THREE
BOB WILLIS
‘Playing in an Ashes series was the biggest thrill anyone could have in their life.’
There is something refreshingly honest about Bob Willis. He tells it like he sees it. As a pundit and commentator for Sky Sports, he has carved a role out for himself that often involves sticking the knife into players and administrators alike. He comes alive with indignation after a bad England performance and is prepared to say what others are thinking. Not everyone cares for Willis’s commentary style, or his sometimes overzealous criticism of players, but having worked alongside him on quite a number of occasions, I’ve realised that a caring and humorous man lurks closer to the surface than some might imagine. And, even though he is more comfortable dishing out disparagement than glowing praise, he desperately wants England to do well.
You see, playing for England meant everything to Willis. Anyone failing to do justice to the Three Lions, or worse – not giving 100 per cent – will automatically incur his wrath. He was one of England’s most wholehearted performers, taking 325 wickets from 90 Tests, making him England’s second most prolific wicket-taker behind Ian Botham. He charged in from close to the boundary edge like a man possessed. The mop of curly brown hair bounced wildly above a face contorted in effort, eyes bulging, angular arms and legs pumping. He must have been a fearsome sight for the batsman when he eventually arrived just 22 yards away.
Willis might not have been able to bat and he was no gazelle in the field, but he could catch well at slip and, as a bowler, he possessed that rarest of assets: genuine pace. He was England’s quickest bowler since Frank ‘Typhoon’ Tyson in the mid-1950s and, whether on a flat pitch in India or a more favourable one at Leeds, Willis was always totally committed.
He was also a respected member of an England team prepared to show displeasure at the slacking of others. As Mike Brearley says: ‘Bob was good, as he could be tough with people and wasn’t afraid to say things that they might not want to hear. He didn’t mind being unpopular. He was very helpful. People admired him.’
Captains need enforcers within the team to get others back on track at the right times. Andrew Symonds performed this role with some aplomb for me at Kent. Against Surrey in 2003, for example, we had Adam Hollioake’s team nine wickets down and about to follow on, when the last pair hung around for half an hour. We had taken our foot off the gas, lost our previous intensity and paid the price. We had lost the Surrey game the previous season when they chased down 410 to win, having been 208 for 7, and I’d hoped motivation wouldn’t be a problem with the pain of that defeat still fresh in people’s minds. But now I was livid with our mental complacency. As we walked off, Symonds could tell I was mad. ‘Leave them to me,’ he said. Symonds, who was just as incensed, promptly proceeded to tear strips off the boys, reminding them of last season and how much it hurt. He challenged them about their desire to win cricket matches for Kent and what that said about them as paid employees of the club and professional sportsmen. It was passionate stuff and made the hairs stand up on the back of the neck. He was so fired up I threw him the new ball and, together with Muttiah Muralitharan and Martin Saggers, he helped to bowl us to victory.
Willis could rabble-rouse in similar fashion when needed. It was a quality that made him a perfect vice-captain, a role he performed under Keith Fletcher on the tour to India in 1981–82, which followed all the drama of the 1981 Ashes summer. India won 1–0 in a series dominated by farcically slow over rates and flat, low bouncing pitches, which Willis describes as being ‘mind-numbingly dull’. It was the perfect time for the South African rebel tour organisers to strike: with Geoff Boycott recruiting much as Tony Greig had done for Kerry Packer five years earlier, fifteen of England’s best players were signed to play later that winter in South Africa. They were banned from playing for England for three years by the Test and County Cricket Board (TCCB) as a consequence. Willis turned down the rebel tour after extending his county contract with Warwickshire. ‘I was made a spectacular offer to captain that rebel side, which Goochie ended up doing,’ he said. In 1982, £60,000 was a lot of money, but I didn’t really have any real warmth for South Africa or the project. I was fortunate that in A.C. Smith I had an ally who was in a powerful enough position at Warwickshire to guarantee me an extended contract whether I got injured or not. The only problem I had with turning down that kind of money was that if I got injured and got dropped by England, where was I then? The club sorted that out and I found it pretty easy to say no to the rebels.’
