamously his confrontation with Devon Malcolm in South Africa, but this I dismissed as going with the territory when you put a Yorkshireman, and a successful one at that, in charge of a team. If his name was going to be on the results sheet, he wanted to put his stamp on things. I also found that like me, particularly in those days, he could be sensitive to criticism. Men who take on a coaching role across any of England’s sporting teams and are not so, are few and far between.
The one big shock to me on becoming England coach was the process of selection. There was nothing particularly scientific about it. In fact, it was done over dinner, with glasses of wine on the table, and felt like a throwback to a bygone age. Rumour suggested that in these meetings Raymond would be the one to get his way, but in my experience this was simply untrue. It was rarely, if ever, the case.
Initially, I was a part of this process. Only later, having taken stock, did I take the decision to come off the selection panel. As coach, doubling up as a selector – and only one voice of five – meant there was an obligation to justify decisions made by the group as if they were my own. This caused some discomfort for me in dressing-room situations. Players who are left out naturally wonder which of the selectors have lost faith in them, and if the coach is one of the five this carries unnecessary tension. An example of being placed in a compromising position – supporting the decisions of others even though they contradicted my own view – came in the Caribbean in early 1998 when I wanted Mark Ramprakash in the XI for the first Test versus West Indies but the other tour selectors were firmly opposed to the idea.
The buck stopped with me to justify a decision not mine in the making. It would have been improper to let on the truth, so I was forced to act as if I was behind it. Ramprakash was a player who needed to feel backed by his coach, and even in this instance when he was being backed, it did not appear so from the outside. During my time, the panel reduced in number from five to three but then increased to four once more, the common number since.
My feeling as coach was that selection should be the remit of a single man – a system that would promote clearer accountability. In football, a manager picks his team and sends it out to do his bidding. On match days selection is his domain, yet through the week he may have a cast of thousands on the training ground feeding back advice. As the millennium approached, this was the system I believed cricket should adopt.
My thirty-eight months in charge of England offered arguably my greatest challenge. While there was some progress made in stopping the rot, most notably when we won our first five-Test series for a dozen years against the touring South Africans in 1998, the fact that we were still only a mid-ranking side showed what a big job was on our hands. It certainly wasn’t one to be completed in the space of a year or two, and would take long-term planning.
But putting strategies in place was not easy. With Lancashire I had been used to arriving in my ‘office’ at Old Trafford not long after sunrise in early season, preparing for each working day by chatting to groundsman Peter Marron over a coffee. Pete, who sadly lost his battle with cancer in 2015, was the best ally one could wish for and someone who would do anything for you. I knew if I wanted anything, he was the man to ask – but it was also important not to upset him. He was a tough man. You didn’t mess with him. Sat behind my desk in the converted toilet block tucked behind the dressing rooms in the pavilion, I would scribble notes on players and pitches and plan training schedules. This was my working environment as a county coach, but my routines for England were quite different. Surrounded by blocked off urinals I might have been, but I knew what I was working with at county level. But with England there was no such regularity when it came to ‘office’ work. There was no staff to call on and not even a settled squad. I had big plans for England but not necessarily the financial backing to put them into place. That much I found out in my first few months in charge when, having discovered funds were available for certain schemes, I was stymied by counties unwilling to loosen their collective purse strings.
At that time, I wanted all eighteen clubs to invest in technology such as a universal video system that had first been introduced in New Zealand rugby. All this seems par for the course now in an age where players walk from the field to watch their dismissals and other highlights of an innings instantly, either on their personal laptops, tablets or smartphones. As well as giving physical evidence of their performance, and any evidence of faults in technique, this particular video system offered footage of opposition players, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses and what one might expect when confronted with them.
In the late 1990s, this was all cutting-edge stuff but English counties appeared to contain no appetite for it. It might shock cricket followers au fait with the Decision Review System gadgets like Hawk-Eye and Snicko and virtual reality practice devices such as ProBatter, that some of the counties baulked at the idea of forking out £23,000 each so that every ground in the country could share this video system and build a national library of footage.
