It is generally agreed by historians that English cricket reached its lowest point on 22 August 1999. Humiliated in the World Cup, the national team had regrouped under a new captain, Nasser Hussain, to face New Zealand in a four-Test series. New Zealand were unofficially the worst team in the world, thanks to Wisden Cricket Monthly’s recent invention of a world championship table, which ranked Test nations in order for the first time. When Hussain’s men lost to them 2–1, it was England who slumped to the bottom of the pile and the Sun, echoing the Sporting Times’s famous obituary of 1882, ran a front page announcing ‘the death of English Cricket’.
I missed it all. At the moment Nasser Hussain was getting booed on the balcony by his own supporters, I was on my way to the Grand Canyon. I had gone on a road trip across America with Ben and Tom and our university friends, a final adventure before the real world came calling. In those pre-wifi years, a trip to the US could still isolate you from home – a half-hour at an internet café was an unaffordable luxury, and we sent postcards, not emails – so I couldn’t keep up with the cricket. The truth was, I didn’t even want to.
Since cutting the cord on the World Cup, I had enjoyed the freedom from the tyranny of fandom, of no longer needing to care how England were doing. For years I had lived with feelings I’d long ceased to consider peculiar. One was the heavy responsibility I felt to know the state of any ongoing match. My body used to spike with dread if someone asked me the latest score and I didn’t know. Was it a fear of being disgraced, of being told I wasn’t a proper fan? Or was it existential shock, the terror of discovering that my team existed independently of me? Either way, that summer, the habit was broken. For a while I felt the need to justify myself with defensive tirades – ‘who cares who they’re playing, they won’t bloody win!’ – but I eventually came to understand that no one cared that I was ignorant of England’s first-innings performance.
As for the team themselves – and this was stranger – I didn’t miss them at all. I let them drop, these men who had been both idols and imaginary friends, without a second thought. Like the callous child who stops believing in fairies, I didn’t even notice as their Tinker Bell light began to die. My summer was just as fun without them: arguably more so, since I didn’t have to drag their failures around with me like a purgatorial rite. Life was good: I had a degree; I had the best friends in the world; and I had enough money to get me from New York to LA, so long as I slept in a tent and ate nothing but Taco Bell. I was a grown-up in a grown-up world, and I didn’t need the proxies of my childhood any more.
Revelling in this revolutionary state of independence, I moved back in with my parents. I had big plans – a place at drama school, a life on stage – that could only be pursued from the security of a rent-free bedroom. My mother wasn’t known for her indulgent parenting and had always boasted of her hardline position on adult children in the family home (‘when they’re 21, they’re gone!’) but it turned out it was all bluff. Now she had lost Kate to university she was in less of a hurry to fling her fledglings out of the nest and see if they survived the drop.
In the summer, my parents had relocated from Luton to Bath, and while Dad had grown up in Bristol, Mum and I knew nothing of the West Country. Life was suddenly very different, but not necessarily in a bad way. I applied for drama schools, and went to auditions, and wondered how long it would take me to get an agent. In the meantime I worked behind the counter at Thornton’s and subconsciously adopted the local burr. I dated a nice man who lived in London, worked for a bank, loved the opera and knew how to julienne a carrot, all of which I considered the most heavenly sophistication. I had lost all my friends to the post-uni diaspora, but I discovered for the first time that my dad was really excellent company. We became cinema buddies, went to pubs together, had dinner dates. In the course of a few months I got to know him better than I had in the first 21 years of my life.
The novelty of my situation was enough to keep me happy. Within a couple of months I was convinced that the boyfriend, with his bachelor pad and his beautiful manners, was my future husband; I didn’t notice that he was less excited to visit me than he was to see my parents. I remained equally blind about my acting ambitions: the letters of rejection should have hinted that my talents lay elsewhere, instead they convinced me that my greatest gift was being thwarted. All those years of watching Atherton had left their imprint – a stubborn refusal to admit defeat.
I did envy my friends, however. The organised ones were already installed in grown-up-sounding positions in the civil service, accountancy firms or the BBC; Tom and the rest of the medical students were enjoying a second student life in training hospitals. Even Ben, who I could normally rely on to be even less ambitious than me, had got a job in London and forgone his mum’s incredible cooking to kip on a friend’s floor.
