Driving Ambition - My Autobiography

by Andrew Strauss

  Australia 419 (A. Symonds 156, M.L. Hayden 153; S.I. Mahmood 4–100)

  Australia won by an innings and 99 runs.

  5th Test. SCG, Sydney. 2–5 January 2007

  England 291 (A. Flintoff 89, I.R. Bell 71, A.J. Strauss 29) and 147 (A.J. Strauss 24)

  Australia 393 (S.K. Warne 71, A.C. Gilchrist 62) and 46–0

  Australia won by 10 wickets.

  Australia won the series 5–0.

  8

  DROPPED LIKE A STONE

  No one enjoys being humiliated. All confidence drains from your body and it becomes difficult to look people in the eye. Everywhere you go, it feels as if you are walking around naked, with people pointing and giggling at you. We have all been through it at some stage. The joke that goes down like a lead balloon; the speech where you can’t get your words out; plucking up the courage to ask a girl out, only to be rejected; losing your job – the list goes on and on. I defy anyone to claim they haven’t been humiliated at some point in their lives.

  Humiliation is even more painful, however, when it is played out in public. Think for a moment about the politician caught with his trousers around his ankles, or the film star whose latest movie is a complete flop. It is one thing having your world come crashing down around you; it is quite another having the whole world know about it.

  Getting dropped from the England cricket team feels very much like that. Aside from the immense pain of having the honour of representing your country taken away, along with your aspirations and dreams, you also feel a little like the Elephant Man. Suddenly the phone goes silent, people don’t know what to say to you and even those close to you cannot ease the pain.

  It happened to me at the beginning of September 2007. My phone rang, I looked at the number and I knew at once that I was in trouble. The chairman of selectors, David Graveney, did not ring if he had good news.

  ‘Straussy, we are leaving you out of the squad for Sri Lanka. We think we have better options against their spin bowlers. This is not the end for you, but you must take some measures to get yourself back in form …’

  I stopped listening. I couldn’t believe it. My world had come crashing down. What about all those match-winning performances over the three years I had been in the side? Did they count for nothing? What about all the work I had put into my game? What about the fact that I had captained the team in four Test matches? I felt bereft, I felt bitter and above all I felt completely lost. What was my future going to look like without international cricket? It was like a drug, and the thought of going back to county cricket without my regular fix held little appeal.

  Although I didn’t like to admit it, I knew it was coming, and in many ways I had brought it on myself. Throughout the 2007 season I had felt all at sea. Under the new regime of Peter Moores, who started as head coach in May 2007, past performances were cast aside. It was a new start for everyone and Moores seemed keen to break up some of the hierarchy that was in place under Duncan Fletcher. The ODI team, in particular, was overhauled after the end of the World Cup. There was no place for Michael Vaughan, myself and a few others who had flopped during the tournament. It was clear that Moores wanted to have a look at some of those who had not been considered for international duty during the Fletcher years. Players like Owais Shah and Ryan Sidebottom came into the mix after years in the wilderness, which gave everyone involved in the side the clear message that no one’s place was assured.

  I don’t know whether being dropped from the ODI team had affected me more than I thought or if I was going through a mid-career crisis, but that summer I just couldn’t focus properly during the Test matches – first against the West Indies in May and June, and then against India in July and August. I was increasingly distracted by the thought of being dropped and was therefore trying to avoid it at all costs. The problem is that trying to play Test cricket with that sort of negative mindset is nothing short of purgatory. It is no fun doing something just to avoid something bad happening. There is a hint of desperation and it is all but impossible to play the game naturally, trusting in your instincts. I was walking around with a cloud over my head that summer and every score I got merely brought a temporary reprieve.

  I knew I was really in trouble when I battled my way to 96 in the first Test of the three-match series against India, only for the media to pick over the moment of madness that led to my dismissal, suggesting that I hadn’t done enough to justify my place in the team for the next series, in Sri Lanka. According to them, I needed more runs. I did, in fact, get more runs, with a half-century in the second Test, before finishing disappointingly at The Oval with scores of 6 and 32. It was impossible to keep them happy, though, and my place in the side was a hot topic, discussed both in the newspapers and in breaks in play on television.

  No matter how hard players try not to read the media at these times, it is impossible to get away from it completely. Just when you really need to focus on getting the process right, watching the ball and keeping it simple, your mind is awash with what people in the media are saying about you, as well as the various bits of advice that come your way from all sorts of different sources. It is a truly horrendous feeling. You know that your career is on the line, you know that you are not playing well, but you also know that there is only one way to get yourself out of this mess – and that is to get a century. A fifty is not enough. To put all the chatter to bed, nothing short of scoring a hundred runs will do.

  The main problem with this is that scoring an international century is incredibly hard to do. You are very fortunate if you have twenty days in a career when you go to bed at night with the warm afterglow of scoring an international hundred. Now, when you are completely out of form, not sleeping and haunted by the thought of losing everything you have worked so hard for, you have no choice but to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat. As you prepare for what might be the last match you will ever play, nothing seems less likely. How could you possibly perform under those circumstances?

