by David Lloyd
‘This man, he vexing me,’ he told me.
‘Pardon?’ I asked him.
‘He vexed me, man! I’m going to hit him into the pavilion,’ he informed me.
I caught his drift but not as well as Clive caught this one particular delivery. He had this wonderful front-foot pick-up and he smashed him into the stands during what would have been a marvellous spectacle for the crowd. Proc, who never failed to get the home crowd going as a visitor, absolutely steamed in. On occasions, he used to remonstrate with people, seeking a barracking just to get him going.
Meanwhile, at the other end, Gloucestershire had a left-arm swinger called Jack Davey who I simply could not get away. I kept persuading myself to get forward because he was not quick, but every time I played a shot I kept clunking it, jamming down on yorkers. Until that is, Clive, immersed in the contest, offered some advice.
‘Stop coming forward. Go back,’ he advised me. ‘Just open up and put him over midwicket.’ It’s a fairly recognisable shot now in Twenty20 but not necessarily one I played. But on Clive’s word, I just hopped onto my back foot, waited for the ball to come to me and drop-kicked it over the infield on the leg-side. The full length I was struggling with had effectively been turned into a half-volley. Now, Procter as Gloucestershire captain had another problem. If he was putting a man out there, where was he getting him from? Other gaps appeared and by the end our unbeaten fourth-wicket partnership had swelled to a record 234, still the biggest for this wicket in English domestic competition.
That great West Indies team played for Clive and I shared their respect for the man. He was just a top bloke, and one of the saddest things for me is that Michael Holding, another dear pal, has fallen out with him over recent West Indies politics. They were an awesome outfit in their day. Forget all this contemporary sledging, shouting and bawling, which takes place against a backdrop of claims that ‘we know where to draw the line’ from players. What line? There wasn’t one when you played West Indies.
Draw whatever line you want, it might as well have been the Siegfried Line if you started abusing that lot. You would be running home to your mammy for tea. Come up against Colin Croft, Holding, Andy Roberts, Malcolm Marshall, Wayne Daniel and Joel Garner and you didn’t say a word. They didn’t have much to say either. Nor their successors Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose. They would stare at you and that was enough. I, for one, wouldn’t have wanted to have got them any more agitated.
Equally, Atherton drew admiration from his team-mates for the way the heat of a battle inspired him to his best. That week was one of his best as an England player, I would suggest, coming out as he did victorious in that contest with a pumped-up Donald and the match itself. That particular episode actually showed the desire to win on both sides in an enthralling series. From an England point of view, we had not won a series of five matches in length since 1986.
That was a long wait and the opportunity to overturn it all came down to the final morning at Headingley, when South Africa needed just 30-odd with two wickets standing. That it had come down to this was thanks to a fine team effort but notably Atherton – who had shown remarkable resolve since relinquishing the captaincy earlier that year – along with his successor Alec Stewart. Atherton’s runs in Nottingham had hauled us level, but those he made alongside Stewart in a double-century alliance in Manchester a fortnight earlier prevented the tourists taking a 2-0 lead. It was unmissable cricket that evening when Robert Croft and our No. 11 Angus Fraser, who told me that Donald would have to knock him through the stumps to dismiss him before departing the dressing room, rebuffed their efforts. Unless, of course, you had a vested interest in it all, and really would not rather watch your last man in combat with a fearsome pace attack. One of two leg-before shouts while Gus defended those stumps could easily have been given. But we survived and the only score on the board was South Africa’s landslide victory at Lord’s.
There had been talk of the public losing interest early in that series, but there were signs to the contrary on that final morning when Yorkshire left the gates open and more than 13,000 wandered in to witness what proved to be an historic win. It showed how much winning Test matches and Test series still meant to people in this country. The mood inside the dressing room preplay was that we weren’t losing. It’s called a Test because it tests your resolve, your nerve, your character. Had we got it in us to come through and deliver? Had we ever. Positivity flowed through the team that final morning to complete the last rites of a series you simply couldn’t take your eyes off. To come from 1-0 down to win 2-1; it doesn’t get better than that.
It had been tetchy at times and South Africa expressed post-series ill feeling that they had suffered badly at the hands of the umpires. Unfortunately, our mood was to turn sour at the end of the summer when we hosted Sri Lanka in a one-off Test match on a pitch described as ‘scruffy’ and liable to ‘turn big time’ by Graham Thorpe, who was a decent judge given his experience as a player at The Oval with Surrey.
There was no time to dwell on our fantastic achievement against the South Africans, no sense of reflection on a fine advertisement for our national team. Instead we were pitched against the Sri Lankans on a surface that suited them perfectly. We had been up against hostile pace all summer, and from nowhere suddenly we were thrown into battle with the world’s new spin threat Muttiah Muralitharan.
Murali is someone I have become friendly with in recent years, but at the time he wasn’t well known to English cricket followers. Inevitably, people were asking questions about his action as a result, and I was one of them. In my view, both he and fellow spinner Kumar Dharmasena breached the woolly laws as they stood, in that they partially straightened their arms in delivery. Back then it was open to interpretation in that an umpire should call no-ball ‘if not entirely satisfied with the absolute fairness of a delivery’ and that such a delivery was illegal if dispatched from an arm that ‘partially or completely’ straightened. Only since have we replaced this arbitrary process with a scientific one and the world become accustomed to the fifteen degrees of leeway bowlers have been afforded.
