It is diametrically opposed to the one-day game, where the mathematics of the occasion dictate your approach. Test cricket offers greater opportunity to impose yourself on the situation, because of its length and intricacy. It doesn’t tell you what to do, through force of circumstance. To survive, you must find a way that works for you.
It can suck the life out of you. Not many batsmen who go straight back to county cricket after being found wanting bounce back immediately. They endure what is almost a period of mourning; it takes time to rediscover the mental fortitude required if they are to regroup. On the way up, or the way down, your promise or failure is emphasized by the TV news ticker, a snapshot that sums up your performance in a few words or numbers.
It is a dive into very deep, extremely cold and invariably murky water. What is talent? Can it be defined only by its reproduction on a regular basis? Skills are nothing without application, and delivery of results. Certain players have obvious attributes – the ability to swing the ball both ways or to bat with conviction and imagination – but they lack that intangible force to fulfil themselves.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard people around the game exclaim, ‘God, he’s so talented!’ Sometimes that expression is tinged with exasperation. On other occasions, such as in the case of Joe Root, it reflects the emergence of a special player. He announced himself in the final Test of that Indian tour, at Nagpur.
I knew, instantly, that he was made for international cricket. He’s naturally cheeky, and walked to the wicket for his first innings with a broad, beaming smile. He wasn’t going to be overawed by the occasion. We probably should have selected him sooner, but that transitional stage, being exposed to the environment in training, held him in good stead.
I benefited similarly at the start of my career as an unused squad member in Pakistan. His inner belief, bolstered by the knowledge he had been picked as a fantastic player of spin, manifested itself in a first-innings 73. It came as a surprise when he offered a return catch to Piyush Chawla because he was so obviously comfortable.
The most improbable highlight of a drawn three-match series in New Zealand in the spring of 2013 was provided by Steve Finn, who erected the Watford Wall on the fifth day of the first Test in Dunedin. He had come in as night watchman the previous evening, when I was out after sharing a first-wicket partnership of 231 with Nick Compton, who also scored a hundred.
Since the match remained in the balance, an unorthodox approach was required. Quite simply, I ‘incentivised’ Finny. It began before the start of play with the promise that I would pay for his evening meal if he survived the first hour and ended just before tea with me ordering him a case of wine for making 56 and, more importantly, eking out 203 deliveries in 286 minutes at the crease. Had he reached a century I would have been in real trouble.
We warmed up for the Ashes in the return series against the Kiwis, winning both Test matches. Rooty scored his maiden Test hundred at Headingley, where I contributed 130 in the second innings and Graeme Swann took ten wickets. The sense of anticipation was tangible; unfortunately for Compo it was too much. He just went, mentally.
Promoting Joe to open in his place was the only major selection decision. The pundits, who have the privilege of not having to back up such statements, forecast victory as a formality. Beefy Botham, never one to gather splinters from fence sitting, proclaimed that we would beat the Australians 10–0: not bad going in a five-Test series.
We were in a pretty good place as a team but weren’t from another planet. Australia weren’t Luton Town, my team, turning up at Manchester City in damage-limitation mode. Margins were narrow and matches were decided by players who possessed the confidence and experience to seize the moment. The first Test, at Trent Bridge, was a kaleidoscopic example of long-form cricket.
The fairytale of Ashton Agar, the teenaged tail-ender who made 98 in his first Test innings, didn’t quite make it to the publisher. Stuart Broad somehow made himself a marked man by refusing to walk when an edge ricocheted to slip from the gloves of wicketkeeper Brad Haddin. Jimmy Anderson, another Aussie irritant, bowled himself to the point of exhaustion on a slow, low pitch before his tenth wicket of the match, confirmed by DRS, clinched a fourteen-run victory.
We ran around like headless chickens, but the quietest member of the group had made the biggest noise. Ian Bell came of age in that series, scoring the first of three centuries at Nottingham and raising his game to a different level. He was a beautiful player, an aesthetically pleasing cover driver, but naturally insecure and easily overshadowed.
