‘I looked at the scoreboard, just to make sure no one had miscounted and there it was – M E Trescothick 100 … I raised my eyes to the sky and said quietly: “Cheers, Eddie.”’
My deep satisfaction at our victory in Karachi was tempered by the knowledge that I had a massive amount of work still to do to establish myself in the England side and stay there.
Clearly, my fitness was lacking, but, against Pakistan, so was my batting. I was fine against the quicks, but I had struggled against top-class spinners like Saqlain Mushtaq and Danish Kaneria, and, on the upcoming tour to Sri Lanka, starting in February 2001, I was about to face one of the most dangerous who ever lived, Muttiah Muralitharan. I knew full well that the way I batted against him in the next few months would decide whether I would be given the chance to play against Australia in the 2001 Ashes series in England. And Shane Warne.
Duncan knew how much needed to be done. And he believed he had developed just the method to help me, his ‘forward press’. Duncan’s theory was that, when batting against spinners, if you made a small but positive move onto the front foot before the ball was released, you would put yourself in a better position to go either fully forward or fully back depending on the length of the ball. It was unorthodox and some batsmen never really got on with it, preferring instead to stick to their own tried and trusted technique against the turning ball, but for those who mastered it Duncan’s explanation made sense: ‘If you are going to catch a bus, it is better to arrive at the bus stop early enough to read the number on the front, rather than at the last moment when you have no choice but to get on and find out later if it is going where you want to go.’
As I didn’t really have a technique to speak of, except to sweep as much as possible, and, failing that, slog, I was the perfect blank canvas for Duncan to work on. I had tried putting the theory into action during practice in Lahore, but I hadn’t managed to get to grips with it all. I ‘pressed’, then simply got stuck.
Now, when we got to Sri Lanka, I told Duncan I wanted to have another go. He agreed and I threw myself into it. I was glad of it for two reasons. First and obviously, I liked playing at this level so much I wanted to do it for years to come. Second and less so, I had my first real experience that the feeling of uneasiness at being away from home was more than the usual mix of run-of-the-mill homesickness, jet lag and sleepless nights. I didn’t know quite what the problem was; all I did know was that the feeling wasn’t right. It was just a shadow of what was to come later, but chilly enough and Nasser picked up on it, as a matter of fact, though in all probability he wouldn’t have had a clue he did. After practice on one of the first few days of the tour in Colombo, he came up to me asked: ‘How you feeling, Tres? You don’t seem yourself.’
‘I’m fine,’ I told him. ‘I just need to get into the tour, that’s all.’
That I did, spending so much time in the nets with Duncan that the other lads started asking me if he was my dad. Duncan’s lad they called me. Some have speculated that he invested so heavily in me in terms of hours and energy because it was perceived that I was his pick and therefore his reputation for being able to identify talent and nurture it rested on my becoming a success with England. Knowing Duncan I’m pretty sure all he wanted was the best for me and therefore the team. Seeing him shun the limelight on so many occasions in future years when his England teams won series after series, there is no way on earth you could describe Duncan as a glory-hunter. In fact, his painful shyness was often misinterpreted as plain rudeness, and sometimes vice versa, by the way.
But he could coach, don’t worry about that. I pressed and pressed again, and suddenly it all clicked into place, like it had with Peter Carlstein in Perth.
The second aspect of my batting that required improvement was my concentration when nearing a century. In county cricket I had often had trouble in the nervous 90s and, meeting up with the England sports psychologist Steve Bull for the first time, he recommended I try and practise batting through them by creating the scenario in my mind. Starting a net as though I was on 90, I would try to play my way through the next ten runs, a single here, two there, maybe a boundary if the shot was on and risk-free, so that I would know how to approach the task next time, if ever, I got within sight of three figures.
I have no hesitation in saying that I owe the first of my 14 Test hundreds, in the shadow of the old Dutch fort on the headland jutting into the crystal blue waters of the Indian Ocean in Galle, and probably quite a few of the rest as well, to Duncan, with a bit of Bully thrown in as well.
