The Autobiography

by Alastair Cook

  All too often such questions go unasked. They prompt awkward silences but are never designed to belittle the individual. Singling someone out in front of twelve or fifteen of his peers is the worst thing you can do, as a coach or a leader. If there is an issue to be thrashed out, it must be done on a one-to-one basis.

  Andy’s style was to frame everything in a team context. Typically, he would say, ‘Well, what went wrong this week? I thought we took our eye off the ball.’ He’d then ask a player for his thoughts. It took me back to those days at school, when you are day-dreaming in class, and snap back into the present thinking, ‘Shit! I hope the teacher doesn’t ask me a question now …’

  As we gained more confidence in each other, developed trust and ease in each other’s company, those awkward silences became shorter. We weren’t afraid to be self-critical, or critical of others, within reason. Obviously, the management of that is hard, because once you throw a meeting open you don’t know what is going to be tossed back at you.

  Failure is a touchy subject. Occasionally, an argument is going to be created by a loose word or a thoughtless comment, but that comes with the territory. I resolved to rebuild faith through the infusion of new players and coaches. Different personalities can help to restore a sense of momentum, provided they are loyal to the common themes of the group.

  I had no active role in the selection process but was happy when Peter Moores was appointed as Andy’s successor in April 2014, before the summer series against Sri Lanka and India. He was a familiar figure who offered a different voice and had re-evaluated his approach following his first spell in charge. I liked him as a person, already related to him as a coach, and he understood what made me tick.

  I had come up with a list of non-negotiables for what I regarded as the second stage of my captaincy. These revolved around the principle of being an England player 24/7. It didn’t involve a grand gesture, a PowerPoint sermon. I’d seen enough of those to doubt their effectiveness. It was more intimate, a renewal of our vows to one another as tried and trusted teammates.

  My plan, scribbled in a little black book, included a commitment to reconnecting with the cricket public. We needed to rediscover our sense of freedom, reaffirm what it meant to us to play for England. We had a team charter that had run its course, but we still needed a simple set of rules to live, play and work by. This wasn’t revolution. It was an evolution that recognized strengths we hadn’t made the most of. No one was going to come riding in on a cloud of glory to save us. We had to do it for ourselves. Live it, think about it, revise it if necessary. Players improve themselves as people, coaches become better teachers; everyone benefits.

  Peter acknowledged he pushed too hard in his first stint with England and took too much on himself. We worked collaboratively, to enable players to discover where they were, and what they needed to do, either technically or personally, to progress. I was disappointed he only lasted little more than a year, but coaching is an unforgiving business. The best cricket coaches, like the best football managers, rarely have long cycles in charge. There is a huge burnout factor; travel is constant and pressure rarely relents.

  Looking at senior players on the verge of making the transition today, I can see Marcus Trescothick and Ian Bell being successful coaches. They are both low-key characters, hugely experienced players, bonded by a deep love of cricket. Their lives are based on the game, and they have a deceptively fierce drive. They don’t hang around to admire the view; they want to climb upwards, safely and effectively. They have the level-headedness to appreciate that the art of coaching is incredibly hard.

  Ultimately, success or failure is down to the player. You can’t always hold his hand, though there will be times when you are forced to do so. He must make his mistakes, put his fingers in the fire and get burned. Graham Gooch, in his old-school way, understood the power of pain. Whenever I made an error in my batting, he expected me to learn from it.

  The tenor of coaching is changing, in all sports. Back in the day, the ‘tell me’ coach held sway. Now it is fashionable for the player to be asked to find the solution. Theoretically that makes sense, because he is in the middle thinking for himself, looking for the answer, but I wonder whether the pendulum has swung too far.

  Sometimes you just need to be told. The player may insist on personal preferences, but if he is wrong, he must be challenged. It is a balance; the coach has to be strong but could cause damage if he is misguided. We’re back to that common currency, trust. Does the coach have the eye of a batsman, for instance? It obviously helps if he has experience at the highest level.

