The Shorter Wisden 2013

by John Wisden

  Cricket was not an end in itself. He did not love batting like, say, his former partner Marcus Trescothick, which is why he retired from all cricket as soon as he had finished with England. For him, cricket was the means for undertaking challenges and stretching himself. It could have been another sport. When his prep-school headmaster sent a letter to the warden of Radley College, Dennis Silk, about the 11-year-old preparing to enrol there, he wrote four pages on the promising rugby of this young fly-half. Only as a postscript did he add: “He also has the makings of a useful cricketer.”

  It was this love of a challenge which enabled Strauss to compose two or three of the most valuable innings ever played for England. His 129 in the deciding Oval Test of 2005 kept them in the game, when no other specialist batsman made 50 in their first innings: typical, again, that everyone forgets Strauss and recalls Pietersen’s 158 in their second. His 161 at Lord’s in 2009 gave England the psychological lead; and they were soothed by his brace of 55 and 75 at The Oval in the last Test. So long as Strauss was in, England were winning on all these momentous occasions. One false move and they would assuredly have lost the match and series; yet Strauss walked the tightrope while millions watched, without looking down.

  Once Strauss got the team culture right, everything flowed from there – like hanging wallpaper properly from the picture rail. His record as England’s Test captain by the start of 2012 was 21–5. He had led England to No. 1 in the rankings by supplanting India 4–0. Sir Leonard Hutton and Michael Brearley, if you count the 1978-79 tour of Australia during World Series Cricket, had been the only other England captains to win Ashes series home and away (Percy Chapman won the Oval Test of 1926 after Arthur Carr had drawn the first four, then won again in Australia). But they played when England were the only country with a professional domestic circuit. Strauss made them No. 1 on a level playing field.

  Self-doubt set in last year. Trying to retain their status – an arithmetical calculation – may have distracted England from winning the next Test. His playing of spin improved after the 3–0 defeat by Pakistan in the UAE – and he was already the only England batsman to score two centuries in a Test in Asia – but the mental side was more important to him than technical competence. He felt he was past his prime; and he had shown by resigning the one-day captaincy after the 2011 World Cup that he would never linger once he had concluded he had given his best.

  He was still enthused by the problem-solving side of captaincy, at which he was masterful. But he felt worn down by attending not only to every player, but to all the members of the management team, and had too little energy left for his own game. And that was before Pietersen rocked the boat with his “provocative” texts to the South African tourists, so that instead of concentrating on squaring the series at Lord’s and celebrating his 100th Test, it was back to fire-fighting. Of all England captains, Strauss did not deserve his end to be like his beginning.

  Only Hutton, from my reading of England’s history, has had such a beneficial effect. He took over in a similar state of chaos in 1952, as both the last resort and the first professional captain since the 19th century. England had been thumped by Australia since the Second World War, and had thumped no one in return, yet he transformed them into the team of the 1950s. Both Hutton and Strauss conserved runs in the field, identified players of inner strength, and built a team in their own image.

  Both were criticised for being too cautious. Let Strauss speak for both in response: “Based on my own experience, if you starve batsmen of runs they will get edgy, and are likely to get themselves out. That was my philosophy, but if a bowler came up and said, ‘I want an extra catcher,’ I would say, ‘Perfect, let’s go along with it.’ Normally, though, the bowler hated going for runs. Jimmy Anderson, for example, felt his best way was to starve batsmen, and the way to get the best out of a player is to let him do what he wants. You don’t tell Jonathan Trott to score more quickly, because he averages 50 and knows what he’s doing.

  “It’s very easy for commentators and the public to say, when the ball flies through fifth slip: ‘You should have had a fielder there.’ But that is a bit facile. It is your strategy that wins you games and series, and the most important part of captaincy is to create an environment in which you make best use of the players you have.”

  Hutton and Strauss: archetypal northern pro and southern amateur type. Poles apart on the surface but, from what I saw when ghosting them, very similar: both outwardly calm, quiet and shrewd problem-solvers who knew their own mind and the direction in which England’s cricket should head. I like to think of it as an endorsement, or seal of approval, that Hutton’s grandson Ben was Strauss’s best man.

