THIRTEEN
STEVE WAUGH
‘My thoughts were to win and win as quickly as we could by being aggressive and disorientating the opposition.’
In the late summer of 2002, Steve Waugh came to Kent for a six-week stint in preparation for Australia’s tour of Pakistan. It meant I had the pleasure of captaining one of the most successful captains in the history of the game and one of its toughest competitors. To say I was nervous would be an understatement.
An evening meal broke the ice, as had a peculiar welcome by our outgoing overseas professional, Waugh’s fellow countryman Andrew Symonds. Symonds, who had been due to fly out to join Australia’s one-day team on the same day, forgot his Test captain was arriving early in the morning and consequently forgot to clean his club flat. To make matters worse, Symonds, who had had a few leaving drinks with Rob Key and some hockey friends, invited all and sundry back to the flat, where they crashed on the floor, on the sofa and even, I believe, in the bathroom. Waugh, no doubt expecting the red carpet treatment befitting one of the leading figures in the game, was somewhat surprised to have the front door of ‘his’ flat opened by a hockey player in his boxer shorts. It was not, I suspect, the welcome David Beckham received when he arrived to play for LA Galaxy or AC Milan. Waugh decided to go into town for a coffee while Symonds and his mates tidied up.
After our dinner that evening we nipped back to my mother-in-law’s house to pick up some clean sheets and pillow cases for Australia’s captain. Unfortunately, just to round off the comedic scenes, the pub round the corner from his flat had blown up earlier in the evening (a gas leak, apparently) and the road was cordoned off. Steve Waugh had to walk half a kilometre to his flat in Canterbury with the bed linen under his arm. Welcome to Kent!
Waugh was good humoured about the whole affair, though, and after a press conference on Monday morning it was down to business as he prepared for our one-day game the following day. What struck me about him as soon as he hit his first throw-down was the intensity he poured into every shot. A lot of players just like to get a feel of the bat on the ball, hit a few half volleys and they’re done. Waugh, by contrast, would hit throw-downs like they were the last few balls he was ever going to face in Test cricket. He was livid if he mistimed one, regularly chastising himself for a lapse in concentration or failing to track the ball properly.
This was the Waugh I recognised from watching him perform in televised matches and the one I’d also come across in my second ever first-class match in 1993. It was Waugh with his ‘game face’ on. In that 1993 match against Kent, he scored the most inevitable of hundreds. It was nothing more than a glorified net towards the end of that summer’s tour, but it was a lesson in professionalism and how to grind out a century. He was a more than useful bowler, too. Before his back problems he bowled brisk medium-paced away swing and pioneered the slower ball out of the back of the hand. He gave the Australian side balance before the emergence of Shane Warne meant they only needed four bowlers.
I missed Kent’s tour match against the Australians in 1997 with a broken knuckle, but once again Waugh scored a hundred. His concentration had lapsed on one occasion that day so he tried to get himself going by having a few ‘verbals’ with our short-leg fielder, Will House, who was only in that position because I was not playing. I was already gutted enough to miss the match, without discovering that there might have been an opportunity to engage in a bit of feisty banter with the great Steve Waugh.
Indeed, no one cricketer personifies Australia’s dominance of the modern era more than Waugh. The most capped player in the history of the game, with 168 Tests, he captained Australia to victory a record 41 times – including 15 of their record-breaking run of 16 straight wins, which easily eclipsed the previous best of 11 set by the West Indies. He led from the front to capture the 1999 World Cup in England and held aloft the Ashes urn at the Oval in 2001, having scored 157 not out on one leg after an incredible recovery from a torn calf-muscle. Mark Taylor was the captain who took Australia past the West Indies to become the best in the world, but it was Waugh, whose relentless intensity pushed the boundaries of what was possible, who left a legacy of Australian invincibility.
His first game as a Kent player in 2002, against Leicestershire in the Norwich Union National League, was a challenge. It was a poor Canterbury pitch and batting second under lights we needed just 169 to win from 45 overs. Waugh spoke to the lads about backing themselves and playing their own games but said we might have to be prepared ‘to get ugly runs’. The pitch was nipping about and the bounce was variable. Circumspection was the order of the day, but one by one our top order succumbed through a big shot. Waugh struggled to locate the middle of the bat for ages. He was hit on the body numerous times, edged one here, squirted one there, but kept going until, with a couple of overs left, he smacked a couple of fours and a leg-side six and we’d won. Waugh finished 59 not out.