The day I was able to keep my promise to Alan Gregg, Eddie’s father, 24 February 2001, the third day of the first Test against Sri Lanka, was bloody boiling hot from the start. We had spent the best part of six sweltering sessions in the field watching Marvan Atapattu score a double-ton and Aravinda de Silva 106 and only once during that time did our mood briefly lift, when Caddy tried to sledge de Silva with hilarious consequences. ‘Harry’, well known on the county circuit playing for Kent as one of the most pleasant and inoffensive blokes of all time, had just cut a shortish ball for four over the covers and Caddy let him have a barrage. ‘F***in’ ‘ell, mate,’ he began, as he always did, in his unmistakeable Kiwi twang, ‘are you ever going to learn to play that shot properly?’ To a man, we winced because we knew what was coming next and Caddy certainly didn’t let us down. He bowled the exact same ball and de Silva leant back and hit it harder than I have ever seen a cricket ball hit before, straight along the deck, to the cover boundary.
‘You’re right, Caddy,’ de Silva called back, ‘but maybe, if you keep bowling those long-hops, I’ll get the hang of it in the end.’
The heat and humidity were so energy-sapping I drunk gallons of energy drinks to keep me going, with the unfortunate result that by the time I got back to my room to sleep I found I was caffeined-up to the eyeballs.
I was still wide-awake when, after they finally declared on 470 for five, I had my first chance to put the forward press to the test, as Murali grabbed the new ball to open the bowling with Chaminda Vaas. It was the first time I had ever faced the snake-eyed assassin and before then I had considered the idea that he put so much spin on the ball that you could actually hear it coming as nothing but one of those old cricketer’s tales. But I swear it really is true. I actually did hear the thing fizzing as it burned a hole in the air on its journey towards me. The eerie noise, like a whistling mosquito, only added to the hypnotic overall effect Murali had on the best batsmen in the world. And this was before he had even thought of inventing the doosra, the ball that looked like an off-break but which, on landing, turned the other way, like a leg-break. Controversy over his action had dogged him throughout his career and we did some practice against our off-spinner Robert Croft just chucking the ball from 19 yards, not because we thought Murali did it as we were quite happy to accept the findings of the ICC in that regard, it was just that no other bowler alive could turn the ball as much as he did, simply by bowling it. Actually, as time passed, I grew to appreciate that views in the dressing-room over whether he chucked the ball tended to depend on whether he had just got you out and for how many.
Soon enough I settled into my plan; a slight forward movement then pause, then spot the length. If the length was good I played straight on the basis that the top-spinner or arm-ball would hold its line, and the off-spinner would turn so much it was bound to go safely past the outside edge. I would be patient, forget the sweep completely, but if the ball was up I would drive straight or punch for singles and if it was short enough I would sway back and cut and pull. The fact was I couldn’t pick Murali’s different deliveries for love nor money, but, with Duncan’s expert help, I had developed a plan to play according to the law of probability and it worked. When I got to the 90s I then tuned myself into the practice sessions suggested by Steve Bull and flicked on the memory switch.
Murali helped no end when he dropped one short and let me pull him through mid-wicket for four to get to 99. And then, of course, standing one run away from a Test century for England, the biggest moment in my career, and probably my life, the bloody plan disappeared into thin air. Murali bowled the next ball in about the same area, but slightly fuller, I started to go back for the pull, realized it wasn’t short enough, panicked, then sort of shovelled my bat at it in a now quite desperate attempt to turn it into the leg-side for a single. In the end, hours of work in the nets came down to closing my eyes and hoping for the best and when I opened them again I saw the ball squirt sideways out off the leading edge at a comfortable catching height towards backward point on the offside. Only there was no backward point, so I ran and Robert Croft ran past me and I’d done it.
I looked at the scoreboard, just to make sure no one had miscounted and there it was – ME Trescothick 100.
I raised my bat towards Hayley, sitting in the main stand, and to the dressing-room, then raised my eyes to the sky and said quietly: ‘Cheers, Eddie.’ And soon, at the close of play, I was enjoying the moment with two more of our mates from school who had come all the way over to watch me play, Lee and Mark Cole. We sank a lot of beers that night in memory of a good friend.
Later, when I rang home to speak to mum and dad, I noticed dad didn’t sound too well. He didn’t say anything himself but, when I spoke to mum afterwards she told me why. With a substantial time difference between Galle and Bristol, they had both come down to the living room to watch the cricket on Sky in the middle of the night, well before the central heating fired up to battle the February chill. Dad had dressed for the cold, wrapped in pyjamas, socks and a thick dressing-gown and mum had also wrapped up warm. The difference was that, because dad was educated in the ways of cricket superstition, when the central heating system came on and mum went upstairs to change into normal clothes, as long as I was batting dad had to sit there in what he was wearing and not move. By the time play ended for the day in Galle he was sweating like a horse. He had obviously been on the point of heatstroke when we spoke.
