Last in the Tin Bath

by David Lloyd

  Ben Hollioake was a really exciting player. Here was a true athlete, a talented sportsman, who had chosen cricket for his career path. Never did he consider failure as an option; he played purely on instinct. We wanted to expose his talent, not muzzle it. To his credit, the following year it was Alec Stewart as captain who really pushed for Andrew Flintoff to be in the England team. The assumption might have been that it was me because of a Lancashire bias, but not a bit of it. This selection of Ben was another example of faith in youth, and what a tragic loss to cricket it was when he died in 2002. Naturally it has led to thoughts of how good England might have been at one-day cricket with a side containing both Hollioake junior and Flintoff in their prime.

  Seldom is there a correlation between what happens in white-ball and red-ball assignments, but beating Australia in any format provided further evidence that they were not impregnable in that summer of 1997. The previous winter I had chatted to Bob Woolmer, who had just been engaged in a series with the Australians as South Africa coach, and he reported that despite defeat he saw that this team could be beaten.

  Unlike the disastrous decision to base the England team in Canterbury two years later for the 1999 World Cup when I had requested to be positioned in Leicester, a central location easily reached from north and south, the decision-makers at Lord’s scheduled the start of the Ashes that summer perfectly. Birmingham is a great place to open any series with its patriotic crowd – that Eric Hollies Stand is as partisan as any in the country when it’s at full capacity. Their vocal backing is equal to an extra man on the field.

  Additionally, the conditions can be challenging for batsmen from overseas, even if they have enjoyed a decent period of acclimatisation, because the ball tends to nip around first thing in the morning. One of the strengths of that particular England side was the new-ball acumen of Darren Gough and Andrew Caddick. The reintroduction of Devon Malcolm for the first time since the spat in South Africa with Raymond Illingworth provided an injection of pace in reserve. Extreme speed is the one entity that can trouble even the finest batsmen, and Devon was not to be underestimated in this department.

  We couldn’t have started any better. The first morning was like a dream as the ball talked. Gough was the protagonist as eight Australian wickets toppled before lunch. Having made the most of the atmospheric assistance, the anticipated Australia fightback proved a fleeting one, and a near-triple century partnership between Nasser Hussain and Graham Thorpe put us on course for a win inside four days.

  Even though Australia got to 327 for one next time around, the gulf was too wide to be bridged. The public reaction to us chasing down our modest fourth-innings target on the penultimate evening was memorable. Spectators pouring onto the outfield evoked memories of Lancashire’s Gillette glories.

  Unfortunately, this only served to stir Glenn McGrath from his slumber. During my time as England coach, there was not a pace bowler that provided more problems than McGrath. He was neither an out-and-out quick nor darn-right nasty with his bowling, he didn’t seam or swing it lavishly, but his uncomplicated, repetitive action and nagging line meant he was a constant threat. Such a bowler preys on errors of judgement or loss of concentration by his opponents. Few have worn the Baggy Green with such distinction.

  McGrath routed us with eight for 38 in the next match at Lord’s, one that with rain as our ally we crept out of with a draw. However, our optimism was swiftly pricked over three consecutive defeats. It was an authoritative comeback that might have been stopped in its tracks but for an uncharacteristic miss in the slips by Thorpe when Australia were 50 for four. It denied debutant Mike Smith a maiden Test wicket and allowed Matthew Elliott to progress from 29 to 199.

  Smith, Dewsbury-born but a prolific left-armer in county cricket with Gloucestershire, was selected for his ability to move the ball through the air and had taken ten wickets in a recent County Championship match at Headingley. This was a decent horses-for-courses pick and, despite suggestions to the contrary, was not at the behest of chairman of selectors David Graveney, a Gloucestershire man. There was scepticism from Atherton, the captain, as to what Smith would do if the ball did not swing due to his lack of height and speed, but all reports suggested that he got it to go like clockwork, and so we even entrusted him to choose our ball from the box presented to us by match referee Cammie Smith. Unfortunately, he didn’t get it off the straight and we were all left to rue that life for Elliott.