His other major contribution came against Yorkshire at Headingley. The home side won the toss and inserted us on a damp pitch under slate-grey skies. Waugh entered the fray at 49 for 2 and was immediately given a mouthful by fiery flame-haired quick Steve Kirby. Kirby is notorious on the circuit for his exchanges with the batsman and fancied essaying a bit of Shakespeare with the master of the sledge himself. Even from the balcony 100 yards away we’re sure we detected a wry smile from Waugh as he gave something back with interest. A little matter of 146 runs later, Waugh had left Kirby in no doubt as to who was the winner of that particular contest.
I travelled a lot with Waugh over those six weeks and talked frequently about captaincy. He spoke about the need to compartmentalise, something that obviously worked well for him. He was very different off the field to when batting or practising, although never so different as to be anything other than himself. I suspect he was very different again with his friends and family and when supporting his charity in India. This ability to switch off from cricket gave him a healthy perspective about the game. It enabled him to maintain his enjoyment of it, explaining his longevity at the top of the sport. It was work that entailed sacrifice, true, but it provided well for his family and he was going to be a long time retired when he could redress the work/life balance. He had it worked out.
Off the field he was very relaxed. He came across as a normal down-to-earth guy, who was very comfortable in his own skin. Even when waiting to go into bat there was no suggestion of the steely competitor or the fearsome combative presence that he exhibited in the middle. His dry sense of humour was very much in evidence with the lads on the balcony and, while he was happy to share lessons from his playing experiences, he also enjoyed talking about things outside cricket. Every match day the dressing-room attendant would bring him a dustbin full of mail which he’d meticulously read and respond to. Only when summoned to the crease at the fall of the third wicket did he flick the mental switch. A quick stretch, then on went the helmet and off he went into the arena. It was an unconscious routine that he had performed a thousand times: he was ready to do battle.
He was big on backing your instincts as captain. ‘Don’t be afraid to rip up the rule book,’ and ‘Back your gut instincts,’ were phrases that stayed with me. Meeting up six years later to interview him about his captaincy experiences for this book, I returned to those concepts. ‘I always tried to be innovative,’ Waugh said. ‘The first time I captained New South Wales I opened the bowling with Gavin Robertson’s off-spin in the second innings and he took five wickets and we won the game. I thought after that win that this was how I would like to captain, by backing myself and going with my gut instinct.
‘But then when I captained Australia, where the stakes are a bit higher and people are sitting in judgement on you, I initially went away from that. I was inexperienced as a captain, having only led New South Wales six times before I took on the Australian captaincy. I made the mistake of trying to please everyone by captaining by consensus. It only changed for me when I had that collision with Jason Gillespie in Kandy and I found myself lying in hospital thinking that if I missed the next Test match and someone else did a good job I might not get another chance. From that moment on, I did it my way and backed myself, which was a good lesson.’
Waugh’s reputation as the toughest batsman in the world game had been established long before he inherited the captaincy of the Australian Test team. By the time Taylor retired at the end of the Ashes in 1998–99, Waugh had enjoyed a 13-year international career and – by March 1999 – he had been ranked as the world’s best Test batsman for virtually the whole of the previous four years. He had also led Australia’s one-day side for the preceding year and, at the age of 33, seemed ready to take forward what was already a formidable side. But, as he says, he was still inexperienced as a captain and, unlike Taylor, he did not have a clear plan of how he would do things from the outset. It took him his first two series in charge to find his feet.
Waugh had to find ways of distinguishing his regime from Taylor’s, whilst continuing the upward curve of Australia’s cricket. The challenge was to take the best side in the world and improve it; effectively to make it the best of all time. Taylor had won Test series home and away against every Test nation bar India but, under Waugh, winning series in themselves would no longer be enough. He wanted to win every match, every day of every match, every session, every spell, every ball. He knew his team was better than all the rest, but that it was still to reach its potential.