It was a fateful decision that resulted in him, moreover, being named England captain for the summer’s series against India and Pakistan. ‘I was flabbergasted when Peter May phoned me up and asked me to captain the side in 1982,’ Willis said. ‘Basically, there wasn’t anybody else. May wasn’t a fan of Gower’s flippant character at that stage and they’d had a go with Beefy, who unfortunately had played most of his Tests as captain against the West Indies, so I was a bit of a last resort.’
Willis had captained Warwickshire in 1980, winning the 40-over competition, and would later also lead his county in Lord’s finals in 1982 and 1984, but no one had considered him a serious contender to lead the national side until that moment. Useful right-hand man, yes. Happy to do the tough jobs as a vice-captain, absolutely. But England captain? The then 33-year-old Willis had been around the game a long time, having first been called up for the Ashes tour of 1970–71 under Ray Illingworth, but he appeared to use all his mental capacity for his bowling. He used hypnotic tapes to train his mind in the mid-1970s and such was his trance-like state when bowling that it was difficult to see how he could appreciate all the other facets of captaincy on the pitch. ‘He was in a dream world half the time,’ said Mike Gatting. ‘At Headingley, he was running in and we had to stop him to point out that he had neither a third man nor a fine leg.’
Captaincy can be a complex enough business without having to focus on opening the bowling. There are strengths and weaknesses to having a bowler as captain, but history tells us that few out-and-out ‘quicks’ lead their country. Batsmen are generally preferred because they are one step removed from the action and can judge the next move more dispassionately. Bowlers, especially quick bowlers, often need to get the adrenalin pumping and can therefore find it more difficult to make cold, calculated calls at the key moments.
Knowing when to bowl yourself and for how long is another challenge that bowler-captains have struggled with. Brearley, for instance, thought it was an aspect of the job that Botham never quite got a handle on. In his book Phoenix from the Ashes, Brearley reflects on Botham’s captaincy during the first Ashes Test at Trent Bridge in 1981.
Australia’s first innings took place in conditions in which, at almost every other time in Botham’s career, his captain would virtually have had to prise the ball from his grip in order to take it off him, yet it was not until the 54th over that he put himself on.
Nevertheless, Willis got off to a winning start in 1982 by leading the team to victories over India and Pakistan (1–0 and 2–1 respectively) before embarking on England’s quest to retain the Ashes Down Under. It was a series he was relishing. ‘The Ashes was always the most special series for me,’ Willis said. ‘I had gone out as a 21-year-old replacement for Alan Ward in 1970–71 and found myself in the same squad with players such as Colin Cowdrey, John Edrich and Basil D’Oliveira, whom I’d pretended to be in the back garden. It was an awesome experience and it left its mark on me. I knew from that moment that all I wanted to do was play cricket for England. Playing in an Ashes series was the biggest thrill anyone could have in their life, and you only had to go to Australia to experience how much the contest meant. The grounds were full regardless of the state of the match, or the series. It’s very special.’
England’s lack of resources, due to the ban on the rebels, couldn’t dampen Willis’s enthusiasm, but it made his job harder against an Australian team fired up to avenge the disaster of 1981 and which welcomed back Greg Chappell as captain. Willis was one of six selectors who had the unenviable task of picking a squad that could at least challenge Australia. ‘Apart from Gower, Botham, Lamb, Randall and myself, the rest of the team were second or third choice,’ Willis said. ‘The top of the order was always going to be a problem. Instead of Gooch and Boycott, you had Geoff Cook, Graeme Fowler and Chris Tavare. Cook was a poor selection, only coming about after his performance in a one-day final at the end of the domestic season. He churned out the runs for Northamptonshire, but on pacier, bouncier pitches he was never going to be up to the standard required. We had high hopes for Fowler, who later was to go to India after I retired and score a double-hundred alongside Mike Gatting. Unfortunately, though, in Australia he struggled, too.’
