The Autobiography

by Alastair Cook

  Since their media can be vicious in the event of disappointment, that wasn’t an entirely comfortable place to be. They had named a seventeen-man squad, which suggested they didn’t seem entirely sure of their best side, and we had been decisive to the point of brutality. Steve Finn, our leading wicket taker, was told he was dropped on Christmas Day.

  Happy holidays …

  It’s professional sport. It’s hard and harsh. It shouldn’t really matter on what day the big decision is taken. He was left out because he was being hit for four runs an over. It was the equivalent of dropping your most productive batsman for scoring too slowly, a brave call, made after exhaustive discussions between captain and coach.

  Tim Bresnan came in. Straussy gambled on the accuracy of our seamers, deciding to bowl on winning the toss. If that lager company ever did Boxing Days, this was it. It was just bloody marvellous. Australia made their lowest total against us for forty-two years: 98. They chased the ball and, excepting two early drops, we caught everything behind the wicket.

  I had the best gig, watching carnage unfold from mid-off. Conditions were English, with a little rain around at lunchtime, and our bowlers were relentless, exceptional. The anticipated partnership didn’t develop. There aren’t many moments when serenity settles, but I looked around and thought, ‘This is it.’

  It felt almost fated, a reward for faith and application in those stressful net sessions searching for a semblance of form. We felt as if the ball would also nip around when we batted, but conditions caught the deadened mood. Straussy and I didn’t feel the need for words when we walked off at the close, with an unbeaten partnership of 157. We simply touched gloves.

  The MCG is a great stadium, but doesn’t feel like a traditional cricket ground, because of its scale. It’s a concrete bowl, and lacks the charm of Adelaide or Cape Town, where the scene is softened by the grass banking. I’ll leave you to insert your own joke, but Straussy and I cleared it. The Barmy Army sang ‘We can see you sneaking out’ at the locals. There were 84,000 in at the start of play; by the end there were about 30,000 Englishmen left.

  Memories were created, but nothing had been confirmed. I had a momentary flash of alarm when someone in the dressing room shouted, ‘Bat properly here, and we’ve got the Ashes,’ as we prepared to go out after tea. Don’t tempt fate. Don’t look too far ahead. Simply do your job. I was out quickly the following morning, for 82, and Straussy lasted little longer, but others took our places in the trenches.

  Trotty was metronomic, forming adhesive partnerships with KP and Matty Prior, who was reprieved after being mistakenly given out to a no-ball early in his innings of 85. He was unbeaten on 162 when we were bowled out with a first-innings lead of 415. Australia were six down entering the fourth and final day and though Brad Haddin and Siddle put on a few, we were soon doing the Sprinkler Dance on the outfield.

  It’s simple enough – put one hand behind your back and whirl the other arm – and legend suggests it was originally performed in the eighties. Paul Collingwood rediscovered it; Graeme Swann’s video diary ensured it went viral. The occasional fossil, back in England, saw it as another death knell for cricket’s dignity, but most saw it for what it was, harmless fun.

  The MCG’s dressing rooms are cavernous, due to the AFL’s need for internal kicking areas, but the ferocity of the celebrations made up for the lack of traditional intimacy. A few of the lads headed out to share the night with the Barmy Army, but something held me back. We had retained the Ashes for the first time in twenty-four years, but I wanted to win them, outright.

  I’m puritanical when it comes to performance. Losing in Sydney would have meant a drawn series, which wouldn’t have felt right. Would we lapse into old habits? Would we be up for it, mentally? Had we retained our hunger? Sad, perhaps, but I was nervous, even as I watched the New Year’s Eve fireworks from an apartment overlooking the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

  Ricky Ponting and Ryan Harris were injured. Australia were in disarray, but they still had their oath of allegiance to the Baggy Green. We were in for one of those tug of wars, when weakness, once sensed, builds before it bursts. They got to 105 for the loss of one wicket before Brez had Shane Watson caught, and defiance seeped away.