So I found a more sedentary job in the offices of a greetings card company, doing something that involved sending faxes and processing orders. I still couldn’t tell you exactly what I was achieving, but I know that when I got it wrong one day – I accidentally shipped several thousand teddy bears to the wrong country – I was forgiven (but the unlucky teddies were incinerated as soon as they reached land). That incident aside, it was a pretty undramatic environment. Our data-entry computers were the kind where green numbers blinked at you from a black screen, so we didn’t have the internet, although back then there wouldn’t have been anything to buy on it anyway.
All this quickly reinstated my need for cricket. Maybe I could be blasé about the game while the Grand Canyon and the Empire State Building were in my eyeline, but with nothing to occupy my brain but basic administration, I started sneaking my pocket radio into work. It sat hidden in my desk drawer like an alcoholic’s stash of vodka miniatures, waiting for the quiet moments I could take a guilty draw through my earphones. My colleagues were understanding and created an early warning system for when the boss walked by. In some ways, it was no surprise those poor bears met a fiery doom.
England’s results were not showing notable improvement under the new coach and captain. The team won a single Test on their winter tour, thanks to the South Africa captain’s strange and surprising offer to manufacture a run-chase on its final day. Forfeiting an innings was the kind of old-school custom that just didn’t happen in the modern era – I had only read about it in books – and I was thrilled to see it put into practice. (My nerdy side had always loved the more arcane laws of the game and I secretly longed to see more people being ‘timed out’ on their way to the crease.) Since Hansie Cronje, the South Africa captain, was well known to be a Christian, I interpreted his gesture as both generous and gentlemanly. He clearly had a great sense of perspective about the game, and a strong moral core.
As for Nasser Hussain, I didn’t know much about him at all. He had been a senior member of the side and Atherton’s vice-captain for several series, but I never paid much attention to him until he became captain. Perhaps it’s because I was so fond of Graham Thorpe, England’s number four; Hussain, whose position switched between three and five, seemed merely an adjunct to him in my mind. When I did think of Hussain, the first image that came to me was a spiky piece of quartz that my dad kept in his study as a paperweight; he had a kind of jagged energy when he batted, and a large pointy nose.
In fact, of all the cricketers I’ve planned to meet Hussain is the one that I’m still, as an adult, a bit wary of. He has never made a secret of his impatient temper, or his inability to suffer fools. On my bookshelf sit the autobiographies of my three England captains of the 1990s. Alec Stewart’s is called Playing for Keeps, a jaunty schoolboy term redolent of a life of locker-room promises and old-fashioned values. Michael Atherton named his Opening Up, an admission of the stubbornly standoffish front he always presented. Hussain’s book is called Playing with Fire.
These days Hussain runs with the pack of former England captains in the Sky commentary box, where he’s an excellent analyst and an acerbic wit. When he started, his combative streak was obvious in his regular on-air arguments with Ian Botham, although he seems to have mellowed into the role and laughs more easily now. Still, his life has been spent dissecting the game with some of the best cricketers in the world. My teenage interpretation of it might not be one he has a lot of time for.
As I disembark the train at Chelmsford, a large banner welcomes me to the home of Essex County Cricket Club, and a stern-faced Alastair Cook eyeballs me as I descend the stairs to the taxi rank. Hussain has picked an inn on the outskirts of his village for our encounter, and it’s clearly one where he’s known well. On my arrival the receptionist politely tells me they’re not open, but when Hussain gets there he simply sweeps through to a corner table and we’re soon presented with steaming cups of coffee. I send up a silent prayer that one day I will have such a decisive manner. That assertiveness notwithstanding, he’s less intimidating in the flesh than I had expected: tall but not imposing, and the baseball cap he’s wearing seems to soften his features. I tell him I’ve been reading his book and he says that’s probably a good move: ‘It’s more likely to be factually correct than my wine-damaged brain cells,’ he laughs.
Hussain is wearing training gear – he’s doing some coaching this afternoon and it has got him thinking about when he was a kid. His younger son has a trial for the county under-13s tomorrow and he can remember going through the same: the peer pressure, the way you always knew exactly how well your friends and rivals were doing. ‘Everyone says, “You must have known you were going to play for England,”’ he says. ‘But when you’re young all you’re worried about is getting into the next side.’ From the age of ten the young Hussain was constantly comparing himself with the country’s top schoolboy cricketers: Mark Ramprakash, Michael Atherton. ‘Ramps was the one we all wanted to be: good looking, talented, smashed it everywhere, had the dance moves, everything.’