The area of English cricket I believed I could advance the furthest was our one-day game, if only I could break down the stigma of selecting specialist players suited to the shorter format rather than the traditional style player. There was lots of potential for improvement, as England’s recent record in 50-over cricket had been poor, culminating in a limp World Cup effort. Unfortunately, that has been echoed across a couple of decades because as a nation we have always tended to pay lip service to big one-day tournaments.
Progress was made initially in 1996 and 1997 but later hit a brick wall. Through the influence of David Graveney, who took over from Raymond Illingworth as chairman of selectors on the eve of the 1997 Ashes, we tried to get one-day specialists selected – the kind of players rather short-sightedly dismissed as bits-and-pieces men whenever we didn’t win but some good cricketers like Vince Wells, Matthew Fleming, Ian Austin, Dougie Brown and Mark Ealham. These were people with good one-day records. However, a lack of continuity damaged our efforts. We had a history of picking Test players to play one-dayers, particularly on overseas tours, and the team development we planned was occasionally hit by not having the right kind of personnel to hand when on tour.
Like a magpie I tried to adorn our own nest by pinching a tactic off Australia. In a bid to add a sprinkling of dynamism in the field, I asked the team to buzz the ball back to the wicketkeeper whenever they picked it up. I liked the energy it gave off and left the opposition in no doubt they were in a game. If I had an influence with selectors, it was that whichever kind of player they were looking at, be it batsman or bowler, if they got into a toss-up, I let it be known the successful candidate should be the best fielder. I didn’t want a load of donkeys. Sure, there would be a few who would not be overly athletic and there was no need to change them because it was for their primary skills that they had been selected. Others were electric in the field and one of the very best never got any credit – Mark Ealham was quicker off the mark and a better fielder than most folk thought. In fielding drills, he was always very good at hitting the stumps with his throws.
The potential of the team was highlighted when in the space of a few months we beat Australia 3-0 and then won the Champions Trophy – a four-team tournament in those days – in Sharjah. During that period, Adam Hollioake proved himself to be an inspirational captain, a true leader and a brilliant one-day player who England could have got more out of in the longer term. His best qualities were that he kept things simple while being a great innovator. He just had the feel for one-day cricket, with his slower balls and power hitting. These days, they talk about funky fields and changes of bowling on a whim. Well, he was about fifteen years ahead of his time. He did everything on instinct. Also, if it needed someone to come in and give it a thump he would be the one putting his hand up. His other ingredient was the essential one for a captain: all the other players wanted to play for him.
People would tell you that Adam Hollioake was not quick enough to be considered as a serious bowler. People would tell you that he was not good enough to be considered as a top six first-class batsman. In fact, I myself wouldn’t have put him down as a Test match player, but what I do know is that he would be box office in the Indian Premier League right now. He would be earning an absolute fortune. In fact, I don’t know why he doesn’t get himself fit, stop his cage-fighting and get himself on a plane. While I was commentating there in the spring of 2015, I came across a leg-spinner called Pravin Tambe who was still turning out for Rajasthan Royals at the age of forty-three. Brad Hogg was rolling out his chinamen at forty-four.
Back then, Hollioake always wanted to fight. You could probably tell in the way he played his cricket. When he first came on the scene in 1997, he had this reputation as a battler and Shane Warne stood at the end of his mark shadow-boxing in taunting fashion. ‘Don’t upset him,’ was my immediate thought, because Hollioake would have dropped him like a stone. In 2014, at Twenty20 finals day, he was still seeking some rough and tumble on duty for the ECB as a crowd entertainer. Michael Vaughan happened to be the mystery competitor in the mascot race and when Hollioake got wind of what was going on, he came over to ask me which one he was. At this stage, I had no idea why he was asking but having told him it was the squirrel, I watched in horror as Hollioake, in best shirt and shoes, charged after these furry friends, picked Vaughan out and rugby tackled him to the floor.
Poor old Vaughan – who barely has a leg to stand on these days, given that post multiple operations his knees are held together with bits of old sticking plaster – took considerable time to get to his feet after Hollioake hit him so hard that it sucked all his breath from him. With his victim laid out in shock, Hollioake beat the ground in convulsions of laughter.
