At the end of the over the electronic scoreboard flashed up the attendance figure in big white numbers – 91,092 – and declared it a world record. On screen the cameras then showed a close-up of my face. My expression was as blank as I could make it, betraying nothing, I hoped. Though I didn’t know it, Bill Lawry was on commentary. ‘His heart will be pumping,’ he said, as though he could hear it thumping against my chest.
He wasn’t wrong.
Mitchell Johnson and I weren’t strangers.
I’d pitted myself against him before. Indeed, he was partly responsible for getting me back into the England team in 2012. Slap in between the end of the West Indies series and the opening stages of the South Africa one, I’d been picked for England Lions against Australia A at Old Trafford. Johnson took four wickets in the first innings, but in the second I faced him down, making 139 at almost a run a ball. That I did so well, blunting him into the bargain, was sufficient for the selectors. I was recalled for Lord’s, able to begin my Test career again after a pause rather than a protracted wait. Manchester, it’s fair to say, didn’t offer as much to Johnson as the MCG did.
I’ve never minded fast bowling, mostly because of my dad who came up against a few quicks himself. He once belted Dennis Lillee back over his head for six and got a reply comprising almost every known expletive – some of them barked twice, apparently. My dad, unafraid of the bouncer reprisals to come, took a step down the pitch and calmly suggested that, rather than ‘chuntering on’, Mr Lillee ought to ‘go fetch the ******* ball’ so he could bowl at him again.
He wasn’t always on the winning side, however. He got banged over the eye so badly in a Roses match that a doctor put stitches into the cut while he was still on the field. In another match – thankfully he was wearing a helmet – he got a blow on the left side of his head. The swelling immediately became an egg-sized lump, his ear began to bleed and he was so dizzy for days afterwards that medical advice sidelined him for more than a week. The last Test match of his career took place in Barbados, during that ill-fated tour, where he watched close-up what’s been tagged as The Greatest Over of All Time. In the scorebook, it’s innocently recorded as: G Boycott b Holding 0. On YouTube – though the clip is rather grainy – you appreciate why those six balls are recalled with gasps. Whispering Death? You bet. Michael Holding, beautiful in his action, sent down what was ‘a loosener’ to him but would be considered as lightning by anyone else. The ball rose, rapped Boycs on the gloves and nearly carried to first slip. The second delivery beat him outside off stump. The third struck him on the inside of the right leg. The fourth and fifth were somehow defended with the body.
On a warm day, the Barbados Oval had swelled beyond capacity. Spectators had lapped on to the boundary’s edge; some were even sitting on the thin galvanised roofs of the stands. The crowd knew Holding was cranking up his pace. Each ball bowled was faster than the one before. The sixth ball was an incandescent blur. Boycs’s off stump was gone, uprooted and cartwheeling like a matchstick flicked casually from someone’s fingers. You have to say that very few batsmen could have survived even as long as Boycs did. Some, afraid of the physical danger, would have backed away waving the white flag. Boycs being Boycs – and despite being 41 years old then – stood his ground, only beaten by something otherworldly. Given the status of this over in cricket’s history, my dad’s contention that Holding bowled even faster on the second morning in the final Test in Jamaica – he pushed himself off from the boundary wall with the sole of his right boot – makes you wish there’d been a speed gun to provide clinching evidence of it.
Some of the early instruction my dad gave me was based around speed. There wasn’t much of that ‘give it some loop’ stuff from him to me, perhaps because of Holding and Lillee and the rest. Sometimes my uncle Ted reminds me about how he bowled to me with a cork ball. I was about four years old, and he began twisting deliveries out of the side of his hand or lobbing them underarm. The ball would drift so slowly that it took an age to get to me. I’d take a few swipes, hopeless air shots. ‘Bowled you,’ he’d shout, the noise of his triumph reaching my dad, who bustled over eager to see what the fuss was about. He watched Uncle Ted beat me again before asking, in a bit of a huff, what the heck was going on. He grabbed the ball and said: ‘That’s not the way you bowl at him.’
