Michael Atherton is haunting my dreams. Literally. He’s been making the occasional cameo for a year now, since I started meeting the cricketers. But this week he’s popping up most nights. Sometimes he’s pally, sometimes cool and aloof. Occasionally he’s angry with me, and I feel terrible, and desperate to make things better, but I just can’t remember what I’ve done wrong.
It’s been like this ever since we arranged a time and a place to meet. I have put it off as long as I could. Atherton was the first person to agree to talk to me, 12 months ago – cautiously, reticently, yet courteously and graciously. But I was too cowardly to follow up with dates. He’s busy with his TV commitments, I reasoned; I’ll come to him last. Now a new summer is about to start, and there’s no more procrastinating. He has found a couple of hours in his diary for lunch, and I have found a smart restaurant near my office that I hope will induce in me a calm professionalism.
I will need it, as I’ve spent the days beforehand in a wretchedly nervous state. My mum’s exhortation to ‘just be yourself’ is no help at all. It’s the thought of being myself – excitable, over-eager, and prone to embarrassing scenes – that is powering the washing machine where my stomach used to be.
The problem isn’t that I can’t imagine talking to him. The problem is that I have imagined talking to him. Plenty. When I was 14, I used to talk through my troubles with him in my head, and make up his responses. It helped me to get things in perspective – best-friend traumas, school bullies, teachers giving me a hard time. He was always a good imaginary listener. So even though Atherton is the person I most want to sit down with, it’s also the meeting I dread. He, I am sure, will be as straightforward and lucid as he is on the TV. But I have no idea what he’ll make of me. Even if I were known for my ability to play it cool, which I am not, it feels like a rather dangerous thing to do, to let someone know that they were your hero. It’s a one-way street, after all: an act of commitment that has meant so much to you, and absolutely zero to them.
My mum met her cricketing idol once. Her firm was receiving a corporate award and, by pure coincidence, David Gower was the man handing them out. He was so charming that she fell completely mute. It was, my dad maintains, the only time that had happened in her life. Gower had made his Test debut the year she had me. While I was still in a cot, she oohed along at his creamy cover drives – the way he didn’t so much compile runs as conjure them – and joined in the groans when he got himself out to a nonchalant shot, his mind seemingly elsewhere.
It was fair to say that his Goldilocks looks were quite as attractive to her as his lissom batting. In the eighties, women like my mother admired Gower because he had the devil-may-care charisma of a gentleman playboy. Cricketers were still sex symbols back then – even the men developed feelings they couldn’t quite understand for Ian Botham and his rampant machismo.
I became smitten with a man whose defining characteristic was being imperturbable.
Certainly, few others saw the attraction. After a short period at the start of his captaincy when he was, quite literally, the blue-eyed boy of English cricket, Atherton’s northern reserve began to be considered uninspiring and uncharismatic. The more England lost, the worse it got. At the end of matches, he sat in front of the TV cameras with a grim expression and a sardonic turn of phrase. He had no interest in managing his public image, nor a particular pride in his personal appearance. When he took to the field unshaven, the short golden stubble on his cheeks did not look like a daring nod to youth culture, just lazy habits.
Once he was given the sobriquet ‘Captain Grumpy’ by a newspaper, it stuck; after that, even people who didn’t follow the cricket felt they had the measure of the man. I suspected – no, I knew – that there was more to him than that. It wasn’t just his intellectual side, either, although it warmed my heart whenever I heard he’d been spotted playing chess at a hotel, or reading Milan Kundera in an airport. There was, too, the man I pictured in my gentle daydreams: an Atherton with a softer side, an Atherton always ready to smile, kind and loyal to his friends and teammates in ways invisible to the outside world.
I was confident that this Atherton existed, and occasionally came across glimpses that seemed to support my claim. The wicketkeeper Steve Rhodes once told a journalist that the team would ‘run through a brick wall’ for their leader, and I carried that quote around with me long after Rhodes had left the scene. ‘It is a shame,’ wrote Michael Henderson in a 1996 match programme, ‘that the private man, who is amusing, gregarious and intelligent, peeps out infrequently from behind the public carapace of indifference.’ I couldn’t prove that Atherton was a beloved captain or a good man, but I had an unshakeable faith that he was both, and I stood firm in my belief whether his team were winning or losing.
With the benefit of hindsight, and Atherton’s newspaper columns, a vast number of fans have realised just what an incisive cricket brain he owns, and how good a captain he might, with the right team and the right circumstances, have been. He has been vastly more appreciated in retirement than he was during his career. And while his sportswriting regularly wins awards, it’s on the telly that he has really won people over, projecting both an acute intelligence and a surprisingly lively personality.
