I reach forward and take hold of the delicate little trophy and thrust it up into the air. Immediately fireworks, music, champagne and pandemonium fill the air. We have just won the Ashes.
England in the West Indies 2008–09 – The Wisden Trophy
1st Test. Sabina Park, Kingston, Jamaica. 4–7 February 2009
England 318 (K.P. Pietersen 97, M.J. Prior 64, A.J. Strauss 7; S.J. Benn 4–77) and 51 (A.J. Strauss 9, J.E. Taylor 5–11, S.J. Benn 4–31)
West Indies 392 (R.R. Sarwan 107, C.H. Gayle 104; S.C.J. Broad 5–85)
West Indies won by an innings and 23 runs.
2nd Test. Sir Vivian Richards Stadium, Antigua. 13 February 2009
England 7–0
Match abandoned after 10 balls because of dangerous outfield.
3rd Test. Antigua Recreation Ground, St John’s. 15–19 February 2009
England 566–9 dec (A.J. Strauss 169, P.D. Collingwood 113) and 221–8 dec (A.N. Cook 58, A.J. Strauss 14)
West Indies 285 (R.R. Sarwan 94; G.P. Swann 5–57) and 370–9 (R.R. Sarwan 106; S.C.J. Broad 3–69)
Match drawn.
4th Test. Kensington Oval, Barbados. 26 February – 2 March 2009
England 600–6 dec (A.J. Strauss 142, R.S. Bopara 104, P.D. Collingwood 96) and 279–2 dec (A.N. Cook 139*, K.P. Pietersen 72*, A.J. Strauss 38)
West Indies 749–9 dec (R.R. Sarwan 291, D. Ramdin 166, S. Chanderpaul 70, D.S. Smith 55; G.P. Swann 5–165)
Match drawn.
5th Test. Queen’s Park Oval, Port of Spain, Trinidad. 6–10 March 2009
England 546–6 dec (P.D. Collingwood 161, A.J. Strauss 142, M.J. Prior 131*) and 237–6 dec (K.P. Pietersen 102, M.J. Prior 61, A.J. Strauss 14)
West Indies 544 (S. Chanderpaul 147*, B.P. Nash 109, C.H. Gayle 102) and 114–8 (G.P. Swann 3–13, J.M. Anderson 3–24)
Match drawn.
West Indies won the series 1–0.
Australia in England 2009 – The Ashes
1st Test. SWALEC Stadium, Cardiff. 8–12 July 2009
England 435 (K.P. Pietersen 69, A.J. Strauss 30) and 252–9 (P.D. Collingwood 74, A.J. Strauss 17)
Australia 674–6 dec (R.T. Ponting 150, M.J. North 125, S.M. Katich 122, B.J. Haddin 121, M.J. Clarke 83)
Match drawn.
2nd Test. Lord’s, London. 16–20 July 2009
England 425 (A.J. Strauss 161, A.N. Cook 95; B.W. Hilfenhaus 4–103) and 311–6 dec (M.J. Prior 61, P.D. Collingwood 54, A.J. Strauss 32)
Australia 215 (M.E.K. Hussey 51; J.M. Anderson 4–55) and 406 (M.J. Clarke 136, B.J. Haddin 80; A. Flintoff 5–92)
England won by 115 runs.
3rd Test. Edgbaston, Birmingham. 30 July – 3 August 2009
Australia 263 (S.R. Watson 62; J.M. Anderson 5–80, G. Onions 4–58) and 375–5 (M.J. Clarke 103*, M.J. North 96, M.E.K. Hussey 64)
England 376 (A. Flintoff 74, A.J. Strauss 69, S.C.J. Broad 55, I.R. Bell 53; B.W. Hilfenhaus 4–109)
Match drawn.
4th Test. Headingley, Leeds. 7–9 August 2009
England 102 (M.J. Prior 37*, A.J. Strauss 3; P.M. Siddle 5–21) and 263 (G.P. Swann 62, S.C.J. Broad 61, A.J. Strauss 32; M.G. Johnson 5–69, B.W. Hilfenhaus 4–60)
Australia 445 (M.J. North 110, M.J. Clarke 93, R.T. Ponting 78, S.R. Watson 51; S.C.J. Broad 6–91)
Australia won by an innings and 80 runs.