As Waugh had evolved as a player by squeezing every last drop of ability out of himself, now his evolution as a captain would see him inject a lot of his individual qualities into his team. The green and gold machine was to be fine-tuned. In Star Trek-speak, its phasers were to be changed from ‘stun’ to ‘kill’. ‘His team was a bit more aggressive, scored a bit quicker, and he wanted them to be ruthless,’ England’s Mike Atherton observed. Ruthless was a label quickly attached to Australia’s new captain. ‘I always wanted to make the most of my potential at Test level and the same with my team, so if that’s considered ruthless then I guess I was,’ Waugh said. ‘I prefer to consider it as making the most of what you’ve got rather than being ruthless. I think it’s about being professional, being true to yourself and having pride in your performance. I also consider myself to be pretty compassionate. I like to get close to the players, see what’s bothering them, and I like to be fair.
‘I didn’t want to change things completely, as the team had been successful and was pretty set on its course. There was no need for massive personnel change. But I wanted to get rid of the dead rubber syndrome that I felt we suffered from. We used to lose those Test matches when the series was already decided because our focus wasn’t quite right and I wanted to eradicate that. I wanted us to battle it out for a tough draw on the fifth day if necessary.’
Australia had lost at the Oval in 1993 and 1997 after the Ashes had been wrapped up – something Waugh considered sloppy. Test cricket was the pinnacle of the sport. Giving away wins, like allowing a batsman easy runs, was foreign to him. In 2001, Australia stopped England’s sequence of winning dead rubbers at the Oval. Waugh had torn his calf-muscle during the third Test at Trent Bridge and seemed set to miss the last two matches, but, having seen his team lose at Headingley in the fourth Test, Waugh made it back to ensure Australia saw out the series in what would be his final Ashes Test in England.
‘I guess my calf-injury incident was an example of how driven I was to get back and play for my country,’ Waugh said. ‘But it was also an example of how valuable the people are behind the scenes. Lynette, my wife, was crucial. When I did my calf, I had never felt pain like it before or had that severe an injury before. I couldn’t move. I was sitting in a wheelchair in hospital with the Australia team physio, Errol Alcott, when we got the results of the scan: it was a 5 by 5 cm tear with another smaller tear, too, and I was told I could face between three and six months out.
‘At the same time I was on the phone to the team who had just won the Ashes and in truth I was isolated from the guys and feeling a bit sorry for myself. I was never one to hang around the side when I was out with injury, even before I was captain, so I told Lynette I was coming home at the weekend. She was not having a bar of it. She said that I was the captain of the team and I had to accept the Ashes urn on the balcony at the Oval.
‘I thought that she had a point, so from that moment I stopped feeling sorry for myself and said to Errol that I wanted to see if I could make it back in 19 days. I had 18 days of 10 hours’ physiotherapy per day. I had four to five hours of hand manipulation and five hours doing exercises in the pool. Errol is a magician, a great physio, and all the while I was thinking about my wife at home supporting me and therefore why I should also be giving it 100 per cent. It was one Test match. If it had been the third or fourth Test of the series, I would have taken a different view, but it was the last in the series. In some ways it was a bit of an example to some of the England players, one or two of whom were struggling with a little tear and were out for three or four weeks.’
It was an example of the drive and determination that made Waugh such a champion performer and so respected by his team. He had no right to make it back for that final Test of 2001, let alone score a hundred, yet he thrived on the challenge of pushing the boundaries of what was possible. He also enjoyed showing up England’s players for their comparative lack of commitment and sacrifice. It was doubtful, for instance, whether Graham Thorpe, who missed most of the series through a calf injury, was putting himself through a similar gruelling routine to be fit for his country’s cause.
Tales of Waugh’s legendary toughness abounded at Kent, of course, so you can imagine my surprise when the captain of Australia walked off the field in his first championship match for us, against Leicestershire. He had been hit on the hand by a lifter from overseas bowler Javagal Srinath and after inspection from our physio headed for the dressing-rooms. We all looked on rather grimly from the balcony, concluding that only a multiple fracture or severing of a finger would cause him to come off. The 12th man made it upstairs first, informing us that there was ‘lots of blood’. It turned out, though, that it was just a cut to his finger and so we were able to indulge in a bit of ‘we thought you were hard, Tugga, but you chip a nail and walk off in a county match’ kind of banter, which again he took in good humour.