Atherton, meanwhile, was both a hero and a friend: ‘I always admired Ath, even at a young age. Very straightforward, honest sort of guy. I tend to look at people and wonder, “Will they go off and stab you in the back? Are they a bit two-faced?” Ath never had a bad side in him.’ He does find Atherton’s reputation for seriousness amusing: ‘Crikey, we had fun. Me, him and Brian Lara used to get on pretty well together, because we’d played against each other since we were boys. I remember, after an England game, Ath wrestling Lara in a pub in Trinidad, a good, alcohol-fuelled, rolling round the floor.’
I wonder whether knowing that at the time would have dashed my belief in the awesome dignity that accompanied the England captaincy. Hussain is full of stories that reveal just how limited my concept of the England dressing-room really was. He talks candidly of strops and sulks, and foolish things said in the heat of battle that caused furious stand-up rows. I had always pictured the England dressing-room as one becalmed by failure, a place of quiet gloom and the occasional eruptive celebration. The place Hussain describes is closer to a room full of 13-year-olds stuck inside one rainy break-time. Here’s Gough, showing off again, while Caddick complains loudly that people don’t like him; in the corner, Atherton is giggling irrepressibly at someone else’s misfortune, and Thorpe storms out, slamming the door in a huff.
Hussain notices my goggle-eyes. ‘Don’t be surprised,’ he says. ‘You want to do well for your family, yourself, your fans, and you’re losing, people are niggling each other, the papers are slagging you off, Shane Warne’s giving you a little dig in the field . . . every little thing becomes so huge, and people react.’ Himself as much as anyone, he admits. He once got his hand stuck in a locker door after punching his fist through it.
By the time the England captaincy reached him it was, if not a poisoned chalice, then one that had been passed around so much you knew you might pick up some nasty germs. It had diminished the reputations of previous incumbents Gooch and Atherton, while Stewart, who had actually won a series against a major Test nation while in charge, had been summarily dismissed after losing in Australia. I ask Nasser if he was nervous about accepting the job. ‘I think they were more fearful than I was,’ he replies. ‘You speak to someone like Gus Fraser. He thought: “What the hell are they giving him the captaincy for? Nutter! Short fuse! Quite a selfish player as well . . .” and I was, I was worried about my game.’ It was his way, he says, of coping with the overwhelming number of defeats. ‘There’s a siege mentality sets in, a bit of self-preservation.’
Atherton has written of his old friend that Hussain became a nicer person after he assumed the captaincy, because it finally dealt with his personal ambition. Still, their styles could not have been more different. Where Atherton had been doughty, self-contained, impassive, Hussain was a geyser of emotion. Gimlet-eyed and hawk-nosed, his very physiognomy announced a ruthless intensity, and you needed no degree in body language to read his mood in the field. After the stiff-lipped brigade of Atherton and Stewart it was strangely comforting to see a captain look as furious as I felt at a bowler’s costly spell. Atherton’s coolness was something I admired, but could never emulate; Hussain, however, seemed to feel things as keenly as I did. When other England players looked glum or resigned in defeat, Hussain just looked angry.
‘Partly that’s the person I am,’ Hussain agrees, ‘and partly, at the beginning of the captaincy, I had to be.’ He’s a sports fan, he says; he knows how infuriating it is to watch your football team – in his case, Arsenal – do a bad job. It was important to him that no one took defeat with anything other than bad grace. ‘We should be angry if we’re not performing. We should be angry with each other. I’m not looking for matey-matey. Speak to Michael Holding: the great West Indies side were all arguing with each other. And that Australian side that used to beat us all the time – Shane Warne can tell you who hated who. You’d think they were all very friendly. They weren’t.’
Still, he says, the rage wasn’t the whole story. Hussain’s captaincy was no one-man show; it was a well-scripted double act with England’s new coach Duncan Fletcher. Sitting silently on the balcony, his mouth folded down by the soft curvature of his jowls, the Zimbabwean always looked to me like a man on the verge of falling asleep. Occupying the same spot where David Lloyd could manufacture more static energy than a Van de Graaff generator, Fletcher maintained the stillness of a stone Buddha. And it worked: while Hussain was, in his own words, ‘effing and blinding and kicking and doing the Alex Ferguson’ the coach was preserving the yin to his yang. ‘The actual harsh words went out in Fletch’s room over a quiet cup of tea.’
