AND YET STEREOTYPES in cricket, like a Shaun Pollock bouncer, are sometimes hard to avoid. I was once chatting with an Australian friend about the laziness of such cheap and gratuitous characterisation. Bruce responded with a grunt last heard in the Triassic Period, then returned to his bottle of VB lager and his game of Flick the Dangling Corks. He amused himself this way for several hours before collapsing in a drunken heap and burbling away in the corner about the baggy green.
Of course, the above paragraph contains elements of fiction (Bruce’s name was actually Shane). The sad truth is that my various friendships with Australians only just survived the ritual slaughter that took place between 1989 and 2003. In that time the English were stereotyped to the point where they could barely dunk their custard creams in their Earl Greys without provoking a snort of derision from the Antipodes: dirty, spineless, useless; ridiculous, ineffectual, embarrassing; lily-livered, weak-hearted, pasty-faced. But it was when the Aussies started to get personal that reality dawned. Cricket is not merely a feeble pretext for nationalistic gloating in and around the pubs of south-west London. More than that, it is a great excuse for getting to grips with what makes a country tick; for exposing foibles and laughing at them; and for wondering, deep down, whether the caricatures we all rely on to make life simpler do not in fact have their basis in that scary place which, as we have already discussed, many cricketers try to avoid: the real world.
It is true that generalisations are particular fodder for journalists (you know, those boozy layabouts who doctor their quotes and would happily denounce their own grandmothers in print if it paid for the next round). Pigeonholes, after all, make for more straightforward judgements. We love batsmen like Ken Barrington, who in the words of Australia’s great post-war wicketkeeper Wally Grout used to approach the crease with the Union Jack ‘trailing behind him’. And we love them because we know where we stand. We feel unsettled when a Welshman who was born in Papua New Guinea but grew up in Australia keeps wicket for England, because we don’t know who to blame when things go wrong. In fact, it’s simple: he’s British when he takes a catch, Australian when he doesn’t, and Papuan when the editor demands a fluffy feature on a quiet news day. These days, with Geraint Jones no longer in the side, it’s even simpler.
It is the kind of childish thinking which means that each of the Test nations is invariably ascribed its own set of characteristics, especially when a deadline is approaching. Australians never say die, unless they are standing on the throat of a Pom who hasn’t showered for a week. New Zealanders are understated and have an inferiority complex about Australians. South Africans are humourless and competitive. Indians are wristy. Pakistanis are mercurial, if not downright excitable. West Indians used to be frightening; now they are simply too cool for their own good. Sri Lankans are joyful islanders, despite the civil war that has engulfed their country (note the patronising caveat: this is something of a rule of thumb too). Bangladeshis are plucky, except if they beat Australia, when they become demi-Gods. Zimbabweans are hapless. And the English? That’s a tricky one. The English, more than any other nation, are the sum of their parts, and those parts can be very disparate indeed. During England’s disastrous one-day tour of India in 2006, their top six contained Andrew Strauss, Matt Prior (both born in Johannesburg), Owais Shah (Karachi), Kevin Pietersen (Pietermaritzburg) and Vikram Solanki (Udaipur, India). Geraint Jones (the Australian-born, Papua New Guinean-bred Welshman) came in at No. 7. It all made Paul Collingwood (Shotley Bridge), Andrew Flintoff (Preston), Ian Blackwell (Chesterfield) and Liam Plunkett (Middlesbrough) sound distinctly one-dimensional. Of course, this isn’t the case. But then stereotypes only work up to a certain point. And this, nation by nation, is my attempt to get to grips with them.
Australia
The former Australian prime minister John Howard once described the ideal outlook of any immigrant to his country: he should believe in the principle of equality, the ethic of mateship and the willingness to ‘have a go’. Well, blow me down. At least if Howard had shouted the odds for inequality, the ethic of hostility and the willingness to disengage and crack open a tinnie at the slightest pretext, we would have had a decent headline on our hands. Yet there is something amid his banalities that strikes a chord with the average Australian cricketer. Many people believe that Australians regard cricket as a matter of life or death. They do not. And neither do they subscribe to the equivalent of Bill Shankly’s observation about football being more important than that. After all, why would you bat like Matthew Hayden or bowl like Brett Lee if you were worried that a single mistake would mean a one-way ticket to the great billabong in the sky?
No, what marks the Aussie cricketer out is his competitive instinct and his genuine disgust at the idea that anyone could ever bat or bowl for a draw, which might explain why all pre-war Ashes Tests down under had to be played to a finish. ‘We could be playing Kick a Cockroach From Here to the Wall and we’d want to be competitive,’ said Hayden. And he wasn’t joking: Sydney airport is full of cockroaches desperate to get out. In Australia, the draw is the refuge of the coward, a relic of English village games where the less talented team can stonewall for three hours and emerge with a share of the spoils. When Matthew Hoggard told the media on the eve of the second Ashes Test at Adelaide in December 2006 that England’s aim was ‘not to lose’, he might as well have donned a Harlequin cap and revealed to horrified Australian journalists that he was the long-lost grandson of Douglas Jardine. And when England spent the last day of that Test, a game they had dominated, trying to do precisely as Hoggard had suggested, they failed spectacularly. For the Australians, it was the only conclusion that made sense.
Like most Englishmen of a certain age, I have developed an irrational problem with Australians. I like them very much on a one-to-one basis, but get them in a group and they begin to grate. And if that group happens to be a cricket team, violence can ensue. The fact that they spent many, many years duffing England up didn’t help, although I’ll delve into that special relationship later. But what really got me – what really convinced me that green, gold and Skippy were dirty words – was the zealousness with which they went about dismantling England in 2006–07. Everyone likes to beat England: it’s one of the perks of being part of a former Empire. But the Aussies define themselves by it. ‘Stuff that stiff-upper-lip crap,’ snarled the Pom-hater par excellence Jeff Thomson. ‘Let’s see how stiff it is when it’s split.’ He was talking about bowling bouncers, but no one would have been surprised if he had uttered those words while wiping the beery foam away from his mouth and advancing on a group of ‘Rule, Britannia’-singing bystanders. Thomson may have been an extreme case, but not by much. The Aussies love winning. And they love to hate the Poms. The two ingredients make for a potent mix.
If you were to imagine the archetypal Aussie cricketer you would probably grit your teeth and do it something like this. He would have the nerve of the 22-stone Warwick Armstrong, who led his country to a 5–0 victory over England in 1921, and once whiled away the last session of a Test at The Oval by reading a newspaper that had blown across the outfield, ‘to see who we’re playing against’. He would have the precocity of Neil Harvey, who made his Test debut aged 19 and ended up with twenty-one hundreds, the talented git; the facial hair of Merv Hughes, to muffle the sledging; the fruit-machine-slot eyes of Steve Waugh, dispensing derision and disdain; the verbal dexterity of Matthew Hayden; the harder-than-rusty-nails toughness of Allan Border; the wrist of Shane Warne, although maybe not his texting thumb; the accuracy of Glenn McGrath; the team spirit of Rod Marsh, who in 1984 told Border he was quitting the game ‘because my mates have retired’; oh, and the hand–eye coordination of Don Bradman, who according to his team-mates was equally adept off the field, where he never knowingly dug into his own pocket to buy a round. Anyone who has shared an evening’s drinking with a bunch of Australians will know this kind of behaviour takes a very special talent indeed.