Waugh, of course, was never a cricketer to take a backward step or take a short cut. He never expected any favours. He enjoyed the hard work and the gladiatorial confrontation of Test cricket. His squaring up to West Indies paceman Curtly Ambrose in Jamaica in 1995 is one of the iconic moments of the cricketing ’90s, symbolising Australia’s emergence as the new number one nation, no longer afraid of the previous superpower. A generation of Australian cricketers had failed to beat them, so it was a huge achievement, and a hard earned one, to win in their backyard. Waugh had indeed experienced the hard times of Australian cricket. He knew what it was like to lose and to underachieve. It took him three years to bring up his first hundred, while during that time he had tasted Ashes defeat at the hands of Gatting’s England in 1986–87. He witnessed first hand how Allan Border led by example and turned things around through sheer willpower. The Ashes of 1989 was a watershed series in Waugh’s Test career and it coincided with a new tough approach by Border, the significance of which was not lost on the younger man. ‘We talked about the change of emphasis at the start of the tour,’ Waugh said. ‘For Border, it was a case of, “We’re not friends with this lot anymore. I’m not even going to talk to them off the field and I’m going to do whatever it takes to win.” I think he was just sick of losing and sick of being mediocre as a team. On reflection, as a captain, I can understand that.
‘He was tough on our team: we couldn’t have wives or girlfriends until the last two weeks of the tour. They weren’t allowed to set foot in the hotel. They weren’t allowed to travel with us. It was a case of: “We’re here to do a job. We’re professionals, now let’s turn it around.”’
Waugh scored his maiden Test century, 177 not out, at Leeds in the first Test of the 1989 series. He then followed it up with an unbeaten 152 at Lord’s. Instrumental in Australia’s 4–0 victory margin, he finished the series with 506 runs at an average of 126.5. He credits a lot of his personal success to the tough environment that Border created. ‘He was tough and at times a bit moody, but for me it was probably what I needed at the time. I don’t think I was professional enough in my early international career. I’d had 26 Test matches without scoring a hundred and could certainly be described as being a bit of unfulfilled potential. I probably needed a kick up the backside and needed to knuckle down.’
The old Waugh had been an extravagant shot-maker, taking on the hook and playing all round the wicket off both feet. The Waugh that emerged in 1989 was more circumspect, punching the ball either side of cover point, clipping anything straight through mid-wicket and ducking the short ball. His defence was so solid that a picture of his forward defensive stroke taken from side-on became one of the images of the summer, symbolising the impregnability of the Australian side.
Waugh had streamlined his technique and bolstered his concentration but still there were times when he struggled. In the Ashes of 1990–91, he was dropped for the fourth Test for his twin brother Mark, who made a century on debut, and only fully established himself after a hundred at Sydney in 1992–93 against the West Indies had earned him another stay of Test execution.
Border’s retirement in 1994 saw Taylor rather than the more experienced Waugh take on the captaincy, and Ian Healy surprisingly made vice-captain. It was a blessing in disguise for Waugh, enabling him to focus fully on his batting. He assumed Border’s role of middle-order rock and began to churn out the runs. He scored 429 runs at an average of 107.25 against the West Indies in 1995, as Australia won the Worrell Trophy for the first time since 1978. His 200 in Jamaica to decide the outcome of the series summed Waugh up. He batted for nine hours, absorbed a lot of short hostile deliveries on the body but just kept going one ball at a time. It wasn’t pretty, but his batting rarely was a thing of beauty. He left that to his younger twin. It was an awesome performance and a victory for Waugh’s mental toughness. By the time he started the 1995–96 Australian domestic season, he was ranked as the world’s leading Test batsman.