It was imperative for England to get off to good starts to protect the middle order of Gower, Allan Lamb and Botham, something Willis conveyed to Tavare, who was happy to oblige. Willis was big a fan of Tavare’s application, seeing him as the man who could wear the Aussies down, but the Kent player often took his remit to the extreme. In the first Test, for example, Tavare’s stoic defiance after the early loss of Cook saw him take nearly eight hours over his 89 – having become stuck on 66 for ninety minutes. Gower, Lamb and Randall played round him to good effect as England managed 411, but in the second innings, after Australia had replied with 424, courtesy of a classy 117 from Chappell, Tavare took 63 minutes to get off the mark. Randall made 115 out of 358, but England ran out of time to set Australia a meaningful target. Had more of an aggressive tone been set at the top of the order Willis might have had enough time to put the Australian batting under pressure. Instead, the game petered out to a tame draw. Willis, though, was more than satisfied with his obdurate opener.
‘I was happy with the role Tavare was to play and the tortoise approach,’ he said. ‘He had plenty of biffers up the other end. Tav might have taken it to extremes, but our build-up to that Test series had been very shaky. We struggled against the state sides, so on a notoriously Aussie-friendly venue like Perth our mindset was to make sure we weren’t 1–0 down after that game. He did his job well.
‘We’d lost this bunch of players to the South Africa tour, while Australia had just re-inherited their Packer players, and Greg Chappell had returned, too, after a spell out of the side. They were a much stronger team than the one Brearley beat in 1978–79 in Australia. We had a pretty threadbare bowling attack for an Ashes series, so there was a bit of an attitude where we knew we weren’t going to dictate terms and so trying to stay in matches as long as we could was the order of the day.’
Willis’s cautious approach in 1982–83 is understandable, but it can also send out the wrong message to your team. Alec Stewart had a similar mindset ahead of the 1998–99 Ashes tour, picking a team and a style of play that was about hanging in the game for as long as possible rather than looking to take the attack to the Aussies. Some might call this a realistic or pragmatic tactic. I would argue that it’s a dangerous place to start from. In the longer formats of the game, it is true that you have to work hard to lay the foundations of an innings. You need to earn the right to play more aggressively. Steve Waugh’s Australia team might have gone out looking to take the attack to the opposition from ball one but, traditionally, seeing off the opening bowlers is all part and parcel of being a top order batsman. At some stage, however, you have to play to win, and the batsmen who are established have to set a tempo conducive to this end. Getting the shine off the ball should be a means to an end and not an end in itself.
I also wonder whether Tavare’s strict adherence to Willis’s instructions was in the long run to the detriment of his career as an England player. Tavare was a better player than people saw on the international stage; he possessed a free-flowing attacking game that brought him fourteen domestic one-day hundreds. Part of being a professional sportsman is to explore your boundaries, and possibly the England regime and the player himself imposed a ceiling on his ambition when both would have been better served by a bit more freedom of expression. It should also be remembered that Tavare had played the same way under Botham, Brearley and Keith Fletcher, so I am in no way trying to lay any blame at Willis’s door. I just think he could have been an even better player with a more flexible approach.
Willis, whose career was all about doing the hard yards, appreciated Tavare’s honest endeavour and refusal of risk. England’s captain could get frustrated with the likes of Gower, whose waste of talent he would lament as another wafted attempted cover drive ended in the midriff of second slip. Willis was as black and white as a captain as he is a commentator and his plan was to batten down the hatches. Tavare was told to keep producing more of the same, when a bolder approach combined with more subtle man-management skills might have raised his horizons and with them his output.
I speak, by the way, with a personal affinity to Tavare because I played a similar role in my own early career at Kent, with this approach to batting even earning me the nickname ‘Tav’, which has stuck to this day! My job was to act as a foil for our more overtly attacking players and my instructions were to get stuck in and see the shine off the ball. Of course I performed this task to the best of my ability, but I was never totally comfortable playing in this way and for a number of years I underachieved. I was also stereotyped as a certain type of player. At the start of the 2001 season, which could have been my last as a professional, I realised I had to be true to myself and play the way I wanted to. Kent’s then new coach, the Australian John Inverarity, backed this approach by encouraging me to express myself. Fortunately, the runs flowed, too, and I showed there was a bit more to my game than simply blocking it.