Much is made of Australia’s climate, which has certainly helped encourage fast bowlers, leg-spinners and rabidly keen fielders: the sight of Andrew Symonds tearing up the outfield to turn a three into a two in a game Australia are about to win by an innings is one of the wonders of the age. But the role of geography in Australia’s attitude should not be overlooked. Their position on the other side of the world – stop me if I’m getting all GMT-centric – has nurtured their desire to be noticed. All I can say is thank goodness for New Zealand, who have stoically provided a handy bulwark between Australia and the oblivion of Antarctica for many centuries. Without the Kiwis, the Aussies would probably have won the football World Cup too. Throw in the fact that Australian males still toss and turn with resentment every night at the thought of Bodyline and the taunts of the Barmy Army every four years (‘God save your gracious Queen’ . . . ‘Get your six stars off our flag’ . . . ‘I shagged Matilda, I shagged Matilda’) and you get the picture. This is a nation hell-bent on success. I’d say good luck to them, but they hardly need it. And in any case it would be a hideous lie.
Bangladesh
India aside, no Test team has as much potential for improvement as Bangladesh. A country just over half the size of the UK, it contains almost three times as many inhabitants, most of whom are too involved with the day-today business of survival to spend their time oiling their bat and polishing the shiny side. And yet it is precisely for this reason that cricket is so important to the Bangladeshis: it is the ultimate means of escape from a reality of flooding and poverty. Those quality-of-life indices that rate nations according to factors such as cost of living, health, infrastructure and the tendency of their terrain to break up and help the spinners on the fourth day regularly place Bangladesh somewhere near the bottom, alongside countries such as Rwanda and Turkmenistan. Now, if ‘cricket’ really were added as a category . . .
Not everyone is convinced that Bangladesh will make it as a Test-playing nation, which is why most assessments of a player’s career tend to include caveats such as ‘ignoring for a moment runs made against Zimbabwe and Bangladesh’, ‘take Bangladesh out of the equation’, and ‘were it not for his unbeaten triple hundred against the Bangladeshis . . .’. Invited to dine at the top table, the Bangladeshis have generally been asked to sit at the end in the kiddy’s chair and are sent to bed before the adults pass the port. This stems in part from a widespread belief that the game which helped them attain Test status in 2000 – their victory over Pakistan at Northampton in the 1999 World Cup – was dodgier than a cut-price deal with Trotters Independent Traders. But I’m not so sure. I mean, the fact that Pakistan bowled twenty-eight wides and seven no-balls and then lost three of their batsmen to farcical run-outs hardly differentiates it from most of their other performances over the years. No matter: Bangladesh, who had never before won a one-day international against a Test-playing nation and would not do so again – Zimbabwe excepted – until Boxing Day 2004, were soon invited to join the club.
It has been a painful apprenticeship, and one which has been alleviated only slightly by the occasional plucky performance against Australia and the comedy value of their press conferences. When most sides lose a game, the local journalists might ask a couple of specific questions. Why was Devon Malcolm batting at No. 3, for example? What possessed Nasser Hussain to open the bowling? Bangladeshi reporters barely bother with such niceties. ‘Dav, Dav,’ they clamoured, as the former coach Dav Whatmore did his best to hide his irritation. ‘Why no bowlers? Why no batsmen?’ Then, as he left the room at the end of his grilling, they would swarm round him in search of quotes which had no chance of being exclusive. There have been signs recently that Bangladesh are finally translating potential into results, but I’m happy to say the press conferences are unlikely to become any less frantic.
England
Where better to start with an assessment of the English than through the eyes of a Scot? In The Angry Island: Hunting the English, the journalist A.A. Gill (OK, so he doesn’t exactly go round in a kilt) wrote: ‘An American pointed out that the English are the only people on earth who manage to feel Schadenfreude about themselves. There is a long history of self-satisfied masochism in the English, a self-justifying pessimism.’ Anyone who grew up following the fortunes of the England cricket team in the 1980s and ’90s will be nodding their head right now with vertebra-damaging fury. And while we’re getting all Germanic, it seems only fair to mention that these two decades were an era which defined the Weltanschauung of an entire generation: defeat was the daily diet, victory an all-too-rare feast. In a twisted kind of way, it was good for the soul, or so I told myself on a self-preservingly regular basis. Just look at the stats. In the 1980s England played 104 Tests, winning 20 and losing 39. In the 1990s they played 107, winning 26 and losing 43. As my old geography teacher used to say after we kept confusing our anticyclones with our depressions: ‘Abysmal, gentlemen, abysmal.’
To admit to being an England fan in the days after Ian Botham stopped winning games all by himself was to invite sympathy. But those of us who stuck with them were rewarded: first Nasser Hussain, a very unEnglish kind of Englishman, then Michael Vaughan, who had a touch of Mike Brearley’s elegant ruthlessness, turned things round. Suddenly England were beating everyone on a regular basis except Australia, and even they had the good grace to roll over for one series before resuming normal service.
The experience of winning caused a problem, largely because it is not something the English cricketer has been used to over the years. When Mike Atherton accepted a gong on behalf of Channel 4 at the RTS Television Sports Awards in 2006, he could not have phrased his surprise more delicately: ‘Before I joined Channel 4 I played for a team that won fuck all for fifteen years.’ Success has rarely been part of the national vocabulary. England were the best side in the world until about 1897, when Australia, their only competition, finally got to grips with the game. Their next indisputable period of dominance came in the 1950s, when they had a genuinely world-class side and newcomers like Pakistan, India and New Zealand made them feel even better about themselves. There is also a case for saying they were briefly No. 1 after winning in Australia in 1970–71. But we’re getting distracted. The point is that England tend to be at their best when least is expected of them. Some of their most stirring victories in recent times – The Oval 1993, Bridgetown 1994, Adelaide 1995, Melbourne 1998, Mumbai 2006, the XXXX Beach Cricket veterans’ tri-series in Perth 2008 – have come when it seemed things could get no worse. Yet slap on them the tag of favourites, and they can hardly walk out of the pavilion without tripping on the steps. When they went to Pakistan in 2005–06 fresh from toppling the Aussies, they came a predictable cropper. As Shane Warne pointed out a year later when Australia took revenge in style, the MBEs they were awarded for winning a couple of games of cricket presumably stood for Must Be Embarrassing. In fact, this very English problem with winning had been summed up a few decades earlier by John Snow, the fast bowler who helped England to victory in that 1970–71 series in Australia. Flying home, he recalls thinking, ‘What now?’ An Australian who had just beaten England would surely have been thinking, ‘When next?’