Quite a few things became apparent in subsequent years after video analysis was applied. Watching him deliver the ball with the aid of slow motion proved mightily revealing. Most significantly, Murali was well within the fifteen-degree limit. But he also possessed one of the strongest, if not the strongest wrist, of any spinner in the game’s history. His wrist action was simply magnificent – almost as other-worldly as those trademark eyes.
At the time, the majority of the cricket world, myself included, were ignorant of all this and having expressed my concern to Simon Pack, England’s international teams director, prior to the triangular one-day series that preceded this Oval match, I was advised to put them down on paper after a subsequent telephone call to the International Cricket Council, which was then based across London at Lord’s. My letter was acknowledged by the match referee Justice Ahmed Ibrahim, of Zimbabwe, but nothing further was said until a BBC television interview I did with Simon Hughes at tea on the fourth day, before Murali cleaned us up with nine second-innings wickets to complete a sixteen-victim haul for the match.
I really tried to watch my Ps and Qs, and said he was unorthodox, and if that was legal we should be teaching it. It was meant at face value – I didn’t want to call him a chucker on live TV, but I obviously retained some reservations as per my correspondence with the ICC. I did no more than express a degree of doubt about his action’s legitimacy. It was up to others to judge, but my comments were seen as inflammatory. Neither did it help in the post-play press conference when, asked if I had made any feelings on the matter known to the match referee, I blatantly lied and said ‘no’.
Within a few hours I received a memo from my bosses at Lord’s, asking me to explain my comments. This was not the first time they had taken this course of action. But surely they had done their research? If they wanted me to be England coach, then their homework would have told them wher
e I was from and what I was about. They only needed to go to Accrington and have a look at where I grew up. If someone kicks you once, it’s obligatory to kick them back twice, and preferably twice as hard too, just to stay in credit. You fight your corner; you scrap for everything.
I am from a community where it pays to be forthright; one in which people call things as they see them. During my three years at the helm, I was desperate to get away from the nicey, nicey, stiff-upper-lip Englishness we were showing and had always shown. Sometimes there is a time for straight talking, so forget this idea of showing the other cheek. It reflected the way I wanted the game to be played. If someone was coming at us, we were going to give it them in spades.
In the job description they made a point of emphasising the need for a higher profile when it came to the media – I think I gave them that. But my reaction to Geoff Boycott’s comment on the final day that England would be better served with a coach ‘who could keep his mouth shut’ triggered the kind of publicity they were eager to avoid. It may not have been the wisest course of action in the circumstances but, in keeping with my beliefs, I confronted Geoffrey outside the commentary boxes in an area I took to be a private place. Unfortunately, although we parted amicably enough after I got my point across that I would prefer anything he had to say about me to be said to my face first, it had clearly reached someone’s ears, and a summons to a meeting with Tim Lamb and Simon Pack followed later that week in a conference room at Lord’s, at which we discussed the issues from The Oval.
This didn’t take the form of an informal chat, even though that’s what I had been anticipating on my train journey south. There was even an HR representative in the room (just who she was representing I could not fathom). Tim confirmed he had no issue with my TV interview with Hughes but with what had been said in the subsequent press conference. Now this was news to me, as the media manager Brian Murgatroyd had raised no concerns in our debrief upon its conclusion. In launching my defence of my public utterances on the Murali issue, I got Simon to acknowledge that I had lodged my concerns formally in a letter to the ICC, which he duly did.
But it was the Boycott altercation that they focused on and, after agreeing to disagree on whether this took place in a public or private area, I was shocked to discover following a brief recess that an ECB statement had been prepared in advance of our meeting. I argued quite forcibly that this was no way to treat an employee and that any such statement should be softened. They agreed they would contact me during my journey home for clearance to release a revised version. However, with no great discernible difference in its tone as the new version was relayed to me on my mobile phone, I lost my cool, told them to do whatever they wished and terminated the call.
The statement, which made reference to ‘inappropriate comments’ about Muralitharan and an ‘altercation with a television presenter’, continued: ‘David Lloyd has been reprimanded, warned about his future conduct and left in no doubt as to the responsibilities that go with such a high profile position.’ It finished with the standard clap-trap line: ‘The matter is now closed and David goes as coach to Dhaka and to Australia with our full support.’
However, this had stung me so badly that in the immediate aftermath, I questioned whether I had the desire to lead those tours. Those within the bosom of what I believed was a strong team unit – people like Alec Stewart, the captain, and Wayne Morton, our feisty physiotherapist – urged me not to do anything rash. So, by the time I received an official letter from Lamb – effectively a final warning after the Zimbabwe affair – I had resolved to commit fully to the remaining eleven months of my contract.
