The Autobiography

by Alastair Cook

  My abiding loyalty towards him couldn’t be fairly factored into my first decision as captain: whether we could, or should, bring back KP. I didn’t go out of my way to talk to Straussy about it, first, because I couldn’t be distracted and, second, because I didn’t want to be influenced emotionally by the respect I had for him. I was trying to do what I thought was best for the team, not best for me or my mate.

  While I privately weighed up the pros and cons, I had my public initiation as England captain in the arena I liked least: the press conference. The question I hated most arrived on cue: ‘What leadership style can we expect from you?’ Put simply, it is hard to answer when you don’t truly know. You get picked for the job because people see leadership qualities in you, but it’s hard to put into words, beyond an appreciation of the honour and the intention to do what comes naturally.

  I eventually relaxed into the role after about eighteen months, but was worried about how I came across as a public speaker. I panicked initially, when I had to articulate ideas or strategies in front of the squad. I was uncomfortably aware of Swanny giggling in the corner because I’d misquoted a saying or put my words in the wrong order in a jumble of thoughts.

  Media training is useful, to a degree, but sport involves operating on instinct. I knew what I wouldn’t do following a leadership seminar in the City of London at which a prominent chief executive stood up and said: ‘I tell my employees to reach for the stars. They might not get the stars, but they get the moon. That’s a bloody long way.’

  If I had come out with that tosh, I’d have been laughed out of the dressing room. The truth is that nothing can prepare you for the England captaincy. Experience of doing the job in county cricket might offer tactical experience and acumen, but it has limited relevance because of the magnitude of daily decisions, which are second guessed by people with minimal knowledge of the situation.

  It’s like a football manager walking into a changing room to address his players for the first time. He must meet questioning eyes. He knows what is going on behind those eyes. Every player is watching intently and wondering what change will mean for him. Ultimately words are of secondary importance to actions.

  When I took the job, I had a short but significant exchange with Andy.

  ‘What kind of captain do you want to be?’ he asked me.

  ‘I want to be an honest captain.’

  ‘Honest?’

  ‘Yeah. You’ve got to be honest.’

  ‘Well, what happens if you drop a player. Are you going to be honest then?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I’ll tell the truth.’

  ‘So. You’re going to drop this player because he isn’t bowling well, or he can’t hit it off the square. You’re going to tell him, in so many words, that you can’t trust him.’

  ‘I’m not sure if I’d say that.’

  ‘But what happens if there’s an injury, and you need that player for the next Test match? You’ve just told him you don’t trust him, because you’re honest.’

  He had a point.

  It was a crash course in the value of relationships, which become more interdependent on tour, when captain and coach pick the team. A selector is normally on hand, in case you don’t agree, but there is a constant need to manage, firmly but sensitively, the five or six players who are on the outside, looking in.

  It involves straddling the age-old credibility gap between practice and theory. You must be truthful, because otherwise they won’t respect your authority. You can’t tell lies, because they will come back and bite you on the arse. But the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? You learn quickly that idealism is a luxury.

  Dealing with disappointment is the hardest part of the job. My compromise was to have what I used to call the toilet chat, a private conversation away from prying eyes and ears. I always offered the dropped player the option of revisiting the conversation, though not many took up the offer. Most decisions are clear cut, but borderline choices can prey on the mind.

  Flower and Prior played pivotal roles in helping me reach the decision to reinstate KP. Neither deserved KP’s subsequent criticism. We exchanged views in three- or four-day cycles, after mulling over the issues. Matty was opinionated, but team orientated. I trusted his views, having spent a lot of time on the field chatting as slip fielder to his wicketkeeper. He strongly supported Kevin’s return.

  Andy had more to juggle. He had built a close relationship with Straussy over the previous three years and had dealt with recurring tensions. Kevin was high maintenance, difficult to manage, but worth the extra effort because of his special talent. Loyalties were entrenched, and I knew I would have to sell his return to his teammates.

  Above all, Andy is a principled man. His clashes with KP are a matter of public record, but he thought rationally, and suggested I could make the reunion work. I wasn’t a particularly close friend of Kevin and can count on one hand the times I went for dinner with him in our eight years together, but I saw potential for progress.

  We were polar opposites in terms of personality but had never clashed. As batsmen we suited each other down to the ground. Left hand, right hand. A sponge and a top gun. My fondness for going under the radar worked well, because KP fed off my calmness. Andy was right. We did make it work, in my eyes at least, for a while.

  We both laughed nervously when Andy said: ‘This will go one of two ways, but it is definitely going to be better than ending a bloke’s career for good.’ I was armed with a list of questions when I met KP in London to chat through things. It was awkward, initially, but he talked a good game, in stressing his eagerness to carry on playing for England.

  He gave all the right answers. He knew he needed to clarify his commitment and playing for England built his brand. I prided myself that my teams worked their bollocks off, even on the shittiest of tours, and he had to buy into that. I never had a direct issue with Kevin, though I didn’t like the way he attempted to manipulate Strauss. He’s a man of fascinating, sometimes bizarre contrasts and, to be fair, did go to Andrew’s house to apologize personally, for ruining his final Test.