This natural suspicion of ostentatious glory – to gloss over the Trafalgar Square parade in 2005 for a moment – means the English also manage to find a place in their hearts for players who would not necessarily be considered drawcards elsewhere. While there has always been a rightful helping of reverence for stylish English batsmen down the ages – Frank Woolley, Jack Hobbs, Wally Hammond, Ted Dexter, David Gower – the cult figures in the eyes of England cricket fans have often been the roundheads: Len Hutton, Ken Barrington, Geoff Boycott, Trevor Bailey, Mike Atherton and (no sniggering at the front) Paul Collingwood. Even Chris Tavare makes the grade. As Gideon Haigh, the English-born, Australian-bred cricket writer who surely ranks among Tavare’s most ardent fans, once put it: ‘He did not so much score runs as smuggle them out by stealth.’ Australians find it mystifying that someone like Tavare should inspire such affection. But for the English his strokelessness was taken as an insane devotion to the cause. Heck, at least he wasn’t doing anything too over the top like attempting to hit a boundary. Perhaps we’re back to Gill: ‘The English teeter on the edge of not being able to take anything seriously.’ And that includes choosing their cricketing heroes.
This instinctive siding with the artisans over the artists – it was a crime for Gower to fiddle outside off-stump, but a mere lapse when Tavare chose to do so – expresses itself in other ways. When the nation was debating whether to pick Kevin Pietersen for the 2005 Ashes in place of Graham Thorpe (another nuggety battler), there was a lot of typically English concern about Pietersen’s bottom-handed tendencies. Never mind the fact that he had just averaged over 150 in a losing cause during a one-day series in his native – and extremely hostile – South Africa. No, what the self-appointed aficionados of technique wanted to know was: would he breach a little-read page of the MCC’s coaching manual and play across the line against Glenn McGrath? He did, and it cost him his wicket. But not before he had made 158 on the last day of the series to wrestle back the Ashes for the first time in sixteen years. So they had a go at his earring and his haircut instead.
Yes, the English love a cricketer who goes in for self-deprecation. At the ICC World Twenty20 in South Africa in 2007, incoming batsmen introduced themselves to the camera via a prerecorded message. Asked to name his favourite shot, Collingwood twinkled: ‘The nurdle on the leg-side.’ But get all cocky and start scoring Ashes-winning hundreds and, frankly, you deserve everything that comes to you. That 5–0 humiliation eighteen months later felt far more like it.
India
Three press-box buddies and I once flagged down a small van that was masquerading as a taxi in the streets of Delhi. We were all in a rush to get back to our hotel and write up our reports of a comedy England defeat, but the taxi got stuck at what I still believe to be the slowest set of traffic lights in the known universe. As we sat there for fifteen minutes, breathing in the fumes and wilting like pathetic Englishmen in the late-March heat, the engine started to make a funny noise. ‘No problem,’ said our driver, a huge Sikh who didn’t look as if people generally disagreed with him. But there was a problem and it didn’t sound good. As soon as we had passed the lights from hell our driver pulled over at the first available fountain. He scurried off to find a bucket – like fountains, these are surprisingly ready to hand in the streets of Delhi – which he filled with water and brought back to his wheezing vehicle. Now, the engine was located under the passenger seat in the front, so while one of us – the one who didn’t fancy having his backside toasted – made room, the other three wrenched back the seat as the big man tipped the contents of the bucket over the steaming engine, then stood back to admire his handiwork. It proved rudimentary but effective, rather like an Ian Blackwell innings at Taunton. ‘Are you sure this car isn’t going to blow up?’ one of us asked. And then he did it. That funny little head wobble that means either yes or no or haven’t the foggiest, and occasionally all three. No one said a word. We were in our driver’s hairy hands. But I was more interested in his head. Because if one gesture could sum up Indian cricket, this was it.
India has never been short of cricketing talent. Take a stroll across Shivaji Park in Mumbai, the dusty maidan where the young Sachin Tendulkar learned how to reduce bowlers to tears by working balls from outside off-stump through midwicket, and you can spot more natural ability than at the average county second XI net session. But for many years, until Sourav Ganguly grabbed the Indian game by the scruff of the neck and turned the ambivalent head wobble into a vigorous nod, that talent was almost apologetic. Fatalism ruled. If a half-volley was driven to third slip, then it was simply meant to be. Further analysis was futile. In Cricket Wallah, Scyld Berry’s superb account of England’s trip to India in 1981–82, the full force of the fatalistic head wobble was to be found in the court-jester batting of Kris Srikkanth. Every time he played a shot of which his more methodical batting partner, Sunil Gavaskar, disapproved, ‘Gavaskar would walk down the pitch to speak to him, not criticising his boldness but simply telling him to keep his concentration going.’ Berry goes on to describe how Srikkanth would ‘silently wobble-shake his head from side to side’, and then – bravely – he offers an interpretation. ‘Yes, captain, what you say is indeed understood and I appreciate your telling me this. However, although we may agree about the end, we may differ as to the means. For the moment what more can I say than that I will try to heed your advice?’ Simon Hughes argues in Yakking Around the World that the only way of deciphering the wobble ‘is by looking at the raised/lowered eyebrows’. Quite possibly. But if Gavaskar possessed the kind of methodical temperament more readily associated with the white cricket nations, then Srikkanth was the classic Indian, abnegating responsibility and surrendering himself to kismet.
Anyone who has spent more than five minutes on an Indian road will know that such a view is not limited to the cricket field. (The key to emerging from a rickshaw ride with your bladder still intact and your legs feeling more supportive than spaghetti is to pretend the whole thing is a computer game. You’re unlikely to get hit, because the driver tends to value his own life too, so you may as well enjoy the ride.) But Ganguly decided enough was enough. Taking over the captaincy in 2000, he immediately set about making a mockery of the claim by Lord Harris, a pompous former Governor of Bombay, that Indians would never make decent cricketers because they lacked ‘Anglo-Saxon phlegm’. Ganguly convinced his own side that they did not need to grow a moustache the size of a small walrus to sledge opponents. He burrowed under skin so successfully that the otherwise unflappable Steve Waugh called him a ‘prick’ and the English journalist Michael Henderson – opera lover and general bon viveur – repeatedly referred to him in print as Lord Snooty. The vehemence stemmed in part from the surprise: Indian cricketers were supposed to play beautifully for 100, then chop an off-break enigmatically to slip. They were not supposed to turn up late for the toss and celebrate a wicket with a pump of the fist. These days, the Indians are even producing snarling young fast bowlers, which for batsmen must feel like being slapped in the chops by the local vicar. One of them, Sreesanth, went even further during a Test match in Johannesburg in 2006. He had been getting some dreadful stick from the South African fast bowler Andre Nel, a madman off the field and less sane on it, where he blames his behaviour on a mountain-dwelling, oxygen-starved alter ego called Gunther. Sreesanth’s response to his ear-bending was to drive Nel/Gunther back over his head for six, at which point he did something very strange. He rotated his hips like a professional belly dancer and waved his bat round his head like a lasso, prancing down the pitch in the direction of the chastened Nel. Better than the head wobble, anyway. And by the time India arrived for their tour of Australia in 2007–08, they were giving as good as they got.