My uncle Ted stood back and watched my dad wind himself up like a baseball pitcher or someone wanting to win a coconut at the fair. He flung the ball at me with terrific speed. Uncle Ted had troubling believing what he saw. The boy who couldn’t pick the softest dollydrop was transformed, ‘whacking the ball everywhere’, he said. There were drives off the back as well as the front foot. There were cuts and pulls too. ‘Proper, grown-up strokes,’ he added, eyes widening as my dad chucked the ball faster still at me.
Len Hutton, who didn’t have the benefit of a helmet, once said that the best place to play a fast bowler is from ‘the non-striker’s end’, which is a short-term plan but not a sustainable strategy. Hutton thought something else too: anyone who claimed not to be a little ‘afraid of being hit’ was either telling a fib to others or wasn’t being honest with himself. Hutton had a point. I don’t mind admitting that facing Johnson did make me a little afraid too; every nerve in your body is aware of what could happen.
My innings lasted 19 minutes. Out of 17 deliveries, a dozen of them were against Johnson. The highlight – if you can call it that – was a six. I’d like to say that I drove the ball back over his head. Or that I hooked him savagely into the crowd behind square. Or even that I leaned back and cut audaciously to deep backward point. My shot wasn’t that slick or attractive, I’m afraid. I swung across the line of a half-tracker. The ball came off the top edge and took an almighty flight, which was another sign of Johnson’s terrific pace. It sailed over my head … over the head of Brad Haddin, who leapt instinctively for it but would have needed to be 30 feet tall to take a catch … and then over the boundary rope, dropping a foot in front of the sightscreen directly behind.
Like me, Johnson wasn’t sure at first about where the shot had gone. His gaze swivelled like the turret of a tank before finding the arc of the ball in the most unlikely place. He gave me a half-grin, as though he wasn’t sure whether a choice remark or a stony sort of pity would better convey his contempt of my effort. I was gone two balls later, dismissed for 10. The delivery was full and fast and went across me and between bat and pad. Johnson did what every fast bowler aims to do; he clipped the top of off stump. I realised – but only after I saw the recording – that I’d dragged my back foot to leg; I looked a fool.
After every wicket, Johnson had been high-fiving his Australian teammates. He did so only half-heartedly after getting me out. He concentrated instead on giving a wave to the England supporters – or specifically to a group of them, gathered not far from third man, who’d been ‘a bit chatty’, he said. He thought my wicket would ‘shoosh’ them up a bit. I was one of five batsmen he got rid of in only eight overs, hustling us out for 255. We lost the match by eight wickets and I fell to him in the second innings too; though at least I made 21 and also claimed six catches in the match.
Reflecting about that over against Holding, Boycs said pointedly: ‘For the first time in my life, I can look at a scoreboard with a duck against my name and not feel a profound sense of failure.’ I didn’t feel a sense of failure against Johnson either. It was a defeat, but an honourable one. None of us had anything but fleeting success against Johnson, usually a pyrrhic victory, before he claimed our wicket or softened us up, allowing someone else to take it. In the five Tests we only scored six half-centuries and one century, a 120 that Ben Stokes managed at Perth.
How do I rate Johnson? Put it this way: when he retired, I thought about sending him a postcard with a message that said: ‘Thanks, mate. You’ve just made all our lives far easier.’
Jonny Wilkinson never forgot what became dubbed The Tour of Hell. In 1998 he and England went to Australasia and South Africa and
came back humbled. The trip became one moment of anguish after another for him. There was a 76–0 surrender to Australia in Brisbane. There was a 64–22 loss to New Zealand in Dunedin. Those drubbings were so severe that being beaten 18–0 by South Africa in Cape Town looked almost respectable, like the start of a partial recovery. It still meant that in seven gruesome matches – all defeats – England had conceded a total of 328 points.
Wilkinson said that he ‘personally’ suffered embarrassment, shame and even a sense of worthlessness because of it. Piling in on top of those emotions came others too – predominantly anger and bitterness, which were sparked by the helplessness and frustration he felt during and after the matches. ‘A very bad dream,’ he called it, adding that the shock of being roughed up and losing so comprehensively not only made him feel vulnerable, but also scrambled his whole perspective of the tour. ‘I just couldn’t get a handle on how bad it was. I couldn’t absorb it properly right there and then,’ he admitted.
