Last in the Tin Bath

by David Lloyd

  The absolute no-no for us is to be talking when the play is live. The golden rule is ‘run up, shut up’. Simply, when a bowler has started his run up and you are off on one, telling some story about 1992, you cut it short. If that delivery is a wicket ball or a six, it cannot be used for the edit for the highlights, because as good as your story might be, a ten-second clip of it sounds odd. Another thing that I hate with a passion is when, during action in a cricket match, the coverage leaves the middle to move to the boundary edge to talk to somebody. This is live sport. Why do I want to see two talking heads when there’s a game going on? It’s a total nonsense. Why would you want to sacrifice the chance of seeing a match-turning moment for an interview with a non-playing member of the squad or an assistant coach? Can you imagine Chris Kamara on the touchline talking to Jose Mourinho with Arsenal on the attack? Would Ray French be in conversation with Kevin Sinfield, sat on the Leeds Rhinos subs’ bench, when Wigan’s winger was sprinting down the touchline? No. Yet the Indian broadcasters are obsessed with doing it.

  Whatever people say – and there is a lot of muck thrown at Sky – one thing that the company cannot be faulted on by any critic is the quality of the product. Sky Sports invests heavily in cricket, and the bottom line is that it is a company that finances the game in England, whether you like that or not. As far as I’m aware, and I am just a commentator, there were no other bidders for the product of live international cricket when it last went out to tender in 2012. All the talk about terrestrial versus subscription television is all well and good, but there are some fundamental questions to be asked before you even get to bidding and Sky’s £65 million a year contract.

  For a start, where would these terrestrial channels be putting it? Cricket matches finish sometimes at seven and eight o’clock at night, if there has been an interruption. How would that be factored into their scheduling, and where is a mainstream channel going to put a day-night match, when its timing would eat into your primetime schedule? That is a massive problem and the very reason why terrestrial stations are lukewarm in putting live cricket on. I’m not wishing to dismiss other people’s opinions lightly, but I do believe that Sky get a raw deal. They are able to use their platform of multi-channels to put the product on and pay handsomely for the privilege. One thing that is forgotten is that Sky have been committed in the long term. Since 1991 every England match overseas has been screened, and even in those days there was not a rival to show anywhere near that level of commitment. Yet the discourse, whenever the subject of cricket on TV is raised, usually takes on a suggestion that Sky has somehow stolen live action from the majority of the population.

  Equally, when panic spreads at a drop in numbers playing recreationally in England as was reported in late 2014, it’s a very lazy assumption that the reason kids aren’t playing the game is because cricket is no longer a terrestrial property. In this day and age, a lot of core sports are down on their participation figures and it’s nothing to do with what’s on in the living room. It’s because there are so many other things to do: cycling, canoeing, abseiling, rock climbing just for starters. All these exciting activities, previously one-off leisure pursuits, have come into mainstream life. It’s not where they existed two decades ago. Now there are so many avenues of sport to go down.

  The one question I would pose is: where would English cricket be without Sky’s money? Of course, the compromise is that there are not as many Sky households as terrestrial, and I cannot argue with that. But in defence of my employers, I have calculated that at the time of writing the cost of Sky Sports is the equivalent of four pints of lager a week. There are lots of housing estates dotted with satellite dishes, so it cannot be out of the reach of everyone. If you are a real lover of sport and want to watch it live you have to pay for it, and in turn that pays for the sport.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Kapes Crusader

  Kevin Pietersen is the best England batsman that I have ever seen. You can go through a list of Tom Graveney, Peter May, Colin Cowdrey, Geoffrey Boycott, Graham Gooch and David Gower – but to me Kevin’s the number one, because when he’s at the crease you cannot take your eyes off him.

  How sad then that he should have spent so much time on the outside of the team in a saga that seemingly ran longer than The Mousetrap. Let’s be frank, it’s not a situation in which anyone involved has come out smelling of roses. For a start, to have issued a ‘sacking’ and then reiterated that Pietersen would not be picked due to ‘trust’ issues shows that the entire affair was not handled brilliantly by the England and Wales Cricket Board. And yet to focus solely on the acute sense of loss of the paying public – a proportion of whom were involved in a social media clamour for him to return at the start of the 2015 international summer – would be to overlook his own faults.

  These days I’m very much on the outside looking in when it comes to the England team, and my views on Pietersen as a dynamic cricketer are those formed as a privileged spectator. At his swashbuckling best I would happily part with cash to take my seat in the stands, but maverick players are high-maintenance. Pleasing the masses and annoying one’s bosses appear to go hand in hand for his type.

  I remember asking the Manchester United footballer Denis Law why he never went into management. ‘Managing players?’ he said. ‘Players are complete arseholes. I know. I used to be one.’ It was a fairly coarse assessment but I got his drift. It can be hard work handling players, particularly those who have a tendency to break away from the norm, and there are only so many times you can reinforce the guidelines before patience runs out.