  That’s the paradox. Someone summed him up as the bloke you would buy a drink for without hanging around for him to buy you one back. That’s why he was naturally suited to franchise cricket. Everything’s new, fresh and exciting for three weeks, and then he breezes off, into another town, to do it all again with another team. Spending ten months of the year with him is an entirely different proposition.

  The warning signs were obvious. Kevin felt misunderstood, rightly or wrongly, for long periods in his career and preferred love to be unconditional. Lines of communication had to be clear and unambiguous. As a captain, I tried to treat people individually, and sensitively, within certain boundaries.

  He was always going to be on his best behaviour in India, which was a phenomenal tour on which to bed in as captain. It is a personal challenge, as much as anything, since it is a tour when you spend too much time in your room. Security had increased following the Mumbai bombings, so wandering through crowds excited by their proximity to an international cricketer was impractical.

  I was brought up to treat people fairly and with respect. The adulation you receive as an England player in India is difficult to justify, but logical, if you see what I mean. Cricket assumes exaggerated importance because it enhances everyday life. It costs nothing to be civil. A smile or a quick conversation with the lift attendant or the breakfast waiter can make his day.

  If India’s people are captivating, its poverty is overwhelming. Sometimes you get morally confused by it. One of my great strengths as a cricketer is compartmentalizing my game, not being dull or dense, but refusing to overanalyse things. Yet it is impossible to sit in a grand, spacious hotel and eat fine food with the knowledge that on the other side of the hedge children are washing in polluted ponds.

  It is difficult to get your head around such extremes. You are never immune to the suffering of a fellow human being; I’ve found that in Indi
a emotion seeps out in surprising ways. When we were in Ahmedabad, playing our third and final warm-up match before the first Test was staged there, I watched the box set of The Pacific, an American mini-series that followed a band of soldiers through Second World War battles in the Pacific rim.

  The storylines were compelling and the characters believable. I’m not usually one to cry at fictional TV but was tearful immediately after the final episode, in which two main characters, turned into cynics stripped of compassion by the horrors of war, prepared to return home following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  I was looking out at the sprawling city, imagining unseen lives playing out beneath me, when there was a knock on the door. Jimmy and Swanny burst in and looked at me, red-eyed, with a mixture of amusement and alarm. ‘Thank fuck you guys have turned up,’ I said. We were in a dry state, Gujarat, with a two-phase, three-month, four-Test tour stretching ahead of us. A beer would have gone down well.

  In such circumstances there is no alternative to throwing everything at it. Kevin and I each scored centuries in the warm-up matches, but we were hammered by nine wickets in the first Test. Sehwag got a quick hundred, Cheteshwar Pujara announced himself with an unbeaten 206, and we followed on, trailing by 330.

  We had done a lot of work on playing spin in the nets. The skill lies in not getting caught playing half forward, half back. It is the most mentally challenging aspect of the game and hitting without consequence in practice can be deceptive. A delicate balance needs to be struck. We had spoken of being positive, putting the pressure on the bowler, and trained assertively.

  When the pressure is on, aggression can be self-destructive. Training in the nets, with lots of sweeps and big shots, can sometimes disguise a batsman’s deeper lack of trust in his defensive technique. Ian Bell, for instance, is accomplished facing spin; he ran down the wicket to Pragyan Ojha, the slow left-armer, didn’t get to the pitch of the delivery and was out first ball. That signalled a bit of a scrambled mind.

  There were mitigating circumstances, because he was preparing to return home for the premature birth of his son Joseph. Maybe we were over ambitious, in seeking to put the pressure back on the Indian spinners. As captain, I had to lead by example. I batted for 556 minutes for 176 in the second innings, sweeping consistently and choosing my moments to use my feet. We avoided an innings defeat and at one stage, when Matty Prior was similarly resistant, I sensed we had them worried.

  Batting in India is a mental challenge. The first twenty or thirty balls are very hard work. Everyone is around you, chatting away. Bowlers specialize in pinning you down. It doesn’t take long for the Gimp to ask, ‘How are you going to score a run here?’ You must be at ease having fielders clustered around the bat. You must learn to manipulate the field, to milk runs carefully but decisively. It is a case of low risk, high reward.

  Once I demonstrated what was possible, my words carried additional authority. Batting against spin has certain certainties. It’s picking length, watching the revolutions on the ball. It’s reading the drift, responding to variations, especially the one that goes straight on. You either want to get as close as possible to the pitch of the ball and smother, or as far away as possible, on the back foot, to allow the ball to spin before you select your shot. My message at the end of the game was disarmingly simple: we had to learn to trust our defence, and when to attack on our own terms.

  India were a very good side, with stellar players, but they weren’t in their pomp. I saw the first signs of self-doubt – we call it ‘getting nippy’ – and they gave away their underlying thinking by producing another turning wicket for the second Test in Mumbai. Usually they deliver a series of flat pitches after going one up in a series; here they were desperate to avenge their 4–0 whitewash in England.

  Even the net wickets ragged. We selected Monty Panesar because we needed to play our two best spinners. He promptly took eleven wickets in a match that crystallized KP’s capacity to destroy the opposition. His 186, against a ball that spat and spun, was one of the greatest innings by an England player.