I used to feel a certain amount of pride in how popular he became – told you so – but after a while I got pissed off at how many people were claiming him as their own. I wondered where all these people were back in the days when Atherton was constantly being called on to resign, when his name was a punchline on satirical news quizzes, and why it always felt, when England lost, that I was the only person in the country defending his tactics, his record, his moody persona. It felt, too, that something was being taken from me. Hero-worshipping a largely unsuccessful England captain was so unusual that it felt like part of my identity. Now that others liked him too, it was as if a piece of me was under threat.
I’m starting to sound like a crazy woman already.
I get to the restaurant at noon, and Atherton is already there, sitting behind a table in a capacious armchair. He is, of course, completely familiar. A hint more lined, perhaps, than he appears on the television, with a shade more colour too – he has just returned from two months in the Caribbean. A quietly striped shirt collar pokes above a navy blue jumper, smart-casual with an emphasis on the casual. The curled hair, cropped short to reveal elfin ears, looks exactly as it has done since he first assumed the captaincy, aside from a few silvery strands.
He greets me pleasantly although I sense a wariness. Atherton has been a journalist for over a decade now, and faced plenty of inquisitions in his years as captain. He knows better than anyone how an interview works. What to ask first? I pour some water with a slightly shaky hand. I look at my questions, and worry he’ll find fault with them all.
I decide the only way is to ask the big one first. ‘You’re a historian,’ I say. ‘Do you think history has judged your team fairly or harshly?’
‘The first thing I’d say,’ he says, ‘is I don’t think about it very often.’
I look surprised. I am surprised. He continues, ‘I do not look back on my career at all, unless I’m asked forcibly to.’
‘Why not?’ This is confusing. Does it upset him? Is he ashamed of it? Is the next two hours going to be torture for us both?
‘Because it’s just a time of life that has passed. And when I stopped playing, the great fear for me was that you could turn into somebody who’s forever . . . harking back to what I did. I think it’s quite a sad thing to constantly be boring about that.’
His speech is unhurried, almost languid. I wonder if it’s a tactic, a form of occupying the crease. He tells me he has given all his memorabilia away – not that he had much to begin with. ‘I was never someone who kept cricket stumps or got shirts signed, basically ’cos I couldn’t be arsed.’ The side of his mouth tweaks upwards, not quite a smile, but close. ‘There’s nothing to remind me of that time. If you walked into my house you wouldn’t know that a cricketer lived there, and that’s a very deliberate thing.
‘Anyway,’ he continues. ‘Is the team judged fairly? I don’t know. How do you think it’s judged?’
I flinch. I didn’t expect to be questioned myself, and I don’t want to say anything that will offend him. But I don’t want to be a coward, either. So I say that it’s probably remembered as one of the most unsuccessful England sides in history. Atherton agrees it was ‘a low ebb’. But statistically, he says, the eighties were marginally worse. ‘That wouldn’t necessarily be a public perception, because the eighties was staffed by some fabulous cricketers and an Ashes-winning team.’
I feel foolish, both because I have apparently fallen for a common misconception, and because I have never once checked the stats. And it is, I realise, completely believable: even I’ve been surprised at some of the results as I’ve looked back, at matches I had completely forgotten England won, and series that were closer than I remembered. Atherton calls it ‘narrative fallacy’, which I suppose is what happens when you debate the past with a Cambridge history graduate.
There’s common agreement, for instance, that England’s Ashes campaign in 1994–95 was doomed the moment Australia’s Michael Slater opened the match by smacking four off Phillip DeFreitas. ‘We got beat 3–1 in that series, but we won the fourth Test and we would have won the third but for bad light,’ he says. I detect a hint of annoyance – not directed at me, just at lazy assumptions. ‘We could have been two-all going into the final Test. People looking back at that first ball saying it was a harbinger of things to come – that’s what sports journalists do, see the end result and trace it back. But life’s not like that.’
Maybe it’s the English graduate in me, but when I look at Atherton’s own narrative I see a tragic trajectory. At the start of his captaincy he picked a squad of young players he planned to nurture into future champions, the way Allan Border had rejuvenated Australia’s demoralised team in the late eighties. Atherton respected Border because he was a ‘straightforward character, not full of artifice’, the very qualities Atherton’s former teammates have told me they admired in him. But his vision quickly faded at the hands of boardroom figures – notably Ray Illingworth – whose power of selection outranked his own. ‘I had a clear strategy,’ says Atherton. ‘I just couldn’t make it happen. Probably my weakness as much as anything.’
I can’t tell if that last observation is honesty or modesty, or both. It was, as he says himself, ‘a chaotic time’. English cricket, though professional, still preferred to inhabit the comfort zone of old-fashioned amateurism. Players received invitations to play in the England team by post; preparations for a Test match comprised a mandatory three-course dinner (with wine and speeches) the night before. Atherton’s frustrations as a young leader whose modern ideas were continually checked by hidebound authority must have been intense.