  The amazing thing is that many England cricketers have gone to the precipice, looked over the edge and somehow managed to put in the performance necessary to keep the hounds at bay. When the pressure is at its greatest, they find a way to perform. It is quite amazing, and it is often indicative of a player who will go on to have a long and successful England career. In my time, I witnessed Paul Collingwood do it against South Africa in 2008, Ian Bell against the same opposition in 2009 and Alastair Cook against Pakistan in 2010. I also went through it against New Zealand in 2008.

  With my career now comfortably wrapped up and finished, it is a little easier to look at the effect that the media have on a sports team from a more objective point of view. When you are in the thick of it, it is difficult not to feel victimised by the constant interest and intrusion by the travelling press corps.

  I think that it is fair to say that the way the media in this country works makes it more difficult for professional players to perform. The problem does not lie so much with the criticism players have to contend with when they fail. Instead, I think that too often unrealistic expectations are thrust upon performers that bear little or no relation to logic. When the England football team enters a World Cup ranked as the eighth-best team in the world, the likelihood is that they will go out of the tournament in the quarter-finals. If they go out before then, they have under-achieved; if they stay in longer, they have over-achieved. When the team duly gets knocked out at the quarter-final stage, the country goes into mourning, careers are ended and managers are sacked. All for performing to the level they could be expected to reach.

  On the other hand, the attention of the media can also have a beneficial effect. It spurs teams on to keep improving, it makes players superstars and it maintains interest in sports throughout the country. At a time when so much televised sport is only on satellite TV, many people in the country get their news and opinion about sport second-hand. If the media showed no interest, the population’s attention would also start to wane. A few players h
aving to go through a little mental anguish along the way is probably a small price to pay.

  What gets my goat a little is the media’s fascination with personalities and also its reluctance to give credit when it is due. For example, take a player like Jonathan Trott. His averages in both Test and ODI cricket place him in the very highest echelons of international cricketers. He will never get the credit he deserves, though, because he is not a ‘sexy’ player. He is too robotic. In fact, it is almost too predictable that he is going to go out and score runs.

  The media are far more interested in the flawed genius who may or may not perform. With such a player, there is so much more for them to talk about, so many more chances for superlatives to be used, one way or the other. From a team’s point of view, however, the steady performer is like gold dust. When you are trying to win a cricket series, you want to be as sure as possible that your players are going to perform when necessary. Steady is good.

  I can’t really blame the media for this. Clearly it is more interesting to write a story about a Kevin Pietersen or a Chris Gayle than it is about a Jonathan Trott. Unfortunately, focusing so much on personality and celebrity can have the unfortunate effect of encouraging players to separate themselves from their team-mates in order to gain attention, and that can be very difficult and divisive in a team sport.

  In my case, the media interest and pressure served merely to remind me that I really wasn’t playing well. The days when I could turn up to practice calm and assured, with a large reservoir of confidence to draw on, had long gone. In my mind, I was no longer living the dream. Nothing about international cricket was new any more. The travel was no longer so intoxicating; the daily ritual of focusing on the job at hand, steeling yourself for the travails of international sport, was beginning to wear me down. It was also getting increasingly difficult to leave Ruth and my son Sam, who was eighteen months old, full of energy and in need of a father. Three and a half years into my England career, I was definitely going through some sort of crisis, and if your mind is not clear off the pitch, then it is unlikely to be on the pitch.

  I can see now that I definitely needed to be dropped at that stage of my career. As soon as I received that call from David Graveney in September 2007, my mindset changed. OK, I had to go through the humiliation stage, but that in itself made me sure that I never wanted to go through the turmoil of being dropped from the team again.

  What really changed about me, though, was that my focus immediately shifted from being worried about being dropped to concentrating on what I had to do in order to get back into the side. My attitude became positive once again and straight away I felt better about myself and my prospects. One thing was obvious, though: I needed to do some work on my game. Throughout the summer, I had committed what I believe to be one of the cardinal sins when it comes to batting. I had tried to change my technique while I was out of form.

  Possibly the greatest misconception purveyed by television commentators is that if a player has a weakness exposed by a particular bowler, it is quite simple to make the necessary adjustments to counteract that weakness. For instance, I can imagine Ian Botham or Mike Atherton talking about a player who gets out lbw too often: ‘Well, it is simple,’ they may say. ‘All he has to do is get a bigger stride in. That will get him outside the line of the ball and he can’t be out lbw.’ Or perhaps they might focus on him getting his front foot too far across instead. The clever people at Sky will then come up with all sorts of graphics to demonstrate what the commentators are talking about and how that will allow the player to ‘correct’ his problem.

  There are, however, two difficulties the player will have to contend with. Firstly, making that adjustment is likely to be extremely difficult to achieve. Imagine a golfer trying to change their swing. It can take years before they finally get all the parts moving in sync to produce the perfect shot. In cricket, you have to coordinate the bat swing with foot movement, either back or forward, while judging whether to play or leave the ball. All that needs to be done in less than half a second. To make a fundamental change to how far you move your feet will take hundreds of practice hours to perfect. It can be done, but it is not something to be undertaken lightly.

