In 2013–14, almost 40 years on, we could say something along similar lines.
Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote that it can be ‘better to travel hopefully than to arrive’, which is sound advice from someone who shipwrecked his most famous character in a storm, leaving him to get by almost, but not quite, on his tod. I know what Stevenson meant. We travelled hopefully to Australia, favourites to win a fourth successive Ashes series – something England had not done since the nineteenth century. When we arrived, however, we hit the storm. Its name was Mitchell Johnson.
With 37 wickets at 13.97, Johnson reached the sunlit peak of his career. At 32 years old, he found an extraordinary flush of form that no one will ever forget – even if, like me, you’d prefer to. His was the golden arm, and he gave a once-in-a-generation performance with it. He wasn’t only man of the series; he was the series, bracketed afterwards beside Spofforth and Larwood, Tyson and Thomson and Lillee. Johnson portrayed himself beforehand as a villain, promising that he’d go for our ‘throat’. He looked the part too. The droop of that gaucho moustache made him resemble a gun-slinging cowboy from one of those spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. All he needed, as he ran in to bowl, was his own sinisterly haunting Ennio Morricone soundtrack …
To be whitewashed because of Johnson – suffering only the third 5–0 defeat in 131 years of the Ashes – was humiliating enough for us. But the collateral damage, spreading from the epicentre of the havoc he caused, had consequences that seemed far-fetched before the series started but understandable afterwards. Andy Flower resigned as coach as soon as the tour was over. Jonathan Trott, citing a stress-related illness, went home as soon as the first Test had finished. Graeme Swann quit international cricket before the fourth Test. Seven other members of the party who figured during that series haven’t been seen in a Test since. One of them was Kevin Pietersen. Even Matt Prior played in only another four matches for England before his retirement. Johnson changed the entire look of our team. I’m certain, given the unstoppable ferociousness of his pace, that he’d have done the same to any side at any time. We just happened to be in absolutely the wrong place at absolutely the wrong time.
I thought about my dad, who was part of one particular tour that he described as ‘horrendous’. It began badly for him and barrelled downhill at an awful pace from there. In 1981 he went to the West Indies as number-one wicketkeeper, but came back as deputy to Paul Downton. He’d barely unpacked, let alone practised, before he missed two stumpings on a hard, erratic pitch. He went in as nightwatchman and was out for a second-ball duck, which cost him his Test place. He got a rollicking from his captain, Ian Botham, and gave him a rollicking back. This was still a thousand fathoms from his low point.
(© Adrian Murrell/Allsport UK/Getty Images)
This was the tour – lost 2–0 – that got caught up in political controversy because of Robin Jackman’s connections with South Africa, which led to the cancellation of the second Test. This was the tour in which a spectator – who also happened to be a policeman – threatened Geoffrey Boycott with a whitewashed brick. Upset by an lbw decision, Boycs threw a glass of water out of the dressing-room window and soaked the man accidentally. And this was the tour when my dad got to know and appreciate the ex-England and Surrey batsman Ken Barrington, so dearly loved as a player’s man and everyone’s favourite kindly uncle. You hear about Barrington and get the sense of someone so wonderfully eager about everything, so constantly cheerful on your behalf. Barrington was christened ‘Colonel Malaprop’ because malapropisms became his trademark. These included:
‘There’s a lot of bridges to flow over the water yet.’
‘I kipped really well. I slept like a lark.’
‘That was a great performance in anyone’s cup of tea.’
He discovered piña coladas in the West Indies, but couldn’t get his tongue around the pronunciation of it, ordering for my dad a ‘Peter Granadas’ instead, which confused the barman.
Aware that my dad was down in the dumps, and aware too that his relationship with the management had slowly cracked, Barrington regularly sought him out. He took him for personal practice and generally jollied him along, trying to make things better. He was a mediator and a go-between for my dad, but also someone with whom he could relax and speak freely, aware that his trust would never be broken.