England’s cause might also have been helped had the selectors not left Phil Edmonds at home. The left-arm spinner was a notoriously difficult character to handle, even testing the man-management skills of Mike Brearley to the extreme, but, with Derek Underwood one of the unavailable high-profile rebels, Edmonds would have offered variety to the attack. Willis and his fellow selectors opted instead for three off-spinners in Vic Marks, Eddie Hemmings and Geoff Miller rather than risk Edmonds upsetting team harmony. ‘We copped a lot of criticism,’ Willis said. ‘Edmonds was a very difficult character. I had no problem with him rating his own ability, but where Underwood was prepared to run in during the first innings of the game and keep things tight for his team, Edmonds found this boring in the extreme. I had lost my patience with him when he bowled a bouncer that went for four byes over Bob Taylor’s head in the summer. I’m sure others would agree he had been a right idiot on the previous tour to Australia, but he was probably a better bowler than the guys we took. Leaving him out was me being weak.’
Willis is typically forthright and honest about his own mistake. Just as Gooch was to leave Gower behind for India 1992–93 and Alec Stewart was to omit Andy Caddick and Phil Tufnell from the Ashes tour in 1998–99, Willis had left a player out on grounds of character rather than playing ability. Cricket is littered with examples of captains who prefer to leave talented individuals out of their sides because of perceived character flaws. It happens at all levels of the game.
I was unwilling to compromise when Mark Ealham was demanding a two-year contract at Kent at the end of my first year of captaincy in 2003. He had enjoyed a good season and we got on well, but I thought the fact his contract was up had played a part in his high levels of motivation. I therefore wanted the club to keep his contract short and remunerate him well to keep him fully energised. Ealham was an experienced cricketer with an old-school mindset. He would do his job on the field but wouldn’t always embrace elements of new thinking off it. Winter fitness testing and ice baths to aid recuperation were snubbed, and he was at times quite vocal with his opinions, which made our job with the other players harder. He’d had some clashes with my predecessor, Matthew Fleming, but for me, on the field, he’d been great. He’d always been willing to bowl and was more than helpful with the young bowlers.
Unfortunately, come contract meeting time, I didn’t like the way he tried to force our hand and was happy that we didn’t budge our position. Looking back it was a mistake because he was a home-grown lad who was a top performer and I should have trusted him more. Our loss was Nottinghamshire’s gain, as they won the County Championship in 2005 – and at Canterbury of all places.
So, Edmonds was left at home, but it’s doubtful whether he would have impacted upon the second Test in Brisbane, so dominant were the seam bowlers. Chappell inserted England in consecutive Test matches and was rewarded with the early scalps of Fowler, Tavare and Gower, who all fell to the impressive Geoff Lawson. Lamb and Botham added 78 for the fourth wicket, but the former, who top-scored with 72, mistimed a hook to be caught off Lawson, before Botham smacked the off-spin of Bruce Yardley to cover for a run-a-ball 40. England were bowled out for a below par 219. ‘It was a disastrous performance,’ Willis said. ‘We kept a finger on the self-destruct button virtually throughout our innings. It was a flat pitch, where we ought to have made 150 more.’
Australia fared little better at first, as Botham and Willis took the wickets of John Dyson and Allan Border to reduce the home side to 11 for 2. Chappell made 53, but when he was run out, and Botham removed Hughes for a duck (0), Australia were 99 for 4 and England were right in the game. They were thwarted by the debutant opener Kepler Wessels, a South African who would later captain his native country. England’s bowlers had few answers, as he punished anything remotely wide in a brilliant innings of 162. ‘We got a few tactical things wrong, particularly the way we bowled to Wessels,’ Willis said. ‘We attacked him on and outside off stump, and I should think if you saw a run chart of his runs throughout his career 70 per cent of them would have been on the off-side. It wasn’t until he’d played two Test matches that we realised he got completely tied up on leg stump. It’s quite difficult to tell young bowlers like Pringle and Cowans that you want them to bowl leg stump to this bloke but off and outside to everybody else. It was difficult, too, as he always looked like he was going to edge one of these cuts so he suckered us in.’
