Two white helmets. That’s the first memory I have of the England cricket team. It hovers in my mind, free-floating. It’s not moored to any particular piece of sporting action. It’s just there, like an impression from early childhood, formed long before you had the understanding to give it context. The colour of your dad’s suit, say, or the smell of your nan’s face-powder. The squeak of the springs in your first bed.
These two white helmets were worn by two very different men. Underneath the first helmet was a weathered face, skin somewhat tanned, eyes somewhat small. Its wearer had a neat black moustache that seemed to be issuing a stern statement, one slightly undermined by a soft dimple in the chin below it. He had reached maturity a couple of decades before – in the 1970s, if that moustache was anything to go by. The helmet itself, with its white peak, didn’t seem so different from a construction worker’s hard hat, except that it extended down further, and had yellow flaps that protected its wearer’s ears.
The other man’s helmet also had ear-protectors – they were a sky blue – and a grille across the front which partially obscured his features. Still, it was easy to see that this man was much younger: he had a positively boyish look. When he smiled, which he seemed to do more often than the first man, it was the smile of the schoolyard, of someone wrapped up in a fun game at break-time.
The men were called Graham Gooch and Michael Atherton – he was never, in my household, ‘Mike’ – and they were the first players whose names I knew, and whose features I learned to recognise from the television. For someone who had never watched sport, it was hard to understand how two people of entirely different generations could be in the same team, and perhaps that’s why the image of the pair of them stuck in my head. But more likely it was the daft look of those ear-protectors.
Mum – who was no doubt ironing at the time – explained that Gooch was the captain of the England team. What this might actually mean was as unfathomable to me as what was happening on the screen. In close-up, the men in helmets seemed to be doing little but standing around, holding a large hunk of wood at their side. Every so often, the TV camera would show a long brown rectangle on the ground, and someone positioned at the end of it hitting a ball. Was it one of the men in helmets? And, if so, where were the rest of their team?
Sport, with its private jargon, invisible rules and assumed patterns of behaviour, can be impenetrable enough at the best of times. But nothing can appear as confusing on first encounter as cricket, particularly if you’re watching it on television. A typical sequence of images will include: men in identical kit lobbing a ball between them; men rubbing that ball on their trousers; men clapping their hands; men pulling up their trousers at the knees and positioning themselves into a crouch. And at semi-regular intervals, someone will sling a ball at a chap in a helmet.
Occasionally, a wider shot of the field will attempt to put this baffling mummery in context. Of course, in a football match, when the camera pulls back to reveal the whole pitch, the purpose of the players’ actions becomes instantly clear: they are manoeuvring a ball across the ground towards a target at the other end. The same is true of rugby – and of netball, basketball, ice hockey, lacrosse, NFL and Aussie rules. Even if you don’t know the first thing about the sport, you can tell what they’re trying to achieve.
Show an overhead shot of a cricket pitch, however, and it looks like you’ve stumbled on a military exercise from the days of Waterloo. White-clothed men stand across a green field in a curious asymmetric pattern, a giant snake of rope surrounding them. At their centre is a thin strip of discoloured turf with some geometric white markings and a man in thick padding standing sentinel at either end. What the overall purpose might be, other than signalling messages to extraterrestrials, is left to your imagination.
The commentary isn’t always going to help either. It certainly didn’t when I first stumbled across cricket in the early 1990s. This was a time when the BBC treated Test cricket as something that furnished your living room like gently murmuring wallpaper. The discretion of the commentators was supposed to allow the images to speak for themselves. Which was all well and good if you understood how they related to each other, but for the rest of us, a day of Test match coverage was as mystifying as David Lynch on a particularly obtuse day, and one-third as entertaining.
One afternoon I asked my mum a question about what she was watching. Who knows why I asked it; perhaps I was bored. More likely I was lazy and trying to get out of some chore or other, and thought that engaging her in conversation might distract her from the fact she had asked me to tidy the kitchen or lay the table. On the TV, a man was chasing a red ball across a swathe of green, but in the top-left corner of the screen, a separate box showed two men nonchalantly jogging up and down a brown strip, crossing each other as they ran.