  The best teams take pride in their superiority, reinforce it in pivotal phases. Straussy seized the initiative from the off, and I made the most of my good fortune, in being caught off a no-ball. I was in unprecedented rhythm and cursed the lazy drive that cost me a double hundred. Ian Bell and Matty Prior compensated with centuries; once we were out for 644 it was a matter of when, not if.

  We were taken into a fifth day, warmed by the memory of the previous evening’s skewering of Mitchell Johnson. The crowd were living it; they, too, sensed it was our time and their place. An entire stand serenaded Johnson with his song all the way to the wicket, once Chris Tremlett had bounced Haddin out.

  ‘He bowls to the left. He bowls to the right. Mitchell Johnson, your batting is shite …’

  Chris was a big, intimidating guy, but wasn’t express pace. As I delivered the ball to him from mid-on he murmured, ‘I’m just going to try and bowl this as fast as I can.’ He produced an absolute jaffa, which swung in and splayed the stumps. The next few seconds were almost surreal.

  It was bedlam. The crowd’s roar could have been heard in Auckland. Johnson, accompanied by TV’s cartoon duck, was serenaded all the way back to the pavilion. He would exact his revenge, three years later, but you couldn’t do anything other than laugh. When I saw Henry, my brother-in-law, later, he summed up the mood by saying he never needed to see another away Test match.

  There was the usual champagne-soaked scrum in the changing room before we decided to take a few beers out to the square for a debrief. We knew the symbolism of sitting in the middle, in the spiritual home of Australian cricket, and events took on a life of their own. The cigars were passed around, and everyone spoke from the heart about what the achievement meant to them.

  Sport at the highest level doesn’t encourage emotional growth, but no one held back. I was in a panic when it came to my turn to speak, worried about failing to do justice to the magnitude of the moment. Somehow, I came up with the words to express the essence of being an international cricketer.

  ‘Ten weeks ago, I still felt I shouldn’t have been selected for this tour,’ I said. ‘Four months ago, I was one innings away from not being here. Being named man of the series, winning the Ashes, is mad. I’ve achieved something I didn’t think was possible. We have achieved something that will be with us for the rest of our lives.

  ‘So, never give up. No matter how bad it is, never give up. It will turn if you keep doing the right things …’

  9. View from the Mountain Top

  It takes time, on emerging briefly from the bubble of international sport, to get used to the light and shade of life. You think you can gauge the public mood by looking at online trends and talking to friends, but it is not until you are confronted by the impact of your achievements on a human level that you appreciate their deeper meaning.

  The English are generally reticent about approaching recognizable figures, but I lost count of the number of people who came up to stress how happy we had made them feel by winning the Ashes in Australia. So many confessed, like guilty schoolchildren, that they had stayed awake all night during the previous six weeks and snatched surreptitious naps in the office.

  My depressurization process began in a pressurized first-class cabin, to which Alice and I were upgraded on the way home. That twenty-four-hour journey, free from phones, email and Wi-Fi, allowed me to reflect and reset. I had never felt such personal satisfaction. That deep ache of insecurity had gone – for the moment, at least. I knew I could not have done any more.

  As a team, we were in rarefied air, close to the summit of our Everest. We still had a home series against India to negotiate, the equivalent of the deadly Hilary Step, before we could call ourselves the best team in the world, but we were relentless. We reach
ed the peak at Edgbaston on 13 August 2011, precisely 918 days after that honesty meeting in Kingston, Jamaica.

  India’s spirit, weakened by heavy losses in the first two Tests, was finally broken on the third day of the game. This may sound silly, but there are very few occasions when it doesn’t matter how long you bat. I was 182 not out overnight and woke up with a single thought in my head: ‘This is your chance to go massive.’

  The pitch was flat. I had dispelled doubt, created by averaging only five in the series going into the game. The Indians, who had required late-innings defiance by MS Dhoni to reach 244, knew defeat was inevitable. It was Test cricket at its most brutal. It is rarely as obvious as football or rugby, where dominance is reflected by six-goal or sixty-point winning margins. Distress signals are subtle, but instantly recognizable at close quarters.