  When Hutton looked back on his captaincy, after half the Establishment had hoped he would fail so that an amateur could be reinstated, he used to say, with the pauses that were characteristic of his speech: “I never... I never wanted... I never wanted to make... a smell.” And, miraculously in this age of intense media scrutiny, Strauss did not do so either: there was no howler, no on-field incident that went undefused, no gesture to any umpire or opponent, not a single word out of place in a press conference or captured on a stump mike. He was dutiful, and selfless in his service to his players and country, until the last.

  Scyld Berry, editor of Wisden 2008–11, is the cricket correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, where he ghosted Andrew Strauss’s column.

  FAREWELL (3): RICKY PONTING

  The very essence of desire

  GIDEON HAIGH

  “Catch, Ted,” said Ricky Ponting. “Catch, Ted.”

  It was late in Australia’s morning training session ahead of next day’s Perth Test against South Africa. The small knots of onlookers had moved on; only a handful of players remained. Still in his pads, Ponting was sitting on a bench after a long stint facing net bowlers and throwdowns, and watching a helmeted Ed Cowan practise his short-leg catching with coach Mickey Arthur. “Catch, Ted,” he would repeat as each hit went in. “Catch, Ted.”

  Nothing so unusual about that. In his long career, Ponting had made a habit of being among the last to leave training. Except that, unbeknown to those beyond the team and their immediate circle, he had just a couple of hours earlier confided that this, his 168th appearance – equalling Steve Waugh’s national record – would be his farewell Test. It remained at that stage Australian cricket’s best-kept secret. “Catch, Ted,” he repeated. “Catch, Ted.”

  After one last surveillance of the practice area, Ponting shouldered his backpack, tucked two bats under his arm, and began wending his way to the dressing-room – the same one from which he had emerged 17 years earlier, a fresh-faced youngster of 20, to make his Test debut against Sri Lanka. Twenty minutes later, it was official. Amid a gathering sense of anticipation and occasion, Ponting walked into a room in the bowels of the WACA, accompanied by his wife, his daughters and finally his team-mates, who ringed the back wall. There had been tears earlier, Ponting admitted: “I tried to tell them a lot, but I didn’t get much out. As I said to the boys this morning, they’ve never seen me emotional, but I was this morning.” Now he was more composed, and there was relatively little theatre, certainly when compared to the lusty salaams that accompanied the departures of his eminent contemporaries Steve Waugh and Shane Warne. Fifteen minutes later, the journalists were composing their obsequies. It had all been disarmingly matter-of-fact – very much the Ponting vein.

  And thus did an era pass that had been a long time in the fading: the era of Australian dominance, of which Ponting, and not merely his bustling, bristling batting, but his hairy-armed, spitting-in-his-hands presence, had been a personification. Australia had ceded their No. 1 Test ranking in August 2009, and their No. 1 one-day ranking three years later. Since then, all that had remained had been Ponting – and now he, too, was to go.

  He had opened up in that time a sizeable gap between him and the next-highest Australian Test run-scorer, Allan Border. And even if his form had been more variable than of yor
e, an Australian order with his name in it could not help bear a strong look; he drew, of course, on a massive estate of international runs in all conditions and all climes. But the clock had been running down. He had passed the captaincy on to his dauphin, Michael Clarke, with promising results. Yet the wins were coming harder, and wins were what mattered to Ponting above all else.

  “Seriously,” he had said to Cowan just before the Sheffield Shield final earlier in the year, “you don’t really think I give a toss about hundreds, do you?” Cowan had joked to Ponting about the possibility he might emulate Sachin Tendulkar and score a hundred international hundreds. In reply, Ponting had enumerated all the trophies and garlands Australia had won in his career – a lengthy list. Winning: it wasn’t everything, but to Ponting it had always been the main thing.