In the summer of 2000, Hussain’s men lost their opening match against West Indies, but finished the Test series 3–1 winners, England’s first victory over them in 31 years. In the official history of that summer, as set down in Wisden and the like, you will read about the opposition’s fragility, and the hugely advantageous bowling conditions. They are not what I remember. What I recall is England’s verve in the field, and the sweet sense of revenge as their bowlers humiliated the West Indies batsmen, bowling them out for 54 at Lord’s, and for 61 at Headingley. It was the first time I had seen an England team do to others what had so long been done to them: make the foe look completely inept. And there were other firsts, miracles I could never have imagined: Andrew Caddick taking four wickets in a single over; England winning a Test in two days; Brian Lara averaging under 27.
While England’s fortunes were improving, mine were not. I lost the sophisticated boyfriend after a disastrous house party where I drank a considerable quantity of absinthe and had to be put to bed in tears. The drunken scene itself was not what caused the end of our brief relationship, but the fact that I’d hiccupped through my sobs that I wanted to marry him. I woke up the next morning with the awful realisation that I’d blown it; for the next few weeks he treated me with the kind of extreme courtesy you normally reserve for the elderly and the unwell. He was too courteous to actually dump me, but he did stop visiting shortly after.
My hopes for drama school had also been dealt a blow by the fact that I had failed to get into any. My enthusiastic appeals to agents continued to receive polite form-letter replies. I landed a couple of auditions for touring theatre companies, and built entire imaginary careers around each before I was turned down. Thanks to the miracle of human optimism, each new failure remained both surprising and disappointing. Growing up, I had been taught I was capable of anything; becoming a grown-up meant learning I wasn’t.
I had been so convinced that I was going to act for a living that it hadn’t occurred to me to want to do anything else. Now my mother brought home books from the careers section of the local bookshop, promising to identify your strengths and reveal your vocation. The Bath life that had seemed thrillingly novel as a stopgap now felt lonely and miserable. A home-cooked meal could make me wince with sorrow – who was this girl, still living with parents who were, apparently, her only friends? I still went to the cinema with Dad, but now each movie we saw had become a poignant reminder of just how lost and alone I was. Happy films taunted me with a life I wasn’t living, a wider world I was excluded from; sad ones seemed to show me my future. I cried at the end of them all.
The theatre was an equally painful experience. We’d often go, the three of us together; I’d generally be fine until the curtain calls, but the sight of the actors breaking from character and beaming with pleasure was too much to bear. I pretended I was moved by the performances – ‘Silly sausage,’ Mum would say when she saw me wiping my eyes with my sleeves – but I knew this pain wasn’t fictional, it was mine.
One Saturday evening, we were all watching Gladiator on DVD; ten minutes from the end, tears already streaming, I realised there was no way I could hold in or explain away the sobs that were about to burst from my chest. I slipped away to my room before the final scene, and muffled the sound in a pillow. A cloud of panic descended on me. I was sure, at the age of 21, that I was going to be unhappy for ever.
I didn’t want my parents to see me upset, but it became impossible to hide. The slightest thing was triggering tears: a TV romance, a burnt piece of toast, the well-meaning smile of a stranger. I sobbed on the sofa, I sobbed on the phone, I sobbed in my room. I sobbed when I discovered that Hansie Cronje was a match-fixer who had sold that Test match against England for a leather jacket. When my mother became worried, I sobbed in a doctor’s surgery. It wasn’t depression, said the doctor, just unhappiness. I nodded through the tears and, facial muscles straining and quivering, tried to summon up a hopeful smile. Then she and my mum cried too.
At the end of one grim week, my mother bundled me into the car and wedged a picnic basket at my feet. With a blanket tucked over my legs like a war veteran, and my eyes still puffy from the night before, she drove me to the county cricket ground at Bristol. I can’t remember the opposition or the result, but I remember the sun, the breeze and the black cloth covering up the sightscreens. The bright green of the oval, the smell of ice cream – the familiar elements seemed to calm my anxious mind.
After that, the county ground and its gentle rhythms became a kind of therapy. I didn’t go to the cricket with any interest in the outcome; sometimes I didn’t pretend to watch the game at all. I just stretched out across the plastic seats, face to the sky, letting the indistinct chatter of the players and the murmur of the spectators swirl around my head. Who knows if it was really the cricket, or just the loving presence of my mum, but somehow at that ground I found some moments free of all the fears – of failure, of folly, and of the future in general – that were making me so wretched.