Australia made 341 before Lawson and Jeff Thomson took five wickets apiece, as England scrambled to 309. Hughes and Hookes made light work of the 190 required on a decent last-day pitch, as Australia ran out seven-wicket winners. Lawson finished with impressive match figures of 11 for 134, but it was Wessels’s innings that proved the difference between the two sides. ‘A Brearley or an Illingworth would have worked Wessels out far quicker,’ Willis said. ‘He got a huge score and set the tone for the series – I’m not ashamed to admit that error.’
Willis acknowledges he was not the strongest tactically. He bowled his heart out for his team, taking 5 for 66 from two balls short of thirty overs in Australia’s first innings, but crucially failed to highlight Wessels’s technical deficiencies. This is where as captain you need good advice from people you trust. Bob Taylor was extremely experienced, and Botham (a former captain) had a good view from the slip cordon, yet neither could come up with the right formula against a debutant who stayed leg-side of the ball and repeatedly pierced the off-side gaps.
Of the 20 England wickets to fall, 19 were caught, which indicates there was good pace and bounce in the pitch. Sometimes bowlers can get carried away bowling on such a surface and bowl too short. Botham, who should have known better, went at nearly 5 per over in each innings, while Cowans, playing just his second Test, bowled only six overs for 36 runs in the first innings as Wessels got away.
Batsmen’s strengths so often appear like weaknesses early in their innings. They tend to look too much for their favourite scoring options rather than pick the right delivery to allow proper execution. But a plan that, as captain, you try when a batsman first comes to the crease needs to be revised as soon as he is set. England’s plan of trying to find his edge allowed Wessels to get his eye in and play his favourite off-side shots with impunity.
If a batsman has a technical weakness or glitch, then, as a general rule, the bowling side should look to set that player up to expose the weakness. A player who is prone to being trapped lbw, for example, will start to line the ball up better if every delivery is aimed at the stumps. The better plan would be to keep the ball outside off stump for a couple of overs, giving him the feeling of getting over to the off-side, before unleashing the straight one. By the same token, if England had bowled very straight to Wessels, the slightly wider one might then have caused him more problems.
In Willis’s defence, Wessels was a player England knew nothing about. In the current era, it is unlikely an international side could include too many unknown quantities. Modern technology has advanced to such an extent that a surprise inclusion by an opposition side could be checked out by video and a special CD of the player compiled and examined well before a ball is bowled. If Willis and his players had been briefed on Wessels before the Brisbane Test, the series could have been very different.
The third Test, at Adelaide, was now crucial for Willis’s side. Like a football team that sets its stall out to get men behind the ball and be difficult to beat only to concede an early goal, England needed to emerge from their shell and adopt a more aggressive approach. Unfortunately, England’s captain made a defensive move before the match had even started and it cost his team. Just as Hussain would do 20 years later in Brisbane, Willis bowled first on a good pitch and came unstuck. ‘My esteemed colleagues saw a green tinge in the pitch that I did not, and I should have had the courage of my convictions and said we would bat,’ Willis said. ‘I probably leant on my senior players too much. Botham had captained England, Gower was destined to, and you couldn’t keep Lamby out of any conversation if you tried. They were the fulcrum of the batting and the guys we were relying on to score our runs. But, if I’m honest about that toss, I was also affected by our batting in the Brisbane Test. We’d been wiped out and I didn’t want that batting line-up exposed again, although it was a much flatter wicket than in Brisbane. It was a defensive move and got the result it deserved. I copped the flak for it and I’m reminded of it every time I set foot in Australia.’