‘Mum, why are the men in the box jogging?’
‘Because they’re trying to score runs.’
‘What are runs?’
‘They’re the things that batsmen get when they run between those two white lines.’
‘So why is that other man chasing the ball?’
‘Because if he gets it back to one of the ends before the batsman gets home, he’ll be out.’
‘Like rounders?’
‘Yes. But instead of having bases, you have wickets.’
‘What’s a wicket?’
‘Right—’
When my mother says ‘right’, it is not so much a word as a statement of intent. It is delivered with a downward inflection and a brisk, schoolmarmish tone, followed by a slightly dramatic pause. This is a habit left over from her days as a courtroom lawyer, and it signifies that you – be you plaintiff, judge or daughter – are about to be rendered cognisant of Truths which are Vital, Needful and Incontestable. If my mother says ‘right’, you pay attention, and you find a chair. You are about to be schooled.
The education that followed was overwhelming, intriguing, dense, ephemeral and all-consuming. Every new piece of information I processed only prompted more questions. Why did everyone get two goes at batting? Why did some bowlers run up fast, and some slow? What did the two men standing around in white coats actually do? And, most confusingly of all, why did the word ‘wicket’ mean three different things?
My mother answered everything with a patience she had no reputation for. In our house, technical questions were summarily despatched to my father, a details man who has a head for trivia and a preternatural understanding of the workings of things. But here she was, leading me step by step through the ten different ways a batsman could get out, who was who in the batting order, how to read the score, and why the fielders stood where they did; my mum uncovered the cogs of the game, plus the intricate, invisible structure that held them together. She did it with such care, such enthusiasm and such seriousness that I intuited how important these conversations were to her, even while I struggled to understand the game itself.
Cricket is not a game you can learn instinctively; nothing about it is especially natural. Just look at the peculiar way you have to hold the bat: no child, lifting a piece of wood to hit a ball, chooses to hold it side-on and lead with their elbow. A bowler’s delivery stride, with its learned mechanics, is utterly contrary to the accepted laws of human anatomy. The complexity of the leg-before-wicket dismissal is so evolved that my teenage self spent as much time figuring it out as she did learning to solve quadratic equations.
It is, therefore, a sport that requires a special form of introduction. You cannot come to cricket on your own: it demands a relationship. I have yet to meet an obsessive like me whose fervour was not stoked by a teacher, a friend or a family member. Up to that point in my life, my father had been the parent my sister and I associated with play, the one who messed around with Lego and took us kite-flying. Mum was at the business end of parenting, checking up on homework and report cards, setting the chores. She often seemed serious, and exhausted. My relationship with her was about to change for ever.
Another thing I’ve realised only in hindsight: if cricket hadn’t been so difficult to understand, I might never have bothered with it at all. The game was constantly raising more questions than it answered. Some of the answers never even made sense – the existence of a fielding position called ‘cow corner’, for instance, or the fact that the members in the Lord’s Pavilion had chosen to wear orange-and-yellow-striped ties of their own free will. You had to work hard for the privilege of understanding what you were watching, and it was impossible to ever feel satisfied that you understood this game in its entirety. But that was a big part of the pleasure.
Back to those white helmets. After Graham Gooch and Michael Atherton, the third cricket player whose name I learned was Alec Stewart. He too had a white helmet – it must have been the fashion that year. There was something about him I found rather daunting. He reminded me of my mum’s brothers, not because of any family likeness but because of a certain serious, adult expression that his face settled into.
I hadn’t come across many male teachers in my single-sex education so, aside from my dad, my uncles were the only men I knew with the power and the licence to tell me off. I was seriously intimidated by the authority they wielded, and the inscrutability of their moods, especially since they were not easily charmed by my know-it-all behaviour, or my word-perfect performances of the songs from Cats. I remember the day my uncle Martyn took my sister and me to the seaside, and I bounded up to deliver some clever insult, clumsily brandishing my candyfloss. Its pink stickiness stained his brand new jacket and his wrath was terrible. And I was stunned: how did he not find me adorable?