He seems extremely phlegmatic about it – after all, he says, you can’t choose what period you live through. He also believes that the captaincy came to him too soon. ‘But I’d say that about my career as an England player too. I wasn’t good enough and didn’t know enough about the game.’
Atherton made his international debut at 21, the summer he graduated university. Adulthood and success seemed to arrive together so quickly and naturally. To the teenage me, that fact had always been a source of hope and confidence. It’s true that when you’re 14, everyone in their twenties is sophisticated, but a cricket captain like Atherton, commanding his troops in the field, seemed particularly mature. Actually, he tells me, he did most of his growing up on the job: ‘That is one of the beauties of cricket: when captains are 25, they’re going to make all the mistakes, and that’s what’s fascinating. You’ve got this guy in charge of the team who is completely immature and short of experiences in life, learning about himself as much as anything.’
The restaurant is filling up, and a pair of older gents has taken the table next to us. It’s obvious they’ve clocked Atherton and he instinctively lowers his voice a little, but he doesn’t seem too bothered. I ask when he felt most out of his depth; he says he was probably out of his depth throughout: ‘I look back and can’t believe some of the things I did or said to players. But it’s the narrative fallacy again. At the time, you can only do things from the point of view of a 25-year-old who’s a bit wet behind the ears.’ I guess it must be awkward, having to tell your friends they’re not doing a good job. He shakes his head. ‘At times it wasn’t awkward enough. I just let rip instinctively.’
When Hussain was explaining the way he had gamed some of the players, saying this thing to Gough and that thing to Caddick, it occurred to me that I could not imagine Atherton doing the same. Not that Atherton would disapprove of the use of psychology – but his character was never an artful one. I suspected Atherton would resist anything that felt like puppeteering, or telling a player something other than the unvarnished truth.
When I ask if he can remember any of his team-talks, he replies bluntly, ‘Nothing that would go down as the Gettysburg Address.’ And his preference for honesty crops up in his conversation quite a bit. He says it’s one of the things he enjoys about sport itself: ‘You can walk off at the end of the day and you know if you’ve had a good day or a bad day because the scoreboard tells you so. It’s a meritocracy more often than not. You can’t bullshit people, you can’t go round telling people how good you are if you’ve got three noughts in a row.’
There was one occasion when his hardboiled approach had tested my loyalty. I was 16 as Graeme Hick crept, tortoise-like, towards his first ever Ashes century, during a period of the Sydney Test when England needed quick runs. Atherton sent a message to the middle telling Hick to hurry up; Hick did not. He was on 98 when Atherton ran out of patience and declared. The dressing-room was, by all accounts, a sizzling silence of anger and reproach.
I wrestled with this piece of utilitarian ethics and felt awful for Hick, the kind, gentle soul who really, really deserved to catch a break. I never admitted it to anyone, not even my mum, but for the first time I truly doubted Atherton. His behaviour just seemed so mean. For a few days I had winced every time I remembered what he’d done, and I wonder how long it took for Hick to forgive him. ‘Well, he was a little upset at the time, which is probably an understatement. He was rightly sore for a couple of weeks. And then he was fine.’
It was one of those mistakes of youth, he says, one he regrets. I ask how he thinks a management expert would evaluate him, how they would rate his ‘soft skills’? ‘Empathy, you mean? I think I was empathetic of players’ difficulties because I was an average player myself. You’d have to ask other people . . . well, you have asked other people.’ Caddick did call him a poor man-manager, I say. ‘He’s absolutely entitled to his views,’ Atherton shrugs. I get the impression that he didn’t see why his own creed of personal accountability shouldn’t apply to all. ‘You need to give players a sense of responsibility. You can’t be nannying them all the time.’
At this stage, I realise, he could be reading from my mother’s parenting notes (if my mum had ever written a self-help book, it would have been titled Buck Up). It makes me wonder what his parents were like. He says his mum was gregarious, and his dad quiet; I resist the urge to shout, ‘Snap.’ Did he get his ambition from them? ‘My dad had a strong work ethic, but that’s different. I don’t think I’ve ever been ambitious. Ambition makes it sounds a deliberate thing, doesn’t it? To say you’re ambitious means you’ve set out in a certain timeline achievements that you want to have made. I’ve never really been like that. I’ve just thrown myself into what I’m doing and assumed that life would pan out in one way or another . . . I wouldn’t say I’m ambitious, I’d say I’m hard-working.’
When I ask how he fell in love with the game, he looks genuinely stumped. ‘I don’t know, really. My father played for a village club in north Manchester called Woodhouses, and I remember always going to watch him as a five- or six-year-old. I would go with my little packed lunch and I would watch intently. And I was always just good at cricket. As a kid, you’re attracted to the thing you’re good at, ’cos that gives you status and confidence.’