One thing hasn’t changed, though. No other group, with the possible exception of Trekkies and Captain Spock, venerates the cult of the individual as highly as the Indians. Ganguly went some way towards superimposing a team ethic, but personal milestones tend to delight Indian fans almost as much as team success. Just look at Sachin Tendulkar. At the time of writing Sachin had hit a world-record forty-one Test hundreds, but only fifteen of them had come in an Indian win. Yet if you make this point as I have just done – soberly and empirically – you are likely to receive emails from all over the Indian subcontinent gently advising you to ‘go fuck yourself, you great bustard [sic]’. Now, I am not for one moment suggesting these people represent India. They do not. They are the definitive small but vociferous minority. But how small and how vociferous! When I was working for Wisden, our website compiled a list of the 100 greatest Test innings ever played. The list was based on a complicated system designed by – you guessed it – an Indian, who factored in everything from the quality of the opposition to the nature of the pitch, via the match situation and which side of bed the batsman had emerged from that morning. Not a single one of Tendulkar’s innings made it. The scale of the Indian outrage was genuinely disconcerting, and I’m not sure my inbox ever recovered from the shock.
New Zealand
To understand what makes the average New Zealand cricketer’s hackles rise, just titter patronisingly at the kiwi. While the English have the lion, the Australians the kangaroo and the South Africans the springbok, the New Zealanders have a half-blind bird that cannot fly and snuffles about in the undergrowth in search of prey that deserves to take a long, hard look at itself should it ever be caught by this limping quarter-wit of a creature. Perhaps sensing the inherent absurdity of the situation, the New Zealanders decided to rename their cricket team the Black Caps, a cunning variant on their greatest national export, the All Blacks, and one which has been applied to the nation’s footballers (the All Whites), basketball team (the Tall Blacks) and badminton players (the – what else? – Black Cocks). No matter that the new name was straight out of the Genghis Khan school of sophistication: the name Black Caps was supposed to lend an air of menace. Yet this was as futile as trying to get Americans interested in soccer. The truth is – and this is going to hurt me more than it hurts the Kiwis – that it has always been difficult to take New Zealand seriously as a cricket nation.
Part of this stems from the fact that the All Blacks nick all the country’s best sportsmen, then teach them the words to a scary song called the haka which makes every other sporting occasion in New Zealand seem like a Women’s Institute AGM. Here’s Brian O’Driscoll, who captained the British and Irish Lions rugby team to New Zealand in 2005: ‘Having been here six weeks, I would say that their obsession with rugby borders on the unhealthy. Being passionate about something is fine, but rugby dominates to the exclusion of everything else. This results in tunnel vision. There has to be life outside rugby, especially in such a gorgeous country with everything going for it.’ It goes without saying that O’Driscoll ended up both in hospital and on the losing side. But the main issue here is that – rugby aside – New Zealand’s society is riddled with an all-pervading sense of unworthiness which may or may not have something to do with constant references to the place as ‘a small island nation off the east coast of Tasmania’.
If you type ‘New Zealand inferiority complex’ into Google, you will find – assuming your PC does not crash in the process – 52,800 results, a figure which Australian sociologists believe will have reached the 100,000 mark by the time you read this. One report, based on the number of times the word ‘lonely’ was entered into internet search engines, identified Auckland as the third most isolated city on the planet (after, bizarrely, Dublin and Melbourne). And on his trip to Wellington, one of the least ostentatious capital cities in the western world, Michael Palin lapped up the sun and the cleanliness before noting: ‘Something is missing and the New Zealanders know it. They want more than all this. In the bedrooms of the comfortable villas of Kelburn, teenagers are making plans to get out – to Africa, America and Europe. Young New Zealanders want excitement.’
New Zealand cricketers want more than that. They long to be respected, but this is not always easy. If a team could choose a number with which to be associated, they would probably go for a nice, round, fat 100. New Zealand’s less glamorous fate is to be linked to the number 26. This is the total – still the lowest in Test history – they were bowled out for by England at Auckland in 1955. It is the number of years they needed to win their first Test (Bangladesh needed only four and a bit years to win theirs). And it is also thought to be the average age at which a New Zealand cricketer begins to wonder whether he should jack it all in and instead become Manawatu rugby club’s fifteenth-choice scrum-half, a position which is far more likely to bring him fame and fortune than opening the batting for the Black Caps.
New Zealand’s simmering resentment over its lack of status can go one of two ways. Either their players fall into line with what the rest of the world thinks and retreat into mild-mannered self-deprecation, a process which includes laughing along at predictable gags about their clipped – ‘clupped’ – vowels. Or they become extraordinarily chippy (‘chuppy’; I’ll stop now). The former Daily Telegraph cricket writer Martin Johnson used to take great delight in his portrayals of New Zzzzzealand and their unique brand of slow-medium dibbly-dobblers. His view, hammed up with typical wit for the benefit of his readers, was that nothing encapsulated the Kiwis’ lack of charisma more than the sight of Gavin Larsen floating down 70 mph seamers designed to take a batsman’s wicket by sending him to sleep. But the joke was not appreciated by Larsen. When Johnson, who had been watching New Zealand play Zimbabwe in the 1999 World Cup, wrote that ‘the idea of Larsen and Harris bowling to Goodwin and Campbell isn’t calculated to cause a stampede at the turnstiles – not to get in, anyway,’ Larsen was not amused. In his autobiography, he called Johnson’s article ‘the most derogatory and patronising piece I’ve seen written on the New Zealand cricket team’. Which presumably meant he hadn’t read the rest of Johnson’s work.
Even Stephen Fleming, a man who did more than anyone to add a layer of toughness to New Zealand’s exterior, occasionally cracked under the strain. After his side won in England in 1999, he was flabbergasted by the lack of credit they received from the press. ‘It was bloody annoying at times, the reporting,’ he would write several years later. ‘It didn’t matter what we did, the English media couldn’t see anything good in us. It was about how badly they’d played and not much else, and that ticked us off – almost to a man.’ (I love the ‘almost to a man’ – a classic example of Kiwi aggression falling flat.) Worse was to follow when Fleming took over the captaincy of Nottinghamshire in 2005. The fact that he would spend the summer leading the county to their first championship title since 1987 was not enough to please most journalists. No, all they wanted to know was who he thought would win the Ashes. For a New Zealander, it was the ultimate insult: a reminder of their position on the periphery, and of two of their most recent results (0–3 in England and 0–2 at home to Australia). It was a bit like asking the leader of the Liberal Democrats which of Labour or the Conservatives was going to win the next election.