Alec Stewart looked like the kind of man who would not find me adorable. His face, his body, his whole personality seemed to have been hewn from granite. He held himself with the open-chested deportment of an off-duty soldier, and at 14 years old I instinctively understood, without even knowing the phrase, that this was a man’s man.
There was more about him that I could not relate to. He was, for instance, a player of great personal discipline, whose timekeeping, tidiness and immaculate wardrobe were matters of record – and utterly alien to a teenage girl whose bedroom looked like the aftermath of a burglary. Stewart was the kind of man who initialled his shoes and numbered his gloves. He ironed his playing shirts. He also used moisturiser a good decade before it was fashionable for men to do so. Instead of making him the David Beckham of his day, this grooming habit only seemed to render him more practical and predictable.
Stewart had been England’s vice-captain for two years, the willing adjutant to Graham Gooch. Gooch was turning 40, and no one knew how much longer he could feasibly go on playing international cricket – many of the chief companions of his playing days, from Ian Botham to David Gower, had already retired. Some thought Stewart would soon succeed him as captain. But not my mum. She thought it would be the baby-faced batsman with the sky-blue ear-protectors. Michael Atherton.
Do people choose their heroes? I’d argue not. Cultural achievements, covetable style, acts of compassion or derring-do – all of these things can make someone a hero, but they don’t determine that they’ll be your hero. We can admire an artist because their work moves us, or follow a visionary leader because we believe in the rightness of their cause. None of these things, however, can explain why my best friend at primary school, Philippa, had pictures of Bros on her wall, or why she kissed them goodnight before she turned out the light. (Philippa knows I’m not judging her. I was crushing on William Shatner in TJ Hooker around that time.)
We hero-worship people not just because of who they are, but because of who we are, too. In the days before it was chic to be a geek, before nerds became celebrated Silicon Valley billionaires, I was an old-fashioned swot. I loved schoolwork and I was good at it. The fact that doing well at my studies pleased my parents, combined with a natural competitive streak, made me a hard worker, the kind who wasn’t embarrassed to win school prizes (and got annoyed when she didn’t). On top of this, I was an extrovert – a show-off – who loved to be on stage. My dream was to be an actor, and my role models were Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Rowan Atkinson. Their common feature: they had all studied at Cambridge University, a place I desperately wanted to go to.
It was an ambition my parents were proud of; they had got their degrees at the same polytechnic, and no one in either of their families had previously been to university. So I’m pretty sure that Michael Atherton’s Cambridge degree was one of the first things my mum told me about him. It was certainly what piqued my interest. It isn’t entirely unusual for an England cricketer to have an Oxbridge education; cricket has always been the sport of toffs, after all. But in the professional era, when young athletes like Stewart left school at 16 to sign to a team, Atherton’s history degree was unusual enough to be a cause for regular remark and mickey-taking among commentators and teammates, and rare enough for me to confer a special status on him.
The fact he was such a young-looking 24-year-old also appealed to a girl who still found grown men rather daunting. What really won my sympathy, however, was watching him trip over. It was June, and cricket was still an unidentified blip on the very periphery of my radar. England were playing Australia in the Ashes at Lord’s, and Atherton was on 97, three runs away from scoring a century. If I had understood what I was watching, I would have known that England were 427 runs behind on first-innings scores, and that this was epically bad. I could have appreciated that Atherton’s stand with Mike Gatting, which had lasted almost three hours and yielded more than 100 runs, was a vital and positive contribution to the game. But I didn’t know any of this. All I saw was the young man with the white helmet and the blue ear-protectors and the Cambridge degree hit the ball to his left and set off to run.