It takes strength to admit weakness but, by working with Mark Bawden, he reached his optimal level. He was sensational, almost lyrical on occasion, but as someone saddled by expectation since the age of sixteen, when he was selected for England A, he was temperamentally a slow burn.
It took time, and careful self-analysis, for the golden child to truly believe in himself. He acknowledged the pressure, rationalized it, delivered and dominated. I owed him so much because appearances were deceptive. The win by an innings in the second Test at Lord’s, where Belly changed the tenor of the match by scoring 109 after coming in at 28–3, signalled the beginning of the end for that team.
We never again reproduced the ruthlessness that spawned articles with headlines such as ‘How Does One Beat a Team of Robots?’ The journalist, who had evidently decided to flog the analogy to death, suggested removing my battery, apparently inserted by ECB scientists. He hoped fervently that I would be found, wandering around, intoning, ‘Does not compute! Does not compute! Error! Error!’
This wasn’t science fiction, or even a rom com. It was a kitchen-sink drama, coming to a climax. We were lucky with the rain in Manchester and won a tight Test in Durham through Stuart Broad’s personal momentum. His six-wicket spell, following a heated dressing-room row at tea sparked by Matty Prior’s scathing summary of declining standards, was decisive.
My form had certainly cooled, and I felt I had to take the lead by speaking passionately and harshly about what we were in danger of losing, without allowing emotions to contaminate relationships. The draw at the Oval, when bad light intervened controversially to prevent a 4–0 series win, merely emphasized the unforgiving nature of international cricket.
What turned out to be a flawed selection, that of Simon Kerrigan, proved to be another sobering example of flying too close to the sun. I had first faced him for Lancashire two years earlier, when he struck me as a serious bowler in the making. He was competitive, skilful, knew his own game. He also had that stubborn, arrogant streak you look for in a player from whom much is expected.
Jimmy agreed with my instinctive conclusion that he was a goer. In that blunt Burnley way of his he described Kerrigan as ‘the first young spin bowler I’ve seen who knows what he is doing’. Perhaps we should have both paid greater attention to those whispering that he bowled too slowly to thrive at the highest level.
It would become critical, once he was psychologically damaged by Shane Watson in Australia’s warm-up game against the England Lions at Northampton the week before his senior debut. Watson is a fantastic cricketer, a brilliant batsman in the shorter forms of the game, and since the pressure was off, was able to unload. He scored only 45 but hit Kerrigan hard and consistently in the general direction of Milton Keynes.
The logic of Kerrigan’s selection, that we wanted a left-armer to turn the ball away from a right-handed batsman in spinning conditions, began to look shaky in the build-up, where he simply didn’t look the same bowler who, at first glance, exuded authority and self-belief. He seemed nervous, and though I was conscious of the danger of him bowling at Watson, it was unavoidable.
It was another of those sliding-doors moments. Had he made an immediate breakthrough the course of his career could have been drastically different. As it was, those eight wicketless overs, which went for fifty-three runs, are his solitary contribution to Test cricket. He was released by Lancashire at the end of the 2018 season and is dev
eloping a coaching career.
On a personal level, that match was one of my most memorable experiences. Being an Ashes-winning captain is very special. It meant everything to share it with Alice and my parents. I don’t care about the relative merits of that Australian team; they never go quietly. Who, for instance, remembers the weakness of the side beaten by Mike Gatting’s ‘can’t bat, can’t bowl, can’t field’ England in 1986–87?
It’s in the book, part of the bloodline.
I had set up the series by telling the team that it was their chance to enter folklore and link their names to an historic rivalry. We didn’t want an open-topped bus parade and the keys to the Downing Street drinks cabinet, but I find it puzzling that our 2013 win should be regarded as the forgotten Ashes. The sudden familiarity of victory, after a quarter-century of Australian domination, worked against us.
Of course, there is an element of remorse. It is part of a captain’s responsibility to look after people and I felt for Simon on a human level. I occasionally wonder what he thinks of those celebratory pictures, with the champagne spraying and the tinsel cascading, where I’m holding up a replica Ashes urn taken from the Lord’s shop.
