SIX
ALLAN BORDER
(PART ONE)
‘I had no lust for leadership.’
Allan Border captained Australia in 93 of his 156 Test match appearances, winning 32, drawing 38 and tieing one. That he only lost 22 Tests – especially in the early part of his long reign – at a time when Australia was suffering a rare dip in its cricketing fortune, says so much about his fighting qualities and the eventual prolonged success of the new team he steadily built.
His astonishing durability, however, and his personal toughness, is even better highlighted by the following statistic, which in itself is one of the most remarkable in the history of cricket. From March 1979 to March 1994, Border played in 153 consecutive Tests – a record, not surprisingly, and by a considerable distance from the next man on that list. When he retired from Tests, he had also scored a then seemingly unbreakable record of 11,174 runs, at an average of 50.56, including 27 hundreds. Moreover, he led Australia in 178 of his 273 one-day internationals.
Border’s contribution to Australian cricket, however, was very much more than mere figures can express; and, specifically, it was his leadership and dedication to the cause that hauled Australia’s Test side up off the canvas and, by the time of his retirement from international cricket, positioned to claim the title of undisputed champions of the world. As a leader and captain, he was, though, often criticised – again especially in the earlier days – for negativity on the field and a tendency to overlook the importance of communication with struggling players off it. Yet, in man-management and in his tactical expression, Border simply got better and better with the remorselessness that characterised his general approach to cricket. Winning the 1987 World Cup was also a clear key moment in his development as captain; after two Ashes series defeats in 1985 and 1986–87, here was a triumph, and against England in the final to boot, to show that Australia were again a world force to be reckoned with.
Border succeeded a tearful Kim Hughes on 7 December 1984 and led Australia without a break until 29 March 1994. He had played Test cricket for just under six years when Hughes’s resignation handed him a job he had never sought, and in that time he had matured from a rookie thrown into the deep end during the schism of Packer’s World Series Cricket into a highly respected world-class batsman. He had acted as a staunch vice-captain behind his friend Hughes, but had repeatedly said in public that being Australian captain was not an ambition. Border had by then led Queensland in the Sheffield Shield, but, before that, he had to go back to North Sydney High’s first XI, in 1973, his last year at school, for his previous experience of leading a cricket team.
As Border said in the mid-1980s: ‘I had no lust for leadership. I can’t say I hadn’t entertained the idea of captaining Australia because I was, after all, the deputy. But think back and consider how many Australian vice-captains of the past decade had advanced that one step further. Heir-apparency had been so fleeting as to be non-existent. Sure, I’d given the captaincy some thought, but fantasy is far removed from real ambition.
‘So when I’d said publicly that I had no Australian leadership aspirations, that’s what I meant. Besides, my credentials weren’t all that flash. Before I led Queensland, I had not captained in any grade of cricket. Hardly the grounding for the country’s top job. But when Kim resigned I guess I was sort of the incumbent captain. I expected to get the captaincy; I think most people probably thought that way, though a phone-in poll was held in Adelaide and David Hookes was a shoo-in winner there.’
Border admitted to apprehension in the immediate aftermath of being offered the job. Australia, 2–0 down to a rampant West Indies when Hughes threw in the towel, were being described by some members of the media as ‘a rabble’. Border knew he had the players’ support, but he doubted his ability to lead and especially so in such difficult circumstances. ‘When I looked at it, I really didn’t think people would respond to me as I believed they should respond to a leader. It’s terribly hard to look at yourself objectively and imagine how others see you. I reckoned most people who looked at me just didn’t see me as a convincing captain.
‘All of this relates to my character. I’m never really forceful or overbearing about anything. It’s not in my nature. Don’t confuse this with a lack of determination, but a leader of men? I couldn’t say. And if I couldn’t, who could? I think, deep down, I was just happy to be one of the boys. I just saw the captain as being the big boy who sometimes had to be a bit mean to get the message across.’
When he was a young cricketer, Border had been keener on his surfing and bumming around the beach than he had been on cricket practice. For a while, in fact, he was in danger of dropping out of cricket altogether, before coming under the influence at his club in Sydney of former England Test all-rounder Barry Knight, who had worked with him in his coaching capacity and recognised something a little bit out of the ordinary in this self-effacing, straightforward young lad.
Now, as a developing Test and first-class cricketer, he had also received the benefit of Greg Chappell’s wisdom and insight – both on the field, as they batted together for Queensland, and off it. Both Greg and his older brother Ian, both highly successful captains of Australia of course, had seen in Border the makings of a great captain when he himself could not even entertain such thoughts. As Border himself acknowledges in his autobiography:
The Chappell brothers had done all they could to convince me that I could make a good captain. It was Greg, indeed, who first asked me if I had thought about captaining Australia. At that point, I hadn’t even captained a grade side, and I thought he was being very, very premature.
But from then on, in the dressing-room, on the golf course, wherever we happened to be, Greg kept working on me. And in the end I suppose he succeeded. Ian Chappell, too, talked to me a lot about captaincy, and mostly we argued about Kim Hughes. I always found myself defending Kim’s captaincy so we argued, sometimes quite heatedly. And, despite our conflicting viewpoints, Ian was convinced that I could do the job.