Twice he and Gatting passed each other, almost brushing shoulders as they crossed. When Atherton started for the third time, he saw the fielder ready to throw the ball and quickly realised it was the wrong call. Turning to cover the short distance back to safety, his body seemed to move in two directions: his legs slid forward under their own momentum while the rest of him, already on its way back, fell abandoned to the ground. Even as Atherton re-gathered and pitched himself desperately forward on his knees, the ball arced into the gloves of Australia’s wicketkeeper Ian Healy, who broke the stumps while Atherton was still grubbing on the ground.
Getting out on 99, one short of your century, is the most galling thing that can happen to a batsman. Getting run out on 99 is even worse, because unlike, say, being bested by an unplayable delivery, you have effectively fashioned your own downfall. It’s like doing the perfect driving test, then sideswiping the examiner’s car as you park up. But back in 1993 centuries were one of the confusing traditions I had yet to understand. The significance of scoring 100 runs left me nonplussed: it wasn’t like your team got extra points for it, so why was it so much more important to players and spectators than scoring 99 or 95 or 92?
On the other hand, watching a man humbled to the point where he was literally on his knees, crawling in the dirt in a frantic scramble to save himself – that was almost too real. For the first time, sport had revealed itself as cruel and humiliating. The sight of Atherton’s demise touched my sensitive teenage soul as surely as Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. The unfairness and sheer awfulness of that suspended moment won my sympathy, and from now on I cared what happened to Michael Atherton.
The 1993 Ashes series was not an auspicious time to begin watching cricket – not if you were English, at any rate. England had already lost the first Test at Old Trafford, and after Atherton’s run-out at Lord’s defeat there became inevitable too. After a draw in the third Test, Australia were 2–0 up with three matches left to play. To salvage the series and regain the Ashes, England would need a fantastical reversal of fortune, the kind that required the imagination of Hans Christian Andersen, Heinrich Hoffmann and the Brothers Grimm combined.
Of course, reality prevailed. In the fourth Test, at Headingley in Leeds, England conceded another gigantic first-innings lead and suffered the ignominy of losing by an innings. I don’t remember being particularly interested or depressed by the results – my mum had explained that losing the Ashes was both a formality and a regularity – but I did notice Michael Atherton’s scores. He had made two half-centuries in Leeds. And while I was still sceptical about the mathematical significance of scoring 50 simply because it was half of 100, it seemed to me further proof that he was a cut above his teammates.
Half an hour after the Ashes had been lost, Graham Gooch, still at the Headingley ground, resigned as captain. Now things had got really interesting. My mother was convinced that Atherton would be England’s next captain, and I discovered that this possibility was really quite appealing.
There was, of course, one man in his way.
It is not hard to track down Alec Stewart these days. He’s the director of cricket at Surrey, the county he played for all his life. Gooch’s vice-captain is one of the uncontested names on my teamsheet, partly because he was England’s leading run-scorer of the 1990s – he, more than anyone, must have been frustrated with the team’s performances – and partly because I want to know what he really thought of Atherton.
Stewart agrees to see me during a county game at Surrey’s home ground, The Oval. On the day of our meeting I set my alarm early. It isn’t just that I dread being late to meet someone whose punctuality is legendary – I also need to try on three different outfits before I settle on one smart enough for the encounter. Even when I do, I change out of it to eat breakfast, because the laws of probabilities, of Murphy and of Sod all agree that if I am wearing the only crisp white shirt I own I will absolutely, definitely drop porridge down it.
Heading south on the Northern Line, I emerge from Oval station 20 minutes early – so early, in fact, I kill time with a cup of tea at a café, and make myself late. The resultant scramble to the ground is neither dignified nor professional and puts paid to the crispness of my shirt. Even with the help of the gatemen, it takes a while to find the right entrance to the team offices, and then I find myself lost in an empty, anonymous corridor, whose doors I am terrified to open in case I find myself surrounded by sweaty men in jockstraps. Eventually I run into a man in a suit who explains I am on the wrong floor. In my hopelessly nervous state it seems I got out of the lift too early.