The next day I was finally out for 122, but a combination of Murali’s brilliance and some shocking umpiring decisions did for us, all out 253. We counted seven bad ones in the match, of which the worst was suffered by Alec Stewart, leg before to a ball from Sanath Jayasuriya, bowling left-arm over, which pitched a yard outside leg-stump. And though the ‘press’ worked for me again in the second innings, helping me make 57 as we followed on, we lost by an innings and some.
Nasser’s pre-tour assessment, that we were ‘a mediocre side but improving’ may have been his way of dousing expectations after our win in Pakistan. But it suddenly sounded a bit too close for comfort and, after months of poor form with the bat, his own position in the team and as skipper were under scrutiny, especially as it was clear Michael Vaughan’s promotion could not be delayed a moment longer than necessary. And now, in the second Test in Kandy, Nasser showed exactly what he was made of and exactly what he wanted from his team. He had some luck, or rather, a lot. The umpiring by the local man B C Cooray and the South African ‘slow-death’ Rudi Koertzen was even worse than in Galle, with something approaching 15 errors in total, but, unlike in Galle, almost all of them went in our favour, prompting a local newspaper headline claiming ‘BC bats for England,’ and rumours that he had received death threats and his house had been attacked, both of which, happily, turned out to be nonsense.
The unfortunate BC first gave Nasser not out to clear bat-pad catches twice on his way to a pretty ugly 109, and Hicky was also reprieved twice by him before he had got off the mark in the first innings. The second, bowled Jayasuriya for 16, turned out to be his last in Test cricket. Hick, my inspiration as a teenager, played 65 Tests and enjoyed many good days. But did his record in international cricket do justice to his immense talent?
There is no doubt we were up for a fight, and on day three, so were the Sri Lankans. Trying to peg back our first innings lead of 90, they found themselves two for 2 when Caddy, who along with Gough and White bowled really well and really fast throughout, drew Jayasuriya into a big booming drive. The ball flew like a rocket to third slip where Thorpe took off and clung onto an amazing catch. But when Sanath stopped about three quarters of the way back to the main stand, we knew something was up. Their players had seen on the TV replays that Sanath had actually smashed the ball hard into the ground, and gestured to him to stay put, but with no way within the rules of using the TV evidence to prove his case, he ended up registering his ‘disappointment’ in spectacular fashion, taking off his helmet and hurling it into the turf at his feet. That provoked uproar among the travelling Barmy Army on the upper tier of the stand. They then started booing him and, for a few moments, it looked as if Sanath might actually invite one or two of them down to sort it out man to man.
Later the already fractious mood boiled over again with Atherton and Sangakkara blowing up on the pitch and afterwards, along with a fine against Sanath of 60 per cent of his match fee, these two were issued a severe reprimand by referee Hanumant Singh. So the final acts of the drama, with us needing 161 to win in the fourth innings, were played out in an atmosphere that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a spaghetti western, which was perfect for Thorpey, as cool as Clint Eastwood, to go out and nudge and nurdle 46 precious runs and for White and Giles to take us home by three wickets.
How knackered were we when we got to Colombo to play in the third and now deciding Test just four days later? Gone at all levels, as were they. We traded first innings scores around 250 in the first innings, with me getting out in ridiculous fashion when I smashed a short ball towards the boundary, looked towards the rope to see whether it had gone for four or six, then heard Russell Arnold at short leg screeching like a banshee. Upon inspection, he had found the ball in the billowing sails of his loose-fitting shirt, grabbed it and claimed a perfectly legitimate, if utterly bizarre catch.
The exhaustion of all concerned manifested itself on the third and last day, 17 March, when 22 wickets fell at the Sinhalese Sports Club in absolutely scorching heat, many of them, including mine, to very tired-looking shots indeed. Years earlier, nearly to the day in March 1993, Duncan’s namesake Keith Fletcher had seen his side become the first England team to lose a Test in Sri Lanka and commented afterwards: ‘It is very nearly too hot here, at this time of year, for Europeans to play cricket.’ To me, it was very nearly too hot for any human life to survive.
Vaughan was a tad fresher than the rest of us, coming in for Hick, and he made our second top score next to the amazing Thorpe, who dragged up 113 from his very essence. Then the bowlers, again huge in the inferno, skittled them out for 81. Giles and Croft shared 11 between them in the match and Caddick and Gough were also superb. And Thorpe was just brilliant in calming things down when it looked like we might keel over before we reached the finish line, making an unbeaten 32 out of 74 to win, with six wickets down. He virtually had to be carried off the field at the end and spent the rest of the evening battling dehydration.