I feel sorry for the Kiwis, I mean the Black Caps. I have spent two very happy tours there, and find their people incredibly friendly, their air clean, their food delicious, their wine crisp and their traffic jams non-existent. They just never seem to get the credit they deserve. Richard Hadlee was one of the most incisively brilliant bowlers in the history of the game, but is he ever spoken of in the same awed breath as Dennis Lillee or Michael Holding? Even the compliments are double-edged. Graham Gooch, who fell to Hadlee twice as often as he did to any of his team-mates, reckoned that batting against New Zealand was a case of ‘The World XI at one end and Ilford Seconds at the other’. Then there was Mark Greatbatch, who invented pinch-hitting at the 1992 World Cup and watched helplessly as history attributed the first use of the tactic to the Sri Lankan openers Sanath Jayasuriya and Romesh Kaluwitharana in 1996. And only in New Zealand could a team’s greatest-ever innings have been played in a losing cause. I was at Christchurch that day when Nathan Astle took England for 222 off 168 balls, with 28 fours and 11 sixes. His second century came off 39 deliveries, but the best statistic was the maiden in Andy Caddick’s spell of 3–1–45–1. England won by 98 runs and a nation didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Then they all shrugged their shoulders and went home to see if there was any rugby on the telly. Which there almost certainly was.
Pakistan
If I had been paid a pound every time I read that the Pakistanis would be world champions if only they could harness their natural talent, I would be far away on a desert island chuckling at the prospect of ever needing to write a book to earn a living. Because Pakistan, you see, would be world champions if only they could harness their natural talent. Like Kevin Pietersen’s fashion blunders and Shane Warne’s double chin, it is one of cricket’s facts of life. Over the years, the Pakistanis have redefined bathos not merely by veering from the sublime to the ridiculous but by squeezing a whole host of other abstract nouns into the process too. To call them the Keystone Cops of the international circuit would be to confer a frankly flattering sense of organisation on a team that has been accused of match-fixing, ball-tampering and drug-taking, sometimes, it feels, in the same day. To label them ‘mercurial’, as many do, is to suggest quite misleadingly that their essence can be reduced to one element alone. Perhaps Duncan Fletcher’s favourite word fits best: multidimensional. They are never dull, and if they were, you would suspect it was because they simply didn’t feel like being colourful.
However capable they are of being bowled out for 59 and 53 by Australia only two Tests after compiling 643 against New Zealand, I grew up fearing the Pakistan team far more than India. They didn’t do the head wobble for starters, which for a young westerner meant they were probably quite hard. They also tended to win in England, which India, back then in any case, did not. And they produced frightening fast bowlers capable of reverse-swinging the old ball at 90 mph onto the tip of your big toe and the base of the stumps at the same time.
In Pundits from Pakistan, the Indian writer Rahul Bhattacharya asks the former Pakistan fast bowler Aqib Javed why it is that India has always lagged behind their great rivals in the pace stakes. Part of the reason, replies Aqib, is diet: Pakistanis, as Muslims, eat beef; Indians, four-fifths of them Hindus, do not. ‘The aggression,’ says Aqib, ‘you get that from the beef.’ He goes on: ‘Your Srinath, he was 90 miles [sic], but he never created terror. His body language was so soft. My speed was less than his. But the pressure I could exert, because of my body language, was much more.’
Whatever the supernatural powers of beef and – as Aqib also suggests – buffalo meat, Pakistan’s long tradition of fast bowlers, from Fazal Mahmood in the 1950s via Imran Khan and Sarfraz Nawaz in the 1970s and ’80s, through to Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Shoaib Akhtar, has always given them the capacity to turn a game that seems to be heading nowhere.
Then there is the question of reverse swing, fast bowling’s most treasured sleight of hand, which is achieved by different means depending on who is doing it – or, perhaps more to the point, who is writing about it. When Pakistan won in England in 1992, the cry of ‘cheat’, perhaps preceded by an insulting epithet, was never far away, particularly in the British tabloids. But when England employed reverse swing to beat Australia in 2005, they were praised for their ingenuity. A claim by an Australian that the English had been sucking on sweets to provide a sugary coat of saliva to apply to the ball – God forbid – was dismissed, inappropriately, as sour grapes. Still, most people accepted that reverse swing was a Pakistani gift to the game, honed in the 1970s, so the story went, by Sarfraz and handed down the generations like a meaningless trinket in a Dan Brown novel. The secrecy was sacrosanct and did little to distract from accusations of skulduggery. Not so long ago, I was talking to Geoff Arnold, the Surrey bowling coach who played thirty-four Tests for England. ‘Reverse swing is nothing new,’ he said casually. ‘Mushtaq Mohammad said he first encountered it when I was bowling on the 1972–73 tour of Pakistan.’ Come again? Was Arnold, a reliably English type of seam bowler, claiming to have invented reverse swing? Damn right he was! ‘I tried to shine one side with a lot of sweat and kept the other side dry. I suddenly discovered it was going the other way from what I thought. It really happened on the off-chance.’ So there you had it. If what Arnold was saying was correct, it was all an Englishman’s fault anyway, which feels like precisely the kind of surprise Pakistani cricket has always dealt in.
Of all the Pakistanis who fascinated me when I was a kid, Javed Miandad usually won hands down. Journalistic convention had it that Miandad, a magnificent batsman, should be referred to as a ‘streetfighter’, which – as with so many tags applied by the western media to subcontinental cricketers – managed to be a compliment and sound mildly patronising at the same time. Yet it had the ring of truth: Javed specialised in squeezing the most out of a situation through the kind of sheer nerve that would not have come naturally to an Indian. Take the second Test against Australia at Faisalabad in March 1980. Pakistan had won the first and were so keen to hold on to their advantage that when light drizzle began to fall after Greg Chappell had won the toss, Javed refused to bring his team out to play. For the entire day. Chappell was so incensed that he set about compiling a double century in a total of 617 before bowling all eleven of his players as the match petered out into a farcical draw, exactly as Javed wanted. He was also, the story goes, instrumental in exploiting the Gatting-Shakoor Rana affair eight years later, to ensure a day was lost at Faisalabad – another occasion on which Pakistan held a series lead. It was gamesmanship of the highest class. But he could be straightforward too. Fortunate to survive a shout for lbw at a crucial stage of the 1992 World Cup final, he approached the bowler, Derek Pringle after the match. He tapped his ankle and said with a wink: ‘Allah was with me today.’
I loved Javed. He was argumentative, feisty, brilliant enough to hit the last ball of a one-day international against India in Sharjah for six when four would have done, and more inventive than any English cricketer could ever dream of being. The only surprise when chaos descended that day at The Oval in 2006 after Darrell Hair had penalised the Pakistanis for alleged ball-tampering was that Javed wasn’t in the middle of it all, pulling the strings. Although perhaps, in a strange kind of way, he was.
South Africa
First, an admission. My entire view of South African cricketers will be forever blighted by Gary Kirsten’s double century at Old Trafford in 1998. Now, before giant men called Johannes and Pieter start spluttering at me in something sounding like Dutch, I should point out that Kirsten himself described his innings of 210, chiselled out in 10 hours and 50 minutes from 525 balls, as the worst of his life. Don’t for one moment imagine this was false modesty. Kirsten had batted for roughly the time it takes to fly from Heathrow to his home city of Cape Town, but for a penniless graduate earning some post-university pocket money in the local Co-op freezer-warehouse there were no on-flight miniature vodkas or sachets of pretzels to ease the pain. This was South African dourness at its most expressive, or possibly its least. And because England eventually saved that game with one wicket in hand, and went on to win at Trent Bridge and Headingley, there is a strong case for arguing that Kirsten’s sloth cost South Africa the series. For a 23-year-old like me who had never rejoiced in a major England series win it was all too delicious for words.