‘The first half of my career I didn’t have that mental toughness,’ Waugh said. ‘I was going out to bat hoping I was going to get runs rather than believing I could. Mental toughness is simply the ability not to give in to yourself at those weak moments when it is easier to take a short-cut and look for an excuse. You’ve got to be prepared to do the hard yards. If you’ve done the preparation when there’s nothing at stake, there’s no one watching and there’s no kudos to be had by that moment, when it comes to the big moments you can reproduce it pretty easily because the motivation’s already there and you’ve laid the platform.
‘I learnt, too, that it’s not about having 500 throw downs when you could benefit more from doing 20 really well. Working it out and being honest with yourself is the key. Getting runs when I played for Bankstown in Aussie grade cricket was important. Everyone was trying to knock me over, there was no crowd watching but my professional pride was at stake and I was walking out as a Test player. I had to knuckle down and score runs. It was hard work concentrating, but if I could do it there, then walking out to bat at Lord’s would become very easy. It was about learning those processes so you could reproduce them at the key moments.’
There are many similarities between Border and Waugh as cricketers and captains but the context in which they inherited the captaincy of Australia could not have been more different. Border had to feed off scraps as a captain whereas Waugh had an embarrassment of riches. He had benefited from knowing the losing feeling as a player, benefited, too, from playing under two very different captains, while he established himself as one of the best players in the world. Now his toughest task was keeping players who were used to winning fully engaged and motivated.
‘You need a good blend of characters in any side,’ he said. ‘There are some who don’t need much management at all. Jason Gillespie would just get on with his job; Gilchrist, Ponting, McGrath are low maintenance guys, but at the other end of the scale you have the spinners MacGill and Warne, and a guy like Michael Slater who takes a bit more effort. That’s not a bad thing. They’re their own people and they like to do things their way. At times it needs a bit of maintenance by the captain or the management but that keeps you on your toes. The underlying factor was that we always respected each other and we knew that every player in our team was always giving his best for the team.
‘The hardest part of working with such a talented group is keeping everyone happy and focused and playing for the side. McGrath and Warne, for example, were both great bowlers. They were two bowlers rolled into one in the sense that they could attack for you but they weren’t going to go for many runs. To have them both was a great luxury for any captain. But the hard part was managing those players and keeping them happy with their expectations because they always wanted to take five wickets and they always wanted to bowl. Then you had to find a way of getting the other players into the mix as well.
‘I think you treat people equally but differently. You turn up at the bus at the right time, you wear the same uniform, you treat spectators with respect, but at the same time you encourage the players’ individual flair and follow your gut instincts about your players. My style of captaincy was really about getting the best out of people and making them fulfil their own potential. If they did that, then the team was going to play well.
‘Justin Langer is a good example of a player who needed to feel wanted and special and part of the side. His role is significant, opening the batting. I’d regularly talk to Langer about how important he and Matty Hayden were to the side by getting us off to a great start, laying the platform and setting the game up for us. He likes to stay in form and know what’s going on, so you’ve got to have a lot of contact with him. He was out of the team on a couple of tours over here and he found that hard.
‘Warne liked a lot of communication about the field setting and how he’s going to bowl to certain players, whereas with MacGill you’d just got to let him get on with it and leave him alone. You didn’t talk to Stuey much on the field, you just threw him the ball and let him bowl. He was happy for you to set the field, though. It’s about working out their personality and what makes them tick.
‘People also forget that I used to be a bowler and I used to know my plans, what I was trying to achieve and where I wanted my fieldsmen. As captain, therefore, if a bowler was strong in his convictions, telling me what he was trying to do, then 99 times out of 100 I’d say to him to go for it. Rarely would I step in and say, “I think you’ve got that wrong,” because I think you’ve got to let players follow their instincts and follow their plan.’
Just as Waugh was a huge believer in trusting his instincts as captain, he wanted his players to back themselves on the cricket field. Hayden, Langer and Ponting all trained on under Waugh, who showed faith in their abilities by encouraging them all to play their games and be positive. ‘Our goal was to try to forget about the scoreboard and the situation of the game and back ourselves. If you think you can hit the first ball of the game for four or six, then go out and do it. My advice was for them to play their way rather than the way others thought they should play. We had such a talented line-up we could be aggressive.’