On reflection, my treatment was a case of a sledgehammer being used to crack a nut. I had skirted around the periphery of the Murali issue and told another ex-player what I thought of his own comments. It was neither the last time Muralitharan would raise suspicion – indeed we were the opponents later that winter in Adelaide when the Australian umpire Ross Emerson’s calling of him led to Arjuna Ranatunga’s walk-off protest – nor that Boycott would provoke a reaction from someone within the England team. I have come to accept that is a consequence of straight-talking in the pundit’s role – a pre-requisite of the job.
There were more important battles to be fought across those three years for me than re-engaging any Roses rivalry with Yorkshire’s most-famous bespectacled man. Not least when we were trying to turn the tide of Ashes results in the summer of 1997 and allowed a 1-0 advantage early on to be overturned. Unlike my successors Duncan Fletcher, Andy Flower and Peter Moores, I had no real control over who played when or how often in county cricket during that six-match series. Once a player hits the Test team these days, their shire writes off their availability for evermore. By contrast, the only way we would ever get them a rest period was to dispatch chairman of selectors David Graveney cap in hand.
Ludicrously, we had to beg to get our crackerjack cricketers recuperation time, or even adequate practice for an international fixture. By the way, we rarely won a battle in this regard because the counties could not see the bigger picture. A £1.9 million annual handout and compensation for England calls on top has certainly helped alter thinking, but back then all players were remunerated by their counties, and in some instances that actually made the players develop a club-first mentality, a bit like what exists in top-level football.
A shift towards the England team taking priority only occurred after Fletcher took over in 1999. This came through the introduction of central contracts, and a cultural change that was necessary. Anyone involved in the game has to accept that it is international cricket that underpins the domestic structure. Previously, it could feel like players would turn out for England if and when they were free.
Dual commitments led to some players turning up ‘fit’ but barely fit for purpose on occasion. Bowlers would rock up with jelly legs and need to recuperate rather than net with their colleagues once it got beyond midsummer. Thankfully, the medical monitoring has improved beyond recognition. Now, counties liaise with the ECB, and information on strength and conditioning and overall fitness is shared. If a player is summoned to the National Performance Centre in Loughborough for any matter, off they go.
Contrast that to when I was coach and arranged a team-bonding camp – a three-day get-together at the NatWest training premises in Oxfordshire – on the eve of the 1997 season. My aim was to develop a ‘unity’, concerned that whereas rivals like Australia and South Africa appeared tight, we were thrown together from the length and breadth of the country and dispatched on an overseas tour.
The subsequent reaction of Graham Thorpe to this summons showed the difficulty the players were under. Thorpe, one of the finest batsmen England has produced, on being asked to give up three days outside his cricket schedule, refused, citing it as a family time, and informing us that he would resume cricket activity closer to international matches. He turned up, following an assertive phone call from Tim Lamb, but I for one could understand the pressure these players were under at home. They weren’t being paid to be there, and we were relying on them eating into their home lives.
I arranged for the squad to be addressed by Frank Dick, the former British Athletics Federation’s director of coaching, who was carving out a reputation as a motivational speaker. The players were asked to think about their own personal landscapes. Were they mountains or valleys? Mountains were the individuals striving upwards and achieving, while the valleys would allow their performances to dip on occasion for an easier life. He spoke about the recipe for a good team ethic – collective trust and a willingness to be considered as a single entity, not as individuals. This proved a stimulating exercise during a very productive three days. Our mistake, I concede, was in trying to build on its success with other team-bonding jaunts in schedule gaps. Sometimes less is more.
What I certainly was looking for was positive thinking, and one of my initiatives was to create video montages of each individual player’s best moments with their favourite m
usic as an accompaniment. It took some diligence but I wanted them to acknowledge their good points. To complement this, I made a bloopers tape of the Australians. I wanted to dispel their immortal image.
There was certainly an air of confidence about us when the Australians arrived in 1997, and by the end of the Texaco Trophy that preceded the Test series, the nation was believing in us too. The 3-0 victory in those one-dayers could be accurately summarised as a trouncing.
A real energy ran through our team in that whitewash, exemplified by the way our lads threw themselves about in the field. A mobile team is always pleasing on the eye for a coach, and in the second match at The Oval, four of the six wickets we claimed were run-outs. Brought up under Jack Bond’s tutelage, even in my coaching career I continued to emphasise the importance of fielding to the highest standards.
The inclusion of the Hollioake brothers, Adam and Ben, was invigorating for this team. They might have had Australian backgrounds but they showed they were neither uptight with nor weighed down by the attention and expectation this carried. They really energised us. Adam took a couple of wickets and then raced us to our target with an unbeaten 60-odd in the first of the three matches, at Headingley, while Ben’s precocious talent was first witnessed on the international stage a few days later, with the series already settled, at Lord’s.
Because of his tender years, in the pre-series media gatherings the presumption was we would be looking to slip Ben down the order and break him in gently. This was never our intention, though. We had selected him on ability, not age, and we had chosen him to bat No. 3. How refreshing it was to witness a young England player express himself fearlessly, driving Glenn McGrath down the ground and hoisting Shane Warne over deep midwicket for six. It may only have been two decades ago, but 63 off 48 balls was still a fair old lick in terms of a scoring rate.