  The Test would not be kind to Ponting in either individual or collective terms. He was pushing string uphill with his batting, and made only four and eight. He looked on in the field as Australia gave up 569 in South Africa’s second innings. The tributes flowed almost for the game’s duration. An especially moving one came on the final day, when South Africa’s captain Graeme Smith formed his fielders into two lines so as to applaud him to the wicket, partner Cowan joining in; when he was out, every member of the visiting team went to him individually to shake his hand; there were further impressive displays of cricketing confraternity as the game ended. But you got the feeling Ponting would have swapped them all for a win, even just for a few extra runs.

  If desire could be bottled, it would be distilled from essence of Ponting. Sometimes in his career, more of that had seeped out than even he could handle. He had a way of remonstrating with umpires that recalled the Mike Gatting school of diplomacy, although it often looked worse than it was: Ponting tended to be a barrack-room lawyer rather than a potty-mouthed pouter. The first thing he expressed when he sat down at the end of the match, in the same room in which he had started it, was his disappointment at the result and regret that he had not made a few more: “It has been a hard week, and we haven’t got the result we were after and I haven’t got the result I was after.” The desire was still there; it’s just that the capabilities could no longer stretch to the same height.

  Now he was prepared to take questions about his career, about which he had earlier been reticent. His daughter Emmy was sitting on his knee and, in the way little children have of objecting passively to their parents doing something when they should be available for play, stuck her fingers in her ears. Everyone else in the room, though, was spellbound. Normally, press conferences take place in a fairly formulaic fashion: they pretend to answer; we pretend to listen. Ponting’s press conferences, though, were not like this. He was one cricketer who always gave straight answers to straight questions, and the impression of having thought about them. This was no exception. And as he spoke, there was otherwise complete silence. You could almost hear the tape recorders rolling.

  In due course, he began to recite some thanks. Family. Friends. Management. Sponsors, some of whom had been with him from the very beginning, when a local bakery had sponsored his performances at Mowbray Cricket Club in Tasmania. He thanked that club too, with a cough and a sniff. “It’s getting a bit harder.” No – there would be no tears. “The Mowbray Cricket Club, if they see me up here like this at the moment, they’ll be all over me. That’s the place I learned the game, and the person I am was moulded from my background and my upbringing. What you’ve seen over 17 years is a result of my early days at the Mowbray Cricket Club. Thanks to the boys back there.”

  Cricket Australia. Cricket Tasmania. The pragmatist and the fantasist in Ponting showed through when he revealed that he knew when his next training was, for the Hobart Hurricanes in the Big Bash League, and that as a result he would be in the vicinity of Bellerive Oval for the next Test. “Who knows, I might even be around for the first day of the game,” he joked. “If I am, I might even join in the warm-up with the boys and see if there’s just one more chance!”

  “The boys”: they came up a lot. It is funny how athletes always use the words when they are talking about team-mates. Once in a while, it’s “the guys”, but usually discussion circles back to “the boys”. I dare say a detractor of sport would decide this is because sport keeps athletes in a state of arrested development, of perpetual childhood; maybe there’s some truth in that. But it is perhaps also this that allows them to express themselves: when adult doubt and cynicism set in, it is time to go.

  Not that Ponting finished his career as anything other than an adult. His wiry frame and sun-burnished face were those of a man who had seen the world; there was knowhow and wisdom on the game he loved in his every utterance. But to see him to the very end throwing himself around at training, standing in the huddle, singing the team song, enjoying the banter, was to be reminded how sport preserves in us the happiest parts of ourselves.

  The boys: how he would miss them. And how they would miss him: not just his run-getting, but his body-and-soul commitment to the commonweal, audible in his voice as he watched Cowan taking his catches, always upbeat, always encouraging, always urging them on. Now he was off to see them one last time as a player, with a final: “Thanks, everyone.” It was we, of course, who should have been doing the thanking.

  Gideon Haigh is a journalist. His latest book is On Warne.

  FAREWELL (4): MARK RAMPRAKASH

  Farewell, then, the 1990s

  BARNEY RONAY

  Last summer, with his retirement still reassuringly distant, Mark Ramprakash gave a speech at Lord’s in which he confided that, if he could go back and change any aspect of a magisterial, furiously intense, operatically unyielding 26-season career, he would perhaps like to have “taken things a little less seriously”.