We celebrated our fourth series win on the trot, and our second successive victory in hostile conditions in rather more appropriate fashion than we had done in Karachi, and the Barmy Army caught our mood. ‘Bring on the Aussies’ they sang all evening, and the theme from The Great Escape, and how good did all that sound?
* * *
We simply had nothing left with which to contest the one-day series that followed. But it only took a short break at home to perk me up for the start of the 2001 domestic season with Somerset, during which a combination of finally batting on pitches where the ball came onto the bat and my new technique allowed me to score millions. On 7 May in our Benson & Hedges Cup win over Gloucestershire at Taunton I hit my fourth century in six innings, and my third in that competition in seven days.
We won the first of two Tests against Pakistan, at Lord’s, thanks mainly to Caddick and Gough, who put memories of the previous season’s spat to bed as they both celebrated Darren’s first five-for at Lord’s and the Yorkshireman’s 200th Test wicket.
To me, Goughy was the most instinctively clever bowler I ever played with. In later years he may have suffered with his dodgy knee and then carved a niche for himself as the first cricketing champion of Strictly Come Dancing before Mark Ramprakash; he might have come across as a bit of a showman from time to time; and he was prone to the occasional gaffe, as in ‘Why do they call me rhino? Because I’m as strong as an ox’. But he was also quite simply one of the best and most consistent bowlers in the world, not express pace, but skiddy and quicker than he looked. Where Caddick, while brilliant if the pitch was right for his back-of-a-length bowling, only really had one way to bowl, Gough could switch and change to suit the conditions. He seemed to have a plan and a ball for every batsman he came up against. He knew just when to bowl a slower ball or a bumper. In the way he was always probing for a weakness and, if he found it knew exactly how to exploit it; in the way he was always at you, he made me think of how Shane Warne might have operated had he been a pace bowler rather than the best leg-spinner the world has ever seen. It was no coincidence that the pair of them got on so well.
By the time we played in the second Test against Pakistan, at Old Trafford, where Alec took over as captain in Nasser’s absence through injury, Vaughan made his first Test hundred (120) in a first innings stand of 267 with Thorpe (138) and I was helped to my second Test ton in our second innings by Athers. Whether it was eyesight or merely my lack of ability, I found myself having a lot of trouble dealing with the reverse-swing of Wasim, Waqar and Abdul Razzaq. So Ath, who could see it a mile off, suggested the following system. When he was batting at the non-striker’s end he would look closely at which way round the bowler was holding the ball in his hand, a sure sign of which way it would swing. If the ball was going to swing in towards me, he would hold the bat handle in his right hand as he faced me, indicating the ball would be moving from my left to right, and vice versa. The result was my second Test ton and my first at home, 117 in the second innings, earning me a spot on the dressing-room honours board. It was a brilliant plan, so brilliant that, rather carelessly, and to Atherton’s wry amusement, I couldn’t stop myself from sharing it with the nation in my newspaper column for the Mail On Sunday the following week, with relevant details and diagrams. I still had a lot to learn about dealing with the media, but, amazingly, this eventually turned out to be only my third most controversial offering of the season.
Somehow, on that final day, we contrived to slither from 213 for four on my dismissal to 261 all out and lost a match we should have drawn without thinking, or even possibly won.
The trouble was in our approach to being set a target of 370 in 112 overs. In later years, with other characters in the side, I believe we would have gone for it from the start and given ourselves a good chance of getting there. Now though, the mindset of ‘what we have, we hold’ was still ingrained deep in the psyche of some of this group of players and in the mindset of the captain, so used were they to being burned for failure in their earlier years. Instead of thinking ‘Right, 370 to win the game’, we were thinking ‘Christ, we’ve got to bat all day to save this.’ We’d made up our minds before the innings started that we would have to scrap for the draw that would secure us a series victory. Who knows if that thinking made a difference? Maybe they were just better than us on the day, but it didn’t take much for our balloon to be pricked. Afterwards I recall thinking that, despite everything we had achieved in the previous year – wins over West Indies, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka – this stupid collapse meant we were still not quite strong enough or confident enough when the pressure was on us to express ourselves freely and positively; thinking that people were still too insular and fearful, that individuals were still more interested in themselves than the team and that we had to change that mentality or we would end up going nowhere.