5th Test. The Oval, London. 20–23 August 2009
England 332 (I.R. Bell 72, A.J. Strauss 55; P.M. Siddle 4–75) and 373–9 dec (I.J.L. Trott 119, A.J. Strauss 75, G.P. Swann 63; M.J. North 4–98)
Australia 160 (S.M. Katich 50; S.C.J. Broad 5–37, G.P. Swann 4–38) and 348 (M.E.K. Hussey 121, R.T. Ponting 66; G.P. Swann 4–120)
England won by 197 runs.
England won the series 2–1.
14
STEPPING OVER THE LINE
I am sitting on my sofa, enjoying a rare opportunity during a Test match to spend the night at home. It is a Saturday evening in August 2010, and the knowledge that the traffic into London in the morning is likely to be light has tempted me to risk the forty-five-minute journey to Lord’s cricket ground from my house in Marlow. Besides, after a see-sawing first three days of the Test match, during which we were put under enormous pressure by the excellent Pakistan fast bowlers, a monumental stand between Jonathan Trott and Stuart Broad of 332 has seen us wrest the initiative away from Pakistan. There is no way I will be needed to bat tomorrow, and with Pakistan reeling at 41–4, there is every chance that a follow-on might be on the cards.
Having flicked through the TV channels for a while, looking for anything that might take my mind off the cricket, I turn to Sky News to have a quick check of what’s going on in the world before heading up to bed. I listen half-heartedly to the headlines, but suddenly I sit bolt upright. ‘The Pakistan cricket team has been implicated in a match-fixing controversy by the News of the World newspaper’ is the headline that grabs my attention.
Immediately, I download the online version of the News of the World and start reading in complete disbelief about Mazhar Majeed, the secret video footage and the no-balls delivered by Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir on the first day of the game I’m playing in. Straight away I feel as if I have been punched in the stomach. I can’t honestly believe that this is happening. Pretty soon my disbelief turns to frustration and anger. All the hours of practice, all the team meetings, all the stress and mental turmoil that the team has gone through over the preceding weeks – it suddenly feels as if it was for nothing. The opposition were actually trying to give us runs. In fact, who knows if they were trying to win the game at all? I stop reading and brace myself for a particularly gruelling day tomorrow.
Over the years I have played cricket, I have heard plenty of rumours about match-fixing. It was supposedly rife in the 1990s and many of the past England cricketers had stories to tell about potentially rigged matches and implicated players. The Hansie Cronje affair, which broke during a Middlesex preseason tour to South Africa, blew the whole shady world into the open for a time. I can’t think of anyone in the game who wasn’t completely shocked that someone like Cronje had taken money to underperform in matches. He just didn’t seem the type of character to do it. The investigation that followed went some way to explaining how Cronje and his team-mates had got involved but did little to uncover what was happening in other parts of the world, particularly in the subcontinent.
Later, Mohammad Azharuddin, the Indian captain, was banned from cricket and it became apparent that this was bigger than anyone imagined. The problem was that the game’s authorities still faced a devilishly difficult task in trying to unearth actual evidence implicating corrupt cricketers and officials. The ICC Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (ACSU) was established in 2000 to keep tabs on illegal betting and suspicious behaviour, but in truth they had neither the resources nor the powers to make any real progress. They weren’t able to tap phones, gain access to bank accounts or take part in sting operations. All they could do was make it more difficult for players to contact their fixers by banning mobile phones in the dressing room and wait for a whistleblower to appear. It was hardly the stuff to make the hardened underworld figures making fortunes out of illegal betting shake in their boots.
As for whistleblowing, one major difficulty is that once a player has taken money from these people, he is forever under their control. It takes a brave man to give evidence against someone who has the motivation and means to hurt that person or his family.
So the game just meandered on, making optimistic statements about cleaning up the game and even finding a couple of low-profile players guilty of match-fixing. While everyone was congratulating each other on putting the problem of match-fixing to bed, persistent rumours remained about what was going on in some ODI tournaments.