  Even though we decided we needed a new voice in his area of expertise, Goochy spoke with the authority of a fantastic Test career. He held the view that cricket is a game that cannot be tamed, though its contrasts and contradictions can be tolerable. Elementary mistakes can be minimized, through the incremental improvement that comes with experience, but if the player has a poor mental attitude he is often beyond help.

  Cricket produces very few Mourinhos or Wengers, hugely influential coaches with minimal playing pedigree. The closest comparison I can come up with is Paul Farbrace, who worked as assistant to both Moores and Bayliss. A wicketkeeper-batsman with a modest career average of 18.23, he played only forty first-class matches, for Kent and Middlesex, over eight years.

  Occasionally fallibility, or experience of marginal lack of fulfilment at the highest level, is an asset. Mark Ramprakash exemplifies the latter, Marcus Trescothick the former. He and Trotty have, through their individual trials and tribulations, done current and future generations a great service, by highlighting issues that too often remain unspoken.

  The second phase of my captaincy was conducted under the toxic cloud we feared, because of the inability of the ECB to put the KP affair to bed. The campaign on Kevin’s behalf was shrill, ceaseless and spiteful, but it was very efficient in highlighting the limitations of a governing body that lacked expertise in key areas.

  I became frustrated with communications staff who failed to communicate and by edicts that left me in an impossible position. On one farcical Essex press day, every question to me was about KP but I wasn’t allowed to answer. It was extraordinary that the situation had become so convoluted, and mired in legal complexity.

  The ECB board couldn’t deal with the power of social media. There was an inability to follow a consistent line of thought, impotence in the face of clever cyber-warfare, waged by proxy. Interested parties promoted the myth of KP’s victimhood and turned the debate into one of perception of personality rather than principle. I felt like public enemy number one, and lacked conspicuous support from my employers. We weren’t the first team Kevin had fallen out with, yet he was being portrayed as the good guy, a martyr to his art. The elephant had broken out of the room and was rampaging around the outfield at Lord’s.

  The situation was out of my control. I lost count of the conversations I had with the ECB, who didn’t possess the quality of leadership the current CEO, Tom Harrison, provides. His predecessor, David Collier, who retired at the end of the 2014 season before taking up a role in rugby league, sat firmly on the fence. The hierarchy agreed privately that Kevin could not be recalled, but never said so publicly. They hung me out to dry.

  Sport moves on quickly; the controversy had very little relevance to our priority, fashioning a new team. It was wearing and distracting, a waste of mental energy since it was the only thing most people wanted to talk about. There were times I longed for the simplicity and purity of attempting to score as many runs as possible.

  Though we lost that summer’s opening series against Sri Lanka, in such gutting fashion that Alice had to talk me out of walking away, the first green shoots of recovery were detectable. Five of the six changes we made from the team that surrendered in Sydney contributed positively to the drawn first Test at Lord’s.

  Joe Root made a powerful point with an unbeaten 200, Matt Prior scored 86 and provided the solidity and direction expected of a s
enior pro. Gary Ballance contributed a second-innings century. Moeen Ali, on debut, played with the dexterity and assurance of someone vastly more experienced. Chris Jordan, an effervescent presence, took a wicket with his third delivery in Test cricket. Liam Plunkett, recalled after seven years, showed fantastic stamina.

  Newer guys were free from scar tissue. They had everything you would want as a captain, inherent talent, rawness around the edges balanced by hunger and a willingness to listen. Ben Stokes, who had scored a wonderful maiden Test hundred on a cracked pitch at Perth, came into the side for the subsequent series against India.

  It was still open season on me. Shane Warne was chirping away, and KP, a markedly similar character, turned up to watch us from a hospitality box in the second Test against India at Lord’s. Inevitably, he was a magnet for the cameras. I trust I am not being unkind in suggesting his appearance was orchestrated.

  We were back to the old routine, of Test cricket testing character.