The sad nadir of the tour came unexpectedly. One morning, midway through a Test, the England team awoke to discover that Barrington had died of a heart attack the night before. Like everyone else, my dad blubbed his eyes out. No one wanted to go on, but the team did so nonetheless in Barrington’s memory. What happened on that tour was catastrophic compared to my own experience, but I still knew a little of what my dad meant afterwards when remembering it. He said he felt throughout as though he was ‘a long way from home’.
You tend to forget – because what happened over the next five weeks shrank it to a footnote – that Australia were teetering on 132 for six on the first day of the first Test at Brisbane, where the air was humid and the sun desert-hot. Stuart Broad had skittled out the top order, taking four of them for not much. The mood only fundamentally shifted when Mitchell Johnson came in to partner Brad Haddin.
The statistics of his 64 don’t exactly jump off the page: 143 minutes; 134 balls; 6 fours; 2 sixes. But what I remember, sitting on the balcony, is the mood music that went with those figures. Australia had been reeling, as if from a surprise punch, but Johnson’s conviction that he could steady them again – and then begin a fight-back – transmitted itself from him to the crowd, who so far had been fairly muted. He biffed a few balls around, rousing them out of their despondency. When he biffed a few more, you heard the chant of his Christian name, which became so familiar. It was chopped into two syllables – ‘Mit-chell’.
This fog-horn drone spread across the ground. More than 30,000 Queensland spectators responded to a fellow Queenslander, and Johnson responded to them, each feeding off the raw energy of the other. He never looked back. We lost the Test by 381 runs. Johnson took four for 61 in the first innings and five for 42 in the second. His series took off in a fantastic burst of action because of it. At Adelaide, even though the surface was slower than Brisbane, we got bundled out for 172. Johnson took the first wicket. He then claimed the last six, the batsmen making only nine between them. At least in the second innings he spared us the rod, taking only one wicket, as though saving himself for later on. Australia won by 218 runs.
And so it went on …
At Perth, where the defeat this time was 150 runs, Johnson had match figures of six for 140 and Australia claimed the Ashes back more than a week before Christmas.
Johnson called the series his ‘redemption’, admitting in retrospect that if he’d trudged away from it with ‘my tail between my legs’, he’d have been ‘written off as a cricketer’ forever more. He knew, too, that a lot of critics had written him off anyway and were wondering how he’d got back in the team. His mental toughness was under scrutiny. His fitness was questioned too; he’d made only three Test appearances in 12 months since returning from South Africa, where he’d limped away with a toe injury, and the selectors had overlooked him for the tour to England. This was a now-or-never comeback for him. Johnson was aware that, English and Aussie alike, you can play twelve dozen Tests against anyone else in the world, but be defined only by what you achieve in the Ashes. He’d also been considerably narked about – and never forgotten – the Barmy Army’s comic song, which mocked him during the 2010–11 series. The lyrics, though not quite to the emotional standard of a Lennon and McCartney ballad, did have a certain swing to them, I suppose.
He bowls to the left, he bowls to the right.
That Mitchell Johnson, his bowling is shite.
No wonder he bowled as if we pissed him off simply by being there.
Johnson insisted he was such a ‘nervous wreck’ before the first Test that he almost called for a pair of brown corduroy trousers. But he set out to bowl fast
. ‘If I can’t, I don’t want to bowl at all,’ he’d said. His first ball of the series – full, wide and harmless – was clocked at just under 90 mph. At Adelaide he reached 93.5 mph. Elsewhere, he nudged 95 mph. So it wasn’t simply that Johnson went up a gear against us; he seemed to have found a whole new propulsion system within him – a warp drive. As well as being more aggressive than I’d ever seen him, he was also more accurate, making it difficult even to push away a run. And, rather than bowling sustained spells, he was rested and then released at us fresh in a boom that lasted only three overs at a time but reverberated long afterwards, the way a rumble of thunder lingers in the air.
