‘All I got for my trouble in pointing out these dangers was a hammering in the papers and a bollocking from Duncan. It wasn’t that he was unsympathetic. It was just that he felt such thoughts should be kept within the dressing-room.’
There were occasions, probably four in my entire career, when batting became so easy for me it was almost frightening, when everything seemed to be happening in such super-slow-motion that I felt like the master of my own laws of time and space.
For a few moments during my first Test hundred in Galle in February 2001, and my second, against Pakistan that summer, that feeling settled on me briefly. But in my first England innings of 2002, in the opening one-day international against India at Eden Gardens, Kolkata, it was with me for every single ball I faced.
Chasing 282 for victory under lights, I batted like I was in a scene from The Matrix, picking up the sight and the flight of the white ball, then moving so fast and freely that it felt like I had about a week to play each delivery. No matter who was bowling or what they were offering up, I felt like I could have done the shopping in the time it took for the ball to arrive down my end and that I could take my pick of about a hundred different shots for each ball. Fair enough, I might have been a tad light-headed that day, what with 92,000 people in the ground and me suffering from the effects of a gastric virus, but I had a sense of utter dominance. And it was especially pleasing that it happened for me against the veteran Indian pace bowler Javagal Srinath. I’ve nothing at all against him personally and we always found him a determined but charming opponent. It was just that, as I recorded earlier, when county pace bowlers were getting me out for a pastime in the late 90s, Srinath had once made me look so bad it was embarrassing, making me play and miss at about five balls an over in a Benson & Hedges match.
Now I found myself able to play him, and all the other bowlers, not with slogging disrespect but with risk-free disregard. The ball was as big as a beachball and my bat was as wide as my car, and I reached the fastest ever one-day hundred by an England batsman, from 80 balls. I’d hit 121 from 109 and felt sure I was going to bat through to the end, as I had failed to do against Pakistan at Lord’s the previous summer; in fact I was batting so effortlessly that it felt to me like I was going to score almost all of the required runs myself, when I was on the wrong end of a complete shocker from umpire S.K. Sharma, given out lbw to a ball from Srinath, bowling over the wicket, that pitched at least six inches outside my leg stump. It wasn’t the only one but it was the main reason why the management later presented a letter of complaint to the match referee Denis Lindsay about the standard of umpiring. Needless to say, once it became public, that went down with the locals like a plate of cold biriyani.
The innings was not a revenge mission, just an indicator to me of how far I had come in a relatively short space of time. Ironically, but typical of my tendency to over-analyse my batting at times, as I reviewed the innings later I was struck by the unsettling feeling that, if batting was that easy, something must be wrong.
Over-analyse? All the time. In my quest for batting perfection I would leave no shot unexplained and my contributions in the rest of the series reflected that ability I had to disappear up my own coaching manual. But I did manage to regain my focus in the last of the six games in Mumbai, on 3 February, in which I made 95 in our 255, and in which Fred made a very mature 40, adding 37 with Gough for the last wicket.
Fred had struggled with the bat in the Tests but, in the last one in Bangalore, he had started to show how good he could become with the ball, and he had been consistently fast and straight throughout this series, mainly as first change behind Gough, Hoggard or Caddick. We needed to win here to earn a 3–3 draw and to pick up some momentum halfway through an already gruelling winter, and they needed six from the final two balls when Fred bowled Srinath for his third wicket, promptly ripped off his shirt and started waving it around his head. It was a spontaneous gesture of celebration which captured his and our mood. Unbeknown to us it enraged the Indian skipper Sourav Ganguly, who made a mental note to give some back at the earliest available opportunity.
Our subsequent tour to New Zealand started strangely for me, perked up in the middle, then petered out in tragic circumstances, and during it I underwent my first, but by no means last experience of the phenomenon known as burnout which later contributed so much to the illness that finally ended my career.