  One thing we do know about Australians is they hate losing to England, and so I was infuriated when our victory in the fifth and final match was deemed inconsequential because of alleged dead-rubber status. In previous series, England teams had lost 4-0 and not looked like winning games. Yet this time we had beaten them twice and there was still a sense of embedded failure to our performances. Undoubtedly, we deserved more credit.

  It just so happened that we caught them on an Oval pitch that suited us – or certainly a pitch that suited Phil Tufnell. It was particularly pleasing to see Phil do well, because Mark Waugh had done an interview in the build-up to that Test match in which he questioned his ability. He spoke too hastily because Tuffers got him out with two absolute beauties.

  Unusually, there was a decent build-up into that match and we got home in a tight game as Tufnell and Andrew Caddick shared 19 of the 20 wickets to fall, the former claiming match figures of 11 for 93. Yet when Australia, who took a 40-run lead on first innings, then dismissed us for a second time for just 163, we appeared to have as much chance as them winning the Eurovision Song Contest.

  But there is something about chasing small targets that plays tricks on batting teams – for some reason batsmen start doing things they would never usually dream of, or alternatively they stop playing their shots altogether – so on a crumbling pitch and with a fervent crowd roaring the bowlers on, the theory was put to the test.

  When in the mood, Tufnell and Caddick were both top-class performers. With confidence up, impishly skipping into his delivery stride, Tufnell got plenty of revolutions on the ball, and this was a tailor-made surface for his kind of artistry, as it fizzed from his left hand rather than rolled as was the case whenever he wasn’t doing so well. Caddick had lots of similar attributes to McGrath and could be devastating when everything clicked into place.

  In contrast to the boisterous post-match celebrations was Tufnell’s reaction: so often the bar-room reveller he sat, towel draped over his head, for a period of quiet reflection. There was some to be done for me too – earlier that summer on the back of those Texaco Trophy displays, optimism overflowed. Unfortunately, we couldn’t handle the opposition’s spinner, Shane Warne.

  We were not alone in this, of course, and analysis of what Warne did to opponents is fascinating. He did not overwhelm with a repertoire of variations – in fact, although he possessed one, he rarely bowled googlies. With him, you might get one or two over the course of a day’s play. But his genius was in his relative simplicity. Most adversaries were set for what was coming – if you weren’t sure how much the next leg-break was going to turn, he would do the decent thing and tell you – yet they just couldn’t handle it. He possessed a great flipper, superb control and an ability to really rip the regulation leg-spinner. To me, the latter quality was key. Warne was different to other leg-spinners because of the sheer number of revolutions he managed to get on the ball, and the result of giving it such a significant rip was a deadly dip towards the leg-side before it spun the other way. Even after retirement, when he gave a Sky Sports masterclass during our Test match coverage in 2012, you could still hear the fizz of the seam as the ball made its way down the other end. Other leg-spinners might have got it to turn nicely; he got it to turn nastily with his strength of wrist. To be able to get the ball to shape in before spinning away was a God-given talent. You simply cannot teach someone to get that many revs on a ball.

  Although in our planning meetings we discussed the need for an aggressive game plan to try to throw Warne, executing it was easier said th
an done when you had a once-in-a-lifetime bowler to contend with. Nasser Hussain’s attempt to be proactive resulted in him being comprehensively stumped. But that was an isolated example because no one else had the confidence to go after one of the world’s greatest ever bowlers.

  Throughout the late 1990s, whenever we talked about balancing sides, we came back to a belief that we needed a five-man attack. But what we saw with Warne, and subsequently in Graeme Swann’s career with England, was that with a world-class spinner in your team you needed only four. If you work on the theory of having to bowl ninety overs in a day, that leaves 25-30 for your controlling bowler, the spinner, and therefore no great burden for any of your pacemen.

  The Warne question surfaced again for the 1998-99 Ashes. A shoulder injury had wrecked his year, and indeed led to him missing the Test series in Pakistan, but his impending return had echoes of Dennis Lillee’s will-he-won’t-he scenario in 1974-75. But even without Warne, the Australians had much the more potent spin attack, especially given Tufnell’s selection omission. Stuart MacGill would have been a shoo-in selection in most other eras, and would undoubtedly have finished with double his Test-wicket haul of 208, but with Warne around he remained a peripheral figure.