  For the confirmed Rampraphile it was hard to know how to respond. Certainly, as career retrospectives go, it’s up there with Eric Cantona announcing that perhaps he shouldn’t have bothered being quite so enigmatic; Jean-Paul Sartre coming out in his dotage against berets and casual sex; or The Clash wishing they’d just been a little less cross about everything and spent more time on The Kenny Everett Show.

  A Ramprakash who takes things a little less seriously. This is, of course, not just alarming and undesirable. It is also pretty much unimaginable. Across all disciplines there is a certain kind of sportsman who becomes, inexorably, public property – just as Ramprakash has long been cherished as an object of private fascination for a generation of diffuse, faithful, still painfully expectant career Rampraphiles.

  Even now it seems inconceivable that an English summer will be allowed to take place unaccompanied, for the first time in a quarter of a century, by the quiet certainty that at any given moment on some distant patch of green ringed by sparsely peopled plastic seats, Ramprakash will be taking guard, dipping his knees, rehearsing with machine-gun ferocity that crisply laundered off-drive, entirely gripped by the prospect of another six-month odyssey of largely overlooked first-class run-harvesting.

  Naturally, Ramprakash will be defined to a degree by the greatness-shaped hole at the centre of his career, as a talent that remained forever sputtering and smoking on the launch pad of what should have been a brilliant Test-match span. This is the ex-pro’s line, the baffled captain’s verdict: if only Ramps could have relaxed a little, laughed it up, taken a chill pill.

  This is also to misunderstand completely his broader appeal. If Ramprakash had a cricketing superpower, it was the ability to dust everything he touched – every cobwebbed outground, every deathly four-day draw – with that distinct and indissoluble sense of gravity: he took guard 1,221 times with the same glowering, insatiable intent, and remained almost to the very end the most vibrantly promising 41-year-old batsman in England.

  It was all terribly serious. I can remember watching, gripped, as Ramprakash played out three consecutive maiden overs of lard-arsed roundarm all-sorts on some dying September afternoon at a deserted Oval, bat raised like a lance, front knee flexed, off
stump painstakingly aligned, a cricketing Don Quixote still toting about the imprint of his own vanishing greatness. Oh aye. It were proper champion.

  You see, though. This is what watching Ramprakash could do to you. Or at least, it could if you’d been there – and at an appropriately impressionable age – right from the start. Because with Ramprakash’s passing something else has disappeared from view. Farewell, then, the 1990s. For English cricket you were the worst of times – and also the worst of times. The most obviously talented batsman of England’s shredded generation, Ramprakash was also the last man standing, the last reminder of that peculiar drowned world, and nobody speaks to the ruined grandeur of a lost decade quite like Ramps.

  For the adolescent spectator it was a genuinely compelling era to follow cricket in earnest. Presided over by mute, baffled men, with a Test team of tubby indispensables leavened by the usual sweating, ruined debutants, each on-field humiliation seemed to peel away a fresh layer of frowsty pre-Victorian infrastructure, the whole sorry edifice crumbling away before our eyes like a lath and plaster wall in the process of being cheerfully torn down by an Australian with a jackhammer.

  Emerging into this, the young Ramprakash seemed an almost shockingly hopeful figure. Making his Test debut at 21 he looked, even then, curiously complete, rock-star handsome, the only modern person in English cricket, coming out to bat already goggle-eyed with epic-scale obsession. At which point everything started to go wrong. Ramps and Test cricket: it was never really going to work out. Wrong genius, wrong time.

  Those who carry the scars of the 1990s can fantasise about the productivity of a young Ramprakash nestled within the velvet embrace of the current England regime (a two-year bedding-in period, then 23 Test hundreds, 40 hundreds, 80 hundreds). Instead Ramprakash’s career was a masterpiece of departures. First dropped in August 1991, he was dropped in total 12 times, remaining on the verge of being recalled by the England team – broken only by those tortured interludes when he was actually in the England team – for 18 years, or the entire adult life, to that point, of this writer.