Atherton is a thoroughly Lancastrian name. It signifies that at some stage your ancestors came from the place itself – an industrial town between Manchester and Wigan which had been making nails and mining coal since the 13th century. I don’t know how far Michael Andrew Atherton can trace back his family tree, but I like the idea that it probably contains coal miners. The work seems a good metaphor for the way Atherton came about his runs: digging away at the face, minute after painstaking minute, knowing that hard work alone would bring his reward. It may not have been a rich seam of gold, or flash of silver, but the runs he delivered were always a precious and welcome commodity.
His hero, funnily enough, was Gower too. Presumably the young Atherton – a teenager when Gower was at his peak – watched him with a more technical appreciation, paying attention to the effortless use of the wrists, the way he picked the gaps in the field. Atherton always had natural talent – by 11, he was too good for his peers, and played in teams two years ahead of him – but he also had that work ethic, and as a boy he practised constantly; every hour not spent on schoolwork was devoted to his cricket.
He didn’t try to copy Gower – he was too pragmatic a child to think he could replicate such a carefree style – so he concentrated instead on what he could do. Atherton had patience; he had technique. He had a contentedness in his own company that long, solitary bus rides to school had only encouraged. In time, concentration became his greatest strength. At the crease, he could shut himself off, give every delivery his complete focus.
His childhood sounds strangely familiar to mine: an academic school, a blissfully undramatic home life, ‘pretty studious’ as a teenager. ‘I wasn’t particularly rebellious, or into the usual things teenagers would be into.’ I picture his parents watching him grow, delighted at his enthusiasm, proud of his dedication. No doubt at some stage, real-world anxieties began to mingle – could he make it, and would he be happy if he didn’t? Was he investing too much of himself?
I think of my parents, and all the times they ferried me to drama classes and rehearsals and shows, even though, after the debacle in Bath, my hopes of going pro were over. I had headed to London still entirely unsure of what career might suit me, yet with a strangely baseless confidence that someone in the big city would eventually hire me to do something. On the day my parents helped me move in, Mum hugged me and told me if I ever felt sad or lonely, I could always come home for the weekend. She then predicted that I wouldn’t need to.
As usual, my mother proved right. London’s endless possibilities – not to mention the expense – left no time for moping. Within a few weeks, and without even noticing, I had been assimilated into the life of the city. I found a job at a recruitment company: the dotcom bubble was fully inflated, businesses were investing wildly in online ventures, and my task was to produce spurious articles about career advancement for their spurious website. In the year I worked there, the website only placed one candidate in a job, and that was to fill a position on our own team. But the City firm that owned us kept funnelling in cash. As long as they did, I made the most of working in an office near the Bank of England, and drinking alongside rainmakers in wine bars where I could barely afford a Coca-Cola. My colleagues were fun to be around; the writing work was curiously easy. The pay was good enough to allow nights out at trendy-yet-budget eating places, and even a few theatre tickets, if I sat far enough from the stage.
My funds also stretched to a season ticket to Surrey County Cricket Club. Living a 15-minute walk from The Oval, I had decided it would be a scandal not to buy one. The ‘Gardens Estate’ where Ben and I lived had been named in hope rather than observation, and the only places to pause and reflect were the traffic islands in the middle of the murderously busy roads that shuttled Londoners between more fashionable postcodes. So, on match days, the empty stands of a 20,000-seat stadium provided the closest thing to a private retreat I could manage. From the benches in front of the pavilion I could feel ownership of The Oval’s vast green lawn, and the sounds of the south London traffic were, if not stilled, then at least a bit blurred.
It was another Ashes summer. Mum brought our usual picnic to the Lord’s Test but, in a departure from tradition that symbolised my coming of age, this year I had bought the tickets. England were one-down in the series and Hussain had broken his finger, which meant that Atherton was resuming the field as England captain. It was not going well. When we arrived on the third day, Australia were already well past England’s feeble first-innings total. We watched in disbelief as the England fielders dropped four catches off the same batsman. Atherton spilled the last one himself. By the time Australia were all out, they had a crushing lead. It was time for one of Atherton’s trademark captain’s innings. I watched him take up his familiar role as human anchor. His defence looked as solid as ever, but something was different. Was it the way he stood – a bit cramped, a bit crabbier, perhaps? Or was it the way his bat seemed to arrive a fraction later at the ball than usual, so that each new delivery caused me a millisecond of unexpressed panic?
He ran little, but made runs anyhow. The welcome the fast bowlers had reserved for him – fast, short deliveries that cannoned off the ground towards his eyebrows – was nothing new. But he seemed less inclined to duck out of their way, and there was no sign of his sinuous sway, the one he used to execute like the bend of a flame at a birthday child’s breath. Instead, he swiped at them with his bat, a helicopter blade slapping the ball to the boundary. A warm round of applause caught us off guard, and we glanced at the electronic screen: Atherton had surpassed Colin Cowdrey’s total of Test runs. He was now the fourth-highest England run-scorer of all time.