  We had prepared for high-quality Australia leg-spin in advance by engaging an expert in its art, Peter Philpott, a man I knew well from the Lancashire League, to work with the team. He had already lectured on the subject of leg-spin to emerging players in the ECB’s development of excellence programme, and I wanted him to impart his knowledge to the seniors. In his sixties he might have been, but with age came experience and it included coaching both Warne and MacGill.

  Peter was great on the theory – the idea was to get the players to understand the thought processes behind it, and what the bowler was trying to do – although for the practical side of things I drafted in Abdul Qadir, the former Pakistan leg-spinner. Abdul was no spring chicken and I wouldn’t have fancied him in a race against anyone, but when it came to bowling he still bore the hallmarks of the magician. Being able to hire a quality leg-spinner was a real bonus.

  What Abdul did was to deconstruct leg-spin by bowling within the parameters of his action at reduced speed. By slowing the whole process down, so that he went through it at only half or quarter pace, it was like facing a bowler in slow motion until he reached the point of delivery. That effectively let our batsmen see how the hand, the fingers and the wrist worked in unison. Once the batsmen got used to seeing the ball come out slowly, Abdul would build up his pace until it eventually came out properly. He was able to disguise his intricacies at full speed, and for him to strip everything back enabled our guys to train their brains and recognise what he was doing once he quickened back up.

  Peter’s work was more educational and revealed some intriguing information on Warne. We looked at his record in detail, and the research showed that those to have succeeded against him shared a certain trait – aggression. If it was an interesting revelation, there was also a caveat here as the number included Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar, the two best batsmen doing the rounds.

  But Philpott simplified our strategy and made us see it from Warne’s perspective. His primary objective, Peter argued, would be to be as economical as possible, going for as few as two runs an over, providing his captain with control and pressurising the opposition batsmen in terms of the scoreboard. If he succeeded in limiting runs, the opposition were in his trap before he struck. With McGrath at the other end you were not going anywhere in this scenario, and Peter insisted we needed to find ways of scoring at a more reasonable rate.

  Unfortunately, we didn’t manage that during my time as coach and there is arguably only Kevin Pietersen, of England batsmen, who has managed it since. Never during the time I was coaching, or watching Warne admiringly from the commentary box, have I seen anybody take him apart like Pietersen did at The Oval in 2005.

  Our recruitment of Qadir, even on the most casual of terms, was not a commonplace move. English cricket rarely engaged foreign coaches at that stage, but I knew he was in Melbourne and wanted to make use of him. Of course, there were a clutch of overseas bowling advisors in the years that followed – Allan Donald, Ottis Gibson, Troy Cooley, Mushtaq Ahmed and David Saker to name a few.

  We also had Chris Schofield, the emerging Lancashire leggie, as a temporary member of our travelling group. As a teenager at the end of the previous season, he had claimed eight wickets in a County Championship win over Gloucestershire. Over in Australia on a scholarship, he went with us whenever he was available to aid both his own development and our batsmen’s preparation.

  Warne did not actually appear until the final Test but his understudy was more than useful. In fact, he possessed a superior strike rate. We actually managed to get into the final match with the Ashes gone but the series still alive at 2-1 following victory at Melbourne. Predictably, perhaps, with Warne fit, the pitch at Sydney was a bit of a Bunsen. They picked Colin Miller, whose multi-skills saw him bowl seam-up with the new ball before reverting to off-spin, and he did so with incredible success, breaking Chuck Fleetwood-Smith’s 63-year-old Sheffield Shield record of 60 wickets in a season with 67 in 1997-98.