Border began his Test captaincy with a defeat, at Adelaide, but the next match was drawn at Melbourne and, on a turning pitch at Sydney, the series deficit was reduced to 3–1 in the final Test, as Bob Holland and Murray Bennett spun out the mighty West Indies twice. That victory was euphoric for the new captain, and his team, but while Australia also put up a decent showing in the triangular one-day series with the West Indies and Sri Lanka that followed the Tests, there was no rest on the horizon for a man who at the end of that Australian season admitted he had found captaining his country ‘both exhilarating and exhausting’. Moreover, Border was soon to be in England – with a mission to defend the Ashes. Much has been written, and said, about how the Allan Border of the 1985 Ashes was conspicuously different to the captain who, four years later in 1989, wrenched the urn back again from English hands – starting a record Australian period of dominance. In 1985, it is alleged, he was far too matey with some of the England players, such as Ian Botham, Allan Lamb and David Gower, his opposite number as captain. By 1989, however, he was said to be unfriendly to the point of nastiness – on one occasion, apparently, he refused England batsman Robin Smith’s request to send for a drink of water during one innings with the words: ‘Can you have a drink? No, you f ***ing can’t. What do you think this is, a f ***ing tea party?’
The truth, as so often, is likely to be found somewhere in the middle of these two caricatures of ‘Mr Friendly’ and ‘Mr Nasty’, but there is no doubt that Border’s hard edge came from a combination of his competitive character and the tough experience of the cricket he played throughout his 20s. He liked a battle, but few cricketers (let alone Australian cricketers) have been forced to confront – and overcome – as much adversity in their formative years.
Take the situation he found himself in just before the 1985 Ashes tour. Under pressure already as new captain of his country, Border soon had the issue of a rebel South Africa tour to deal with, too. As he says in his memoirs:
The impact it had on Australian cricket generally and the leadup to the trip to England particularly was enormous. The South African issue had put us all under great pressure. It had produced an ‘alternative’ Australian Test team. This created a lot of trauma for cricket in Australia, and nobody needed that sort of stuff. As captain of Australia for my first full series, I certainly didn’t.
Four players – Wayne Phillips, Dirk Wellham, Graeme Wood and Murray Bennett – had initially been linked with the rebel South African tour, and even before a ball was bowled during the 1985 tour Border had to refute suggestions that this caused internal problems with other members of his official tour party, as well as knocking back some media comment along the lines of his team being a ‘Second XI’.
Using this last insult as an extra means of inspiring his side to greater efforts, Border also led from the front with a stream of magnificent performances with the bat. He made four successive hundreds against the counties early on, plus 196 in the victory in the second Test at Lord’s that levelled the series 1–1, and a match-saving 146 not out in the fourth Test at Old Trafford. ‘We played good, positive cricket in the early stages of that tour. On my previous tour of England, the policy, unofficial or otherwise, had been to treat county games largely as practice matches. I saw it more as the opportunity to practise winning.’
And, after winning the one-day series 2–1 and still being level by the end of the hard-fought fourth Test, Border’s tactics seemed to be on the point of paying off. Australia, at 1–1, still held the Ashes, after all. Sadly for Border, however, his first Ashes tour as captain had already reached its high watermark. Defeats followed, at Edgbaston and the Oval, and although the first result was sizeably influenced by the controversial decision by umpires David Shepherd and David Constant to give Wayne Phillips out caught off Allan Lamb’s boot there was no excuses overall from the Australian leader.
‘We deserved to lose at Birmingham because England had outplayed us most convincingly. And, in retrospect, I should have been worried to feel things were satisfactory enough following the fourth Test draw. I should have realised that the wheels had started to fall off, that we had started to play some bad cricket, they had started to play some good cricket and their spinners, Emburey and Edmonds, were starting to cause us a few problems. Maybe it was the absence of disasters up to that point that had obscured the realities of the situation.’
Border was clearly learning that, in captaincy, you have to be at least one step ahead of the game – both on the field and in management terms off it. You must see opportunities almost before they arise, and you have to sense problems before they happen. Experience can help you, of course, but Border’s playing experience and skill far outweighed his leadership know-how at this stage of his career. There was for him, however, at the end of a long 1985 tour, a real feeling of progress being made; for him, personally, as captain, and for the team as a whole. ‘Disappointed didn’t nearly describe our emotion after those consecutive hidings at Edgbaston and the Oval,’ he admitted some time afterwards. ‘But I think the mood was also tempered by a sense of relief that it was all over.
‘We’d come to England a young, inexperienced side with the noises of the South African trauma still ringing in our ears. It had been a long tour. We’d been in England for four and a half months and had performed creditably for all but the last few weeks. We’d come adrift at the last, but nothing but good came from the overall experience.’
Border did not know at that time of his life that he had yet to endure another Ashes series defeat, in 1986–87, before he could turn the tables on England. But, passing his 30th birthday during the 1985 campaign, he was learning the harsh lessons that would one day enable him to lift the Ashes urn aloft himself as captain.
The blows still hurt, and hurt bad. But he was becoming adept at absorbing them and in his cussed way he was storing up the pain and using it as added motivation. He was driving himself forward in the desire to turn Australia’s fortunes around, and he had always had a taste for the close-quarters contest. The trick now was to mould a team in his own image: he needed new players, and he also needed the right characters. Border could only see one road ahead, the long and hard one. But he was more than willing to take it.