Disregarding dalliances with the likes of Vaughan, KP, Trotty, Moeen Ali and Joe Root, it is largely a story of seeking Strauss Mark 2. Jarrod Kimber of ESPNcricinfo, who has rightly underlined the unfairness of the process, worked out that I had scored around 60 per cent of the runs in England’s opening stands since our six-year partnership came to an end.
It’s more nuanced than that. Over the past three or four years we took a strategic decision to play on home wickets that did a bit. There’s no disrespect intended in that policy; Jimmy and Stuart Broad, principal beneficiaries, are extraordinary bowlers, whose ability to exploit traditional English conditions has enabled us to win Test matches.
The flipside is that with a brand new Dukes ball and a bit of grass on the wicket it became hard work for us to build an innings. The first twenty or thirty overs were tricky, especially given the level of scrutiny my less experienced partners were enduring. There were times I sensed their tension: they didn’t have the leeway my longevity afforded me.
None of us are perfect, technically. Few sportsmen are so exposed to trial by slow motion and multiple-angled replay. Getting through the first cycle of Test appearances is fiendishly difficult, because there is no hiding place. Occasionally, as in the case of Michael Carberry in that train-wreck tour of Australia in 2014, a player is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Once a flaw is identified it is worked on, coldly and with disconcerting effect. Alex Hales, employed for aggressive intent, became frustrated and couldn’t duplicate his short-form impact. Ben Duckett struggled on tough turning wickets. Sam Robson and Keaton Jennings each scored hundreds without curing their problems outside off stump.
Adam Lyth looked terrific in scoring 107 against New Zealand in his second Test, on his home ground of Headingley, but struggled against Australia’s fast bowlers in the subsequent Ashes series victory. My opening partnership with Mark Stoneman, which encompassed eleven matches, has the lowest average, 18.8 runs, in England’s Test history.
But, again, statistics scratch the surface of the story. There is an enduring bond between opening partners, however brief or relatively unproductive the relationships. Shared experience helps to develop a unique form of friendships; Alice and I remain close to Mark and his wife Serene.
My instinctive reaction, when I first saw Haseeb Hameed in India in 2016, was, ‘Blimey, this kid can bat.’ I wasn’t alone: Sachin Tendulkar offered him an audience and Virat Kohli predicted he would be a star in all forms of the game. Aged only nineteen, he scored 82 in the first Test at Rajkot and a half-century, batting with a badly broken thumb, in the second Test at Mohali.
Then … he fell off the face of the earth.
Technically, there is a hint of concern against short-pitched bowling. Temperamentally, there is a price to be paid for his obsessional approach, which carries the inherent danger of putting process before outcome. I have no inside knowledge, but sport has many examples of problems created by the emotional intensity of having a father as a coach. It is hard for the parent, too.
It is never nice to look down the wicket and see someone being consumed by their fears and neuroses. I have a lot of time for Nick Compton. Since he was the grandson of Denis Compton, a definitive post-war cricket hero, he bore the burden of the family name well. We played sixteen Tests together, in two spells. He helped us win in India in 2012 and scored a couple of excellent hundreds in New Zealand the following year, but the pressure eventually got to him.
Insecurity is insidious. Nick sought reassurance from too many people, and it worked against him, with his natural intensity. His explosive release of tension after completing his first Test hundred showed how much it meant to him, but you could see the game eating him alive. He took a six-week break after his final series against Sri Lanka, helped Middlesex win the County Championship in unforgettable fashion, and now combines photography with commercial and media activity.
Fitting, that, because cricket is a freeze-frame image of who we are. Why do we do it? Here’s a hint …
5. The Zen of Opening the Batting
The effective distance between batsman and bowler when a ball is delivered is approximately 17.68 metres. When Shoaib Akhtar releases it at around 160 kph, there is fractionally less than four-tenths of a second in which to react. Whatever you do, don’t blink, because that will waste a tenth of a second.