  We bowled too short after preparing a green wicket and were about eighty runs under par when we batted, despite another Ballance hundred. My captaincy was justifiably criticized, since I was too slow to change tactics. We lost, as badly in our own conditions as India did in Mumbai in 2012, but I looked around the changing room and felt a tightness of spirit we had not had for quite a while.

  My relationship with Moores was acquiring depth and substance. He went above and beyond the call of duty to help me find some consistency in my batting, simulating the pressures of a ninety-over innings by throwing 540 balls at me during a concentrated three-hour training shift at Loughborough. We only took a short break, every thirty overs; I needed to lose myself in the process, forget about being a captain, and concentrate on my batting.

  We drilled down into the numbers, which revealed we were winning the majority of sessions in our early matches. We were close to a breakthrough but didn’t complete the job. Such niceties meant nothing to the usual suspects, who didn’t need to tell me that I would have been out of a job if England had lost that marquee series.

  There was, mercifully, a little light relief, in the form of my first Test wicket, which I’d like to think of as the highlight of the drawn Test at Trent Bridge. Ishant Sharma nicked off, was caught down the leg side, and I was away, doing my best Alan Shearer impression. I ran around, pointing at the balcony to remind David Saker, our bowling coach, that I had managed something he never achieved as a proud Australian.

  Sakes has a one-word description of my bowling: ‘Shite.’ But if you have a spare hour, I’ll happily go through my eighteen deliveries in Test cricket, as a study of unaccustomed excellence. I average seven as a bowler, which is none too shabby. I took my wicket with a seamer but also served up an over of spin. Imagine if I had taken being an all-rounder seriously …

  Garry Sobers, eat your heart out!

  I received quite a few texts after taking that wicket, mostly along the lines of ‘it’s good to see you smiling again’. I was still being hammered but viewed it as another examination of my resilience. I had come close to jacking it in after the Sri Lanka series but as the summer progressed, I acquired a strange, if temporary, serenity.

  My stubbornness saved me. I wouldn’t allow myself to be worn down. I wouldn’t give my more hysterical critics the satisfaction of knowing how deeply I had been hurt. I was being tested as a person and felt a responsibility to those around me. My form was suffering, but it was my job to ignore the noise and lead from the front.

  Rod Bransgrove, the Hampshire chairman, intuitively understood the intensity of that inner struggle. I didn’t know him that well, but when we had dinner, in the build-up to the third Test at his pride and joy, the Ageas Bowl in Southampton, he assured me, ‘You’re going to have a good week with us. Don’t worry, we’ll look after you.’

  I took it all with a pinch of salt, to be honest, but when I walked out to bat, on winning the toss, I was given a standing ovation. The crowd’s warmth was tangible. It suggested that, for no apparent reason, the tide of public opinion had turned. I was still scratching around for runs, like a hen scrabbling in the dirt for scraps, but they cheered me to the echo when I reached 48 by lunch.

  Maybe the silent majority had found their voice. Maybe it wasn’t all about shouting from tabloid pulpit and Twitter feed. Maybe, after all the bluff and bluster, people were prepared to take us on our own merits. It was galling to get out for 95, to a good leg-side catch by MS Dhoni off a bottom edge, but a pressure valve had been released.

  Ballance and Bell got big hundreds, Jimmy Anderson was man of the match and Mo took six wickets, in the second innings. We were nowhere near the finished article, but momentum was gathering. That 266-run win at Southampton was followed by victories by an innings at Old Trafford and the Oval. When I got home, Alice sensed immediately how much that sequence meant to me. She felt the same, since we had gone through so much together. We made the most of that week’s grace before, once again, I was under the pump.

  I was really looking forward to the one-day series against India, as a release from the stresses of the Test summer. I hadn’t been in the best of form but was eager to express myself by playing an attacking innings. There’s nothing like feeling ball on bat. Thanks to good old British rain on a Bank Holiday, I was completely blindsided by criticism from an unexpected source.