As I head back, a familiar voice reaches me. ‘Emma, there you are!’ I’ve heard Stewart on radio and TV too many times to mistake his tones – and here he is, sauntering down the staircase next to the lift. ‘They phoned me and said you were here so I thought I’d do the decent thing and come and meet you, but I’ve been going up and down the stairs and I couldn’t find you . . .’ He holds out his hand and smiles. The handshake is much gentler than I expected, but then, so is the smile.
The Alec Stewart of the 1990s had a set expression. There was a hard look in his grey eyes that stayed there even when he smiled. If an England fielder had the temerity to miss a ball, or a journalist asked him an irritating question at a press conference, his cheek muscles lapsed into a headmaster-ish look of disappointment. But age has softened his edges. His face shows a modest amount of wear – he has an embedded tan, his tight, wiry crop of hair is enlivened with grey – and it all suits him. He makes for a particularly handsome 50-year-old. I also realise I needn’t have worried about my wardrobe choices. Stewart is in a black tracksuit and white trainers; his watch looks the kind you can drop on the floor and expect to bounce.
He takes me to the ‘team room’ which doubles as his office; there is a boardroom-style table, large enough to sit a 13-man squad, and, on the back wall, a whiteboard, presumably for illustrating tactics, although today it carries nothing more strategic than a few jokey messages between teammates. A row of enormous sash windows, thrown fully open, faces on to the pitch and floods the room with sunshine. The sounds from the middle are so immediate you feel you are practically in the field yourself.
Stewart pops out to make us tea, and I try to take my mind off my nerves by focusing on the game in front of me. Surrey are in the field, and a young Worcestershire batsman called Moeen Ali, with a black beard that reaches past his collar, is closing in on his century. I’ve only been watching a few seconds when a mistimed shot loops the ball towards a man standing deep in the leg-side field. It passes clean through his hands, and a ghostly sigh whispers around the almost empty stands.
There is a tut of annoyance as Stewart re-enters the room. ‘That’s the third he’s dropped today. Jees—’ He stops himself. ‘Sorry. Kept my language in check there, didn’t I?’ Handing me a mug, he settles into the chair behind his desk. There is a stool to his left, and I perch on it awkwardly, now a foot taller than Stewart, and terrified of falling off. I start babbling about how, when I first moved to London, I used to live just up the road in Stockwell, and even became a Surrey member for a year or two before I moved to north London. ‘And you still support us . . .’ he says, not quite a question. My panicked look must give me away. ‘It’s all right,’ he teases. ‘You can just lie.’
He is himself a man of strict loyalties – his father, Micky, was a Surrey and England cricketer, and there was no question, as Alec grew up, that he wanted anything different for himself. Still, it hadn’t come quickly, his England career: Stewart started playing professional cricket for Surrey at 16, but it was ten years before he got his first cap. In the meantime, he worked and worked at his game: as soon as the English season finished at the end of the summer, he would fly to Australia and spend the winter playing grade cricket in the kind of tough, uncompromising leagues that promise to make a man of you.
Even when Stewart did make it into the England team – against a fearsome West Indies attack in 1990 – there was no suggestion from his scores that he’d stay there. It took him 14 Tests to register his first Test century, and at one point he was dropped from the team by his own dad, who was manager at the time. But Stewart wasn’t just a batsman – he’d taught himself to keep wicket, too. ‘And it was being able to do dual roles which may have just given me . . .’
The edge?
‘. . . a slightly extended stay of execution,’ he smiles.
Within two years, Stewart had been installed as Graham Gooch’s vice-captain. It made sense. Gooch was a disciplinarian, and Stewart ‘looked up to him more than anyone I’ve played with or against’. To some, this young batsman–keeper who had grafted harder than anyone to secure his place in the team, this 20-something who didn’t touch alcohol because he hated not being in control, seemed like Gooch’s mini-me. That’s why, when Gooch resigned, the naming of his successor took on an extra significance. What did the England team need: more of the same, or a dramatic change? A battle-ready pro with a safe pair of hands? Or a 24-year-old with an academic mind?