  The Indian bowlers steamed in for the first hour, but I sensed a slight sag in the shoulders, a realization they each faced another thankless twenty-over shift across another long day. Their intensity level fell by a fateful fraction. My partnership of 222 with Eoin Morgan was cricket’s equivalent of water torture. I scored only two boundaries in two sessions; a mid-afternoon power cut was the opposition’s only release.

  They spread the field in the hope of delaying the declaration, which we planned to make if I got 300. Runs came steadily through midwicket, or behind square on the off side. I was on 294 with the field spread, and everyone on the boundary, when I attempted to hit the ball too hard. I couldn’t believe it when I top-edged a loose drive and was caught at deep backward point.

  History turned to dust. At that moment it didn’t matter that my innings of 294, which lasted seven minutes short of thirteen hours, was the highest in Edgbaston’s 116-year Test history, and England’s biggest since Graham Gooch’s 333, twenty-one years earlier. As in my final Test innings, public acclaim couldn’t deflect private reproach.

  Perspective, of sorts, was quickly reasserted by the manifestation of my worst nightmare, a king pair in Test cricket. Virender Sehwag had nearly three full days to digest the consequences of gloving off Stuart Broad to Matty Prior in the first innings. He seemed almost beyond caring in the second. A massive drive at Jimmy Anderson’s first delivery, an away-swinger, sped to Andrew Strauss at first slip.

  Victory, and number one status, was confirmed the following day, when Kevin Pietersen caught Shanthakumaran Sreesanth in the gully, off Tim Bresnan. There’s a lovely painting of our response, running to form a huddle with arms aloft. Though the consistency of the reaction is subconscious, the symmetry of the image is strangely appropriate, since it captures the nature of the team.

  We were moving parts in a highly efficient machine. Our ruthlessness and resourcefulness were innate. We were operating the 2 per cent rule, continually seeking subtle ways to gain marginal advantage, especially away from home, where we struggled when the ball wasn’t moving around. That attention to detail extended to Mushtaq Ahmed, our spin-bowling coach until 2014, teaching us the reverse swing.

  He had done so, with Matty Prior, at Sussex. My job, as the principal shiner of the ball, was to monitor the moisture on the rough side. Matty would throw it directly to me, rather than going through the hands of the fielders, because their sweat could dampen the dry side. It is amazing, if you don’t touch the dry side for two or three overs, how rough it will get, even when it is thirty or forty overs old on hard ground.

  Fielders consciously threw it seam up to me, so I could catch it on the shiny side. There were unavoidable complications – sometimes someone with sweaty hands would make a diving stop or roll on the ball – but as soon as the ball is moving sideways on a good wicket you are back in the game.

  Another trick to accelerate the process is skidding the ball in from the outfield on a lower trajectory so that its rougher side hits the ground. Footmarks left on previous wickets are a favourite target. If the ball is reversing, though, you never throw it on the ground. For instance, if it is hit to the boundary the fielder carries it forward until he is sure of the return throw reaching mid-off on the full.

  This also helped mentally, through the placebo effect of knowing we had done everything to look after the ball. So much of sport is played in the mind; reaching the finite goal of being number one, faster than we expected, was dangerous. Andy Flower spoke of setting mini-targets, reinforcing and renewing habits. He was the main driver of cultural change and continued to talk of a higher calling than the fleeting sensation of victory, but such all-encompassing ambition was not easy to sustain.

  That big-picture policy had already included an evolution of authority. I had been appointed one-day captain in May 2011. Stuart Broad simultaneously assumed leadership of the T20 team, leaving Straussy clear to concentrate on the Test group. The setting for my introductory speech, Churchill’s War Rooms, tied into an overarching theme of identity. We did something similar in the Tower of London, with a military speaker.

  The underground bunker, beneath Westminster, from which the War Cabinet operated, was evocative, though my speech was hardly Churchillian. I had thought long and hard about its tone and content. As in Jamaica, I thought honesty the best policy. I spoke passionately about my competitiveness, of not letting down those close to me. Sure, we could inspire others. But first we had to look to each other.