There was no doubt I was physically tired when we arrived in the land of the long white cloud and things were about to get cloudier still. At the time we were conducting ongoing experiments with the balance of the one-day side and, when we arrived at the West-pac stadium in Wellington, the home of the local rugby league team, to play the second of five matches, we put into practice the latest idea, which was for me to replace James Foster as wicket-keeper. I did all right with the gloves, as it turned out, taking my first of a career total of four catches behind the stumps to dismiss Brendon McCullum off Fred. In the break between innings, the Kiwi film director Peter Jackson orchestrated the crowd as they made grunting, howling and roaring noises for him to record and use for the battle scenes in his upcoming movie The Lord Of The Rings. It clearly had an effect on our batting as we slid to 89 all out, our second-lowest total in 344 one-day matches, with me starting things off with a big fat zero. Maybe we were scared that, if it looked as though we might win, Jackson might set the Orcs on us.
But my batting in that one-day series was shocking; my scores were 1,0, 41,0 and 5 and we went down 3–2. End of experiment.
By the time we arrived in Queenstown for the pre-Test warm-up against Otago, I was absolutely knackered and made the grave error of saying so to the press. I was merely trying to add my voice to what we all considered should be an ongoing discussion about the physical, psychological and emotional effects of life on the road as an international cricketer; and, particularly, life on the road for an England cricketer for whom the unique demands of playing every northern hemisphere summer at home as well as every southern hemisphere summer on tour, meant we now spent almost 12 months a year living out of suitcases and in hotel rooms. Of course the lifestyle was considered luxurious, our every off-field need was catered for by a solid back-up staff including a doctor, nutritionist, sports psychologist etc., we were very well paid for our efforts and it beat real work any day. But whereas in the past players could enjoy the countries they were visiting in much more leisurely and relaxing fashion, with the tours now so truncated, all you did on them was play, practice or travel, and grab the occasional game of golf on a rare day-off. That, coupled with the four-wall fever that can strike you when you are stuck inside a hotel bedroom complete with en-suite bathroom for days on end prior to moving onto the next one, was simply not a natural way to live. It creates extraordinary strains for the players not to mention their wives and families.
All I got for my trouble in pointing out these dangers was a hammering in the papers and a bollocking from Duncan. It wasn’t that he was unsympathetic. It was just that he felt such thoughts should be kept within the dressing-room. His attitude was that we all knew what the problems were but by airing them in public it gave people the opportunity to attack you, to claim such thoughts were a sign of weakness, of giving in. Just another whingeing Pom. So, from then on, I kept them to myself, for the time being, though I did manage to earn the next match off and I bloody needed it too.
The opening Test in Christchurch was just extraordinary. It was my first experience of playing on a ‘drop-in’, pre-prepared pitch and it started wet, not damp. Both Mark Butcher and I were out for nothing in Chris Cairns’s first over and only Nasser Hussain’s dog-fighting 106 got us to 228. New Zealand did even worse, Hoggard taking seven for 63 as they made just 147.
Then the pitch dried out and turned into a road. Whereas 375 runs were made in the first two innings, 919 were made in the last two in just over two days. Thorpe, back again and by now in better mood, hit 200 not out, the fastest double-hundred for England against the Kiwis, from 231 balls faced. He put on 281 for the sixth wicket with Fred, who made his first Test ton, 137, as we declared on 468 for six, setting them a ridiculous 550 to win. At 333 for nine, with 217 still needed for a New Zealand win, Nathan Astle’s 134 seemed merely a bold effort in a losing cause. By the time he reached his double-ton, from 153 balls, taking 61 off four overs with the second new cherry, he had smashed Thorpe’s 24-hour-old record. He went from 101 to 200 in a scarcely believable 39 deliveries and the harder we tried, the further he hit it. When he was last out for 222, they had cut the target to 99 and we were extremely relieved to win by 98, towards the end of a four-day Test that will never be forgotten by those who played in it or watched.
From such highs we were cut so low by the news that reached us, at 10.30 a.m. on 23 March, as we were preparing to field on the third day of the second Test at the Basin Reserve in Wellington. Ben Hollioake, our friend and a member of the one-day squad in New Zealand less than a month before, had been killed in a car crash in Western Australia in the early hours of the morning. He was 24.
I was sitting in the back of the dressing-room when Duncan told me Ben was dead. In fact, he had to tell me twice before I could actually take it in. Naturally the Surrey boys, Ramps, Thorpe and Butcher took it hardest. But everyone shared their pain. Ben was just one of those rare individuals no one ever had a bad word for, we all had our own personal memories of the guy and none of us really wanted to carry on playing that day.