  There was an element of playing the percentages, since the ball was turning so much. That involves rationalized aggression, designed to knock the bowler off his length and rhythm. Because I am a left-hander, left-arm spinners aim at the rough outside my off stump. It can spin, bounce, or keep low. You can’t retreat into yourself because you will be a sitting duck.

  KP defended calmly and resolutely before attacking viciously and joyfully. He played with discipline, concentrating on the sweep and the slog sweep. We put on 206 for the third wicket. I ground out 122, by sweeping, nudging and nurdling, but my innings was colour-by-numbers stuff compared with his Impressionist masterpiece.

  Sometimes captaincy is simple. Monty and Swanny were doing their bit by bowling brilliantly, and Jimmy Anderson was providing reverse swing, I didn’t have to be a tactical genius. In Kolkata I lost the toss for a third time, and got my head down for eight hours, scoring 190 before enduring one of the biggest brain fades of my career.

  I had shared big partnerships with Nick Compton and Jonathan Trott. I was well set, and ready to play the foil to KP. I was backing up to him and turned back to the crease after realizing a run wasn’t on. Virat Kohli moved round to short midwicket, threw at the stumps … and I stupidly lifted my bat out of the way to let the ball through.

  Dopey, but not disastrous, because of the reverse swing employed by Jimmy and Steven Finn, who had come in for the injured Stuart Broad. We needed only 41 to win; I was stumped, fourth ball, after a rush of blood, followed quickly by Trotty and KP. At 8–3, I was so nervous I literally could not watch. I sat on the toilet until Compo and Belly put me out of my misery.

  We won the toss in the final Test, on a flat pitch at Nagpur, and didn’t bat particularly well in occupying the crease for 145 overs, scoring just 330. It was attritional, soporific cricket, though I managed to be sufficiently alert to run out Dhoni on 99 in India’s reply. Trotty and Belly scored centuries in a second innings we stretched to 154 overs, and the series was ours.

  It took me a long time to appreciate the significance of that win. Playing in India is an immersive experience, since the game drives a billion people absolutely barking mad. The gods of their game, Tendulkar, Dhoni and Kohli, live surreal, detached lives. I’ve rarely spoken to them deeply, because they have become distant figures by the nature of their fame.

  How they perform under such extraordinary pressure is incredible. When Tendulkar went out to bat, electricity surged around the ground. It felt as if the world had stopped to watch, and wait, for its portion of perfection. When he got out there was a deathly silence, as if the world had stopped turning.

  Scoring a hundred hundreds under that sort of pressure is an almost unbelievable achievement. My fear of failure drove me on, but what he went through, on a daily basis for twenty-five years, was of another magnitude. No one is immune to self-doubt, but he was a prisoner of his genius. The responsibility of pleasing so many people, so often, demanded a barely credible inner strength.

  We should have done the double, by winning the one-day series, but lost it 3–2. The noise in the opening match, on Dhoni’s home ground in Pune, was off the scale. I was at first slip and couldn’t hear James Tredwell, who was alongside me at second. It was ludicrously loud. Screeching assaulted the ears like feedback from an electric guitar held up to an amplifier.

  In England, I cherish my freedom to roam as I wish. In India, leaving your hotel involves a calculated gamble. Before the final game of that one-day series, in Dharamsala, Ian Bell, Chris Woakes and I went out to a pizza restaurant recommended by Trevor Penney, our former specialist fielding coach. The plan involved a slice or two of deep crust, washed down by a couple of bottles of Mexican beer as we watched the sun set over the Himalayas.

  Dharamsala is a beautiful place, ringed by cedar forests. The air is so clean and fresh. Appropriately, since it is home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile, it
is a tranquil contrast to the teeming cities we are used to visiting. The three of us reasoned that we would get away with the expedition because we are not instantly recognizable folk heroes in the mould of KP.

  It was Friday, and traffic was strangely heavy. Without exaggeration, our car was surrounded by around a thousand people as soon as it pulled up at the restaurant. I don’t know how they knew we were going to be there, but once we were bundled through the crowd, they decided to storm the place. It was absolute bedlam.

  Armed security guards took us upstairs and locked us in a bedroom, where the occupant’s underpants were still on the double bed. They devised a secret door-knocking code to smuggle the pizza and beer in, so we sat there for an hour or so, giggling at the absurdity of eating with guys who were waving guns.

  And then we tried to leave.

  I’d never seen anything like it. There were now five thousand people there, waiting for us. The most adventurous were blocking the stairway, phones at the ready. They were desperate for any form of contact. It wasn’t particularly dangerous, apart from the fact someone could easily have been hurt in the crush, or during the subsequent stampede after our car, but it was surreal.

  We never got the chance to relax and enjoy the serenity of the mountain top. Perhaps there was a moral there …

  10. Decline and Fall …

  ‘You, or your team, will reveal themselves.’

  Andy Flower’s summary of the challenge of Test cricket, articulated in clipped tones that disguised his sensitivity, stayed with me throughout my England captaincy. He was right; the highest form of the game exposes who you are, individually and collectively. It takes no prisoners. It spins you round and spits you out.