Mind you, even with all this knowledge at our disposal, as far as I knew, none of the players in the England side had ever heard of any game in which we had played being affected. It seemed a very faraway problem,
and just about the only time we had anything to do with the ACSU was when we grudgingly handed our mobile phones over to their representative before games. ‘As if,’ we all thought, ‘taking away our mobiles is really going to stop it happening.’
All this goes some way to explaining our utter dismay and surprise when we turned up at Lord’s on that Sunday morning. There were plenty of conversations in the dressing room about the no-balls and how suspicious they had looked, but overall we were in shock – not to mention baffled by the idea that the game might still go ahead. It seemed completely wrong to persist with the pretence that we were actually playing a proper game of cricket.
God knows how Jonathan Trott and Stuart Broad felt, after fighting so valiantly to register centuries, but it was all but impossible to look the Pakistan players in the eye as we made our way to and from the nets. With 20,000 supporters already in the ground, it became apparent pretty quickly that we would have to keep up the charade. We had an obligation to play, but no one was in the mood to continue the game.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Pakistan team were in a far worse state than we were. There was no way their batsmen could concentrate on the task at hand and we bowled them out twice in less than a day to finish off the game and take the series. No victory has given me less pleasure, and receiving the trophy in the Long Room, with rain pouring down outside, seemed somehow apt. No atmosphere, no celebration, just going through the motions. Players, administrators and media were all sharing the same feelings.
Unfortunately, however, this was far from the end of the story.
* * *
The England team had been through a great deal since winning the 2009 Ashes campaign. The never-ending treadmill of international fixtures meant that the euphoria of winning the Ashes was short-lived. Immediately afterwards, at the end of the 2009 summer, there was an interminable seven-match ODI series against Australia, followed by a Champions Trophy in South Africa, before the more traditional winter assignments: Test and ODI tours to South Africa and Bangladesh. Undoubtedly, the toughest and most enthralling assignment would be the Tests against South Africa, but the sheer amount of one-day cricket meant that we had to give our attention to the shorter form of the game.
Any illusions we had about our abilities were soon shattered by a 6–1 drubbing by Australia. Despite being in a fantastic position to take advantage of the confidence gained during the Ashes campaign, too many of us switched off, thinking that we had done our summer’s work, while the Australians were hell-bent on retribution. The result spurred us to have a long think about England’s ODI inadequacies over the years and how we might overcome them.
It was clear to anyone who had watched England for a long time that, although we could generally match sides in the more bowler-friendly English conditions, as soon as we went away from home, on flatter, more spin-friendly wickets, we were vulnerable. Other teams seemed to have far more attacking batsmen capable of taking the game away from the opposition, as well as more match-winning bowlers. In ODI cricket the ability to take wickets either early in the innings, with the new ball, or in the middle overs, when sides are generally accumulating singles, is absolutely crucial, and without either bowlers capable of bowling at over 90 mph or mystery spinners, we were at a distinct disadvantage.
After the series defeat to Australia, it was apparent that unless we changed our philosophy, we were likely to stay trapped in the same cycle as English sides for most of the last two decades. Somehow, we had to encourage our batsmen to play a more positive, expressive brand of cricket, while finding ways to attack with the ball.
After asking our analyst, Nathan Leamon, to do some background research into what wins one-day internationals, we decided to focus all our energy on dot-ball percentage. We wanted players to stop worrying so much about losing and to ignore all the criticism accompanying any poor performance. Somehow we had to encourage them to go out and play in a more uninhibited fashion. Focusing on dot-ball percentage seemed to be the answer. We discovered that generally the batting side that allows fewest dot-balls (i.e. balls that aren’t scored off) wins one-day games. Our focus when batting, therefore, should be on making sure that we scored off between 50 and 60 per cent of the balls we faced. Everything was to be logged by computer and, whether we won or lost, that is what we should be aiming to achieve. Automatically it put players in a far more positive frame of mind.