As a cricketer I believe it would only have been a matter of time before Ben realized his huge potential. He could do things with the bat that no one else could. Ever since he played his first match for England as a 19-year-old in a one-dayer at Lord’s against Australia in 1997, and scored an elegant 63, he had been marked for special things and, after hard work and encouragement from his brother Adam, he appeared to be on the verge of making the final breakthrough. All we wanted from him now was consistency and he would have been a certainty for the squad for the 2003 World Cup in South Africa a year ahead, and from then on the sky might have been the limit.
As a bloke, Ben was a beauty, laid-back, seemingly always serene and calm and always caring about other people as much if not more than himself. Once, in Zimbabwe the previous autumn when Thorpey was having terrible emotional problems dealing with the break-up of his marriage, Ben scoured Bulawayo for supplies and came back with a sack of the best local hand-rolling tobacco and a bottle of proper Scotch to help ease his mate’s pain. I still find it hard to believe that such a wonderful young man should be taken so long before his time.
No one actually suggested calling the game off, but from time to time the action just stopped as, one after another, most of us succumbed to tears. By now the Barmy Army also knew that Ben had crashed his 924 Porsche after a family dinner, just prior to flying home for pre-season training with Surrey, and that his girlfriend was fighting for her life. When they started to sing ‘One Ben Hollioake, there’s only one Ben Hollioake’ I just thought to myself: ‘Right. Let’s call this game off.’
As we lined up for a minute’s silence the following morning Butch could have filled the ground with his tears. In the circumstances, the fact that the match ended in a tame draw was probably for the best.
I don’t think the cloud ever lifted for the rest of the tour; the final match, in Auckland, was pretty farcical, rain affected and lost. The weather ruled out all but 50-odd overs in the first two days and time was running out for any kind of result to be achieved when somebody, somewhere decided they could turn the floodlights on at 5.50 p.m. on the fourth evening and play until about midnight, which might have been fine with a white ball and coloured clothes, but with whites on and a red ball to try and pick up was just plain mad. Nasser complained a few times that we could barely see the ball and Usman Afzaal, fielding as sub, very nearly got cleaned up by a skier that missed his head at deep square leg by an inch. The umpires Venkat and Doug Cowie wouldn’t listen and were only prepared to offer the light to the batting side, who stayed on, slapped a few and ended up setting us a target of 312 in 105 overs, which we never looked like getting on a dodgy pitch and didn’t. Mark Ramprakash, batting at No.6, made 9 and 2 and never played for England again.
Many observers are still wondering why. Why, when he was by streets the best batsman in county cricket, could Ramps not do what was necessary to make himself a successful Test player? I would not presume to offer a definitive answer, except to say that the reason I think I managed to settle in so comfortably was that I just absolutely loved everything about the experience. For me the England dressing-room, the field onto which we stepped and the atmosphere generated by the crowd meant international cricket was not just the place to be, it was the only place to be. Maybe Ramps and even Graeme Hick just didn’t feel so much at home and a story told by Mike Atherton may furnish some clues. During the second Test of England’s 1998–99 Ashes tour in Perth, Ramps was batting under pressure for his place, as he so often seemed to be. As Glenn McGrath ran up to bowl, he prepared by moving slightly forward onto the front foot. The ball slipped out of Glenn’s hand and turned into a beamer which was heading straight for Ramps’ head at around 82 mph. Sighting conditions were perfect, but, instead of ducking or taking evasive action or trying to fend the ball off, Ramps carried on moving towards the ball and finished off in perfect position for an immaculate forward-defensive shot, head down and over where a good length ball would have pitched. The only problem was that the ball was by now wedged hard in between the bars of the grille on his batting helmet, having flown straight from the bowler’s hand at head height, without bouncing. It was lodged so far in that it had to be manhandled out by one of the Aussie fielders. Michael’s theory was that when Ramps was under the pump he actually lost focus, albeit temporarily, to the extent that, when he first went in, he was virtually playing blind and only if he somehow survived the first few balls would he then have a chance to make a score. I’ve no reason to argue with that assessment and can only offer sympathy that someone could get himself so wound up that all the ability in the world could not help him.