  There was plenty of history, of course, when it came to Kevin falling out with the England management. First, there was his relationship breakdown with Peter Moores back in 2008-09 that led to the demotion of the pair of them. Then came the exile following the breakdown with the rest of what had been a successful England team in the summer of 2012. Finally, there was the ‘disconnection’ that Paul Downton revealed the bosses felt he displayed during the Ashes whitewash of 2013-14.

  Kevin pushed and pushed as far as I can see; he has tested his bosses to the limits over the years. Ian Botham and to a lesser extent David Gower, around the same time of his flying expedition in Australia with John Morris, did the same thing during their careers but they are Isthmian League compared to Kevin.

  It’s easy to say blithely that the best team should always be picked, and I for one wish it was possible for that to be the case, but you cannot carry on irrespective of someone’s behaviour. With English cricket in a right old mess following the World Cup botch-up and a disappointing Test series draw in the Caribbean, clamour for another ‘reintegration’ was inevitable. But for Andrew Strauss it was not a viable option, particularly if rumours that he would have lost Alastair Cook, the man he invested in as captain, were true. Strauss hinted that others would have considered their futures, too, and that would have threatened a mass break-up.

  I got to know Strauss during his post-playing stint as a Sky Sports commentator, and I’m convinced his decision would have had nothing personal to it. I don’t think for one minute he dwelt on the textgate scandal with the South African team in the summer of 2012. Simply, he would have weighed everything up and decided to move on. Happy for all the flak to come his way, he just wanted the team to be freed from KP’s shadow and be allowed to develop. For months it had been suffocating under a groundswell of criticism against the ECB – a bandwagon that developed on Kevin’s behalf – on just about any subject going.

  It’s difficult for people to accept, and I rue the fact that he was consigned to history, but as Margaret Thatcher once said: ‘The lady is not for turning.’ On this occasion, neither was the lord of Lord’s. Strauss made his decision. Investment would continue to be made in the players lampooned on Twitter in a grossly unfair manner every time they contributed a low score. Then his supporters made a point of publicising that in their opinion, X wasn’t as good as KP, at every twist and turn. But his exile was nothing to do wi
th Gary Ballance, Joe Root or Adam Lyth.

  Unfortunately, the PR campaign came too soon after he appeared to consign himself to the international scrap heap. Remember that only six months before declaring himself prepared to give it another go with his annulling of his Indian Premier League deal with Sunrisers Hyderabad, he went into print and, among other things, accused the two bowling mainstays, Stuart Broad and James Anderson, of presiding over a bullying culture in the England team. That is quite a claim, and not one to be made lightly.

  It seems a shame that Kevin didn’t wait until the end of his playing days before publishing his character assassinations. These days should not be a thing of the past because he is a special talent, but they are because that is the way of the world. There are bosses and workers, and while you can certainly challenge a boss, there has to be a level of respect, and that means you can challenge them only so often. Unfortunately, through his writings – the book, newspaper columns, interviews and social media comments – it showed he had scant regard for some bosses and some colleagues.

  From a pure cricket perspective, you could hardly blame him when at the age of thirty-four the penny dropped that the clock was ticking for him as a top-level sportsman. The best players in any field want to be competing against their elite peers, and for all the Twenty20 glitter that decorates the globe, that means Test cricket.

  It was even commendable that he opted to throw his lot in with Surrey in a bid to score some first-class runs on his interpretation of what Colin Graves said about his need to play domestic cricket and perform to have any chance. Grasping at lifelines, it appeared reasonable to Kevin and to a number including myself to assume that, with Graves and Tom Harrison coming in as ECB chairman and chief executive respectively, this meant everyone started 2015 with a clean slate.

  It all appeared set up for him. Pietersen had a great chance to excel in Division Two, and did with his wonderful unbeaten 355 against Leicestershire. In the winter of 2014-15, though it was only Australia’s Big Bash League, he appeared to be in a good place with his batting, and to extend that into the English season would have pleased him. Because of his devotion to preparation and a decent lifestyle, he has tended to be ready to play as soon as he is fit, despite a recent history of niggling injuries.

  He might also have been keen to give it a go because the main targets for his ire in those pages of his autobiography – Andy Flower and Matt Prior – were no longer in the England set-up. For the record, I thought the book was a sad read, dripping with bitterness and containing no joy whatsoever, which is a direct contrast to his batting which is full of it. To learn that he wasn’t enjoying what should have been among the best moments of his life was a real shame.

  Even after all this, however, he could not ignore the magnet of Test cricket. He wanted to make himself irresistible to the ECB once more, and it would have hurt to be told by Strauss that it was not a marriage about to be repaired any time soon before his triple hundred innings at The Oval was complete.

  My preference in all this, and again I’m only speaking from a logistical point of view rather than one with any vested interest, would have been to place all the key players in this drama in one room and tell them not to reappear until they had bashed out a compromise. With his mojo back and commitment unerring, Pietersen is a batsman to strike fear into any opposition and, despite his extended absence and mega-money deals around the globe, it is clearly international competition that gets his juices flowing.