It felt, even to someone with as basic and hasty an understanding as mine, like a crucial moment in English cricket. The simple yin–yang narrative was easy to absorb, and the suggestion in the press that there was ‘no love lost’ between Atherton and Stewart added piquancy. I ask Stewart if the week before the captaincy announcement was a tense one. ‘Yeah, so at the time it was built up as a rivalry with Athers which was never, ever the case. It may sound strange, but I had never had an ambition to captain England. My big ambition was to play for England.’
I am sceptical. There must have been rivalry. A year before Gooch resigned, Stewart and Atherton had been batting together in India and managed, somewhat idiotically, to get themselves stranded at the same end of the pitch. One of them would have to be given run-out, but each refused to leave until, in the end, the umpire made the decision for them. Stewart was given out, to his obvious displeasure. Some have even claimed it was the moment the England captaincy was decided.
Stewart rolls his eyes at this. ‘Run-outs happen all the time,’ he says. ‘I was actually in—’ he coughs, jokily, ‘but I promise you, there was never any problem between us at all. Which is probably a bit boring for you to hear.’ He sounds genuinely apologetic.
In truth, if Stewart had been made captain, my interest in cricket might have been over as quickly as it had begun. It might have died as a one-month fad, like my equally fleeting enthusiasms for plaid, Nicholas Lyndhurst and the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. As it was, reading on Ceefax that Atherton had got the job was my first taste of cricketing victory.
My family was on a camping holiday in Somerset during Atherton’s first Test in charge. Each morning, I darted to the campsite shop to buy whatever newspapers I could get my hands on. It wasn’t very thoughtful of me, hijacking these limited, communal resources, especially since I wasn’t going to read anything but the match report and the picture captions.
My parents indulged this peculiar use of my holiday allowance, and I found a kindred spirit in Joe, a friend of my sister’s who was also at the campsite. As a 12-year-old boy, Joe knew far more about cricket than me. He even knew how to play it, and had brought his cricket bat and a tennis ball. With the confidence of the truly ignorant, I would bowl at him from about ten yards, and with the humility born of a two-year age-gap, he would grant my lbw appeals. Then we’d pore over the newspapers, and discuss whether Graham Thorpe and John Emburey were going to save the Test match in Birmingham.
They didn’t, which was lucky, because if it had looked likely I would probably have forced my parents to drive us home a day early to watch the climax. (The radio in my parents’ car did not have longwave, otherwise Joe and I would have spent four days of the holiday holed up in the car.) But I was more frustrated than upset by England’s defeat. With Atherton as captain, I had been sure we would instantly start to win. I expressed as much to my mum, who looked at me with interest. ‘Oh, it’s “we” now, is it?’
Sporting allegiances don’t seem to be like other lifelong forms of bond. You don’t need to spend a lot of time getting to know each other, or establishing trust. Yes, some football fans will come to support their local team through a process of childhood indoctrination that would shame the Jesuits – give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the Sheffield Wednesday fan, etc. – but, in my experience, it’s more of a done deal. You fall in love with a sporting team the way our grandparents’ generation hooked up in wartime – hastily, wholeheartedly, with no thought for the years of conjugal obligation to come. The England cricket team had walked me home from the post office a couple of times, offered their hand in marriage, and I’d said yes at first asking.
After our camping holiday, and just before the last Ashes Test, my family moved house. We had been living in the countryside, exactly halfway between the ludicrously pleasant village of Harpenden and Luton, multiple winner of the Crap Town Award. The recession was biting, and the cottage that my parents had rescued from dereliction and spent three years turning into their perfect home had to be sold. We were swapping life in a tiny hamlet surrounded by acres of fields and common land for a town-centre house a short walk from Luton’s Arndale Centre.