And while I claimed no real attachment to Gloucestershire, I developed a fondness for their sprightly, spirited band. They were outsiders, and revelled in it, unfashionable, unfancied, unstoppable. With no star in their ranks (their sole overseas player, Ian Harvey, had played a handful of one-dayers for Australia) they joyously mingled inexperienced youth and wily, tenacious old men. Jack Russell would regularly park himself under the batsman’s backside, then bark off-puttingly at his fielders. This was the home of W. G. Grace, after all, a place where tricks and schemes were tacitly smiled upon; ‘Gloster’ were a team who used what they had, and didn’t worry about what they hadn’t. With their pragmatic approach they had overtaken my own Lancashire as the country’s leading one-day team, and Mum and I followed them to two Cup finals that summer. We learned the words to the local chants, and met their lunatic crew of supporters, who brought along a frozen supermarket chicken to every game for luck. ‘We’ve got the whole chicken in our hands,’ they sang, and we’d belt along then fall about in giggles. The team won all three one-day titles that year, but that meant little to me. I just felt grateful for the experience.
Looking back on that torturous time, from the safety of a fairly content life, I’m still sad and sorry for the young girl who felt so much anxiety about her future. On our squashy leather sofas at the inn, Hussain and I discuss our shared tendency to worry. He, too, suffered from the killer combination of being emotionally sensitive and desperate to succeed. As a result he was, he says, ‘always nervy’. He puts it down to his upbringing, the approval he sought from a father who knew how to stretch him. ‘He pushed me, in a nice way. But every innings was important, and it got over the top, really. I remember waking up, not wanting my alarm to go off because I was batting that day.’
Hussain says you can chart how the fears took hold through the evolution – or perhaps the deterioration – of his batting style. ‘As a youngster, I was quite an attacking player, a strokeplayer, and towards the end I was just a blocker, because I was so afraid of getting out.’ I tell him how one of my friends has a theory that you’ve only finally grown up when you realise that cricket is just a game. ‘I don’t think I ever did!’ he says. ‘That’s what I enjoy most about my job now. I love it, walking through Lord’s, I can turn up Thursday morning and I don’t care. I don’t care about the toss, the pitch; I don’t care about the result. I don’t have to practise, net, worry about my bat grips, my average, the papers . . . it’s a great feeling.’
Even in the triumphant summer of 2000, Hussain was struggling with his own batting form. He made a highest score of 22, averaged ten, and missed the pivotal win at Lord’s because of a cracked thumb. The honeymoon period that traditionally graces a new captain’s efforts – the splurge of runs that accompanies the confidence and responsibility of leadership – had been a brief one. Hussain nods. ‘You’ve had that high, and suddenly it comes down, and you have to look after 15 people!’
The England players were now his responsibility. At the start of the year it had been announced that the team would be given central contracts, the thing Atherton had so long been denied. I had read the news without excitement – financial particulars were of little interest to someone who still thought of her pay cheque as ‘clothes money’. I had no idea how much impact that one piece of organisational progress could have on the England team – that they would finally be a team, training together, rooting for each other, accountable to one other.
As a young cricketer, Hussain had served his apprenticeship in a successful but outspoken Essex team, one full of belligerent characters. He had seen first-hand the dangers of team politics, and watched captains undermined by their own players. ‘In any team you have one person who a lot of people listen to,’ he says. In the England dressing-room, that person was Darren Gough: ‘Mothers loved him, fans loved him, and any young player coming in looked up to him. He’d done great things in an England shirt and he was also was quite gobby.’
Gough’s charisma wasn’t just evident on the field, but in the late-night drinking sessions where complaints traditionally outed themselves and where the bowler frequently held court. ‘If he was discontented, it would spread like a virus,’ says Hussain. ‘But I knew that if I had Gough I had the team.’ Cue a number of positive pronouncements in Hussain’s first months in charge. ‘I made sure, any public statement about Gough: get him on your side. And the year I was averaging 12 and we were losing, I had his full support.’
Hussain is in his element now, talking keenly about the art of captaincy. His thoughts arrive fast and emphatic; I’m surprised how open he is about his methods, and how calculating they were. Not maliciously Machiavellian, perhaps, but ruthlessly effective. Gough and Caddick, the bowlers who transformed under his watch into a formidable opening pair, were treated to the same artful parenting he now practises on his children. ‘I’d go to Gough and say, “That big-eared twit at the other end, you know what he’s like, he doesn’t want to bowl at the pavilion end,” and Gough would say: “Give me the ball, skip, I’ll bowl that end!” Then I’d go to Caddy and say, “You know what Gough’s like, such a prima donna, the wind’s in the wrong direction . . .” It’s like my two boys: “Jacob, Joel’s off the Xbox now, will you come off the Xbox?” It was just playing one against the other, really.’