This means that, in the time it takes for a hummingbird to flap its wings about forty times, or a beam of light to cover in the region of 75,000 miles, you must read the ball out of the hand, judge the line and length, and detect, if possible, the degree of revolution. Talk about multitasking. It’s not the moment to realize you left your keys in the car.
Not all bowlers are the same, of course. There’s no one way to do what they do. Spinners are the three-card-trick merchants of the game. Sometimes, you can’t pick them, no matter how long or how intently you study the video. You need human contact to read any clues in body language. You watch in real time to see which way the ball is revolving. No matter how good the bowler is, he can’t release the ball so that it spins in an entirely different direction halfway down the wicket.
It’s not like being in the nets, where you have the freedom to play attacking shots against slower bowlers. You are simply not going to run down the wicket and try to hit them out of the park the moment you see them, because of the pressure of the situation. To play spin well, you attack on your terms, and that requires trust in your ability to defend well.
Batting at the top of the order is an expression of individuality. When you’re young, it is the equivalent of being the kid in the football team who plays centre forward. Opening is regarded as a bit of a status symbol, but as you progress the better players fancy going in at three or four. I had a spell, coming in first wicket down against Pakistan in the summer of 2006, and quite enjoyed it.
The openers’ co-operative is convened in the manner of the goalkeepers’ union. We are united by the disadvantage of fronting up when the bowler is fast and fresh, and the ball is hard and new. There are unspoken responsibilities to those who follow us to the crease. Our failure increases the likelihood of their failure; our success gives them breathing room.
We tend not to be show ponies. We have the hardiness of National Hunt racehorses, rather than the five-furlong flashiness of thoroughbreds on the flat. We’re not dull, but we make a living through dependability. We live for the days when calmness settles, and something intangible suggests the scene is set for profit and plunder.
Such an experience also forms part of baseball’s mystique, where batters deal with the deceptive angles and speeds of a ball thrown from a mound sixty feet away. Batters who have 0.413 seconds to react to a 100 mph fastball speak of ‘feel’, an instinct that defies deep analysis. It’s a hard sport, one that doesn’t encourage hippy-dippy romanticism, but the occurrence is commonly described as entering another dimension.
There’s a lot of talk about mental toughness, but what does that really mean? To me, it involves wringing the maximum out of your natural ability at the most important moments on the biggest stages. Opening is suited to the more literal thinker, the individual who can place an innings, good or bad, in a box and hide the key. Failure must never be allowed to fester.
I took joy in finding the rhythm of my batting, the bass line that set the tempo. The job wasn’t easy (that word rarely features in the vocabulary of any professional athlete), but it was occasionally effortless. I have a lot of moving parts to my technique, so I’ve got to get my hands and feet working in harmony.
A lot can go wrong in those four-tenths of a second. A lot must go right. That synchronicity is very, very enjoyable. You know, when you get to between 30 and 40, that a big score is on the cards. Suddenly, time accelerates, almost into double motion. Those are the occasions you look up at the clock and are surprised to see it is only ten minutes until the first drinks break.
Where did those last fifty minutes go? You can’t really remember
them, break them down into bite-size chunks for comfortable consumption. They’ve just happened. You have a drink, take on any messages delivered through the twelfth man, and go again. You’re preoccupied by the practicality of batting, the actions that speak louder than any words.
Suddenly, something reminds you, from out of nowhere, to focus on the clock. Only five minutes to lunch? Another hour has disappeared. You can vaguely remember specific shots, mood swings and momentum shifts, but you concentrate on cashing in. There will be other days when you don’t have the mojo.
Being out of form is like trying to push a concrete wall away when it is closing in and threatening to crush you, like some sort of fiendish ancient trap. You are out of sync, out of the pattern. Something isn’t quite right, and your brain cannot compute. That’s when the clock face seizes up. Time passes terribly slowly. It’s hard work; half an hour seems like four.