* * *
When we crawled home to England at the end of the first week in April, some of us were ready for a long break. Since the end of the previous summer, those who were in the side for both forms of the game were spent. A few had been on three tours, to Zimbabwe, India and New Zealand, and if I was knackered in Queenstown, I was on the floor by now. Yet there seemed no real respite. Another month slipped by, with a few games for Somerset and then another Test series, against Sri Lanka, which we won 2–0 after drawing the first at Lord’s despite following on. And I didn’t find any real form until the final of the NatWest triangular event at Lord’s against India on 13 July, in which, once again, I made a one-day century in a losing cause.
The match actually revolved around two of our veteran performers, Hussain and Thorpe. We had been inconsistent in one-day cricket for some time and there were calls for changes to be made, for some of the older players to be replaced by younger guys to liven up the fielding. Duncan was keen on introducing new blood but he was also aware of the value of experience. In fact, he used to go on and on about how little we had compared to other countries.
Nasser had taken a lot of stick from commentators like Ian Botham who suggested that his grafting style was not what England needed at No.3 and that he should drop down the order, to let Fred go further up to take advantage of the fielding restrictions in the first 15 overs. What is more, the critics pointed out, Nasser had not yet made a one-day hundred in 71 attempts. Nass wasn’t happy with the added pressure but, as so often in the past, it gave him something to kick against, though he seemed to me so keen to prove his critics wrong, that it may have blurred his thinking as captain.
In that final he wasn’t at his most fluent, but he supported me brilliantly in a second-wicket stand of 185 in 177 balls. I reached my third one-day hundred from 89 deliveries, but, when I was out, Nasser and Fred took us to a huge total of 325, England’s fourth highest, and on the way completed his first ODI hundred in his 72nd match. At this point he took off his helmet and, after raising his bat to the dressing-room, raised a three-fingered salute to the media centre and to Botham in particular, then turned his back and pointed to the number 3 on his shirt, leaving no one in the ground in any doubt as to where he felt he should carry on batting. It would have been the perfect gesture by Nasser to his critics, except that when we needed cool heads to shut out the game with the ball and in the field, mayhem was allowed to take over; Yuvraj Singh and Mohammad Kaif saw them home with three balls to spare, at which point Ganguly removed his shirt on the Indian balcony and could not stop himself doing a Freddie in celebration. Nasser may have won the argument about his batting position, but at what cost?
As for Thorpe, we had all known for some time that, after trying but failing to keep his marriage together, he had been struggling to maintain his focus and enthusiasm, and he had lost his place in the starting line-up as the series went on, but that day he did something which made a deep impact on me. He retired from one-day international cricket with immediate effect.
I was still pumped from having taken part in such an amazing match, from scoring another hundred at Lord’s and having won, albeit rather fortunately, the award for the man of the series. And, even though my initial wide-eyed enthusiasm about playing for England was being tested by the demands placed upon us all, I was still utterly and completely convinced that there could be no better feeling in professional life than to play cricket for England and to score a century for England, at the home of the game.
So, as we sat on the dressing-room balcony taking in the noise and commotion of the crowd, I asked Thorpey: ‘Mate, why would you ever want to give all this up? You don’t think you’ll miss it?’
‘Tres,’ he replied, ‘I’m sorry but I couldn’t give a f***.’
Clearly his mood was as low as it had been for a while, and though he initially made himself available for the upcoming Ashes tour that winter, he subsequently pulled out, once again putting his future career in jeopardy.
Knowing then what I do now, of course, to Thorpe the question must have sounded simply absurd.
I did manage to take a break for the second half of the summer, as it happens, though not quite the way I would have planned it. Fielding for Somerset against Worcestershire in a Cheltenham & Gloucester quarter-final at Taunton in the week before the first Test against India at Lord’s, I was standing at extra-cover when Hick belted a ball with a touch of slice on it and, as it skidded across the turf it pushed back my left thumb and shattered it. The first effect was that I had to cancel a few precious days of holiday with Hayley as I went to have my thumb re-set and put in plaster. And I missed about seven weeks in all, which took out the first three games of the series, which I watched at home on the box, ironically not enjoying my enforced rest at all, but thinking ‘this is horrible’.