Willis once again holds his hand up for the mistake, while those who advised him were able to crawl back to the dressing-room and let the captain take the blame. That said, Willis is right when he says he needed to have the courage of his own convictions. Compare Mark Taylor’s decision to bat first at Old Trafford in 1997, when his senior colleagues all thought Australia should field first. He followed his gut instinct and backed his own judgement as captain.
Australia compiled 438. Chappell scored his second hundred of the series and was again well supported by Hughes, who made a solid 88 before being run out by Randall when attempting a quick single to cover. Gower and Lamb played well in reply and England were on course to avoid the follow-on at 181 for 3. But then disaster struck. ‘Our batting had a horrible habit of disintegrating and when Lamb was unluckily given out caught behind for 82 that is exactly what happened,’ Willis said. ‘It was a wretched collapse, the last seven wickets going down for 35 runs in a little more than an hour. No one showed the fibre to halt it.’
Chappell had no hesitation in enforcing the follow-on. England made a better fist of things at the second time of asking, thanks to 114 from Gower and 58 from Botham, but this was a responsible innings and not the Botham of 1981. England’s total of 304 allowed Dyson a bit of a net, as he helped himself to 37 not out in knocking off the required 83.
As holders of the Ashes, England still had much to play for, even with the score reading two down with two to play. True, the way his team were playing gave Willis little cause for optimism, but he was not by nature an optimist anyway and the scoreline did mean England had to loosen up and play a more attacking brand of cricket. There was only one present England’s captain wanted that Christmas: an England win from Melbourne’s Boxing Day Test. The fact it turned out to be one of Test cricket’s most memorable finishes was just a bonus.
For the only time in the history of Test cricket, all four completed innings were within ten runs of each other. England made 284 after being inserted, thanks to 83 from Lamb and a fluent 89 from Tavare, who, according to Wisden, ‘batted with unaccustomed vigour’. Australia responded with 287 against a four-pronged seam attack, which looked a whole lot more penetrative than the three seamers/two spinners balance of the previous two Tests. So often when scores are around the 300 mark, a cracking game of cricket ensues. It implies the wicket offers something for both batsmen and bowlers and leaves plenty of time for a result. So it proved here.
England’s second innings score of 294 was the highest in the match, Graeme Fowler top-scoring with 65, but the pitch was still playing well and a target of 292 was within the realms of possibility for Australia. Cowans, granted greater licence to attack by virtue of having another seamer in the side, produced his best bowling in Test cricket by taking 6 for 77 – including Chappell for the second time in the match. When he pinned Rodney Hogg lbw to leave Australia in the parlous position of 218 for 9, England seemed on course for a straightforward win. By the close of play, however, Allan Border had farmed enough strike to get Jeff Thomson through to the close and the score to 255 for 9.
Willis recounts the final day. ‘For a start, it was amazing that 18,000 people came on the last day, when they had just one wicket to fall and 37 runs to get,’ Willis said. ‘I used the time-honoured plan of giving Border the one, which he’d occasionally take, but we couldn’t get Thomson out. Then when I brought the field up, Border started hitting a few boundaries. Border got it about right, and he was a very resilient cricketer and his was a remarkable innings in an extraordinary stand.
‘You always think, until they get to within 20 runs, that they’re going to get out. Thommo had started playing a few shots and I thought he was going to miss one or edge one, but he didn’t. You know when you’re playing Australia that whoever comes out to bat they’re going to be hard to shift and so it proved.
‘We got to the situation where they were one hit away from winning the match, so I thought I had to turn to “Golden Bollocks” (Ian Botham) and, sure enough, Thommo edged it to first slip, where Tavare dropped it, but fortunately Geoff Miller grabbed it. It was Christmas time and we hadn’t had much to celebrate on that tour until then, so let’s just say it was an interesting bus ride to the airport for the trip to Sydney!
‘It was a good cricket wicket and, considering we’d been slaughtered at Adelaide, we bounced back very well. Cowans had bowled well at Chappell. His was a big wicket and we should have wrapped the game up. While that last wicket partnership was edging them ever nearer, I’d be lying if I said the impending press conference didn’t cross my mind. You have 40 journalists travelling around with you, waiting to suck the blood out of your veins if you lose the Ashes from an “unlosable” position.’