South Africa have had their share of attacking cricketers, but – even accepting the arrival on the scene of Dale Steyn and A. B. de Villiers – how many of those have come since 1991, when they were readmitted into the international fold? Herschelle Gibbs, granted. And Jonty Rhodes, although for all the hyperactivity he made only three Test hundreds. Certainly Allan Donald, who was the fastest white bowler alive at his peak. But the image of the left-handed Kirsten propping forward in his dark-green helmet to smother another half-volley and then gathering his strength for the next maiden has proved a little too definitive for South Africa’s good. From Kepler Wessels via Hansie Cronje to the early Graeme Smith (but not the more recent version), conservatism has run through their approach like a set of grumpy babushka dolls. It’s a macabre thought that the most enterprising declaration ever undertaken by a South African captain came at Centurion in January 2000, when Cronje’s motivation to make a game of it came from a fistful of rand and a leather jacket.
I have tried – goodness knows I have tried! – to give the South Africans the benefit of the doubt, and I generally cheer them on against Australia, if only on a lesser-of-two-evils basis. But their fate was sealed in my mind by Jacques Kallis’s performance in the Sydney Test of January 2006. South Africa were one down with one to play and needed quick runs on the fifth morning to set Australia a target. So what did Kallis do? Yep, he batted for three hours to make an unbeaten 50 while his team-mates and extras chipped in with 138 at the other end. Worse, his captain Smith was prepared to delay his declaration until Kallis had reached this piddling milestone, as if he was waiting for him to conquer Everest or split the atom rather than boost his Test average by 0.38. Australia knocked off the runs for the loss of two wickets and Kallis left the pavilion by the back door. Or at least he should have done.
This South African tentativeness probably stems from fear of defeat, which paradoxically stems from a desire to win and then overwhelms it. For South Africans are as competitive as they come. Jasper Carrott once invented a character called Wiggy, who would dress his three-year-old son in cricket gear, bowl at him from about 10 yards in the back garden, and sink to his knees in jubilation as the middle stump cartwheeled into the begonias. The South Africans frequently resemble a team of Wiggies. In 2007, Herschelle Gibbs bullied six sixes in an over off Daan van Bunge, a leg-spinner from the Netherlands. But that was small fry compared with 2004, when New Zealand’s Mark Richardson invited the least mobile member of the South African squad to take part in a 100-metre sprint. The joke was that Richardson was the least mobile biped in the southern hemisphere, but South Africa – possibly piqued by failing to win the Test series – sent forth the whippet-like Neil McKenzie, who duly zigzagged his way to victory. It was like cheating at Monopoly against your grandma.
A lot of South Africa’s seriousness was instilled by Hansie Cronje. It always astonished me that Cronje would be held up as a paragon, even in the days before his involvement with the bookies made cricket fans look at life a little more suspiciously. If anyone embodied South Africa’s win-at-all-costs attitude, their Protestant work ethic, their grim seriousness (and other assorted clichés), it was the man with the broodingly bushy eyebrows and the aura of invincibility. On a tour of Australia in 1997–98, Cronje twice showed the darker side of his character. First he was filmed standing on the ball with his spikes, as blatant an example of tampering as you can get without hacking the ball to shreds with a machete while grinning at the camera. Then he slammed a stump through the door of the umpires’ dressing room after they had failed to give out Mark Waugh hit-wicket during the third Test at Adelaide. Waugh went on to score a match-saving, series-winning century. At the time of writing, South Africa had just achieved their first series win over Australia since beating them 4–0 in 1969–70. It was a record that clearly rankled.
But it doesn’t rankle half as much as their exits from the 1999 and 2003 World Cups. On both occasions they fell one run short of victory in comical circumstances. Lance Klusener and Allan Donald were more like Laurel and Hardy than Sutcliffe and Hobbs as they made a complete hash of trying to score the winning run in the 1999 semi-final against Australia at Edgbaston. Four years later, the team misread their Duckworth/Lewis charts and were knocked out of the group stages by Sri Lanka at Durban. It’s strange to relate, but this haplessness is another strange feature of the South African cricketing psyche. The Aussies have delighted in calling them chokers because they know it gets under South African skin. The South Africans know the accusation contains a grain of truth, which bugs them all the more.
Sri Lanka
Imagine spending most of your childhood having sand kicked in your face. One day you decide you can’t take it any more. You disappear from the beach circuit, spend months in the gym and return to break the legs of your tormentors with your bare hands. Give or take a snapped limb or two, that is the tale of the emergence of the Sri Lankan cricket team, and it has left them with an identity crisis that has never quite been adequately resolved. Are they the happy-go-lucky islanders whose old Arabic name of Serendip bespeaks a tendency to rely on fortunate discoveries, like Muttiah Muralitharan’s wrist or Arjuna Ranatunga’s abnormally thick skin? Or are they a bunch of ruthless young thrusters determined never to return to the days of seaside subservience? Sociologists are yet to reach a conclusion.
At times the Sri Lankans have suffered from the same credibility problem as the New Zealanders. In neither case has it helped to be on the doorstep of the world’s two cricketing superpowers, even though Sri Lanka has never been as obsessed with India as New Zealand is with Australia. But the Sri Lankans have gone about asserting themselves without tacit need for approval. And they have done this mainly because of the two men name-checked in the previous paragraph. If Muralitharan has been the star turn, taking roughly two-fifths of all Sri Lanka’s wickets since he first let the world in on his rubbery wrist and goggle eyes in 1992, then Ranatunga was his big, brassy agent, a barrel-chested general of a man whose sole aim in life, it seemed, was to kick the sand back with interest. Others, such as Aravinda de Silva, Sanath Jayasuriya and Chaminda Vaas, have sparkled quite beautifully, but none has exerted the pulling power of Murali or the charisma of Ranatunga. And none has been no-balled for throwing by self-congratulatory Australian umpires or called a ‘fat [expletive deleted]’ by an Australian wicketkeeper.
Until 1972, Sri Lanka was referred to by the outside world as Ceylon, because that’s what the British called it. In cricketing terms it was a stopping-off point for England and Australia teams seeking a break as they sailed halfway round the world to play for the Ashes. Attitudes towards the Sinhalese, as they were known before independence, were warm but – from a 21st-century perspective – a touch un-PC. Here’s Jack Fingleton, who opened for Australia in the 1930s, describing a crowd scene in Colombo in his book Brightly Fades the Don, an account of the 1948 Ashes series. ‘You see thousands of dark, smiling faces against a background of gleaming teeth and the startling white of their dress. The enthusiasm of the Colombo crowd is infectious. They applaud vigorously, chit-chat about every little incident and laugh uproariously at anything which tickles their fancy – and plenty does.’ The subtext is not hard to discern: simple folk enjoying simple pleasures. And until Sri Lanka started winning Test matches on a reasonably regular basis in the 1990s, the accusation of naivety stuck like Marvan Atapattu in one of his less skittish moods.