After an hour, Steve Waugh threw the ball to Shane Warne. Atherton had always enjoyed the mind games that facing Warne involved. Duelling with the greatest leg-spinner of his age – heck, of all time – was a far more cerebral pursuit than avoiding the slings and arrows of outrageous pace. But that day there was no Fischer v Kasparov marathon. Warne slung the ball to the leg-side; Atherton knelt instinctively to sweep it away, and missed completely. The ball boomeranged back behind his legs, hitting middle stump. It was a good delivery, but it was not the kind of mistake Atherton often made. He had scored 20.
I’m not sure whether I registered that Atherton’s powers were waning. Not in my conscious mind at least. Graham Gooch had played for England until he was 40; Atherton was only 33 and I believed I had years of watching him left. But I couldn’t ignore the struggles he was having that summer, or the weariness in his face when the camera caught him in close-up. I winced when newspapers wrote about his weakness against Glenn McGrath, the Australia bowler who had tormented him in the two previous Ashes series. And then there was his bad back. It had been an open secret for a few years, but it had never kept him out of a game, not until 1998, when he was forced to sit out a Test in Australia. Every now and then, you would hear that he’d been given an injection of cortisone, the magical substance that could return a bedbound sportsman to instant life. Back problems are among the regular currency of sports injuries. Atherton had never claimed it as an excuse for poor performance, so neither had I.
It was only after his retirement that he admitted he suffered from something called ankylosing spondylitis, a hereditary rheumatism that had curved his father’s spine so badly it had ended his professional footballing career. When Atherton was diagnosed with it in his early twenties, he pulled a Jed Bartlet – like The West Wing’s bloody-minded president, he didn’t want his degenerative condition to be public knowledge in case it affected people’s perception of his career, or what he was capable of. Atherton didn’t want to give the selectors any excuse to leave him out of the England team, so he lived silently with the pain, which he later admitted was semi-permanent.
Nasser Hussain told me that even his teammates knew little about the state of his health: ‘I only put two and two together later and realised that his grumpy days generally coincided with how bad his back was.’ Atherton often had to literally drag himself out of bed, and he managed the creeping immobility with twice-daily doses of anti-inflammatories that slowly stripped the lining of his stomach. All those times he had to arch quickly out of the path of a bouncer, he did it with a bad back. All those six-hour days he spent crouched at slip, or bent over his bat, were spent in pain. No wonder his batting was cussed.
It seems strange to me that his dad never warned him off a career in sport, but Atherton says his father played at a time when very little was known about the condition, and they ‘never really talked about it too much’. At the start of his career, Atherton was told by a surgeon that his own problems were caused by a stress fracture, and even had an unnecessary operation to fix it. ‘I had a screw put in there,’ he says, suddenly remembering, and reaching to feel for it through his shirt. ‘I’ve still got it, actually. Yeah, it’s still there.’
The problems with his back were a defining element of his career: ‘a constant, constant weariness, really’. The England captaincy, for all its privileged status, was also enervating. Everything came to his door: player problems, yes, but also financial decisions, logistical details, when, where and how to train. When Ray Illingworth became coach in 1994, he adopted such a hands-off approach that Atherton was required to source practice equipment and run fielding drills and net sessions. He considers the support staff today’s team travels with – dozens of specialist coaches, analysts, doctors, masseurs and psychologists – and raises an eyebrow. His aides were a single coach and a physio (and, for games abroad, a tour manager and scorer).
In between his England commitments, Atherton was still a Lancashire player, required to play for his county whenever and wherever they needed him. ‘And, as a single bloke, you’re trying to get three bags of laundry done on your day off,’ he adds. He was too self-contained to make a fuss, either in public or private. Perhaps he didn’t think it was appropriate. He had that code of personal responsibility; he also had a strong sense of duty, one he suspects was ‘drummed into’ him under Graham Gooch’s leadership. I imagine a certain pride too, in both the struggle and the self-sufficiency; the kind that might stop you seeking help, or at least admitting vulnerability.
Certainly, when I ask him to name his best moments as an England player, he skirts quickly past ‘the obvious ones’ – Johannesburg, the Donald duel – to focus on his leanest periods as a batsman. He remembers the early season of ’98 ‘. . . when I just could not buy a run for Lancashire. I went into the first Test against South Africa thinking, “Jesus, how am I going to get another run?”’ Battling back from those kind of lows – he scored a century in that opening game – is what stands out in his memory. ‘Being able to raise your game somehow, I don’t know how . . . they would be the moments that other people wouldn’t recognise.’