Jonathan Trott called Johnson his ‘executioner’. What he had, said Trott, was ‘steep bounce … from a length that other people couldn’t replicate’. He was also more assured and controlled than before. ‘A different man’ was how Trott put it. Kevin Pietersen went further. He was, explained KP, ‘a different bloke entirely’. He was ‘in our heads even when he wasn’t bowling’ and became ‘a weapon that we had no answer to’. KP felt ‘a shudder’ shoot through the dressing room early on in Brisbane when Johnson, bowling to Trott, let one go so violently that only a glove stopped the bumper from smacking into the grille of the helmet.
I reached Australia not expecting to get into the Test team unless something extraordinary happened. I was there as a 12th-man type – fetching drinks, carrying towels, tidying up the dressing room, practising in the nets. I remained fairly anonymous to the Australian public too. In the beginning, I could walk around without being recognised. If I only wore my England tracksuit top or T-shirt, everyone assumed I was another supporter, a member of the Barmy Army. ‘You here for all the Tests?’ someone asked me in a shop. ‘Hope so,’ I replied, saying nothing more.
The only barracking came when Gary Ballance and I shipped out to Perth for a match with the England Performance XI. With our conspicuously big bags covered in ECB logos, we were unmistakably cricketers on the move and not fans there to soak up the sun. When we reached our hotel, a group of workers on a neighbouring construction site turned the air blue with a flamethrower blast of insults, dire warnings about our chances of survival against the Aussie bowlers and an invitation to book ourselves on the first available flight home.
I’m guessing the construction workers weren’t overly impressed with me, but I got a century in that match, which was only my third appearance on tour. The first had come against an Australian Invitational XI in Sydney. I made 48 and claimed seven catches. The second was against the Cricket Australia Chairman’s XI in Alice Springs, where I finished with a tidy, unbeaten 30-odd and took a stumping off Graeme Swann. I still wasn’t in good fettle. Becky arrived from England, bringing with her another bat, a pair of wicketkeeping gloves and some other kit for me. It took up precious space in the case where more of her clothes should have gone. Not much sisterly intuition was needed to know that I was downcast and out of sorts. I sat in the room and watched her unpack in silence.
The earlier games were useful, but scarcely white-hot preparation for what came next for me. With the Ashes gone, and with Matt Prior off-form, I found myself thrown into the Boxing Day Test, which is a bit like playing in a cup final without experiencing any of the previous rounds.
The Melbourne Cricket Ground rises around you, a great coliseum even when empty. You practise on that vast outfield, picturing what it’ll be like when everyone is crammed inside it. When everyone is, there’s nothing like it in cricket – the colour, the constant hubbub, the sheer number of fans in those wide, steep tiers, where the topmost rows are lost in shadow when the sun sinks. I can’t say I slept much the night before, though not because the Test overawed me. If you don’t want to play in a match like this, you shouldn’t be a cricketer. My only apprehension stemmed from being ring-rusty and the fact that a place such as Traeger Park in Alice Springs (capacity 10,000) is gorgeously appealing, fringed as it is with low brown hills, but about as different from the MCG as Arundel and Cheltenham are from Lord’s. It’s no preparation for the grander stage.
As soon as you step into the nets you get an idea of how daunting the atmosphere in the Test will be. There’s a balcony overlooking them, enabling those on it to look down on you. It’s as though some Roman thumb is about to be jerked upward or downward in judgement. The locals attempt to rile you, the throwaway comments about being ‘no-good poms’ with ‘no chance’ being fairly standard. We lost the toss, and Australia made the predictable decision to put us in. You couldn’t blame them because of the partisan crowd, waiting for us to buckle again. We made a respectable start. Alastair Cook and Michael Carberry put on almost fifty, and we’d almost doubled that score before the second wicket went down; Johnson didn’t take either of them.
I was batting at seven. Sometimes I like to doze before I go out. I have the knack of being able to nod off in most places at most times. The old-school rule says that you should watch every ball and be aware of what every bowler is doing with it, but that was laid down in the era well before you were able to swot up on anyone, replaying any delivery from a multitude of angles with a few clicks of a laptop mouse. In the dressing room, I’ll lay a thick towel on the hard floor or across the bench, and stretch myself out for a while. I once nodded off sitting down – my head forward, my hands on the handle of my bat as I pressed them against my forehead. I find a quick nap relaxing. I don’t take long, a minute perhaps, to snap awake, and I feel alert afterwards.