And now we had to play Australia, experts in the theory and practice of doing your head in.
* * *
The world champions arrived in England in early June with Steve Waugh at the helm and war on their mind, or rather The Art of War, by the ancient Chinese warlord Sun Tzu, which their coach John Buchanan used as his coaching manual. No prisoners were to be taken and anyone or anything that stood in their way was to be brushed aside. And the talking started almost as soon as they got here. I can’t recall who said or wrote it but one of them described me as being about to find out my honeymoon period was over and the words stayed with me for the rest of the summer.
The highlights of our triangular one-day series with Pakistan and Australia were the 69 I scored against the Aussies at Bristol on 10 June and the 137 I made against Pakistan at Lord’s two days later, though both matches were lost. In the immediate aftermath of making that hundred at Lord’s I was in a pretty weird mood. I’d enjoyed the innings hugely, because it was a bloody battle from start to finish and I made my first one-day ton for England, but as time passed the realization grew that, in the end, I had probably cost us a victory I had done so much to earn.
Chasing 243 to win, I started by running out Nick Knight for one. We then lost Alec for four and Vaughan for a duck and were 36 for three when Middlesex’s Owais Shah came in and played brilliantly on his home ground for 62. He was out at 196 for four, then three more wickets fell in quick succession and, at 205 for seven, it was down to me, with only Caddy, Gough and Alan Mullally for company. When the final over began we were 234 for eight, with nine runs needed and two wickets left. I looked up at Caddy at the other end, with the absolutely terrible Mullally to come, and considered my options. I plumped for going for broke and tried to launch Saqlain into the Mound Stand for my third six of the innings. I knew I was cooked the moment the ball left the bat because I just hadn’t got enough of it. I watched in despair as Shahid Afridi positioned himself for the catch at mid-wicket, then in hope when Shoaib Malik, who hadn’t heard his call, ran straight into him and knocked him flying. Sadly for me, Afridi got up holding the ball in his hands, Caddy was out stumped soon after and we lost by two runs.
I resolved, there and then, that if I ever found myself in a similar situation I would make sure I finished the job. But any disappointment at not doing so here was soon replaced by embarrassment at finishing the tournament with scores of 15, 0 and 0, the last one, bowled McGrath, and at some comments I made in my Mail on Sunday column. Bad behaviour by certain sections of the crowd, sadly mainly the young Pakistan supporters, had led to nasty incidents of pitch invasions, including an assault on Nick Knight. When Australia’s Michael Bevan, standing on the Lord’s balcony at the end of their NatWest final win against Pakistan, was hit on the side of the head by a full lager can thrown from the crowd in front of the pavilion, the fall-out was hard to contain. And I didn’t help by going into print to suggest, reasonably I thought, that anyone caught behaving like that at a public sports event should be heavily fined and ‘banged up for a night in the cells.’ Thank you, Nelson Mandela.
My columns were becoming unmissable, by now. But the best was yet to come.
The prospect of taking on Australia was exciting but incredibly daunting. We were up against it from the start, with injuries removing Thorpe for four Tests, Hussain for two and Vaughan for all five, and it took Waugh & Co. just 11 playing days to achieve the three wins they needed to retain the little urn, once again.
Initially, I allowed the ‘honeymoon’ comments to worm away in my head. As I prepared for my first Ashes experience, at Edgbaston, I wasn’t thinking about facing Glenn McGrath, but GLENN F***ING McGRATH, which is probably why, after Atherton called me for a leg bye from the only ball he bowled me, I edged the first one I received from Jason Gillespie to Shane Warne for a two-ball duck and they said thanks for coming.
We made 294, thanks bizarrely to Caddy and Alec Stewart putting on 103 for the tenth wicket. The pressure was off in the second innings, but only because Steve Waugh, Damien Martyn and later, brutally, Adam Gilchrist all made hundreds in their 576, and their lead of 282 meant we were doomed. So I relaxed and hit an encouraging 76, and shared a second wicket stand of 95 with Mark Butcher who scored 41. Slightly less encouraging was the fact that the next highest score was nine, three blokes made ducks, Nasser broke his finger, and we were all out for 164, losing in four days by an innings and 118 runs.
Until the series was over as a contest, on the third day of the third Test at Nottingham, we never looked forward.