But Ranatunga moved Sri Lanka on from the idea that their role was to be a bunch of amiable losers. Ranatunga would have made a perfect Toad of Toad Hall in a Sri Lankan production of The Wind in the Willows. He was never happier than when strutting around the field barking orders, mainly to his own team, but occasionally to the umpires. When Ross Emerson no-balled Murali for throwing during a one-day game against England at Adelaide, Ranatunga led his players off the pitch. When they returned, he instructed Emerson to stand closer to the stumps, a tactic designed to prevent him from getting a good look at Murali’s action. Later in the same game, Roshan Mahanama barged Darren Gough out of the way as Gough tried to gather the ball for a quick run-out, prompting Gough to feign a headbutt. England’s captain Alec Stewart was so irritated by the whole thing that he made a mess of his attempted sledge to Ranatunga. ‘Your behaviour today has been appalling for a county country captain,’ he said, to general bemusement. Stewart later wrote that Ranatunga was ‘the only cricketer who’s ever wound me up on the field with his antics’.
The point was that Sri Lanka had moved on from the days when it was acceptable to talk of their dark, smiling faces and gleaming teeth. They could still be charming, of course. After all, what other Test team could boast an opening bowler who sang love songs to his wife with as much élan as Vaas? And was Kumar Sangakkara the only wicketkeeper in the world who could lose himself in the works of Oscar Wilde? But Ranatunga had instilled a refusal to be cowed: his verbal battles with Shane Warne, usually involving accusations of who had swallowed how much of what, were the stuff of legend. And the legend lived on long after his retirement in 2000. Mike Atherton described England’s tour of Sri Lanka later that year as the most acrimonious he had ever played in. Helmets were flung, fingers pointed, umpires bullied, insults exchanged, and that was just at the toss. There were even claims during a warm-up match at Matara that Ruchira Perera had directed racist abuse at Craig White, although the more sober analysis was that Perera had probably said something involving White’s surname.
Still, let’s give credit where it’s due, as Ranatunga almost certainly never said. Before Sri Lanka won their third Test, against New Zealand in 1992–93, their overall record was P41 W2 L20 D19. Since then, up to and including their trip to Bangladesh in 2008–2009, they have won 53 and lost 57 of their 140 Tests. They have also lifted a World Cup, won a Test series against Australia and sparked countless jokes, mainly from Englishmen, about the unpronounceability of their surnames.
Tim Rice, the former president of the MCC, tells a story about the time he was roped in to commentate for Test Match Special in a game involving the Sri Lankans. Since Rice had once confused Gladstone Small with Graham Gooch live on air, the portents were not good, and he spent his entire stint at the microphone praying for the ball to be hit to the Sri Lankan seamer Vinothen John. ‘That would have been easily fielded had the ball gone to John,’ he would say as Don Anurasiri or Rumesh Ratnayake did the honours. ‘Time for Duleep Mendis to give John a bowl,’ he would declaim as his co-commentator gently pointed out that John had completed his spell some time ago. Nowadays, you poke fun at your peril.
West Indies
No team, not even England, has undergone a more severe transformation in the past fifteen years than West Indies. It has been Trinny and Susannah in reverse, stripping an ageing Hell’s Angel of his shiny leather jacket and sending him out in public wearing sackcloth and ashes. And it has provoked endless shakes of the head by lovers of the game, who all agree, without knowing exactly why, that world cricket ‘needs a strong West Indies’. For many years it was a sentiment that made little sense to me. I have vague and disquieting memories of their 4–0 win in England in 1988, when the home selectors warmed up for the shameful 29-man Ashes summer of ’89 by choosing four different captains. And I was outraged when England were denied an incredible 2–0 lead in Trinidad in 1989–90 by some West Indian time-wasting which seemed to involve Curtly Ambrose continually doing up his shoelaces (very fiddly they were too). But by 2000, Andy Caddick was taking four wickets in an over at Headingley. By 2004, Steve Harmison was claiming 7 for 12 in Jamaica. Later that year England were whitewashing them 4–0. The worm had not merely turned. It had performed a triple salchow. Yes, one thing is for sure: world cricket needs a strong West Indies, with or without the help of a Texan billionaire.
It is generally agreed that West Indies’ global reign of terror ended in 1995, when Mark Taylor’s team won 2–1 in the Caribbean. But for me reality did not sink in until England visited in 1998. True, West Indies won the series 3–1. Yet for the last two Tests they selected Philo Wallace and Clayton Lambert, a pair of openers whose idea of taking the shine off the new ball revolved around belting it into the nearby streets. In his 1966 essay, ‘Kanhai: A Study in Confidence’, the Trinidadian historian and cricket lover C.L.R. James wrestled with the essence of his favourite team. ‘The West Indies in my view embody more sharply than elsewhere Nietzsche’s conflict between the ebullience of Dionysus and the discipline of Apollo,’ he declared, as numerous workaday hacks prepared to sue for plagiarism. Wallace and Lambert must have stopped reading after the mention of Dionysus: they tried to smash everything, and briefly succeeded. Angus Fraser became so fed up with being dumped back over his head in comedy fashion that he christened the pair ‘Wallace and Gromit’. Neither had an extended career: Wallace was dropped soon afterwards (he scored 68 runs in eight innings on a tour of South Africa), while Lambert was politely shown the door after making 43 in four. Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes they assuredly were not. The golden age was over.
The decline and fall was evident in the bowlers too. It used to be the case that Clive Lloyd or Viv Richards merely had to work out a rota for their four world-class quicks. This usually took about five seconds, after which the likes of Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Colin Croft, Malcolm Marshall, Ian Bishop, Courtney Walsh or Curtly Ambrose would bowl eleven overs an hour of chin music designed, as Haynes once put it, to take the batsman ‘up to the twelfth floor’. Yes, batting against West Indies could be a lonely business. ‘One of the disconcerting things about facing the Windies’ ultra-quicks on their own lightning-fast tracks,’ wrote Graham Gooch, ‘is that no fielder is in front of the bat, so it’s as if you’re the only one in the spotlight – you are too, for that matter – because all that’s in vision is the umpire, the non-striker and the bowler steaming in. You know the ring of five slips, two gullies and two leg-slips or whatever is behind you in a cordon, but you never actually look at them. You just hear them.’ It’s little wonder that of the nineteen Tests spread across four series between West Indies and England in the 1980s, West Indies won sixteen and, to their disgust, drew three.