My dad was the same. Once, he snoozed in the dressing room at Scarborough, which is difficult enough because the spectators are right outside the door. He woke up without realising that a run chase, arranged beforehand, had been called off while he’d been sleeping. No one thought to tell him. He came out intent on causing mayhem with the bat. At the other end, his partner, stonewalling for a draw, looked completely nonplussed as my dad began trying to win the match with some whirlwind hitting. The Yorkshire Post wrote that ‘Bairstow flailed away like a man demented until someone plucked up the courage to explain the reality of the situation to him’.
I didn’t sleep before going out at Melbourne. The atmosphere, the state of the game and the prospect of what Johnson might do kept my eyes open. Wide open, in fact. You don’t come across too many bowlers as fast as he is. Fewer still who are left-arm (England have never had a left-armer who’s taken 100 Test wickets).
With his sling-shot action, Johnson’s arm disappears behind his back just before he delivers the ball. He’s like a magician hiding the trick. You see the ball so late that you have no idea where it’s going until the thing is well on its way. This is the exact opposite of facing someone such as Dale Steyn. You can clearly see the ball – as well as his wrist position and how his fingers are gripping the seam – because Steyn’s hand is beside his face as he launches into his delivery stride. You have a fraction longer, about half a heartbeat, to size up the line and length.
We were on 202 for four and the ball was relatively new when Johnson, close to the stumps, got one to go away from Ben Stokes for his first wicket, an edge taken at slip. When someone is out, there’s usually silence in the dressing room. I picked up my bat, only half-registering a ‘good luck’ said in a way that implied ‘don’t get hurt’. The winding walk from dressing room to crease seemed as long as trekking from John o’ Groat’s to Land’s End. There were wide corridors to navigate and I had plenty of time to think. I turned a corner and found myself walking past the members, some of whom weren’t slow to offer the opinion that I would be walking past them again in ‘less than five minutes’. Ahead I saw the field in the harsh wash of light, and also the hard roof-lines of the stands. Once you’re in full view, you look around and blink your eyes to get them accustomed to the brightness as the noise of the place rolls towards you.
Johnson was already at the start of his run, rubbing the ball against his flannels, his expression set into a mask of menace and indignation. The introduction of the stump microphone has reduced the amount of sledging
in Tests – everyone is wary about a fine – but the fielders, especially the slips, chuntered away, the conversations coming my way. The talk was about how Johnson’s tail was really up now. About how his bowling had suddenly caught alight and he was ready to burn through me and what was left of us, leaving only cinders. You’re always braced for this yackety-yak, the attempt to take the battle into your mind before it starts on the pitch. Johnson contributed to it himself. He made a show of waving in a short leg and a leg gully and then he pushed a fielder back on to the long-leg boundary. I was left to decide whether this was an elaborate con, the preparation for a yorker, or a very short ball that I’d either have to fend down, sway away from or be courageous enough to hook.
There were three deliveries left in the over. The first of them wasn’t dug in at all. Johnson angled it across me and I let it go through on a length, comfortably shouldering arms as if it was the most natural thing to do. The second came at me from halfway down the pitch, and I saw it early, ducking lower than I needed to go but listening to the hum and swish of the seam through the air as it passed half a mile overhead and into Brad Haddin’s gloves. The third brought me runs. The ball was outside off and fuller than Johnson had planned. It was there to be driven, so I went for it and ran for a couple through extra cover. I’d survived the first onslaught, much to the crowd’s chagrin.
Johnson once compared playing at the MCG that day to being a rock singer and strutting about the stage in front of a band, each of whom followed his lead. I can see the connection. Normally, I can find Becky, her hair like a warning light, even in capacity crowds. My eyes hunt her out like radar and I know my mum will be in the next seat. I did a sweep of the faces packed in front of me. I couldn’t see either of them.
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