  Call my proposal arbitration if you like. To me, it was necessary for a simple process to take place in the immediate aftermath of Graves’s comments. It may have needed an independent mediator, someone who has dealt with high-profile figures at the top of their sports, such as Sir Clive Woodward or Sir Alex Ferguson. They would be chosen not because of their knight-of-the-realm status, but because they have dealt with similar situations over the years with characters who have excelled in the highest company and come with huge egos and pay packets in tow. Think of Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Martin Johnson and Lawrence Dallaglio.

  I would have said something like: ‘Kevin, we want you playing because we recognise that you are a player of match-winning potential, but these are the rules. You have previous, and lots of it. How are we going to make this work? Because the minute you step out of line – and we will be watching – that will be it. Our patience has a limit, we have stretched it for you but one more transgression and it will be very thin.’

  For the record, I would also have allowed Kevin to bring his mate Piers Morgan with him. No doubt it would have become quite lively, but it would have got everything out in the open and stopped all the innuendo on Twitter and the like. The default position, if I had been coach, would have been to make it clear that I wanted him in, but if he was to be in, it was all or nothing and no more dealing in the shadows. Everything onwards would become transparent.

  It was all very well when Kevin turned up at Lord’s for the Test match versus India in 2014 sporting a baseball cap with Pasadena emblazoned on the front. As the band of that name sang: ‘I’m doing fine now – without you!’ Yes, England were for a while, but they certainly were not over subsequent months.

  I’m all for including characters that challenge the norm. One of the beauties of cricket to me is that the best teams contain players of all different shapes, sizes, colours, creeds and social status. And so one of my contemporary concerns has been an apparent one-size-fits-all attitude that now prevails.

  One guy in particular who I swore by in my days as a coach would never have got on the park. In an age where 12 was always an acceptable score on the bleep test and 15 was achievable by the fittest, Ian Austin would not get anywhere near double figures. What’s more, he wouldn’t even try.

  Using the bleep test would tell you if someone was strong. But when I was at Lancashire, there was no one like Austin when it came to strength. Yet one pre-season, Oscar, as we called him, set off and got to seven, which is a brisk walk, coughed and said: ‘That will do for me.’ ‘No, Oscar, the challenge is to go until you can go no further.’ ‘Yep, that’ll do,’ he said.

  Now no one could tell me that Ian Austin was not strong. He was like an ox, and he would bowl all day for you, and never go off injured. So, unlike the parameters they use these days so meticulously, I would only ever use them as loose guides. The evidence I would want to see is how players coped physically in the middle. Tests like the bleep were devised not to discount players from being able to do six to seven hours a day on the field. This was a guideline to differentiate between them doing seven hours a day okay and five hours leaving them knackered.

  I would be looking at what Austin did with ball or bat in hand, and when it came to this he was in my Lancashire team every time. In fact, moving up a level, when it came to the 1999 World Cup selection we surveyed domestic cricket’s opening batsmen to ask who they found the most difficult new-ball opponent, and the name that kept coming back was that of Austin.

  I would certainly not use it to preclude someone from playing, like they did with Samit Patel, for example. That’s a nonsense. Jack Simmons used to tuck the local newspaper under his arm, with biro circles all around the properties he liked in the district, and stop off and have a nosy on our pre-season run. For him it was a glorified shuffle. But ask him to shuffle in and bowl his off-spin all afternoon and there would be no problem. Job done. I don’t think Colin Cowdrey and Tom Graveney would get much over nine on that test, but could they bat? That was a given. Could they bat a long time? Yep. It should never be the criteria for whether someone should play or not. What I would be interested in is whether they could do the job.

  For what he could do to the best bowlers on the planet, it was obvious that Pietersen was more than capable. When he whacked the great Shane Warne against the spin into the stands at The Oval back in 2005, trying to save a Test match to win the Ashes, it was the first time I had ever witnessed anyone render the Australian leg-spinner powerless.

  Piet
ersen’s outstanding effort of 158, his first Test hundred, was as good an innings as I have witnessed. What made him stand out for me over the next ten years was that, like Brian Lara and Ricky Ponting, he possessed that ability to get himself in, and to then shift gears once he was ‘in’. Part of the art of batsmanship is to use your defence to work yourself into attack mode, and there are endless examples of Pietersen doing this.

  In South Africa the previous winter, he built his hundreds slowly before bursting down the home straight like Usain Bolt. His management of an innings is truly masterful. At The Oval that famous September afternoon, he went into overdrive. Much later, during the winter of 2012-13, he showed that perfectly with his hundred in the Test match at Mumbai. Just a few days previously in Ahmedabad, he had not got a clue how to get started, and looked a completely different player. Yet the genius players are able to find answers mere mortals cannot. By getting into the nets and working tirelessly on tightening his technique, he realised how to prosper on those subcontinental surfaces.

  Then in the match situation, you saw that once he got a measure of it all, he knew when to step on the gas. The reason that Mumbai innings was so special was because he gave the innings the impetus it lacked. That has been a problem for England for several periods when Pietersen has been missing over the past decade, and is the one thing I would have been fretting about as coach. What we witnessed with Nick Compton and Sam Robson making their way in international cricket, and Jonathan Trott and Gary Ballance also taking their places in the top three at any given time, was a tendency for the innings to get stuck before it had moved anywhere.