Just before I was fit enough to come back Hayley and I did manage to get a week in Marbella, which meant I had to miss Somerset’s C&G semi-final against Kent. You can imagine how thrilled Hayley was that I spent virtually the whole of that day texting and receiving texts from the boys at the ground as we scored 344 for five and Kent got closer and closer until they were finally all out five runs short.
Quite a bit had gone on in my absence from the England side, with Kent’s Rob Key being given a go at the top of the order and doing enough to get himself on the plane to Australia, and debuts awarded to Simon Jones and Steve Harmison, two up-and-coming young pacemen. With Gough and Caddick starting to creak, the time had come to cast the net around for the next generation of young quicks, especially as we would need something pretty special in terms of firepower to unsettle the Australians that winter. Fred and Hoggard took the new ball in the first Test against India at Lord’s in which Jones, well known to Duncan from his days as Glamorgan coach, made his debut. He had proper wheels and could bowl good reverse-swing as well. He was raw but busting a gut to succeed and though as Welsh as Tom Jones, bowling for England was in his genes. His dad, Jeff was a lively left-arm quick who toured West Indies in the 1960s but had been forced to quit early through an elbow injury. Alex Tudor was also back in the running and Harmison was known to a few of us who had faced him at Durham as a bowler who could make the ball take the elevator from just short of a length and at express pace. He clearly needed a lot of work and his confidence boosting at all times, but if he could develop along the right lines he had everything, and he made a promising start with five wickets on his debut in the second Test at Trent Bridge.
It was just now, towards the end of August, that I also came across another young paceman who I thought was destined for great things. I’d never seen the lad before I travelled to Blackpool with the Somerset squad as twelfth man to get myself ready to return to the England squad for the final Test with India, but the 19-year-old rookie swing bowler they called the Burnley Express more than lived up to his nickname. He took six for 41 as we rolled over for 140 in our first innings, and another three for 16 in seven overs as they routed us in the second for 71. In the middle of all that I rang Duncan, making no attempt to hide the excitement in my voice.
‘Fletch, I’ve just see this lad Jimmy Anderson and I’m telling you we’ve got to pick this bloke now because he was magnificent. You’ve got to take him to the ICC Champions Trophy and keep him in mind for the one-dayers in Australia and the World Cup after that. He’s only 19, but I’m telling you he is that good.’
Duncan said he would bear it in mind and Jimmy ended up being drafted into the England Academy squad for work down under that winter, which meant he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time when opportunity knocked a few months later.
For the time being the series ended in a 1–1 draw and a drawn match at The Oval. Vaughan completed an amazing series, in which he made 615 runs at an average of 102.5 with his third hundred in seven innings, 195 to set alongside his 197 at Trent Bridge. It was his fourth hundred of the summer in all as he had made one in the very first Test against Sri Lanka. He was performing with the kind of ice-cool, consistent, yet understated brilliance you would have expected from a man with the nickname ‘Virgil’, pilot of Thunderbird 2.
Sadly, when we arrived in Australia after a soggy and disappointing Champions Trophy in Sri Lanka, we very soon discovered we were beyond even the powers of International Rescue to save us.
As usual for visiting Poms we were beaten up from all angles almost from the moment we arrived. The smile of satisfaction that they were better than us at cricket and the scowl of contempt at our general uselessness was only later replaced from time to time by a raised eyebrow of respect for the fact that they weren’t better than Vaughan, who had an utterly brilliant series that settled the issue of who should be England’s next captain firmly in his favour.
Things started badly, at Lilac Hill in Perth when Steve Harmison began an over that at one stage, littered with no balls and wides, looked as though it may take him the rest of the tour to finish. Fred never made it because of complications following a hernia operation that had kept him out of the final Test against India and when Goughy’s knee ruled him out, we were right up against it as we went into the first Test in Brisbane.
Nasser has always taken responsibility for the decision to stick Australia in to bat that first morning of the 2002–03 Ashes series. He wrote later (about two days later, in fact) that he took one look around the dressing-room and saw something approaching fear on the faces of one or two of the players and that persuaded him to give up first use of what turned out to be a very good batting track. It’s about time I held up my hand and admitted my part in the start of our and maybe Nasser’s eventual downfall.