There was another confession from Wilkinson. The thought of what had happened reduced him to tears. He only came out of his deep funk after his father, hearing him talk only about yesterday, made him concentrate on tomorrow. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ he asked. The logic of the question jolted him out of his despair the way a hypnotist’s demand to ‘wake up’ abruptly draws someone out of a trance. What had seemed like the end of something to Wilkinson was immediately transformed into a beginning instead. He saw the tour differently from then on. It became ‘a lesson in disguise’ and also a ‘fork in the road’, he said. He stopped feeling sorry for himself. He stopped beating himself up too. He realised that moping would get him nowhere.
Wilkinson accepted the hurt the result had caused him, but also rationalised it and moved on. He used the tour as a spur, a way of motivating himself. The player who already practised tirelessly now spent even longer than before on his drills, his fitness, his focus. Out of his distress came a ‘better way’ to achieve his goals – and also ‘a better goal to strive for altogether’, he explained. The tour became one of the most ‘valuable experiences’ of Wilkinson’s life because it hardened him.
We lost the last Test in Sydney by 281 runs. We were mincemeat by the third day. At one point in our first innings we were 23 for five. Our second innings lasted only 31.4 overs, which was pitiful. My series ended with a third-ball duck. I felt then the way that Wilkinson had felt in 1998. And, like him, I went through the same sort of upheavals and doubts because of it, and a period of bleak introspection, the worst I’d ever gone through.
But, also like him, I eventually came out of it – wiser and tougher, a different and better player as a consequence.
CHAPTER 9
TWO PHOTOGRAPHS, TWO ERAS
Often the significance of something slips by and becomes obvious only in retrospect. You look at events in the rear-view mirror and see them suddenly with a clarity that had been absent before. Out of something that, at the time, seemed messed up or jumbled emerges what you recognise in hindsight as a turning point, entirely logical and necessary.
The 12 weeks between the end of that Ashes tour and the build-up towards Yorkshire’s County Championship season were the most important of my career – even though I barely played a match. I know that now. I didn’t then because I was so tired, so confused and so disillusioned with cricket that I didn’t want to go near it. At one point I seriously thought about quitting the game and trying to break into rugby.
It happened like this.
Those months in Australia exhausted me. After the last Test, I felt mentally shot. I wanted nothing more than to come home and take stock quietly, reflecting with a painful slowness on what I’d learnt from the series. But England sent me on the Lions tour of Sri Lanka. The basic plan was sound enough. I hadn’t played much over the winter. So surely I’d benefit from more game time, ensuring that I’d be sharper when the new season began here?
From the best possible intentions came the worst possible consequences. As the tour began, I wanted to be anywhere else but Sri Lanka. And, as it continued, I wanted to do anything else but play cricket. It was wretched. I wasn’t so much homesick; though, as my dad always did, after spending month upon month in the sun, I’d have loved to have gone for a walk in a hard shower of Yorkshire rain. Knowing that wouldn’t happen, I became steadily more dispirited and worn down. Outwardly, at first, I tried to pretend that everything was fine. Inwardly I was in a bad place, not wanting to practise and certainly not wanting to go on to the field.
I roomed, as ever, with James Taylor, who knows me so well that he recognised even before I spoke to him how troubled I’d become. He could see my mood in my face. I was irritable and edgy, the opposite of the friend he knew. Titch did his best to offer support and advice, but he had his own game to focus on and nothing anyone could have said would really have made a difference to me. Somehow – through sheer will, I guess – I came close to getting a couple of half-centuries, and then made a hundred even when my heart wasn’t entirely in it. I batted on autopilot. The last five innings were more indicative of how weary and lacklustre I felt. I averaged 15-something from them. I wasn’t in the right state of mind to achieve anything better. I came back from Sri Lanka not wanting to watch, read or talk about cricket at all – not even for half an hour.
I brooded over Australia. Questions about what we might have done differently – and also my minor part in it – surfaced constantly. I couldn’t stop turning them over in my mind. No one had made a mountainous pile of runs or taken a substantial number of wickets. Kevin Pietersen top-scored with 279, but 120 of those had come in one Test, and only Stuart Broad had taken over 20 wickets.