  The first ODI, at Bristol, was rained off by 1.30 p.m. By that time, Graeme Swann had set the hares running by suggesting on Test Match Special that I should quit as one-day captain. Talk became increasingly cheap as we waited for the inevitable abandonment; Michael Vaughan piled in by implying I was doing ‘half a job’ as a batsman.

  Bad news travels exceptionally fast. The controversy dominated the news feed on my phone, once I retrieved it from the anti-corruption officers. I understand the need to fill airtime, and the danger of issues being hyped out of all proportion, but when I read Swanny’s tabloid newspaper column the following day I was livid. He had doubled down on the original comments. I didn’t have an issue with his view, as such, because he had every right to an opinion, but I expected greater understanding from someone who knew what I had gone through in the previous eight months.

  I regard him as a good friend. We’d shared beds in India, shared dressing rooms around the world. I had his back when he wanted to retire midway through an Ashes series. I now have even greater cause to understand the inevitable conflict when a senior player pursues a secondary career in the media, but at the time I felt genuinely let down.

  ‘Couldn’t you just see it from my point of view?’ I asked him. To be fair, he apologized, but the agenda had been re-inforced. Moores felt he should have been more proactive with the media, in explaining the thinking behind the transition to a new generation of players shaped by the limited-overs game. Our plan was to introduce them gradually, rather than all at once.

  I was obviously vulnerable. Results, the ultimate arbiter, weren’t good. We had brief bursts of success but lost consecutive one-day series to India and Sri Lanka. I wasn’t producing the goods. I was assured that the selectors retained faith in me, but the proximity of the World Cup inevitably concentrated minds.

  I wanted to complete my four-year cycle as one-day captain. After all, we became number one on my watch, and only a late-innings collapse in the 2013 Champions Trophy final against India at Edgbaston stopped us from winning England’s first major final in five attempts. We had picked a team suited to fifty-over cricket that day, but rain reduced it to a twenty-over thrash.

  Moores backed me publicly, as World Cup captain, just before Christmas. But, given the selection meeting was obviously going to focus on my position, I recognized a potential conflict of interest, and withdrew from it. Had I joined Peter Moores, James Whitaker, Mick Newell and Gus Fraser, I would have argued for stability, because wholesale changes in the build-up to previous major tournaments had been counter-productive.

  I told Alice I intended to call Peter on the day of that meeting, to stress that I d
idn’t want him to feel pressurized by his public show of faith. Above all, I wanted him to be honest. That might sound a bit naïve and unworldly, but I didn’t want to sit there thinking he had backed me as one-day captain out of a misplaced sense of loyalty.

  ‘I know there’s a lot to talk about,’ I told him. ‘I still think I’m the right man to be captain, but be true to yourself. The form over the past twelve months has not been great. I appreciate that we’ve been plotting a path to this World Cup, and through to the Ashes next summer, but whatever decision is made I will not bear a grudge towards you.’

  I had no interest in discovering the voting patterns, or whether, by making that assurance, I had inadvertently tipped the balance against me. When I took a call from Whitaker, asking if he could come to see me at home, it was obvious that the die had been cast. It was a big blow. I was back, deep in the bush.

  There was only one person to blame, myself. I couldn’t moan about being left out because I hadn’t scored the runs, but it dented my pride and almost destroyed my spirit. To be brutally honest, for two or three days around Christmas I didn’t really want to walk down the street. As ridiculous as it seems, I imagined strangers whispering, ‘He’s the bloke who’s just got sacked.’

  I rang Eoin Morgan on the day he was appointed as my successor with the one-day team, to offer any help I could. I wished him well and assured him there were no hard feelings. He’d been given a hospital pass in many ways, because at that point in our development we were behind the curve in a limited-overs game that was changing so radically, so quickly.

  Instead of measured, quantifiable preparation over the life cycle of a World Cup, we were like a student doing crash-course revision, trying to respond to the new realities of the game in a fifteen-match programme. Predictably, a young team uncertain of its identity failed to qualify for the knock-out phase in Australia and New Zealand.