It is true that Nasser was worried that some of the younger lads might not be up for it that day, and that it might be better to field first if only to avoid the possibility of us getting rolled. But that was only after he had asked me what I thought we should do. I had just been batting in the nets which had definitely been doing a bit and when I went out to the wicket to take a look and try and make an educated guess as to how it might play the surface looked identical. I said to Nass that I felt our best chance of making an early impact was to bowl first.
By the end of the first day, the green tinge had long gone, the sun had dried the track out to burn it into a belter and Australia were 364 for two. We didn’t help ourselves by dropping four catches, but we might have made a better fist of things had disaster not struck Simon Jones only seven overs into his Ashes career.
Coming on at first change after Caddick and Hoggard shared the new ball, Simon had quickly shown he had something a bit extra. His pace was good and he was certainly not overawed by the occasion and when he had Justin Langer caught behind by Alec Stewart for 32, a little spark of hope briefly flared.
We had been warned in advance about the possible dangers of diving on the newly-laid and sandy outfield, but Simon was such a wholehearted lad that he must have just forgotten for a moment when, after chasing a ball to the long-on boundary he attempted to slide alongside it and pull it back before it hit the rope. Even from where I was standing, 90 yards away at slip the other end, you could tell there was a big problem, when he went down and stayed down. When we got there we found out that his studs had stuck in the ground as he dived and his whole body weight had gone through his right knee, causing massive damage to his knee ligaments. Simon was in agony and it was here that the uglier side of the Aussie mentality took over and he was barracked by sections of the crowd, Clearly, they were unaware of the seriousness of his injury but they didn’t think to stop and find out before they let him have a barrage. ‘Get up, ya pommie pr***!’ was about as sympathetic as it got. One kind soul even offered him a drink, or rather threw a full can of coke at him. It took Simon more than a year to rebuild his knee and restart his career and I know those memories made him even more determined to come back and even more delighted when he made such an impact in the 2005 Ashes series.
The effect on us was immediate and clear, like letting all the air out of a balloon. When they reached nearly 500 in their first innings we all just felt the series was more or less over before it had really got going. I was happy enough with my 72 in our reply of 325, but us being bowled out for 79 in the second innings didn’t help, nor did the newspaper headline the following day which marked our defeat by 384 runs by asking: ‘Is there anybody left in England who can actually play cricket?’
Fortunately there was. Vaughan. From here to the end of the series he batted like the best player who had ever lived. Every time they pitched the ball up he smashed it through the covers. Every time they bowled short he pulled it for four or six. I remember thinking they could not bowl at him, and the ‘they’ were bloody Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne.
Following on from his century-filled summer in England, he hit 177 in the second Test in Adelaide, which we lost by an innings and 51 runs. They blew us away in the third in Perth, by an innings and 48 runs, which I suppose amounts to an improvement of sorts, but meant once again the Poms were beaten within eleven actual days’ playing time, on 1 December. Brett Lee bowled a spell during which I came as close to being physically frightened on a cricket pitch as I have ever been in my life.
Vaughan then hit 145 in the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne, after which we were 4–0 down after four, but saved the best until last, a wonderful 183 in the final Test in Sydney to put us in position to grab a consolation win, despite Steve Waugh, in his 156th and probably last Test match, completing a century that provoked one of the loudest roars I had ever heard on a cricket field. Caddick had a brilliant match as well, taking ten wickets and finishing the second innings with seven for 94 as we bowled them out to win by 225 runs.
I did my best to join in with the celebrations. Unbeknown to everyone but Steve Bull I was struggling badly with burnout that stayed with me all the way through to the end of the 2003 World Cup in early March.
I can’t actually recall much of what happened in the VB series with Australia and Sri Lanka, except that we carried on playing, travelling and losing to Australia. I was delighted that Jimmy Anderson made such a big impact that he won himself a place in the World Cup squad, but my last two innings in the contest were 0 and 0 in the finals and I was that good.
* * *
From the moment we pitched up in South Africa for the World Cup, our initial experiences at the premier one-day competition in world cricket were sheer torture.