In two Tests I’d claimed ten catches, missing only one, in Sydney, when a nick off Chris Rogers bisected Alastair Cook and me, each of us waiting for the other to take it. No fielding relationship is more important for a wicketkeeper than the one he has with his first slip. You have to establish a working geometry, settling on the space and angle between your outstretched hand and his. You also have to develop an expert judgement, anticipating what will happen next. You’ll hear a clang, like an alarm going off in your head, when you, rather than him, have to dive for a ball. Eventually, you become like an old married couple, so comfortably familiar that you’re capable of finishing one another’s sentences. But, in Sydney, Cookie and I were practically at the stage of a first date and still getting used to the way the other played. As a wicketkeeper, you’re an Aunt Sally. It’s in the small print of your job description. If a half-chance goes in and then out of your gloves again, you’ve dropped a catch. It’s your fault when a bowler sprays a ball, barn-door wide, down leg side and you don’t stop four byes. When a throw from the boundary lands three yards in front of you, kicks in the rough and shoots towards your shins, you have to take it cleanly otherwise it’s your mistake; you haven’t tidied up properly.
Like everyone else, I got taken apart in the post mortem in Australia, which began almost as soon as our last wicket fell. My wicketkeeping was criticised, the chance off Rogers cited as an example of my struggle to master my craft. I’d scored fewer than 50 runs in four innings, so I wasn’t rated as much of a batsman either – though I’d scarcely batted since September before being called into that Boxing Day Test at Melbourne. I thought I’d managed as well as anyone could. I’d come late to a series already badly lost and into a team already badly demoralised. Even now I have no clue about what I could have done to prepare for that. No one seemed to appreciate one other pertinent detail either: I’d become England’s wicketkeeper without having kept for a full season for Yorkshire. In fact, I’d made only 40 first-class appearances as a wicketkeeper for them since my career began four and a half years earlier. No one seemed to have a broad understanding of my circumstances – or set out to find one – but I was still being written off as unworthy of consideration until I proved myself again in the County Championship. I’d never stood in front of a mirror before and seen failure staring back
at me. I did now – and I didn’t like it.
First Yorkshire, then a friend and finally – though inadvertently – Liam Plunkett came to my rescue.
Yorkshire gave me the pre-season off. A friend invited me to the Cheltenham Festival. I was supposed to go there and back in a day, but I stayed for three. There was nothing posh about our trip. I climbed aboard a beery ‘charabanc outing’ in Leeds and stayed in a bed and breakfast. I drank the odd glass of champagne. I had a few pints of Guinness. I switched off, forgetting all about Australia, Yorkshire and the County Championship. It was a typical boys’ outing, a kind of ‘what happens in Cheltenham stays in Cheltenham’. I didn’t think about picking up a bat or putting on a pair of wicketkeeping gloves. Afterwards I didn’t even go to the gym because I didn’t want to drag myself there. Instead, continuing my racing theme, I went to the Grand National.
But every holiday must have a full stop. I came back to a practice game against Northamptonshire at Wantage Road, a morning so unlike spring that the early daffodils almost shrank back into the ground for shelter. It was freezing and dank, and I looked at the clouds expecting much more than a clearing shower to arrive and soak us. The modern player at least has modern thermals. In my dad’s day, it would have been three T-shirts and a couple of chunky cable-knit sweaters to ward off hypothermia. There were so few spectators, most of them in big coats and mufflers, that I could probably have walked around the ground and introduced myself to everyone in five minutes. If I’m honest, I didn’t fancy being there much more than I’d fancied going to Sri Lanka.
Early on the ball went on to some rough concrete and came back so scuffed up that it looked as though a big dog had tried to take a bite out of it. You’ll be familiar with the phrase ‘swinging it around corners’. Liam Plunkett did more than that. He swung the damaged ball with a boomerang-like curve and at a scary pace. He broke bones: two Northants batsmen went to the X-ray department. He then claimed his hospital hat-trick. One delivery swerved so much down leg side that I had to leap after it, groping for the thing at full length. The ball bashed into the ring finger of my left hand, pushed the nail into the flesh and fractured the bone. Afterwards it ached as though I’d been hit with a claw hammer. The doctor looked at it, took a sharpish intake of breath and said I’d be out for four to six weeks.
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