For most of us, ‘standing up’ is an act of courtesy on buses and trains for the pregnant and the elderly, and in effect a kind of standing down or aside. In the world of sport, ‘standing up’ is something that marks progress in stature and maturity, a seizing of the day, or of the moment.
In English cricket, it is ‘standing up’ on Ashes days that still count the most, and in 2005 it was Kevin Pietersen and the Andrews Flintoff and Strauss who collared those opportunities best. 2009 will offer a host of ‘standing up’ chances to England’s next generation: how they seize them could determine the trophy’s custody.
Australians have already had a glimmer of that generation, most particularly when they played Essex at Chelmsford in 2005 on the eve of the Oval Test, desperate for good cheer to take into that must-win game. On the first day they struck, and were struck by, two recent England under-19s: Alastair Cook and Ravi Bopara. Cook made a double hundred and Bopara a hundred, peppering a short square boundary, preparing the way for exciting careers that duly came to pass.
Cook, now twenty-four, has been marked out for high honours since boyhood, when at Bedford School he had a succession of top-class coaches: Andy Pick, Richard Bates and Derek Randall. Although he could move his right foot and bend his right leg more, he has all the strokes when he chooses to play them. He has guts, too: his 116 in Perth made in Ethiopic heat against a rampant attack, was England’s best innings of the last Ashes series. Glenn McGrath arrived at the press conference that evening as Cook was leaving, and stopped to pump his hand. ‘Well batted mate,’ said McGrath genuinely. ‘Great knock.’ It was a generous, even paternal gesture, like a headmaster congratulating a diligent pupil.
If Cook has a fault, it’s that he still looks a schoolboy— young, slim, a little diffident, a stranger to struggle. He might detain a bowler a while, but is unlikely to hurt him: he didn’t manage a Test six until he top-edged a pull shot in Wellington last year. His conversion rate, moreover, is likely to remain poor if he continues to be a one-pace batsman, incapable of accelerating after reaching fifty. He should take a leaf from the book of Stephen Fleming, another good-looking lefthander, who recalibrated his game after the first half of his career was disappointingly short of hundreds.
Bopara, by contrast, has all the confidence Cook appears to lack, and more. The best thing about Bopara is his three summer hundreds against the West Indies; the next best is his three winter ducks. Some young England players have never quite recovered from similar setbacks, but having squandered one opportunity, Bopara made the most of the next. He has seized the number three berth in England’s order with a technique and a temperament that look more suited to number five, although number threes are scarce everywhere: it is hard to think of who will succeed Ricky Ponting for Australia when he retires. As admirable a quality is self-belief, one wonders if Bopara has the humility to learn. Australians are apt to cut down players, like Daryll Cullinan and Keith Arthurton, who are a little ahead of themselves. England’s coach, his former Essex teammate Andy Flower, will need to keep Bopara’s feet on the ground.
James Anderson has had all sorts of reasons to get ahead of himself, exciting everyone who saw him as a teenager and quickly becoming a marketable commodity in the overheating, overhyping English sports environment. He was first spied seven years ago, taking 9 for 57 at Blackpool, by Marcus Trescothick, who promptly urged his coach Duncan Fletcher: ‘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 nineteen, but I’m telling you he is that good.’
So four years after becoming a first XI at Burnley Cricket Club, Anderson found himself opening England’s attack during the VB Series of January 2003, before oozing promise during the World Cup. Young, handsome and fast, he had the world at his feet when injury and form checked his headway, and he came no closer to adorning the 2005 Ashes than acting as twelfth man at The Oval, somehow missing out on a British Empire Medal in the process. Rebuilding has been worth it: nobody in England swings the ball as much and at such pace, and he had as many reasons to recall the recent series against the West Indies as the majority of players had to forget it. Anderson’s problem is that when the ball does not swing, he bowls a trajectory and hits the bat at a pace that favours fast scoring. While he has worked hard at his game since, there were times in Australia during 2006–07 when he looked as predictable as a bowling machine.
Nobody held the door ajar for off-spinner Graeme Swann while he was away sorting his career out. On his first England tour at twenty-one, he spent too much time in Phil Tufnell’s company—good for the broadening of one’s life experiences, but not an unmitigated good for one’s cricket. Returning to county cricket, he seemed to lose his way, like rather too many players of his type, slipping behind his teammate Monty Panesar in the Northants pecking order, and rediscovering his mojo only after moving to nearby Notts, who won the County Championship in his first season. Worming his way back into national calculations last year, he made his debut against India in Chennai, then overhauled Panesar in the Caribbean.
Swann is an aggressive off-spinner who flings himself into his delivery with an idiosyncratic double whirl, and attacks the stumps: his thirty-four Test wickets have contained five bowleds and sixteen lbws, and include twelve left-handers. His natural gregariousness equips him well for dealing with the media, whom he handles as adeptly as anyone in his team. Like all slow bowlers, he needs love and encouragement, and assistant coach Mushtaq Ahmed seems to have provided it. The test will come when his so far brief and successful Test career hits a speed bump. The attrition rate among finger spinners in this big-batted, small-grounded era of international cricket is high and rising.
England’s selectors handle their young players better than they did in the 1980s and 1990s, having then been prone to expecting immediate results; as Lord Home once said in the context of a young colleague’s critics, they were like impatient gardeners, gauging a tree’s progress by digging it up to examine its roots. They might now be accused of the opposite characteristic, of operating too much of a closed shop, even if it is surely preferable to their earlier methods. But then, there is the similarity between the two kinds of ‘standing up’: for how long is it expedient to wait before someone does it?