The question was should we play against Zimbabwe in Harare, or not. Many wanted us to pull out on moral grounds alone and the issue was aired within the squad over and over again. One newspaper back in England equated the propaganda victory such a visit would represent for the President Robert Mugabe as akin to England footballers being photographed giving the Nazi salute to Adolf Hitler when playing a friendly match in Germany in the 1930s. But the ECB made it clear they wanted us to go ahead and play. Even when the concerns over security grew, to those who might see our match there as an opportunity for peaceful protest, as well as ourselves, and the death-threats started to arrive, no one seemed to be listening to our concerns at all, until Richard Bevan, the chief executive of the Professional Cricketers’ Association was asked to get involved.
Nasser was particularly upset that neither the ECB nor the International Cricket Council seemed to have any other response than a very heavy-handed ‘go and play and get on with it’.
Meeting followed meeting. No one really knew what the hell to do. Some of the players were keen on carrying on because they might never get another chance to play in a World Cup. Some were dead against it full stop. Others were just bewildered. And the uncertainty dragged on and on until matters came to a head in quite farcical fashion.
It had come to light that Tim Lamb, the chief executive of our Board had received a letter as early as January from a group called the Sons and Daughters of Zimbabwe, denouncing the ECB for letting the team be used by Mugabe for his own publicity purposes and telling him: ‘Our message to you is simple: COME TO ZIMBABWE AND YOU WILL GO BACK IN WOODEN COFFINS!
‘Mugabe’s thugs and a huge opposing group are like two chemicals waiting for a catalyst to spark a violent reaction. Your visit to Zimbabwe will provide precisely that catalyst and there’s going to be one mighty bang. The England players and a load of Zimbabweans will die in the carnage.’
It went on ‘Come to Harare and you will die. And how safe are your families back there in the UK? Even if you survive, there are foreign groups who are prepared to hurt you and hunt your families down for as long as it takes.
‘Our advice is this: DON’T COME TO ZIMBABWE OR YOUR PLAYERS WILL BE LIVING IN FEAR FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES.’
Initially the South African security forces merely ridiculed the letter and its contents, even questioning the existence of the Sons and Daughters. When information later reached them that not only did they exist but they did in fact present a credible security threat, one show of hands in the room was all it took to confirm that, as far as we were concerned, we weren’t going anywhere near the place.
For the point of view of our chances of progressing in the tournament it was a big shame. Jimmy had bowled brilliantly against Pakistan in Cape Town, taking four for 29. Had we beaten Australia on 2 March in Port Elizabeth, we would still have gone through to the next round. When they plunged to 48 for four with Caddy taking two for 4, then 135 for eight chasing 205, we were sure we were going to as well, then Andy Bichel kept Michael Bevan company and they ended up squeezing home with two balls to spare.
Nasser was on his knees at the end of the match, inconsolable. Soon afterwards, and to no one’s great surprise, he quit as one-day captain.
Almost immediately after getting home I was extensively quoted in an article in the Mail on Sunday explaining exactly how I felt. By now, even if the words wouldn’t go down well with Duncan or the management, I couldn’t hold back any longer.
I’d had enough of playing cricket for England non-stop. I’d had enough of travelling and packing and unpacking and travelling and unpacking and living inside four-star prisons. The article highlighted: ‘A winter schedule that began on Tuesday 12 September 2002 – 72 hours after the fifth day of the final Test against India at The Oval – left the regulars in both forms of international cricket staggering through the arrivals hall at Heathrow on Thursday 6 March 2003, looking like extras from The Night of the Living Dead.’
I spoke as honestly as I could, without fear of the consequences, because while I so wanted to carry on loving the experience of playing for England, I now knew exactly what Thorpe had meant the previous summer. Some days I just didn’t give a f*** either. There comes a time when you just want to stop; stop playing cricket, stop training, stop travelling, stop putting yourself out there, a time when you just want to not be doing what you’ve been doing over and over again for so long, a time when you make nought and feel nothing or make fifty and still feel nothing, when you just don’t want to be with the same sixteen blokes on tour, on the bus, at breakfast, out to dinner, in the bar; when all you want to do is remove yourself from where you are. And I hated the feeling.
‘I’ve had such a gut-full of playing cricket over the last five months that I just want to get it out of my system,’ I said. ‘I get so much enjoyment from the game and I love it so much but, at the moment, I’ve reached the stage where a bit of enthusiasm has gone. I am experiencing something I never have before and I thought I never would. I’ve stopped enjoying it.’
Little did I know I was about to embark on the most rewarding period of my whole career.