On the bowling side, it was obvious that we couldn’t suddenly turn our players into mystery bowlers, capable of blasting out opposition teams on flat wickets. Instead, we decided to play to our strengths and use accuracy to our advantage. If we could force other teams to use up a lot of balls without scoring (i.e. a lot of dot-balls), then we had a good chance of forcing mistakes. So out went overly attacking field settings and in came players capable of fielding exceptionally well in order to force dot-balls, while the bowlers concentrated on containment. It was a far from sexy game plan, but over the course of 2009–10 things started to work for us.
A journey to the semi-finals of the Champions Trophy in October was accompanied by ODI series victories against South Africa in November and Bangladesh in March 2010, quickly followed by another ODI victory against Bangladesh in the early part of the summer. Clearly we were on to something and it was incredible to feel that we were finally getting somewhere with ODI cricket.
Alongside the limited-overs improvement, our performances in Test cricket built on the encouraging results from the 2009 Ashes. An enthralling series was played in South Africa, where in Centurion and Cape Town we twice managed to hang on, nine wickets down, in much the way we had in Cardiff against Australia. In between those magnificent rearguard performances, we enjoyed an emphatic innings victory in Durban thanks to some breathtaking bowling from Graeme Swann. The final Test, in Johannesburg, was something of an aberration, when the effects of a long tour, a poor decision at the toss and some high-quality fast bowling by South Africa proved too much for us. However, a 1–1 series draw against a very good side was no disgrace, and yet again I was heartened by our fighting spirit and togetherness. Without those qualities we would never have drawn the series.
Although many of the players had a good series with the bat, I struggled against a bowler who was rapidly becoming my bogeyman, Morne Morkel. Most players have one or two bowlers that they just can’t seem to get on top of, and in my case it was Morkel. For a left-hander, his willingness to come around the wicket, angle the ball in and then get it to seam away towards the slips was particularly awkward. Also, his disturbing bounce made him very hard to handle. My technique, which was far more geared towards hitting the ball on the leg side, didn’t fit well with his style of bowling. He gave me very few scoring opportunities.
Looking back, I can see that my struggles against him became far more mental than technical. Having succumbed to him a few times, I began searching for ways of adjusting my stance or backlift to counteract him. I am far from certain that any of these helped, as even in my final series as an England cricketer, in the summer of 2012, he had the better of me. I would have been far better, in hindsight, concentrating on watching the ball and leaving it well, rather than trying out technical changes, but that is easier said than done when you lose confidence in your technique. He is one man I will not miss facing in retirement.
* * *
One point of contention, in what was a very successful winter, was the decision that James Anderson and I should miss the Bangladesh tour in February and March 2010. The idea was to rest ahead of what was going to be a gruelling eighteen months, including a full summer schedule, an Ashes campaign away from home and a World Cup in India.
While Anderson slipped under the radar somewhat, there was plenty of attention focused on the captain missing a tour. To some people it seemed that I was abdicating my responsibility, opting not to travel to an inhospitable part of the world while my team-mates suffered. I can understand why people felt that, but the decision for me to rest was based entirely on what was in the bes
t interests of the team. Strangely, I drew a bit of perverse pleasure from hearing ex-players and commentators criticising the decision. For me, it was a demonstration that we were willing to fly in the face of convention in order to achieve our goals, and this was a problem that needed to be addressed.
It had been clear for a long time that the sheer volume of international cricket was making it incredibly hard for players to perform consistently in all forms of the game. Either they were getting injured, and were therefore out of action for extended periods of time, or they were getting burnt out by the constant demands of time away from home, practice, mental application and pressure. Andy Flower and I decided that rather than run away from these uncomfortable truths, we should meet them head-on. If we were able to manage our players better than other teams, then hopefully we would be at an advantage.
After looking at the packed international schedule for the next eighteen months, it was clear that we had to be proactive if we wanted to protect ourselves against players burning out at exactly the wrong time – against Australia in the Ashes or during the World Cup. As soon as we looked at it that way, then the twin series against Bangladesh seemed to be the perfect opportunity to rest players who were likely to have busy schedules in the coming months. Anderson and I would miss the tour, while Collingwood and Broad would miss the Test series in England that followed. Other players, such as Pietersen, for instance, would be monitored on a match-by-match basis.
Driving Ambition - My Autobiography Page 19