A last wicket stand can be frustrating at any time, but when a winning total is being approached, as a fielding captain the nerves can really start to fray. Michael Vaughan was faced with a similar prospect in 2005, as Brett Lee and Michael Kasprowicz inched Australia ever closer to the unlikeliest of victories at Edgbaston. Vaughan’s captaincy was widely acclaimed, as he kept his calm amidst the mayhem. Lee nailed a square cover drive with four needed, but Vaughan had wisely kept his sweeper back to protect the boundary. The resultant single brought Kasprowicz up to face Steve Harmison and the rest is history.
Willis was faced with similar tactical challenges, but his was a different era, when the convention was to give one to the top order batsman and bring the fielders up for the ‘tail-ender’. On a big ground such as the MCG, a fielding team can lose focus and intensity when the field is scattered too widely. There is also a danger that the bowlers forget about getting Border out and then conversely try too hard when they get Thomson on strike. I’m a big believer in keeping the field up to both players with a sweeper on either side to the more accomplished player. With the field back Border was skilled enough to place the ball well and scamper back for two.
Willis has been candid about his mistakes throughout the series and yet takes little credit for the calls he got right. Throwing the ball to Botham for the game’s denouement might seem like an obvious move, but with all the tension at the MCG no decision would have been easy and it was the right call. Willis had also made a conscious plan to target Chappell with short-pitch bowling, which started to take effect from the third Test. ‘Greg just went against the short ball for a while,’ Willis said. ‘It was very much the plan to let him have it. There was a very strange situation in 1979–80 where we played three Tests against Australia, as did the West Indies. Australia beat us 3–0, but the West Indies were hammering them. They taught us how to bowl at Greg. Nobody likes it, but some play it better than others. It was amazing to see a player of that quality – certainly one of the top ten I’ve played against – struggle like that.’
England, buoyed by their win at Melbourne, began at last to believe they were the equals of the home side as all attention turned to Sydney. A win at the SCG to retain the Ashes would represent a turnaround as significant, if not as dramatic, as that achieved by Brearley in the 1981 series, and Willis was encouraged by the mood in the camp.
Chappell won the toss and elected to bat, which, strangely, was the first time in the series that either captain had chosen this option. Dyson and Border made fifties in Australia’s 314 and then Thomson and Lawson got to work by taking eight wickets between them in bowling England out for 237. Kim Hughes reminded everyone of his stroke-making ability with 137 in the second innings, which left England to chase an unlikely 460 to win in a little over a day.
Lawson immediately trapped Cook lbw on the fourth evening to leave England 3 for 1, which brought Hemmings to the crease as nightwatchman. He survived to the close and the next day, while the top-order batsmen found ways of getting themselves out, showed all his and England’s fighting qualities in making 95 in a little under four hours to save the game. ‘We fought well,’ Willis said. ‘We showed plenty of character after scraping ourselves off the floor after Adelaide and finished the series a better side than we had started it, even if we couldn’t quite hang on to the Ashes. I wanted the side to show some fight and I wanted the players all pulling in the same direction without worrying about their individual spot in the side. In the end, Australia beat us conclusively and, despite one or two aggravations along the way, we had no reason to feel hard done by.’
Future England captains, indeed, might have welcomed a 2–1 Ashes scoreline and Willis finished the tour in credit as a leader. The fast bowler, who 18 months earlier had ripped through Australia at Headingley to write himself into Ashes history, was now an Ashes captain who could hold his head up high. He might not have been Brearley, but he had galvanised a second-string team, which extended him the courtesy of giving their all in a bid to retain the urn he had worked so hard to acquire. Willis led the side for another year before seeing Gower preferred for the West Indies series of 1984. Only ever intended as a stopgap, Willis captained England eighteen times, winning seven and losing five. His response to losing the captaincy was typically downbeat. ‘I didn’t have any complaints,’ he said. ‘We still had a fairly ropey side, as the big guns hadn’t come back.’