I suppose I should have been sad that we’d lost our rural idyll, but I liked the idea of being within walking distance of a cinema, shops and friends. Plus, the TV was the first thing to be unpacked and I was pretty swiftly distracted by England’s final game at The Oval. England had batted surprisingly well in their first innings, and that was nothing compared to what came next. I watched open-mouthed as their pace bowlers tore in and tore up Australia’s batting. Michael Slater for 4, David Boon for 13, Mark Waugh for 10; to an ingénue like me, every wicket appeared a genuine miracle.
I ran up and down the stairs relaying each new occurrence to my sister Kate, busy decorating her new bedroom, who was by turns baffled, bored and irritated by my excitement. As I was quickly to learn, however, winning a cricket match is rarely simple. Ian Healy helped squeeze another 100 runs out of Australia’s last two batting partnerships, almost wiping out the bowlers’ good work. And while England’s batsmen stood firm in their second innings, a bout of rain blew in from nowhere, eating up the overs needed to bowl Australia out a second time.
In the end, one day remained to take ten wickets. With hindsight, I would back the fielding team’s chances in that scenario almost every time. But I was a 14-year-old girl who knew nothing of cricketing probabilities. I found it extremely hard to get to sleep that night, and the entire next day I was locked on the sofa, calling my mum at her office to inform her of each wicket, desperate for her reassurance that victory was still on track.
When England finally did win, they had ended a drought of six years and 240 days since their last Test victory over Australia. Strangely, I don’t remember the final wicket falling – perhaps my young mind wasn’t yet equipped for such moments of intense pleasure. Instead, it is two newspaper clippings from the following day that have stuck with me. The first was the Matt cartoon from the front page of the Daily Telegraph. A man in bed with his sleeping wife is shining a torch at a piece of paper on the wall: it reads, ‘England won. It wasn’t a dream.’ That cartoon summed up the sleepless wonderment I felt for days after. Atherton’s England had just given me my first teenage high, and it took me ages to come down.
The other picture I see whenever I think of that match is a photograph of Atherton and Stewart running off the field together, side-hugging as they went, both grinning like nincompoops. The Oval win was the beginning of a relationship between the two men that was to prove as solid and long lasting as it was unsuccessful. For the next eight years, the two of them seemed to come as a pair, whether opening the batting together, consulting in the field, or facing down an increasingly hostile press as England’s performances went from bad to worse.
They struck complementary attitudes on the field: Atherton’s arms crossed, his brow furrowed; Stewart with his mouth open wide, clapping his gloves together. The thinker and the encourager. The strategist and the enforcer. The officer and the sergeant-major. And I often wondered, as a teenager, how their conversations went, this student of Magna Carta and his stalwart sidekick.
I mention this to Stewart, who laughs: ‘You need to get out more, Emma.’ He can’t recount particular conversations with Atherton, or even their first impressions of each other – the man with the military bearing seems to have a pragmatic, rather detached, power of recall. He talks about past matches in the manner of a pundit, relaying the essential facts as if he had been a spectator rather than a participant, and his conversation is scattered with observations that sound like coaching mantras: ‘You’ve got to have physical courage . . . I always used adversity to spur me on . . . When you’re winning things go your way, and when you’re losing they don’t.’
Anyone who has spent any time listening to professional sportsmen being interviewed on TV has heard these kinds of phrases. We hear them often in the aftermath of a game, when players unfurl obvious sounding yet supremely meaningless clichés about ‘doing what they had to do’ or ‘soaking up the pressure’. I tend to dismiss them as unthinking, and they often make me roll my eyes and groan with frustration.
For Stewart, they have always been something of a trademark. He actually earned his nickname, ‘the Gaffer’, because his dressing-room colleagues thought he talked like a football manager. But listening to him, I wonder if it isn’t unthinking at all, just a very different way of thinking: less contemplative but more disciplined, and far more useful on the frontline when you’re getting pummelled by the enemy. ‘If everyone walks around looking miserable you’ll guarantee everyone is miserable,’ he says at one point. ‘What can you do about it? Lie down, cry and feel sorry for yourself – and they’ll walk all over you. Or front it up, go out there and be brave about it. Sport can be tough, so get on with it. You never gain anything, do you, from feeling sorry for yourself?’