I always considered Hollioake to be a loveable wild man. After winning the Champions Trophy, he saw the British journalists gathered in the foyer of the team hotel and from his position a couple of floors up decided to make his own fun. He picked up a plant pot and dropped it from 60 ft, shattering it into fifty pieces right in the middle of them. Pot and soil flew everywhere. A few yards either side and one of them was in serious trouble – A&E kind of trouble. He was absolutely crackers.
On a trip to the West Indies, he devised some training activities to beat the wet weather. We were staying in some villas in Jolly Beach, Antigua, and it had poured down for a week. It was literally monsoon weather, and with no grass to work on, we ended up practising on the concrete pathways where we were staying. The players took it into their own hands to create other routines too, as I was to discover when one day, a bloke came over to me and asked who the group of blokes were stood across the way. I told him that they were the England cricket team and they were with me. ‘Well, can you tell them to stop throwing tomatoes at my yacht. That’s my yacht there,’ he said, pointing over towards the water. For fielding practice, Hollioake had been purchasing pounds of tomatoes and was taking aim trying to hit specific targets on this vessel. I couldn’t fault him for his ingenuity.
We fell short in the 1999 World Cup, not because we were a poor team but for a number of external factors. Hollioake, who had suffered a loss of form and no longer justified previous optimism in him as captain or indeed an automatic place in the team, suffered one moment of madness too many when he stopped off on a road trip to Southampton to barrack a village green game. He had already been given a warning for a disciplinary misdemeanour in the warm-up match versus Essex, and this after Graham Thorpe had been fined £1,000 for failing to attend a reception put on by our tournament hosts, Kent. Timing is everything, and had Hollioake’s running commentary come when we were winning it would have been received rather differently, I’m sure. But we were not winning.
Distractions and ill feeling were everywhere we turned. On 12 May, two days before the World Cup’s opening match, ours against Sri Lanka at Lord’s, I was invited to a dinner with the ECB’s senior officials. It put me in a room with Brian Bolus, a man who I suspected to be a source of several newspaper stories about my removal as coach, for the first time since his appointment as chairman of EMAC, the England Management Advisory Committee. During this dinner, I put it to him that I thought he was nailing me behind the scenes, but he denied this and suggested it was someone else on the committee, a man I trusted and always liked, who wanted to sack me. I didn’t disbelieve Bolus but neither did I want to accept any suggestion of betrayal. It did not help my mood.
In addition to struggling to get as many specialists on the ground on tours, it was difficult to break hard-set English thinking on how to approach 50-over cricket from a strat
egical point of view. There was never a doubt in my mind that maximising the first fifteen overs, when the ball was hard and the field restrictions were on, was paramount. Then, look to be busy in the middle overs before launching at the back end. For those that watched the 2015 World Cup, this policy might seem familiar. Frustratingly, although the concept was simple enough, we either made a Horlicks of it too often or didn’t have enough people buying into the need for speed at the top, to the point that we took the hard decision to drop Nick Knight, who was in sketchy form, and in the absence of the injured Michael Atherton, use Nasser Hussain as a top-order anchor.
We beat the holders Sri Lanka, and the minnows Kenya and Zimbabwe comfortably, but were victims to a large degree of Zimbabwe’s upset victory against a South African side who had been clinical in their defence of a 226-run target against us. An appalling rain-affected performance against India over two days was a humiliating way to end an international coaching career.
On reflection, we were just too stuck in our ways. We had tried to be brave with Knight and Ali Brown at the top of the order in previous years, but it was un-English, and any new ideas were generally frowned upon. The enigmatic Graeme Hick remained an automatic limited-overs pick despite his fluctuating Test form which had seen him dropped on several occasions over the year, and I strongly fancied him to be a major influence on our World Cup campaign. One of my policies for that tournament would be to use a flexible batting order – if it’s good enough for the best teams at the 2015 World Cup it would certainly do for me sixteen years earlier. It was something I raised in team meetings in the build-up to the tournament. Such a tactic requires full commitment from the entire group of batsmen, but Hick was one of those reluctant to buy into it, insisting he should be assured of batting in his preferred position of No. 3.