  That’s the three-card trick of managing a dressing room. It must be big enough to accommodate the larger characters, and small enough to breed the intimacy that enables you to show how much you care. Differences should be celebrated, because no successful team contains identical personalities. That’s the theory, anyway …

  Reality tends to set ambushes. We were number one in the world, hoping to push on, and suddenly lost all three Tests in the winter series against Pakistan, who were ranked fifth in the world. Chasing 145 to win the second Test at Abu Dhabi, we lost all ten wickets for fifty-one runs on the way to being bowled out for 72. It was a chastening setback; the subsequent series in Sri Lanka was drawn, and we still had to prove our mettle in Asian conditions.

  Fault lines that existed, largely unnoticed and completely unprotected, opened during the main summer series, against South Africa. KP’s exclusion from Andrew Strauss’s 100th Test, at Lord’s, mirrored his idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies, and raised fundamental issues of trust.

  Perversely, we were engulfed in that particular controversy after one of KP’s most distinctive innings, 149 in the drawn second Test at Headingley. That was a work of genius. His individualism in playing with the nerve and aggression of a baseball slugger was extraordinary and, in hindsight, revealing, since it seemed to be a release of frustration.

  He hinted at retirement in an interview, and then recommitted to the team. The tone was strange, but I understood what he meant when he famously observed, ‘It’s not easy being me in that dressing room.’ He is a man of great gifts, compelling passions, soaring highs and puzzling lows. A psychologist will tell you that anyone with such a strong sense of self is inclined to introspection and liable to view the world with a narrow focus.

  His suspension was inevitable, once an investigation was launched into his sending of what were described as ‘provocative’ messages to South African players on his BlackBerry. He would later admit in his autobiography to agreeing in one exchange that Strauss was behaving like a ‘doos’, a colloquial Afrikaans insult for ‘dick’ or ‘idiot’.

  He had laughed along with us at the ‘KPgenius’ parody account on Twitter, lampooning public perceptions of his character in the build-up to Headingley. Suddenly he seized on it as evidence of poor faith from his teammates. It transpired the account was owned by a friend of Stuart Broad, but he and Graeme Swann, who was also implicated, swore on their lives they weren’t involved.

  As so often happens in these situations, views became polarized. The debate generated more heat than light. Had KP initially been more transparent and shared his phone records as soon as the investigation was instituted, a lot of problems could have been avoided
. As it was, what would be Straussy’s farewell to Test cricket was overshadowed by rancour and suspicion.

  A week after that match at Lord’s I was in Southampton, killing time before a day–nighter against the South Africans. I never slept late, so was watching Homes Under the Hammer in T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops, when Andy Flower called. ‘Where are you?’ he asked. ‘I need to see you.’ His manner was bland, as if he was working through a final pre-match checklist.

  I twigged what had happened when I walked into the downstairs meeting room and saw him sitting with Hugh Morris of the ECB. They clearly weren’t interested in small talk about Dion Dublin’s vision for a semi-detached in Sidcup, but it’s funny how big decisions, and huge career milestones, seem so matter-of-fact.

  Flower wasted no time: ‘Straussy is resigning the captaincy and is going to announce his retirement from the game tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I would like you to become the new England Test captain. Will you do the job?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I replied. ‘I’d love to. It’s a huge honour.’

  And that was that, a schoolboy fantasy reduced to a statement of the obvious. I turned to leave the room and paused before opening the door when Flower added: ‘Don’t tell anyone, and don’t let it distract you from the game tonight. You’ve got a big game.’

  ‘Oh, I won’t,’ I promised. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be on it.’

  Of course, I got 0, bowled second ball by Lonwabo Tsotsobe, who would go on to become a DJ after being banned for eight years in a match-fixing scandal. We ended a run of ten consecutive wins and enabled South Africa to become the first side to be ranked number one in all three formats. I told Alice about my promotion, but otherwise kept the following day’s headlines to myself.

  Straussy sent us all a personalized letter and we bought him a hundred bottles of wine in return. I love the bloke. He embodies everything you wish for in a leader: calmness, fairness, fierce pride and consistent purpose. He’s the rock-solid guy everyone looks up to, whether you are walking out to bat with him or asking for quiet guidance.