  Secondly, and far more importantly in my mind, while making that adjustment may fix one particular problem, what others is it going to create instead? Getting further forward may make it harder for you to play back-foot shots and also make you far more vulnerable to getting out to the short ball. You may find it harder to judge which balls to play, as they will be reaching you a split second earlier. There is no point in getting over your lbw problem if you have just created a number of other problems in its place.

  Throughout my career, my biggest weakness was probably my driving. I was never a strong driver of the ball, partly because of a low(ish) backlift and partly because my short stride into the ball meant that my weight shifted backwards when trying to drive the ball hard. Throughout that 2007 season, Peter Moores and Andy Flower, then the batting coach, had been trying to encourage me to expand my driving skills, primarily by experimenting with a higher backlift. Their concern, which was entirely correct, was that international bowlers had worked out my game. They were no longer feeding me with back-of-a-length balls that I could either cut or pull away. They were instead bowling fuller and wider, knowing that I was unlikely to hurt them in that area and they were far more likely to get me out.

  I practised hitting literally thousands of drives. I was focusing on getting my weight into the ball more and using a higher backlift in order to get more momentum. All of which sounds great, doesn’t it? It had the potential to transform me from a one-trick pony into a far more complete and rounded international cricketer. I have to admit that despite being initially sceptical about the idea of making significant changes to my game, I began to allow myself to get excited at the thought of whacking opening bowlers through the covers or down the ground.

  What was the result of all this well-thought-out graft? That summer I got out far more often driving the ball and I scored hardly any runs off the back foot.

  The concentration on hitting front-foot shots in the nets had subconsciously made me look for scoring opportunities off the front foot. When they came along, I would be trying to put my new technique into practice, but ended up going after balls that were far more dangerous to play, with shots that, even though they had improved a little, were still my weakness. When you are trying to do this against high-quality international bowlers, the odds are more often than not in their favour. My far more productive back-foot game had been neglected and so my bread-and-butter shots were not coming off as often. No wonder I didn’t score many runs that season.

  In the latter part of my career I got far better at accepting my limitations. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t crashing the ball through the covers, as long as I wasn’t getting out. If I was patient enough, the bowler would eventually feed me a ball to my strengths, which I would put away. In short, I started concentrating on my strengths and not my weaknesses.

  If a player came to me for advice about altering their game, I would always counsel against rushing into making wholesale changes to their technique. Certainly, if you have reached international level, your technique, which has evolved over a long number of years, has got you to where you are. You have learnt to evaluate the low- and high-risk shots that come with your own individual technique. Your problem would have to be very serious indeed to throw away all that evolved knowledge. More often than not, your issues will lie with shot-selection, despite what the commentators might say. That is something that is controlled by your head, not your technique. Instead, I would probably get players to look first at things that are easier to control. Can they make slight adjustments to their stance or where they take their guard in order to help alleviate their problem? Keeping it simple is never a bad way to go.

  There is obviously still a time and a place for technical adjustments. Early in a career, it would be foolish for any player to th
ink that they didn’t have to make any changes to their technique. Certainly, schoolboy cricketers should be constantly trying to drill in the correct fundamentals in order to progress up the levels as they get older. On the other hand, you only have to look at the wide array of techniques in world cricket to realise that there is no such thing as one perfect technique. Would anyone coach Shivnarine Chanderpaul to bat the way he does? What about Virender Sehwag, who hardly ever moves his feet? What both those players know, however, is what shots to play in what circumstances. That comes from the bitter experience of learning from their mistakes.

  Looking back on my career, it still frustrates me that I tinkered with my technique as much as I did. Perhaps it is inevitable, if you are practising for thousands of hours every year, that you will try different things in practice in the constant search to become a better player. When I think about it, though, how much did all my tinkering really help me? I arguably became a better player against spin as I got older by experimenting with different ideas in the nets, but I am not sure I helped myself against the quicker bowlers. I think I would probably have scored more runs if I’d constantly honed my own technique, rather than searching for a magical cure. Mind you, I probably did that far less than many of my contemporaries …

  As I approached the winter of 2007–08, at home for the first time since I had started playing cricket for England, my task was fairly straightforward. I had to sit back and reflect on where I had gone wrong in the lead-up to my axing as a player and reconnect with what had worked well for me in the past. My experiment of trying to become a powerful driver of the ball, à la Matthew Hayden, had clearly not worked, so it was back to the nets for me and also back to basics.

  I gave myself three months to refresh mentally, get myself into tip-top shape physically and regroove my technique to something resembling the way I had played in my early days for England. Given that England were going to follow their tour to Sri Lanka in December with a visit to New Zealand in March, it also made perfect sense for me to go and play some winter cricket there, to get back in form and be ready and waiting if the call came to come back into the side.