  I’m not sure of the last time Australia had gone into a match with three spinners in their line-up at home, but that is how they opted to go at the SCG and we could see why from the surface. With the conditions conducive to turn, we discussed playing more than one frontline spinner ourselves, and I proposed we pick Schofield. The selectors would not have been expecting a raging turner like this when the original tour selections were made months earlier, and we now found ourselves with all our eggs in one basket so to speak, with two off-spinners Robert Croft and Peter Such comprising our slow-bowling options. Michael Atherton had favoured the selection of Phil Tufnell despite his occasional off-field misdemeanours, but his successor Alec Stewart did not push for his inclusion.

  Now, although not in the official party, I pushed for that of Schofield to give us some variation. But I just couldn’t get the captain to sanction the idea, which was his prerogative. In the end, we included Ashley Giles, who had flown out ostensibly as a one-day squad player, in our twelve but the vote for the final place actually went to Alex Tudor, another pace bowler.

  Australia had a decent battery of quality fast bowlers in Glenn McGrath, Damien Fleming, Jason Gillespie and Paul Reiffel, but our guys outbowled them at the MCG in the penultimate Test on what I would say was an English-type track. There were some really fine performances, none better than that of Dean Headley on the final day, and victory in Melbourne had kept alive our hopes of a drawn series.

  But our chance of securing that went in the second innings, when Simon Taufel – the recently retired and very well-respected umpire, perhaps the best we had ever seen – made what in my opinion was a poor decision as a young third official.

  At 60 for two in Australia’s second innings, Michael Slater, going for a second run, was the subject of Headley’s direct hit at the bowler’s end. He appeared a couple of inches short, but when umpire Steve Dunne turned to television adjudication for the decision, instead of confirming that Slater was out, Taufel pressed the button to suggest he was in. Having conceded a 102-run deficit on first innings, we would have been right back in the game. Particularly when you consider that Slater went on to get 123 of Australia’s 184 all out. His strokeplay simply took the game away from us. Small margins cost dear at the highest level and this England side, which possessed some very fine players in the late 1990s, had gone toe to toe with one of the great sides in Test history.

  Steve Waugh, Australia’s captain, was an utterly uncompromising character, who you felt would do anything within the spirit of the game to be victorious. He played it as tough as anyone that I ever saw, both as an individual competitor and a leader. Like Atherton, he thrived in the heat of the battle and relished verbal confrontation. In the knowledge that he wanted to engage in chat while at the crease, team orders were for our lads to keep qui
et.

  As with all Ashes series, it was customary to have a beer with your opposite number after play, and at the end of that 1998-99 series, the complimentary nature of Australia coach Geoff Marsh’s comments as we shared ours were most welcome. ‘You’re getting closer,’ he told me. Others had higher pre-series expectations of us than you might have considered too, with Dennis Lillee saying he thought this England team ‘had the capacity to win the series’.

  Arguably, however, we lacked Australia’s depth. That much was evident when in mid-December, between the third and fourth Tests, in a match against an Australia A team in Hobart, we suffered a humiliating defeat that left me seething. In a high-scoring match, the Australian second string were dangled a carrot by Atherton – who was captaining, with Stewart and his vice-captain Nasser Hussain opting to sit out. He offered them a 376-run chase on the fourth and final day. Greg Blewett, in particular, took his toll on an attack fatigued from the exertions of the Test series with an unbeaten double hundred, leading the A side to a nine-wicket win with three-quarters of the final session unused. He and Corey Richards shared an unbeaten stand of 197 in 29 overs during the afternoon.

  It didn’t happen regularly but not for the first time I let rip in the dressing room. ‘It’s all right for you f***ing lot, I roared. ‘But who has to front up and explain it? Joe C**t here.’ Timing is everything, they say, and Darren Gough, another of those given the match off, just happened to be entering the room dressed as Santa Claus. ‘And as for you, Father Christmas, you can f*** right off,’ I added.

  Once the postmortem was over, we moved on. Team spirit, something I viewed as essential, was still intact and the Ashes were still alive. At the Christmas dinner it was like that Hobart defeat had never happened, and that’s the way it should be. Not to say that there were not frustrations at our repeating of the same old mistakes. Our habit of getting into good positions and either letting them slip completely, or allowing opponents off the hook in some way, was chief among them.