This is going to sound weird, but the art of concentration is in being able to concentrate, and then not concentrate on concentrating. I did so through the routine I’ve described previously. Play the shot, scratch the line, walk away. Sometimes I’d go down the track and indulge in gentle gardening. Most times I would head in the direction of square leg.
I’d be digging myself in. Look around at the crowd, allow the bowler to have his say. If I’d been beaten, or had an ugly hack, I might wander down and have a chat with the non-striker, whoever it may be. We’d smile, I’d admit ‘that was a shit shot’ and the situation would be defused. I’d return to the crease, having rationalized what I had done, and let it go.
The sequence probably takes twenty seconds. I’d be consciously calm by the time the bowler turned from his mark to run in. We go again, and again, and again. When you are in form, it is metronomic. When you are out of form, you are fighting yourself. You start to worry about your foot position, how you’ve bent your knee, all the stuff you shouldn’t be thinking about. If you can’t get rid of that, you’re in a skid that’s extremely difficult to correct.
Maintaining concentration during the entirety of an interval is impossible. If I was set at lunch, I’d take my pads off, have a bite to eat and have a variety of conversations, some cricket-related, others inconsequential. I’d switch back into game mode six or seven minutes before resumption, when the mental checklist would once again be employed.
It’s all about the maintenance of routine. I batted, without fail, on arriving at the ground. That might merely be facing underarm bowling from coaches, but I would always be wearing pads. Some players – Hashim Amla, for example – don’t bother to wear pads, but we are all, at heart, creatures of habit. I have never forgotten being pulled up by Graham Gooch at the age of nineteen, when I netted wearing only a front pad.
‘Would you do that in a game?’ he barked. Obviously not. ‘Well, don’t ever do that again.’ It was one of those 0.1 per cent moments that matter in professional sport, a reminder of acceptable standards that lead to marginal gains. We went on to develop a routine in which I’d ask him to throw down at me using the dog-stick to stimulate sharpness. It was our way of making sure we had done everything possible to prepare properly.
I used to enjoy my time as captain once I’d completed the formalities of the toss, especially if we were batting. Ten minutes were taken up with three interviews, with Sky, Channel 5 and BBC radio, leaving another ten or so for me to pad up, and be prepared. That gives the inner voice less scope to start yapping in your ear. The bowlers tap you on the back for postponing the workload, wish you good luck, and you’re off.
There’s not exactly a randomness about success and failure, but it pays to be pragmatic. It helps to remind yourself that sometimes the odds are simply not in your favour. Test bowlers are paid to take wickets and, by definition, they are the best in their country. They make the most of beneficial conditions.
I’ve not been out to that many unplayable deliveries, but in about 99 per cent of dismissals you might have done something differently. Some mistakes come with the territory: you could have been drawn into the new ball and nicked off, because it behaved more dangerously than a ball that’s thirty-five overs old.
I was once told that Mike Brearley, the captain’s captain, used to hum a Rachmaninov quartet when he was batting. My mental musical tastes are less highbrow, easy-listening earworms produced by the likes of Razorlight or Queen. I don’t sing along, but occasionally hum a sequence, or work through the lyrics. Familiar songs in my head allow me to maintain rhythm.
Occasionally I remember scenes from certain films or have a sudden appreciation of the noise of the crowd. That’s not a great sign, because it suggests the bubble of concentration has been punctured. My instinct is to identify the problem, accept what has happened, reorganize and reset. You will never fight it, because the brain can take you to random places. When you are playing well, you soon return to reality. When you are not in good nick, you’re struggling for control.
That’s when easy conversation with the bloke at the other end is important. It brings you back to the moment, delivers a reminder that it’s the two of you against the world. It is a marriage of sorts. You get to know each other’s funny little ways and learn to adjust. The manipulation of small targets is a common way to cope. Trotty, for instance, compulsively built his innings in five-run blocks.