I look around again at the room, and the order he has imposed on it. His large desk is clear but for a computer, a printer, a glass tankard full of highlighter pens. Next to them, lying open, is the notebook they’ve been used on, its pages full of team lists written in neat capital letters. Beyond where Stewart sits, there is a printed schedule on the wall, and a pile of books stacked carefully on a side table. The top one is called Cricket on Everest.
Batting at Base Camp would, I suspect, be a picnic compared to the travails that Stewart had to endure in his 13 years playing for England. He was bruised and battered by the world’s most vicious pace attacks. He was asked repeatedly to sacrifice his opening position to keep wicket and bat in the lower order – a job he liked less, but willingly assumed for the sake of the team. When he did finally inherit the captaincy from Atherton, in 1998, his tenure was short-lived, despite managing to win a series against a strong South Africa side. He fell out with management, and was fired after England’s humiliatingly brief appearance at their home World Cup in 1999.
And yet Stewart remained, throughout a decade of ordeal, arguably England’s most upbeat presence, both on the field and on the balcony. He may not have seemed a reflective kind of guy, but maybe his was the better way. Perhaps the only chance to stay sane in the face of constant defeat is to stop considering it at all. Stewart had created the perfect paradox. He cared deeply, passionately, about his team, even elevating their needs above his own. But he never forgot that he was just playing a game. Losing need not make him miserable.
Or discourteous. As we talk, we’ve watched Moeen Ali score a hundred, pretty much assuring Surrey of defeat. And when Moeen gets out, Stewart stands and applauds him back to the pavilion. We are in an office, and no one can hear or see Stewart’s ovation. But he does it anyway, because he appreciates the performance and because, well, it’s the decent thing to do.
Cricket’s little civilities have always made me happy. I like the antiquated courtesies that are written into the game – the handshake at the toss, the rustle of applause at the end of an over. They remind me of school, and the way we’d stand up for the teacher when she entered the room. Back then, I was nothing if not respectful of authority. The most rebellious thing I did during my schooldays was to get caught eating a chocolate bar in our form room. It wasn’t even during class. But the piercing look of disapproval on my French teacher’s face left me with a lasting sense of shame.
My parents weren’t especially strict, but they did like manners, and my mum was a strong proponent of Commitment and Follow-through. An agreement to go to a distant cousin’s birthday party six months in the future was a binding contract, and nothing short of my own death would release me from it. Perhaps Stewart and his old-fashioned values were as important to my burgeoning love of cricket as any handsome new captain. Loyalty, work ethic, deference to authority, a tendency to over-prepare – these were qualities my teenage self had in spades. Here was a game that prized them, and a player who encapsulated them. No wonder I’d fallen for it so fast.
With a couple of overs to go before lunch, Stewart has to make his way to the Surrey dressing-room. He gives me a kindly farewell and I realise that I am actually sad to say goodbye. There’s just something so safe and comforting about his company. I’ve only spent a couple of hours with him and I already want him as my ‘In Case of Emergency’ number.
The Tannoy announces that spectators are welcome to wander on to the pitch, and the 100 or so people who have been scattered around the ground are now gently promenading across the Oval turf. It’s a funny old tradition. You’re never allowed anywhere near the actual wicket, so the whole exercise is, well, just exercise. I sit in the stands, pondering my recent encounter. Before we parted, I asked what Stewart’s parents had taught him when he was growing up. ‘It was always said to me whatever you do, do it to the best of your ability,’ he replied. ‘Never look back and say, “what if . . .?”, or “if only . . .” and start feeling sorry for yourself.’
Being an England fan was clearly nothing like being an England player. Pretty much 90 per cent of my time as a follower of England has been spent asking ‘what if’ and sighing ‘if only.’ The other 10 per cent was devoted to feeling sorry for myself.
But at least I knew that I’d given it the same level of commitment.