The original artefact, of course, is far too fragile to be entrusted to a bunch of cricketers eager to get on the sauce. It even had its own first-class seat when flown to Australia, for only the second time, in 2006. The romance it represented, as an old perfume bottle given to England captain Ivo Bligh in 1882 by Lady Clark after defeat to Australia prompted a mock obituary of English cricket, didn’t survive our celebrations. That night ended, infamously, with Pee-gate and online images of myself and Matty, still in our kit, attempting to flag down a London bus. I was carrying my England blazer on a hanger; it is one of my favourite photos.
I deeply regret the urination on the square that night. It was not meant to be disrespectful; it was simply a case of a group of young guys being carried away by the moment. The characteristics of a successful team, in our case intensity, repeatability, self-assurance and an insularity tinged with arrogance, can mutate, and accelerate its downfall.
International sport is cyclical, and we weren’t alone in underestimating the underlying issues. It happens to the best. Australia, under the coaching influence of Darren Lehmann, were brash, verbally aggressive and pushed the boundaries of acceptable behaviour until their reputation was scoured by sandpaper. Where once they were praised as being assertive, they were criticized as being amoral.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not Mr Nice Guy 24/7. To put it into a context the Australians can understand, sometimes you have to have that bit of dingo about you. Paul Farbrace says there is something flinty, something slightly different, about myself, Rooty, Broady and Jimmy. We are not hard to manage, but we know our own minds, and are ready to fight our corner.
I try to be considerate in my dealings with the general public. I’m continually ready to offer my advice, if requested, to younger guys working through the challenges of their cricket career. But I’m far from perfect. I tend to be prickly when my standards are challenged and was often sharp when I felt we were training suboptimally.
I can be sarcastic. I’m not particularly proud of my impatience with a cameraman, trying to rig up a GoPro camera in the net when I returned to play for Essex after my knighthood. He took maybe thirty seconds, but I was waiting, as were the bowlers. ‘Mate, hurry up,’ I said, making things worse. ‘You can’t just have a net, can you these days, without being fucking filmed?’
He was just trying to do his job, but I eventually asked him to stop ‘because I’m wasting my time here’. At one level, I was wrong in making him flustered and embarrassed. But on another, my training was being compromised. He was eating into the fifteen minutes I had scheduled to hit. In an ideal world, I would have apologized, and had what Farbrace calls ‘one of those leave your beer and walk away moments’.
Swanny can be sharp and stubborn. He spent part of that evening at the Oval wandering about with a soft toy swan on his head, but there were weightier matters on his mind. In hindsight, he probably should have stuck with his original plan to retire there and then.
He had always dreamed of going out on an Ashes win, but the landscape was changed by the decision to stage back-to-back Ashes series to rationalize the cricket calendar so that the World Cup would not be a competing attraction. Players weren’t consulted and were correctly concerned about intensified physical and mental strains. It should never happen again. That the plan was thrown out for 2019 tells you everything you need to know about the expedience of the modern cricket administrator.
We play too much international cricket. Gambles are being taken that can shorten careers. I was rested for the one-day series against the Australians following the Ashes win. In hindsight, the same consideration should have been shown towards a struggling Jonathan Trott. He was bounced out first ball a couple of times, which deepened his problems. KP, too, should have been given room to breathe.
My final words to the group at the end of that Oval Test were intended to act as a punctuation mark between summer and winter. ‘I want everyone to be as fit as a butcher’s dog for the tour,’ I told them. ‘That’s the only thing we can control between now and Australia.’ Those words had greater relevance, and consequence, than I realized at the time.
Swanny was in pain but got a little greedy. He loves Australia, and gave his son Wilfred the middle name Sydney, so saying farewell at the SCG as part of another winning England team was tempting. His elbow injury was severe and had required two operations. One, in America, was conducted by a specialist in baseball injuries. Swanny spent fifty minutes of every hour in an electrically charged sling for two days and nights after surgery.