It surprises Atherton that he had a reputation as a technically sound batsman. ‘I always thought of myself as technically very poor, actually. I got runs in spite of my weaknesses.’ But unlike for Ramprakash, say, or Hussain, batting never felt like life or death. ‘I was never desperate. I never got overly nervous. I genuinely always felt that it was just like the game I played at school.’ He had a laidback attitude, a naturally low heart rate and a sense, at the back of his mind, that his job was ultimately pretty trivial; to play his best, he says, he had to kid himself that it was important.
That chimes with what his teammates have told me of the man who was the first to giggle when things went wrong. Crawley told me of a time the pair had been batting together against Australia when a throw had deflected off Atherton’s bat and he had called Crawley through for a run. Cricket etiquette deems this very poor form indeed and Crawley – unaware of what had happened – found himself receiving a heap of abuse from the fielders as he stood up to bat. Safe at the non-striker’s end, Atherton had found the situation incredibly funny.
Atherton argues he was equally quick to laugh at himself. But, even so, the demands of the captaincy took their toll. ‘If you speak to my friends from university they would say that they found me more difficult, I think, during the time that I was captain,’ he admits. He recalls a friend’s thirtieth birthday: ‘I spoke to him a couple of days later and he said, “The person I put you next to, you didn’t say one word to him all night.” And that wasn’t a deliberate thing, it’s just you’d go out and you’d be sat there thinking cricket thoughts, thinking about how to do the job better. It was something I found very difficult to get out of my head.’
I used to worry, as a teenager, that Atherton might be lonely. Unlike most of his teammates, he didn’t have a family, though he was sometimes pictured in the papers with a girlfriend. ‘With all positions of responsibility there is a slight sense of loneliness,’ he says, emphasising the word ‘slight’. He talks about the past as phlegmatically and unemotionally as I would expect from him – and I respond with a demeanour so professional and composed I barely recognise myself. Somewhere deep inside, there’s a mini-me rattling her cage furiously, disgusted at how ordinary the whole encounter seems. Who is this serene impostor, talking to her hero as if he’s just a regular guy?
He eats while we chat, and when he’s finished, he leans back, resting his arm on the top of his chair. He’s not unwilling to answer questions, but he looks back through the lens of analysis not anecdote, an assessor rather than a storyteller. A couple of times I disagree with him, just to see what happens, but my arguments are too predictable and my questions not oblique enough to test him. His expression rarely strays beyond the range of neutral and serious. I feel I’m meeting Atherton the captain – careful, reasoning, loyal to his teammates, wary of outsiders. Of his other sides – the silliness that Hussain describes, or whatever it was that would cause Steve Rhodes to head-butt a wall – there is no sign.
Early in 2001, Atherton’s doctor told him that he was not prepared to administer any more cortisone injections. His playing career had an expiration date: one more summer, one last chance to wrest back the Ashes. But Australia were sending one of their greatest teams in history to defend them: Shane Warne, the Waugh twins, Ian Healy, Justin Langer and Matthew Hayden, Brett Lee and Jason Gillespie – every department of the team was stacked with uncompromising, merciless talent.
The standard of international cricket has come up a lot as I’ve talked to players of the nineties. Every one of them has pointed out how extremely high the quality of opposition teams was during the era they played: the devastating power of the pace bowling that dominated the arena, from Ambrose and Walsh to Donald and Pollock to Wasim and Waqar; the once-in-a-lifetime batting talents of Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara. It has only been possible to appreciate what a special time it was in hindsight. It sets a context for all those England defeats.
No team was as ruthless or dominant as Australia at the turn of the century. For 18 months, between 1999 and 2001, they won every Test they played, home and abroad. By the midpoint of the Ashes series England were 2–0 down and still without their injured captain, Hussain. Atherton was forced to take the reins once more, in the decisive Test at Trent Bridge, a situation that seemed needlessly cruel. Especially so when he was out, off the second ball of the game, to his nemesis Glenn McGrath. It brought Atherton a new record: he now had more Test ducks than anyone in England’s history.
The game was lively and brief: 17 wickets fell on the first day, and nine more on the second. England managed to keep themselves level on first-innings scores, then fell apart to Warne, and Atherton’s half-century barely slowed the inevitable slide to defeat. The Ashes had been retained in just over seven days of play, and I found I had a grudging respect for an Australian team. To be clear, I still hated each individual player with the force of a thousand furies, but there was something about their utter ruthlessness I couldn’t help but appreciate. Australians always wore their aggression well. Snarling or swearing or throwing a ball just a little too close to the opposition looked cool on them, in a way that it never did on Englishmen. Our attempts to match it tended to look clumsy and tacky.