Waugh’s 41 victories as captain came from just 57 Tests in charge. He captained in nine Ashes Tests, winning the first eight, and losing the last one in Sydney despite scoring a wonderful hundred courtesy of a boundary four off the last ball of the second day. Some commentators thought Waugh a conservative captain. The evidence suggests otherwise. There were, remarkably, only seven drawn Tests under his leadership. The man played to win.
I remember, too, when picking the Kent team to play Somerset at Taunton in 2002, opting to replace Rob Key, our opening batsman, who had been called up for England, with James Tredwell, our young off-spinner. My rationale was that Taunton was notoriously flat and we would need all the bowling we could get if we were to catch the leaders. Tredwell was no mug with the bat and I said I’d back him to contribute on a flat one. My fellow selectors wanted to strengthen the batting with a like-for-like replacement, highlighting the fact that we weren’t safe from relegation. Waugh, who was in my car and therefore party to the selection process, was critical of this safety-first mentality and agreed with the bolder move of picking Tredwell. ‘Never look over your shoulder. Always keep your attention fixed on where you want to get to,’ he instructed.
Waugh was fortunate to have such an array of talent at his disposal that he could adopt an aggressive, ultra-positive approach. At times Australia would bully sides into submission. He had a batting line-up that would often score at more than four runs per over and an attack that allowed him to bowl first more than was customary. ‘I knew that we had the bowlers to take 20 wickets and my goal was often to get them as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘A lot of times the best option was to stick the opposition in so we could take the first ten then bat well in the middle, leaving us plenty of time to bowl them out in the second innings with Warne, McGrath and the others in support of them. My thoughts were to win and win as quickly as we could by being aggressive, positive, and disorientating the opposition. Of course I couldn’t have played that way if I didn’t have the players, but I thought that as I had got this big advantage I might as well use it. A lot of times I’m sure the opposition didn’t want to bat first against our blokes, so it was less about what the wicket might do and more about who was in the opposition and what they didn’t want to do.’
This approach represented a real departure from convention and highlights how superior Australia were to the rest of the world during Waugh’s tenure. At the toss a captain will assess how a pitch might play and look to use conditions to his team’s advantage. If the pitch is green and damp, you might well bowl because the wicket will generally get easier. If the pitch looks flat, you bat. As Nasser Hussain says, when discussing his erroneous decision to bowl first at Brisbane in 2002: ‘There are certain rules of cricket that apply. One of those is that if the wicket looks good have a bat on it.’
Waugh, though, is saying he often disregarded the conditions because he wanted to exploit the mental weaknesses of the opposition. He, too, would have bowled first in Brisbane, not because he thought the pitch was bad for batting but because he was relishing the chance to get at the England batsmen. Waugh appreciated the power of the mind more than anyone, and he could sniff out mental weakness at 100 paces. ‘I always live by the philosophy that while you respect history and traditions, you create your own future and your own history as well. I was more than keen to do things differently if I thought it was in the best interests of the team. Things like whether to enforce the follow-on or what tactics to pursue came down to disorientating the opposition so their head was in a spin. We played at such a fast pace and put them under such pressure that we could break them down.’
Hussain, Waugh’s opposite number in both the 2001 and 2002–03 Ashes series and a respected opponent, disputes England were mentally weaker than Australia. In the following chapter, he mounts a vigorous defence of his team’s mental approach, preferring to focus on the comparative abilities of the two sets of players. Hussain’s argument is compelling – Australia were man-for-man a stronger side. But when I repeat Hussain’s assertion that had the two captains swapped places he (Hussain) would have been the winning Ashes captain, Waugh’s response was typically sharp: ‘Tell Nass he wouldn’t have got in our team!’ he said.
While Waugh wanted his players to express fully their individual flair on the field, he sought to remind them of what made representing Australia special away from the game. His first trip to England as captain in 2001 was preceded by a trip to Gallipoli, where thousands of Australian soldiers had lost their lives in the First World War. Waugh wanted to emphasise the significance of being Australian and that playing for their country meant they, too, were part of Australia’s great traditions. He continually sought ways to bind them as a group and prevent them from taking their success for granted. A hard taskmaster, who expected them to be ruthless while doing their job, Waugh also wanted his players to understand that playing for Australia was an honour and a privilege. The baggy green cap had always been an important symbol of the Australian cricket team, but it was to take on mythical status under Waugh’s leadership. ‘I really thought we had something special in the baggy green and all that it stood for,’ Waugh said. ‘I remember the aura the West Indies had when I first started playing; the way they walked about, the red caps with the palm trees on. They just seemed really united. And so, with us, everyone wearing the baggy green just seemed to send out a message that this team was really together and hard to break down.