There was indecision over who should lead at Lord’s in Nasser’s absence. He did already consider me as a possible long-term successor but it was too early for me now. Alec said he didn’t want to do it again, so Atherton agreed, somewhat reluctantly, that he would have a go if there was no one else. There was no one else.
They slaughtered us by eight wickets there and buried us by seven at Trent Bridge even though we twice were on top and Steve Waugh had to be carried off on a stretcher in their second innings with a torn calf which everyone presumed would force him out for the rest of the series.
It was at this point that I produced my most significant column to date, in which I freely admitted that the Australians were far superior to us in all departments and had been playing cricket from another planet. Not exactly rocket science, surely. But I got such a hammering the next day for my defeatist attitude I resolved to put my laptop away for the time being at least.
Our batting was down to the bare bones by now, but with Nasser due to be fit for the fourth Test at Leeds a major issue had developed over who should make way. It was decided that Butch had to go and not just for cricketing reasons. Butch had always been a sociable type and his method of winding down after a day’s play was one used by generations of cricketers before him the world over – he had a few beers. This time, however, he had overstepped the mark. One night in Nottingham, and probably not the last night of the game, he had taken things to excess and Duncan wanted to drop him to show he would not tolerate it. Nasser agreed, but as the management meeting broke up Duncan indicated he wanted to make a couple more phone calls before coming to a final decision. Good job he did. Butcher’s brilliant 173 not out in the second innings at Headingley of the fourth Test was an innings of genius; anything short he cut and pulled and he even came down the track to drive McGrath through the covers. He was inspired and led us to victory by six wickets. Twenty years on from the last time an Englishman played a similar innings here to win a Test against Australia against all the odds, Beefy would have been proud of him.
From my point of view the match was memorable for reasons unconnected with Butcher’s brilliance.
By now I was firmly established as the man in charge of looking after the ball when we were fielding. It was my job to keep the shine on the new ball for as long as possible with a bit of spit and lot of polish. And through trial and error I had finally settled on the best type of spit for the task at hand.
It had been common knowledge in county cricket for some time that certain sweets produced saliva which, when applied to the ball for cleaning purposes, enabled it to keep its shine for longer and therefore its swing. As with most of the great scientific discoveries, this one happened quite by accident. While at Warwickshire, Dermot Reeve noticed that his bowlers somehow had the ability to keep the ball swinging far longer than any team they faced. The problem was no one in their side knew why. By process of investigation and elimination he realized the reason was that the player in charge of polishing and keeping the ball clean was his bespectacled top-order batsman Asif Din, or rather, what he did to keep his concentration levels up, chewing extra strong mints.
It took a while for word to get around the circuit but once it did the sales of sweets near the county grounds of England went through the roof.
I tried Asif’s confection of choice but couldn’t get on with them. Too dry. Then I had a go at Murray Mints and found they worked a treat. Trouble was, even allowing for trying to keep one going as long as possible I still used to get through about 15 a day and the taste soon palled. Still, at least I never had to pay for them. Once Phil Neale came on board as our operations manager it was one of his jobs to make sure the dressing-room was fully stocked at all times. We even tried taking them on tour a couple of times until we realized that they didn’t work as well on the Kookaburra balls used overseas as the Dukes we used back home.
On the first day of the match in Leeds, an unfortunate fielding incident almost gave the game away to the Aussies for the first time, as I dived to gather the ball at square leg, landed on my side and a shower of Murray Mints spewed out of my trouser pocket all over the grass right in front of the umpire. Fortunately, neither he nor the two batsmen seemed to take much notice as I scrambled around on all fours trying desperately to gather in the sweets before they started asking awkward questions.
But our celebratory mood soon dipped again in the final Test at The Oval where Steve Waugh made it his business to rub our noses in it and prove once and for all that the common or garden Pom is gutless and weak.
There was no way Waugh was fit to play. But, apparently, he had been so riled by comments Thorpe had made about not being able to play because of a broken finger, he decided he was going to take the field in the fifth Test even if it killed him. His batting in their first innings was incredible whichever way you looked at it. Making 157 not out, without a runner, when he was limping and in great pain, said everything about his extraordinary resolve and will. At the same time we did question his judgement because his almost obsessive desire to prove his point could have resulted in the injury becoming far worse. And in the end it all seemed to be less about Aussie pride and more about his. Still no one could argue with his contribution to their 641 for four declared or, despite Mark Ramprakash’s excellent 133, the result, another hammering. Four-one, Thanks for the series. See you next year.