I mention this to Atherton. ‘Glenn McGrath was a terrible sledger,’ he replies. ‘Really gauche. So not all Australians could carry it off.’ Unfortunately, McGrath didn’t need to use words to get Atherton out. He haunted his favourite victim for the rest of the series. The sharp-angled bounce he got on the ball – the kind of vertical take-off deserving of its own Top Gun soundtrack – seemed primed for the shoulder of Atherton’s bat. In the penultimate Test at Headingley, he had him caught behind twice with identical deliveries that reared and cut back at Atherton’s waist, the second so fast it barely had time to graze his thumb along the way.
As a Surrey member, I could have bought a ticket to the final Test at The Oval for peanuts if I’d only been organised enough to apply for one. But I was hopeless at admin, and the deadline came and went without me noticing. Now, I realised, instead of spending the August bank holiday sitting in the pavilion, holding a Mr Whippy and a bottle of factor 25, I was going to be sitting on an uncomfortably low Ikea futon less than a mile down the road.
I had other reasons for feeling sore. For the past two months, I had been seeing a guy who worked as a computer programmer, and things had been going well. When I’d gone away on holiday for a few days, he insisted on spending the day before helping me pack. When I returned, he never called at all. After a week of wondering why he was suddenly too busy to see me I read his blog, and discovered he’d met someone he liked better while I was away.
So my mood was a downbeat, distracted one. There had been suggestions, all week, that Atherton could be about to retire, but he had refused to confirm anything; there was far more anticipation around whether Shane Warne would take his 400th Test wicket. Australia responded to an unexpected defeat at Headingley vengefully, and massacred England’s bowling. By the time I sat down to watch the match on Saturday, their score of 641 for 4 loomed like a monolith over the remainder of the Test.
And still there was no news on Atherton’s decision. The commentators stopped speculating, and started to wonder instead whether this would be Steve Waugh’s last match in England. I was fractious and faintly annoyed. If Atherton was going to retire, I felt that I had a right to know. On Sunday evening, England were asked to follow on. Only a rearguard of Johannesburg proportions could save the game, but no one really had the faith for that. Not even me.
The opening pair had been out in the dimming light less than half an hour when it happened. McGrath slid a ball along the invisible channel he seemed to keep to Atherton’s off stump. The batsman responded too late. The ball carried to a man standing just behind his right shoulder. Atherton had scored nine.
As he walked away from the celebrating fielders, pulling angrily at the Velcro straps on his gloves, the camera caught his face in close-up. His head gave a small, disbelieving shake; his face broadcast his disappointment. The Australia players stopped congratulating each other and turned to applaud him, but Atherton kept his eyes fixed on the ground a few paces ahead of him. Even as the sound of 20,000 plastic seats tipping up was drowned out by the sound of 40,000 hands beating together, he barely looked round at the standing ovation he was receiving. He didn’t even slow down.
It all seemed to be happening too fast: I didn’t feel sad at his departure, so much as unprepared. As I realised that this was really it – that all these people couldn’t be wrong – I cursed myself for not being at the ground. I stood up from the futon, needing to make some gesture, and a few moments later Ben came out of his bedroom to find me clapping at the television screen, and raising a ridiculous but sincere salute as Atherton reached the pavilion steps. He sped past his two friends, Hussain and Stewart, who were applauding him into the dressing-room, and disappeared behind the dark reflection of the window.
Only Atherton, I think, could have finished his last game with such a stubborn refusal for ceremony. Perhaps that was the greatest difference between him and his fans: even lovers of Atherton’s no-frills approach to cricket and to life could still be sentimental about the man himself. Atherton spared himself not a single tear.
Sitting opposite him 14 years after that low-key conclusion, I ask if he can remember what he was feeling. ‘Relief, I think,’ he says. ‘There comes a point where you know you’re done. I’d already mentally finished and gone. All the ways that you’re one-eyed as a player – you think the umpire’s against you, you think the luck’s not with you, you view the opposition a different way – in the last couple of days, when I knew that I was finishing, I started to see things in a different light.’
It was, Atherton says, a kind of dawning maturity that only comes to sportsmen when they leave the field of play. To be successful in sport you must think and act like a child, with a selfish objective and a limited perspective. It’s why, as a Manchester United fan, he was amazed that Alex Ferguson could still be a football manager so late in his life. ‘For a 70-year-old man to still be snarling at referees and thinking that every foul should be a penalty is a bizarre, curious thing. By the time I finished I realised I couldn’t be like that.’
And he acknowledges that retirement changed people’s perceptions of him too. Yes, he admits, people have warmed to him a bit more. ‘My experience has generally been that when you stop playing, people think more kindly of you. I think they think highly of you if those basic fundamentals are there: you gave the team your all and you showed pride in playing for England. And I don’t think anyone could argue that we didn’t try our best.’ He finds it amusing that, when the England team are doing badly now, his name will suddenly be on the tongues of fans who should know better. ‘They forget that you were useless or led a losing team or got out for nought so many times. The supporters say, “Oh, we could do with you out there,” as if I’m a player who averaged 60! People have slightly selective memories,’ he chuckles.