Each to his own. The problem comes when errors are contagious. I’m fascinated by the psychology of batting collapses, even though it is one of the hardest phenomena to discuss openly, because doing so can be regarded as an admission of collective weakness. A dressing room doesn’t usually have a Corporal Jones, barking out, ‘Don’t panic, Captain Mainwaring.’ It is inclined to be eerily quiet.
Supporters share the paranoia. Whoever they follow, they are convinced their team is more prone to collapse than most. It’s illogical, since with the occasional exception, we are all pretty much of a muchness. It’s difficult to explain, but cricket isn’t an academic exercise, an application of Artificial Intelligence. It is a game played by human beings, who are susceptible to mood and momentum.
It is simple to identify the problem, by the repetition of common sense. Don’t lose wickets in clusters. That might appear to be a statement of the obvious, but to recap, that’s exactly why I was immediately apologetic after being dismissed in my last Test innings. Joe Root and I had lazily put the onus on Jonny Bairstow and Ben Stokes to rebuild. They were subjected to unnecessary pressure.
Here’s the way things can go: you’ve got a steady partnership, forty or fifty or so, and you’re at the other end when your partner gets out. Suddenly you’ve got a new face in, and for no apparent reason you feel differently. Is it pressure? It is certainly a trick of the mind. Logically, you don’t immediately lose shape or form. You know you’ve been batting well, but your mind is telling you that you can’t get out, that you must not get out.
Those horrible negative words, can’t, won’t, mustn’t, couldn’t, are at the forefront of the brain. Predictably, you get out, leaving your teammate, alarmed by the sudden shift in momentum, to struggle through the hardest period of any innings, the first ten to fifteen balls. He succumbs, and before you know it, you’ve lost three wickets in less than thirty minutes.
The collapse is on. The opposition have their tails up. Bowlers are running in harder, with greater intensity. The fielders are sharper, more eager. It’s a hard task to shackle the game, stop it from sprinting away from you, especially in Test cricket, where the players are better, tougher, stronger. It’s like a supercharged tug of war.
You can never win a Test match in a single session, but you can certainly go a long way towards losing one. A palpable air of tension descends on the dressing room. Later, in the debrief, you may conduct a thoughtful review, and suggest it might not have been the best policy to go quiet and retreat into your shells. Yet neither is it the time or the place for bluff and bluster.
The last thing you need, when you’ve gone from 50–0 to 50–3 in what feels like a heartbeat, is
someone blathering on, in jolly-hockey-sticks mode. You need a partnership. You’re desperate for that partnership. Yet something seems to be happening with every ball. It’s like watching an avalanche start to roll down a mountain. This is something bigger than any of us.
There are plenty of England collapses that belong in cricket’s dungeon. Six wickets lost for three runs presented Australia with a win at Melbourne in 1990. England lost their last eight wickets for twenty-six against Pakistan two years later, after Graham Gooch and Michael Atherton had scored 135 and 76, respectively. (Remarkably, they still somehow managed to win.)
We replaced New Zealand at the bottom of the world rankings by squandering our last eight wickets for thirty-nine against them at the Oval in 1999. Shane Warne seized the bragging rights when he was instrumental in England losing nine wickets for sixty at Adelaide in 2006. Oh, and in case you are wondering, regrets, I’ve had more than a few.
My team lost six wickets for nine runs in ten overs at Brisbane in 2013 and compounded the problem by losing our last seven batsmen for forty-nine in the second innings. We lost seven for forty-three in a defeat by South Africa at Centurion in 2016. We were 27–9 in the first Test of my last series in New Zealand, at Eden Park in Auckland in March 2018. That was so bad it was like an out-of-body experience.
It was the first day–night Test in the country, played with a pink ball in swinging conditions. I was first out to Trent Boult for 5, with the total on 6, having batted as if my feet were encased in cement. Aggers, in the commentary box, offered the caveat that I had been lambing a couple of weeks previously. To maintain the rural theme, Trevor Bayliss, our coach, was closer to the mark in suggesting we were ‘like deer caught in headlights’.
The Autobiography Page 7