Perhaps it was easier to employ those subtle arts under the central contract system, which fostered both an increased sense of team and a more general professionalism. ‘These guys feel secure now, they’re not threatened by the other guy,’ says Hussain. ‘So we tried to get people pushing each other, off the field. If you’re not doing your job someone will quietly knock on your door: “Come on, we’re better than this.” Or it might be: “Let’s go to the gym, let’s go do some throwdowns.”’
All this was happening behind the scenes, of course. Fans knew little of the changes, although we felt their effects in unlikely and tangential ways. For me, it was the rediscovery of a player I came to adore: Craig White. White – whose medium pace was so galumphing that he actually slowed down on his run-up – had not played a Test match in three years. His return to the England side had something mystic about it; White had suffered an unexplained blackout on a street in Scarborough the month previously and, the story went, was now a man reborn, living each day like his last.
The truth is more likely that the Hussain–Fletcher axis had done its work. ‘Duncan would eventually lose patience with him – lovely lad, always injured – and it would be me knocking on his door saying, “I know Duncan’s had a go at you, but I want you to do well, let’s move on from this . . .”’ It was an effective treatment. White was a key player in the summer against West Indies, and was in the squad to tour Pakistan that winter.
It was the first time I had followed a Test series on the subcontinent – England hadn’t played in Pakistan in 14 years – and I knew it was important to set my expectations manageably low. Reading the history of past tours had taught me that they were a fractious business that often ended in defeat or, at best, long unsightly draws. The teams’ first encounter fulfilled at least one of the stereotypes. At lunchtime on the final day, the game was still in its first innings. This was cricket as I’d never known it before: arid, attritional, and insanely dull. I was used to England failing, but not to this complete absence of action. I couldn’t understand it – why not try, at least, to win a game?
Little did I know it was a cunning plan hatched by the two ardent pragmatists in charge. In Pakistan, where cricketers are treated like gods, victory is both expected and demanded by the cricket-crazed populace. Hussain says he had one goal on that tour: to ‘stay in the game . . . I knew if we stayed in the game, stayed in the series, the pressure would shift from our side to their side. Because everyone expects them to win every single game.’ Hussain and Fletcher picked teams that batted deep and long, and bowlers who could keep a tight line on unhelpful pitches. Their tactics were unashamed: ‘Play boring, turgid cricket.’
Does anyone go to a football game hoping to see a lifeless goalless draw? I doubt it. But there does seem to be a divide between those who treasure the ‘beauty’ of their chosen sport, and those for whom the end justifies any means. I understand the football fans who railed against catenaccio, or boring, boring Arsenal; the union fans who would rather see their teams play free-flowing rugby and lose than suffer 80 minutes of kicking up and down the field for a three-point win. These days, I might even number myself among them. I’ve spent more than 20 years watching the game I love; the more I’ve seen, the more I’ve developed a taste for the good stuff.
Back then, however, my appreciation of cricket and wine shared a similar philosophy: I was pretty happy with whatever was available. Under the soul-sucking lights of Sainsbury’s, you can admire the £30 bottles of Burgundy, knowing that they contain liquid that won’t leave you with a blue tongue, a crashing headache and some funny scum in your mouth the next morning. But until the day you can afford them, you’ll reach for the Blossom Hill, and you’ll still enjoy drinking it, because you’ve nothing better to compare it to.
Personally, I was never going to turn down cheap wine if the alternative was no wine at all. My experience of watching England play cricket was one ruled by the supreme likelihood of defeat, which made anything other than a loss a cause for rejoicing. I was never going to balk at a positive result for my team, however ugly or unearned. Other people may find the prospect of a drawn Test frustrating, disappointing, second-rank. I used to love them.
It didn’t matter what sort of draw, either. Sure, I loved the exciting kind, the one where a dogged rearguard action withstood the best that a mighty opposition could bring, and denied a team of infinitely more class an almost inevitable victory. But I didn’t play favourites. I’d be just as happy if we dodged the bullet by bowling every ball out of reach down the leg-side, or a three-day monsoon blew in and ruined a Test at its midway point. When the Jamaica Test of January ’98 was abandoned after only an hour because of the dangerous pitch in Sabina Park, I had celebrated the fact we had one fewer Test to lose, and felt cheated when officials added an extra match to the schedule.