It’s not the only irony of his retirement, of course. The big one is his choice of post-playing career: a high-profile job in the media, the industry he saw as ‘utterly irrelevant’ when he was captain. I say he must feel a bit sheepish now he’s on the other side of the microphone. He maintains that, some obstreperous performances in press conferences aside, he was ‘pretty helpful’ to journalists. He finds it hard to believe he was tailed through the Lake District by a couple of tabloid reporters in the wake of the dirt-in-the-pocket-affair – ‘it just seems so nonsensical now’ – but suspects that he escaped lightly. ‘I’d hate to think what the reaction on social media would have been today.’
He certainly must love it, his second career. The Sky rota is punishing enough on its own – Hussain told me that his time was now accounted for for the next two years – and Atherton also writes every week. You would have thought, having held one of the most high-pressure roles in English sport, you’d allow yourself to take it slightly easy. He has a family now and could, presumably, enjoy a pretty good lifestyle without working as hard as he does. He looks back as if the thought wouldn’t occur to him. He likes to be busy, he says. He wants to be busy.
And he is busy. He’s going straight from here to a meeting in St John’s Wood. I’m running out of time; if I’m going to tell him what his career meant to me, I have to do it now. But I’m struck dumb. What should I say to him? Can I articulate his legacy with the kind of scrupulous honesty he would demand? After all, his sporting career gave me pleasure, but an equal-to-greater measure of pain. I can’t remember any scenario when I ever consciously drew on his feats as inspiration, or wondered, when faced with a dilemma, ‘What Would Athers Do?’
He has told me he never considered himself a role model. He didn’t think, he says, about the ten-year-old boy watching television, watching him (‘maybe I ought to have done, a bit more’). But anyone could see that. His bloody-minded shaving rebellions, his ‘so-what’ performances in press conferences – these were all the acts of a man who wanted people to leave him be. He was an anti-Beckham, a proto-Murray, his eyes focused upward on the next objective, his mind dwelling for less than a few seconds on what others thought of him. How hard, then, to imagine that somewhere in another town or another country his actions shaped people he didn’t know existed.
Perhaps ‘shaped’ is too strong. My character, after all, remains very different from his: I am not stubbornly defiant; I avoid conflict at all costs; I am one of the most suggestible people I know. There is nothing self-contained or introverted about me. And those traits we do share existed in me long before I encountered him. I admired Atherton’s work ethic precisely because I had always been someone who tried their hardest. I liked his determination because I, too, was driven to achieve.
But being a teenager isn’t always about achieving – sometimes it’s just about surviving. The grinding business of growing up could be lonely, and there were long spells where it felt like it was just me against the world. Atherton showed me how glorious those solitary stands could be. He was the physical embodiment of St Paul’s exhortation to the Ephesians: that, ‘when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and, after you have done everything, to stand.’
In Beyond a Boundary, C. L. R. James quotes Philip Lindsay, an Australian who wrote in 1951 of the effect watching Don Bradman had on him. ‘Most of us need an ideal,’ wrote Lindsay. ‘Nor is it necessary for that ideal to symbolise one’s particular ambition . . . and to me Don Bradman became that symbol of achievement, of mastery over fate.’ Bradman, he wrote, ‘helped me to keep my faith alight, and this association of myself with him as nearly of an age and of the same country made me feel somehow that I must not let him down as he had not let me down.’ It is the most perfect description of my own hero-worship that I have read.
But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain that to Atherton, who is not, in the flesh, a man who invites intimacies. He is Jack Russell’s Mr Obsidian. It’s not just that I strongly suspect he would find my admission embarrassing (though I do), or that I don’t want an awkward exchange to be my abiding memory of this lunchtime (I don’t), or that the conversation of the two gents next to us has faded out and it’s getting harder to pretend they’re not listening to every word we say. It’s also that I realise that such information is simply irrelevant to him.
That’s the real fantasy at the heart of fandom. It’s not just that we convince ourselves that we know and understand the object of our affection. We believe that they are someone who would understand us, too. After all, who spends their time following a hero who they think wouldn’t get them? If we met, we think, that person would see us for who we were. And they would approve.
It’s only after I leave that I realise what I was secretly hoping for: a moment of connection, some kind of validation from the person I’ve put on a pedestal for most of my life. But that’s impossible. I doubt I’ve met the true Atherton, just as I know he hasn’t met the real me. So as I wander back to my office, I am subdued. Something has happened here that feels incredibly final: even more so, perhaps, than the moment he walked off a pitch for the last time.
In 2001, when Atherton quietly left the sporting stage, it didn’t hurt; in fact, it made a sort of sense. My life had found a balance, and a hope, and a future. I was crossing the threshold of adulthood, and it felt time to say goodbye. Now all that’s left to say is thank you.