As if Duncan and Nasser didn’t have enough on their plate, now Alec Stewart and Darren Gough hit them with the news that they wanted to take a break from touring in the winter. Neither wanted to go to India, though Gough said he would be available for the one-dayers there, but they were happy to pitch up in New Zealand in the early part of 2002.
In Alec’s case there was speculation that he didn’t want to travel to the country where the allegations about his involvement with the bookmaker MK Gupta had originated the previous winter, though Alec insisted he wanted to take a break to spend more time at home with his family and undertake surgery on his elbows.
Duncan wasn’t buying any of it, for any reason. As far as he was concerned he didn’t want players picking and choosing tours to suit them and that was non-negotiable. And then, almost as soon as the squads were announced, with both names absent, an event took place that made such matters appear less than infinitessimally important.
The terrorist attack on the twin-towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan on 11 September 2001 and the reverberations even impacted in a small way on cricket. When the great grey cloud had settled, security was suddenly elevated to the top of everyone’s list of waking thoughts, and attention was inevitably drawn to our winter commitments.
A short five-match one-day series in Zimbabwe in October should present no problems and it didn’t. We won all five, with Freddie and Ben Hollioake putting in very promising displays with bat and ball and, when Nasser decided to have a breather, my appointment as captain of the fourth match in Bulawayo seemed another clear indication of future thinking.
But travelling to India was another matter entirely. The Foreign Office advice to travellers had made it crystal clear that, while they were ‘unaware of any specific threat’, India was one of a number of travel destinations where Westerners should ‘keep a low profile’. Those of the squad who were married with children felt particularly vulnerable and altogether five of the selected squad, myself, Andy Caddick, Ashley Giles, Craig White and Robert Croft, expressed doubts about going. It’s all very well for people sitting in offices to be brave about these things or for people to start writing in the newspapers about not giving in to terror, but we are cricketers, not professional soldiers. In the end, for some of us it was a case of ‘Well, I don’t want to go, but if you’re going, I’ll go and let’s get it done.’ Only Croft and Caddy pulled out, for reasons we all sympathised with and understood. Cricket was our livelihood and our passion, of course, but it was only cricket after all.
It turned out to be a tour of mediums and lows. We lost the first Test in Mohali by ten wickets and Thorpe flew home in distress the day before the second in Ahmedabad to try and patch up his marriage, which gave Vaughan a way into the side but meant Butcher had no option but to play despite being sick as a dog. He and I put on 124 for the first wicket and I still don’t know how he made 51 because he was actually throwing up moments before the start and again all the way through lunch, shouting at the toilet for about half an hour. I fell on 99, annoyingly one short of my third Test ton, and soon afterwards Craig White played brilliantly for his first and only Test century.
Then, when India batted, I got my first taste of what Sachin Tendulkar meant to his people. The crowd swelled from about a tenth full to completely full and outside the ground a near-empty wasteland was suddenly covered in dust, bicycles, tuk-tuks and mopeds.
Inside, when one of their openers got out, the crowd cheered and cheered until they noticed that the batsman coming in at No.3 was not Sachin but Rahul Dravid, at which point they booed and booed.
But from the moment he got off the mark to the moment he was out for 104 it was all cheers and the result, a tame draw, seemed utterly immaterial to his supporters. We even won praise for our resilience.
However we won nothing from the locals for what happened in the final Test in Bangalore when, after Vaughan was given out handled the ball for 64 in our first innings 336, we adopted tactics designed to stop Sachin scoring that for some went too close to the line separating fair and unfair play. In essence Fred bowled round the wicket at his head and Ashley bowled over the wicket into the rough about a foot outside his leg stump with seven fielders on the onside, plus the wicket-keeper James Foster.
We didn’t care. It may not have been pretty and Sachin did manage to make 90, but it took so long and the match was so badly hit by the weather and some of us were so knackered that we were merely grateful not to be chasing leather again and very happy to be home, on Christmas Eve.
When I finished eating and sleeping my way through my Christmas day birthday, I reflected on my first full year as an England cricketer. From my own perspective, though I still wanted more and more, maybe the occasional break might not go amiss. As far as the team was concerned, I wondered whether our performance in the final Test in Bangalore might turn out to be a significant turning point. Did we, deep down, employ those tactics against Sachin because we thought it was okay to settle for a 1–0 defeat? And did that mean Steve Waugh was right about us being weak and gutless? And what were we going to do about it?