If that was storing up trouble, our decision to stage another pre-tour hardship camp was a big mistake. The boys looked back at the one we’d staged in Germany with fear, amusement and a strange sense of satisfaction. To this day, Ravi Bopara talks about it. He loved every press-up, each carefully planned humiliation.
If that one was Teutonic, this one, held in Stafford, was shambolic. Other than knowing it was designed to be less physical, in order to reveal different aspects of character and alternative styles of leadership, Andy Flower went into it as blindly as the rest of us. It transpired that we would be trained in surveillance techniques in an operation that would climax with a firefight.
The prospect brought out the little boy in us all. Who wouldn’t want to learn how to install tracking devices on a car, and to tail it in traffic? How devious would we be when ordered to act as a spy, following someone into a pub and reporting back overheard snippets of conversation? It all seemed harmless fun.
It was terrible. All hotels in the area were fully booked, so we had to travel for more than half an hour to the rendezvous point for the daily mission. The food was awful. We were briefed for hours, sitting uncomfortably in parked cars, before undertaking a farcical set of exercises. On one occasion, when we were tasked to secretly film a stash of plastic guns in the middle of the night, our patrol leader dropped his mobile phone and alerted the enemy. Half of the team got lost before the final firefight.
We can look back and laugh at the absurdity of it all, but it certainly got the 2013–14 Ashes tour off to a bad start. Poor planning was exacerbated by questionable selection decisions. Individually, several players were past their best. Collectively, we lacked the cohesion that defined the team that climbed to number one in the world.
Warning signs were ignored. I was as enthusiastic as anyone when we called up Boyd Rankin, a 6ft 8in fast bowler who had transferred allegiances from Ireland, at the age of twenty-nine, after a nine-year, 82-cap career for his home country. A strapping farmer’s son, he had a distinctive action. Though evidently prone to bouts of cramp, he caused batsmen a different set of problems.
Initially selected for the one-day series after the Oval, he was unplayable in practice. Ashley Giles, who had come into the England set-up, had coached him for Warwickshire.
We wanted to let him loose in the first match at Southampton, but he was forced to withdraw the night before with a back spasm.
By the time he made his Test debut at Sydney, four months later, the Ashes tour had collapsed. It was his first match for five weeks. He admitted to being consumed by nerves, reported a back spasm on the first morning, and was twice forced to limp off with cramp. His only Test wicket for England, when he incited Peter Siddle into a top-edged pull, came from his last delivery.
Australia went into the series on their worst winless run since 1986. They were blighted by injuries that ruled out emerging quickies Mitchell Starc, James Pattinson and Pat Cummins. Mitchell Johnson was deemed to be chronically wayward, a caricature gunslinger. We were unbeaten in thirteen Tests and forbidding favourites.
I’m not going to shy away from the depth of our problems, but credit where it is due. Johnson’s speed, hostility and accuracy exposed weaknesses in our technique and temperament. I spoke to him after the series, when he admitted to being initially nervous about further ridicule. To come back in that manner showed the psychological strength of a champion.
Nathan Lyon, Ryan Harris and Peter Siddle bowled at their best. Michael Clarke scored early hundreds and proved to be a very impressive, tactically astute captain. Brad Haddin was a nuggety batsman who led several significant fightbacks when our bowlers, principally Stuart Broad, were on a roll. Some of the sledging was below the belt but I enjoyed a beer with them once it was all over. They’re very similar to us, beneath a different badge.
We were in trouble, almost from the get-go, and fell apart under pressure. So many things went wrong. It all came to a natural end, with bewildering speed. Andy Flower had become jaded by the incessant demands of international coaching. Chris Tremlett struggled badly and was dropped after the first Test. Steven Finn lost his rhythm and confidence.
Monty Panesar was at his most enigmatic. His form was so unpredictable he could not be trusted. He was, on his own admission, on the rebound from alcohol problems, and withdrew into himself. He seemed especially troubled by Trotty’s issues, and later sought medical advice after suffering anxiety and paranoia that stemmed from a loss of confidence and self-esteem.
The Autobiography Page 15