‘Gallipoli was an important experience because it brought us together in a different bonding way. Usually cricketers associate bonding with a night on the drink and a few stories and laughs that are quickly forgotten. I wanted some more significant experiences that they would talk about in years to come. I wanted them to remember Gallipoli, what had happened there, what we saw and talked about, and say that it made us stronger as a unit. It’s good to get away from cricket and think about other people for a while.’
Not only were Waugh’s players some of the most prodigiously talented cricketers in the world, but he also had enough good players on the fringes to keep them wary of hanging on to their spots. MacGill had long been proven back-up to Warne and was even preferred to him under Waugh in the West Indies at Antigua in 1999. Damien Martyn, Darren Lehmann, Langer and Slater all jostled for possession of batting spots alongside the Waugh brothers, Hayden and Ponting, while Brett Lee had emerged to give the bowling attack a new dimension. Gilchrist had also taken over the wicket-keeping duties from Healy, soon proving himself to be the most dangerous middle-order batsman in the world game. It was further evidence, if any was needed, that the structure of Australian cricket was in good order and that top-class players could be plucked out of their domestic game at the will of the selectors.
In many ways, Steve Waugh had the easiest job in world cricket. Hussain was right when he suggested he would have been very successful leading Waugh’s players, just as Alec Stewart believes he might have gone quite well leading Clive Lloyd’s West Indies team of the 1970s and ’80s, even though he was then just a schoolboy. They have been the two most dominant sides of the modern era, and are worth comparing.
Both Lloyd and Waugh had great bowling options at their disposal. While Waugh’s attack might not have possessed the physical intimidation of the four-pronged West Indies pace attack, with Warne and McGrath he had control and a psychological hold over the opposition. He also had a balanced attack suitable for all conditions.
Both men batted in the middle order, allowing other great players to set the tone of the game. Lloyd, who also afforded himself a front row seat of the carnage in the field at first slip, was just as happy watching Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes and Vivian Richards dish out the punishment with the bat. Waugh, similarly, was happy to see his top order rack up big scores although – like Lloyd before him – he always thrived on the rare adversity of being three or four down for not many, as in Barbados in 1998–99 when he scored 199, or Wellington in 1999–2000 when he notched 151 not out, to mention two shining examples.
The pertinent point, though, is that Waugh had evolved as the perfect captain to lead such an array of cricketing talent because he would never let them become complacent. In conjunction with John Buchanan, the coach, he kept driving them forwards and never could anyone point the finger at him for living by different rules. ‘As captain, you’ve got to be prepared to do the stuff you’re asking other people to do,’ Waugh said.
Talented, motivated and united, Waugh’s Australian team set out to crush England in 2001 and 2002–03. Rarely had the Ashes been so one-sided. Of Waugh’s eight Ashes victories, four were by margins of more than an innings; none were remotely close. England’s victories came at Headingley when Waugh was injured, courtesy of Gilchrist declaring at 176 for 4 and Mark Butcher’s once-in-a-lifetime innings of 173 not out, and at Sydney when the home side batted last on a deteriorating pitch.
Australia came flying at England from the start of each series. At Edgbaston in 2001, Waugh and Martyn laid the foundations for Gilchrist’s belligerent 152, which, at better than a run a ball, tore the belief out of England, who subsided in the second innings from 142 for 2 to 164 all out, losing by an innings and 118 runs. Gillespie broke Hussain’s finger to compound England’s woes. In Brisbane in 2002–03, Hussain’s decision to insert Australia backfired badly as Hayden and Ponting compiled hundreds and Simon Jones badly damaged a knee diving in the outfield. Warne and McGrath bowled England out for just 79 in the second innings to record a victory margin of 384 runs.