When West Indies arrived in England in 2000, things had changed. Ambrose and Walsh remained, but their support came from the likes of Reon King, Nixon McLean and Franklyn Rose. In a five-Test series won 3–1 by England, Walsh and Ambrose bowled more than 400 overs between them for a return of 51 wickets; the other three managed 19 wickets in 200 overs. Things got so bad that Ambrose, a man who rarely bothered to open his mouth unless he was appealing for lbw, denounced his team-mates in a Channel 4 interview conducted by his former team-mate Ian Bishop. My abiding memory from that series is of Rose, having delivered some twelfth-man drinks to a team-mate, disrupting play by absent-mindedly walking in front of the sightscreen behind the bowler’s arm like a confused pensioner. It was a moment that seemed to sum up West Indies’ new-found carelessness, and some believe the series turned when Rose tried and failed to bounce out Dominic Cork during England’s two-wicket win in the second Test at Lord’s. England won their next three series against West Indies 3–0, 4–0 and 3–0 before stuttering in the Caribbean in early 2009. It was hard to find any of the England players agreeing that world cricket needed a strong West Indies.
Much has been made of the reasons behind their decline: the increasing gravitation towards all things American, although Sir Allen Stanford briefly had something to say about that; the lack of forward planning in the days when the team swept all before them; a questionable work ethic that some are apt to romanticise by placing it alongside coconut trees and rum punches as an integral part of the Caribbean character; social problems that make things such as cricket seem trivial. The truth, though, is probably that the West Indian dominance of international cricket between the 1980s and early 1990s was one of sport’s great freaks: rarely have so many talents emerged at one time from such a small space. By 2005 expectations had changed so radically that I – a medium-pace trundler of little guile – was daring to give tips to Ian Bishop, one of the greatest fast bowlers in the history of the game. Bishop was struggling to get rid of a stubborn left-handed opener during a match in Kent for the Cricket Writers’ Club. ‘Aim for the stumps!’ I suggested from mid-off, as one delivery after another sailed through at chest height to the wicketkeeper. ‘I’m trying, man, I’m trying,’ said Bishop, possessor of 161 Test wickets at an average of 24. Moments later he pitched one up and scattered the timber. Yes, when my wrists give way, my eyes fail and the clichés dry up, I will go into coaching.
Zimbabwe
They might be pretty useless right now, but there was a time, in the mid-1990s, when the English were in no position to mock. If one game could have summed up the Ealing-comedy hopelessness of the England team in that period it was the 131-run defeat to Zimbabwe in the third one-day international at Harare in January 1997. It was bad enough that England were already 2–0 down in the three-match series to a side that had won seven games in the previous thirteen years. What made it all the more harrowing was that defeat was hastened by a hat-trick from Eddo Brandes, a typically burly Zimbabwean who farmed chickens in his spare time, which – given Zimbabwe’s lack of fixtures – was most of it. England’s miserable state of mind at the time was reflected by the fact that when Brandes took his third wicket (Nasser Hussain caught behind), the batsman did not even realise he had helped complete a hat-trick. Mike Atherton later wrote of Brandes: ‘When he wasn’t feeding his chooks, he was a fine outswing bowler.’ But that was of no account to the British media, who went understandably big on the poultry angle.
In many ways Brandes was the archetypal Zimbabwean in the days before corruption and racism tore apart the team and eventually deprived them of Test status. He was competitive, uncompromising, loved getting one over the English and could banter with the best of them. His supposed retort to Glenn McGrath about biscuits has done the email rounds too many times to bear repetition here, but it is already part of sledging’s hall of fame. Brandes was helped by playing in a side that formed part of Zimbabwe’s golden era. Sure, they had beaten Australia in the 1983 World Cup, mainly thanks to a glittering all-round performance from the future England coach, Duncan Fletcher. But even that couldn’t compare with the heady days of Dave Houghton, Alistair Campbell, Henry Olonga, Heath Streak and an assortment of relatives called Flower, Strang, Whittall and Rennie.
Most of these characters were playing in the infamous ‘flippin’ murdered ’em’ match against England at Bulawayo in December 1996, when for the first time a Test finished as a draw with the scores level. The quote comes from the England coach David Lloyd, a delightful man who has since carved out a successful career as the funniest commentator in cricket broadcasting, but who at the time was incensed by Zimbabwe’s tactics of bowling sufficiently wide of the stumps to prevent England’s batsmen reaching the ball but not so wide that the umpires penalised them. Lloyd did not merely wear his heart on his sleeve: he tattooed it to his forehead. Later that winter, after England had wasted the new ball on the opening morning of a Test at Auckland, Lloyd was so furious that he sat outside the dressing room for the entire lunch break. Now, with defeats to Mashonaland and in the first one-day international already under England’s belt, his frustrations spilled over and out popped a line that is to Lloyd what ‘Kiss me, Hardy’ was to Nelson.
The tour ranks among England’s unhappiest. They were accused of adopting what is usually called a ‘siege mentality’ (what does this mean? Did they hoard bread and water?), although Lloyd later defended this by saying that ‘the truth in my view is that Harare is the pits’. Things got so bad that when the team arrived in New Zealand for the second leg of the winter, Atherton was faced with ITN’s news reporter, Michael Nicholson, who promptly questioned his suitability for the job. Atherton noted that Nicholson was on stand-by to fly to Russia, where Boris Yeltsin was teetering on the brink. ‘I fervently wished Boris would take a turn for the worse,’ he would later write.
If much of the last paragraph feels a touch Anglo-centric for a section that is supposed to be about Zimbabwe, then I hope Zimbabwean readers will take this as a compliment. Because until England started pummelling their weakened side on a regular basis from around 1999 onwards, the Zimbabweans were something of a bête noire. They were one of only two sides to beat England in the nine-team round robin of the 1992 World Cup, and helped knock them out of the 1994–95 Benson & Hedges World Series, a tournament whose name was belied by the fact that the final ended up being contested by Australia and Australia A. By the time Zimbabwe had whitewashed England in the one-dayers on the flippin’-murdered-’em tour two years later, they had won five of their six ODIs against the mother country. Their motivation was fairly straightforward: England had blocked their ascent to Test level and messages to that effect were posted on Zimbabwe’s dressing-room walls. Even when their team was disintegrating amid a mess of politically motivated selections and mass defections by their white players, Zimbabwe still seemed to act as England’s nemesis: the refusal of Nasser Hussain’s side to fulfil their World Cup fixture against them in Harare in 2003 in effect cost them their place in the competition.
By now, the golden age was long gone, even if the southern African competitive spirit remained. ‘We hate to lose, and we don’t like drawing,’ explained their left-arm spinner Ray Price in 2003. ‘You should see our guys play tiddlywinks.’ At the time of writing, tiddlywinks is being played more often than the Zimbabweans would wish. They have not played a Test since September 2005, and they have not won one against a side other than Bangladesh since surprising India at Harare in 2001. In recent times, the Zimbabwean cricket community has watched in astonishment as their academy in Harare was burned down and then suffered the even greater indignity of being mocked by Ronnie Irani in a speech to the Cricket Writers’ Club in 2007. Irani claimed that the Zimbabwean national anthem was ‘Old MacDonald used to have a farm.’ Zimbabwe used to have a cricket team worthy of the name too.