Unlike the newspaper writers, who seemed to find it infuriating when England played poorly for four days then escaped their just punishment, I loved a draw we had no right to. I loved a draw that papered over the cracks of our incompetence and insufficiencies. They were still David and Goliath battles to me, just with an alternate ending. One where David’s slingshot misses by a mile, Goliath laughs and picks David up by the collar, and David wriggles out of his tunic and legs it, naked but alive.
So while I didn’t understand England’s tactics in their first two Tests against Pakistan, I still enjoyed the results. Two draws meant two non-defeats. It also meant they went into the final game with the series still alive, a rare enough occurrence in my experience of watching England that I carried it round with me, occasionally bringing it out to pet and coo over. Craig White had played his part, ploughing steadily through Pakistan’s batsmen, and batting just as stalwartly.
In the last Test, I looked forward to another stalemate. Pakistan had batted for most of two days, and Atherton had responded with a nine and a half hour century so free from frills that Michael Henderson of the Telegraph deemed it ‘insufferable viewing’. But it had kept England in the game, and I hadn’t had to watch it. On the final day Pakistan had a lead of 88 runs, and seven wickets in hand – a draw seemed the only possible result. Then Pakistan’s lower order fell in a tangle. Hussain and Fletcher’s waiting tactics had finally paid off.
England needed 176 in the three and a half remaining hours of daylight. Pakistan’s captain Moin Khan responded by slowing the action down to the brink of actual inertia. This was a tactic I had rated highly in some of England’s most heroic draws of the recent past. I would yell at our players to take more time tying their shoelaces in the middle of the pitch. Now I found myself taking a highly moralised stance on such behaviour, and labelling Moin a cheat, a cad and a coward.
The radio commentators in Karachi warned how quickly the sun goes down in that part of the world, and the creeping threat of darkness added a gothic element to the suspense. I sat listening tensely; as England edged closer to their target, the commentators were struggling to see the action. How long would the umpires let them play on? The batsmen’s shots were becoming best guesses, and fielders in the deep stood unsighted, powerless to stop the ball racing past them to the boundary.
With 20 runs still needed, and the muezzin calling the faithful to evening prayer, a wicket fell. Hussain can still remember running out to join Graham Thorpe at the crease, the ground around them a smear of black: ‘Waqar steamed in, I nicked one and Moin dropped it because he couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see it!’ Moin remonstrated with the umpire – we can’t play on like this – and umpire Steve Bucknor told him it was his own fault. ‘Steve was stubborn, and once Moin had crossed him I knew,’ recalls Hussain. ‘I said to Thorpe, “We’re going to finish this off, mate.”’
After a fortnight of treacly gameplay, their success – England’s first Test victory in Pakistan in 39 years – was urgent and dramatic. ‘The whole thing about that tour was realising your strengths and your weaknesses,’ says Hussain. ‘It’s like going to Chelsea, and you’re Burnley. You’re not going to go there and win 5–0. Your centre-forward’s not going to score a hat-trick and make John Terry look very silly.’
Sometimes the only way forward is the slow way. A look at Hussain’s captaincy record proves that, more often than not, his uncompromising methods proved effective. He didn’t turn England into a great team. But he did make them a better one. They lost fewer matches and series than they had under Atherton, giving fans the sense that one day a corner might be turned. As for me – he taught me that sometimes pragmatism is more suited to the moment than ideals.
That winter, I escaped the torpidity of life in Bath. I let go of the acting dream; what came next, I had no idea, but it was clear I wasn’t going to find it in the West Country, sending teddy bears across the high seas. Ben was looking for someone to share a flat with in London, and the prospect of moving in with my old college friend was more than enough to counter the terror of how I’d pay the rent.
We spent an afternoon in Green Park reading the flats-to-rent section of Loot like religious scholars studying an ancient text. Somewhere in its mystical script – £450pcm exc, u/f, gch, n/s only – we knew our destiny was hidden. Our destiny turned out to be an ex-council flat near Stockwell tube station. We moved in without owning a single piece of furniture between us; for our housewarming we bought sushi, wore dressing gowns, and told everyone we were aiming for a Japanese aesthetic. But the emptiness of the flat, our bank accounts, and our CVs, didn’t frighten us. We were crouched in our new lives, listening for the starter’s gun.