The Australian juggernaut established early momentum on each occasion and simply rolled right over England. So, I wondered, had the ease with which Waugh’s team dismantled England dampened the Australian captain’s ardour for cricket’s oldest duel? ‘The Ashes is always special,’ he said. ‘There’s the history and tradition. There’s nothing like getting off the plane at Heathrow when the air’s freezing cold. You hear the different accents and you see the black cabs. You come to Lord’s, the home of cricket, and train out the back in your whites. There’s something special about it that just grabs you. You’re on the bus together for four months’ travelling. It’s not just a cricket tour, it’s an adventure, a life experience.’
Waugh’s warmth when talking about the Ashes contest, and all it means, did not however extend to the England players. Waugh was from the Border school of giving nothing away on the pitch. Any conversations with the opposition during play would be short and to the point, while off the pitch he was keen to keep a distance between the two sides. ‘Look, you’re there to do a job on the field and once you lose that intimidation factor, your aura, the opposition see you as the same as them,’ he said. ‘It’s like what the West Indies had when I first started playing. We felt they were on a different planet. They were different to us, the way they carried themselves and the fact they never talked to us. We were intimidated by them. As soon as you break someone down and you get to know them, have a laugh and a joke and start calling them by their nickname, you stop seeing them as superhuman. So we tried to keep up a bit of a wall of secrecy and keep tight as a unit because we didn’t want people to know that much about us. We didn’t want England, or anyone else for that matter, to find out we were the same as them, with the same insecurities, the same concerns, the same pressures.’
Waugh is critical of Ponting’s 2005 team for being too friendly with England. Kevin Pietersen, a county teammate of Warne’s at Hampshire, was less intimidated by the great leg-spinner than other batsmen had been, while most of the Australian players had enjoyed spells with county sides and forged friendships that cut across national ties. In Waugh’s short time at Kent part of his mystique evaporated, too. Underneath the tag of ‘best in the world’ existed a really good guy, who made everyone feel comfortable around him. The atmosphere at Kent, which had come alive with nervous energy when he first entered the dressing-room, noticeably relaxed after a few days. The toughest gladiator in the game was simply known as ‘Tugga’, a bloke whose tights (of the sporting kind), which he wore under his whites to protect his leg muscles and prevent compartment syndrome, caused much jocularity.
Many commentators thought Waugh’s last Ashes series in 2002–03 would also be his last as an Australian player and captain. Taylor had retired immediately after the Ashes of 1998–99 and it seemed likely that four years later Waugh would follow suit. When he scored a brilliant hundred in the last match, in front of his home crowd at the SCG, it seemed like the fitting finale. ‘I didn’t know when I was going to retire, to be honest. I knew it was coming and that there was mounting speculation. I guess after scoring that hundred at Sydney in my last Ashes innings it might have been a good way to go, but for me there was a bit of unfinished business. I started my captaincy career in the West Indies and we had ended up with a 2–2 draw, and I think in the back of my mind I thought it was a good place to call it a day, as it was a completed cycle of having played against each side. I felt like I had a bit more in me.’
So Waugh went back to the West Indies and recorded a 3–1 series victory before announcing that the home series against India would be his last. Waugh’s team had been involved in one of the most exciting series in recent times in India in 2001, losing 2–1, and sure enough the sequel didn’t disappoint, even if tributes to him threatened to overshadow another enthralling contest. He bowed out after 168 Tests, the most capped player in the history of the game, chasing one last hundred in front of his adoring fans at the SCG. It ended with an uncustomary heave at Anil Kumble, the ball landing fittingly in the hands of another sporting icon, Sachin Tendulkar. ‘I got it right because since I retired I haven’t thought once about playing more or what I could have done,’ he said. ‘I felt really fulfilled in what I did because I left everything out in the middle.’
Steve Waugh’s retirement marked the end of an era. Australia simultaneously celebrated his career and mourned his departure: ‘The King is dead. Long live the King,’ was the cry as Ricky Ponting was anointed his successor. In England, meanwhile, the retirement of Waugh meant that the first seeds of a new English belief were sown. Thoughts of recapturing the Ashes, still a distant dream when Waugh was in charge, had suddenly become slightly more realistic.