10
It’s a thinking game, is cricket.
Anonymous
‘Have you been to Brisbane?’ asked Sir Leonard Hutton.
He would never dive straight in. First, he always cautiously surveyed, to pick up every relevant cue: it was part of his training as a Yorkshire opening batsman. I remember him pulling up in his car outside the offices of The Observer in Blackfriars. He did not know where to park, and I was on the other side of the road, stranded by a busy dual carriageway. Without haste or panic, he assessed the situation: no entrance to the office of any kind on his side of the building. I could only watch and, well, observe the only England captain who to that point had won a full Ashes series at home and away.
He and Denis Compton did not have much in common. Having to fend off Lindwall and Miller armed with a new ball every 55 overs (not 80 in the 1940s), Hutton was cast as the northern Roundhead, while the southern Cavalier was free to come in down the order and attack the spinners. But I noticed that they shared a trait: chatting to hotel porters and doormen. As well as the geographical lie of the land, or perhaps the bars in Compo’s case, they wanted to know who was coming and going so that they were not caught unawares, as professionals in the society of amateurs. Eventually a passer-by came along, Sir Len wound down his window, had a chat, then slowly pulled his car away from the kerb.
‘Is there still a river in Brisbane?’ he asked.
‘Yes, there is.’ As he well knew.
‘In 1954, after I’d sent Australia in and we lost the first Test by an innings, I went for a walk beside the river in Brisbane.’
Pause.
‘And I thought of throwing myself in.’
He widened his bright blue eyes. He was not joking.
The purpose of psychology in cricket is to minimise the pressure a player feels so that he can be in the right frame of mind to perform his best. All sport contains an element of cat and mouse; a cricketer tries to anticipate what his opponent is going to do next and stop him doing it. In the right frame of mind, he is tuned into everything of importance that is going on around him. His nerves are not disabling but enabling. He lives in the moment, completely. He does not think about the past, even the previous ball; he does not think about the future, beyond the next ball.
In cricket through the ages, no person has felt more pressure than the England captain in the first Test of an Ashes series in Brisbane. If India and Pakistan had played each other on a regular basis since 1952–53, and in five-Test series, the pressure their captains would have been under would undoubtedly have been greater: even more national prestige would have been at stake, especially at times of war between the two countries. But India and Pakistan have played each other irregularly, so no enormous caseload of history and tradition has built up, as with the Ashes, which began in 1882.
It had been stressful enough for Hutton at home. As the first professional to captain England in the twentieth century, he had been trusted so little by the establishment that for the second Test of the 1953 Ashes he had the chairman of selectors in his side, Freddie Brown, watching his every move on the field and in the dressing room. But this was nothing compared to the stress Hutton felt after going to Brisbane in November 1954, defying all precedent by selecting an all-pace attack without a spinner, sending Australia in, losing Compton with a broken hand, watching England drop approximately twelve chances and Australia post 600 before declaring, and losing by an innings.
Into the Brisbane River, during his walk after the Test, Hutton did not throw himself. Instead, he did exactly what Wally Hammond had done eight years before, after he had captained England (as an amateur, no longer a pro) and lost the opening Test at Brisbane. Hammond got into a car and silently drove the many hours to England’s next venue, barely exchanging a word with his passengers. Hutton was brooding over Alec Bedser, England’s finest bowler by a street since the war but losing his nip, and how to drop him. Before the series was won 3–1, Hutton felt the pressure so much that he lay in bed one morning shortly before the start of a Test, staring at a wall, too depressed to get up. The manager and senior players were needed to coax their captain to the ground.
Consolations of the flesh have been a traditional way for the England cricketer on tour in Australia to mitigate the stress. But Hutton could not afford to be caught with his trousers down, even if he had been that way inclined. The establishment would have hung him (not his trousers) out to dry.
The night before the Brisbane Test is nerve-racking for the rest of England’s cricketers too, but they only have to worry about their own game. They can prepare in the pragmatic way that experience has taught them. From what I have observed over four decades, the batsmen are no different from soldiers on the eve of battle. They do the equivalent of polishing swords, checking bowstrings and sharpening arrows as they fiddle with their bats and new rubber grips. The combatants are visualising what will happen on the field of battle on the morrow, so they are not caught unprepared, and do their job.
In cricket’s recorded annals, Richard Nyren was the first captain to be astute at psychology. In a big game between Hambledon and All England, in front of ‘many thousands’, Hambledon were set a large fourth-innings target and one of their players, Noah Mann, kept pestering Nyren to let him go in. Mann was a left-handed batsman and ‘a most severe hitter’, according to John Nyren, son of Richard, in The Cricketers of My Time. But Captain Nyren held him back, and back, until Mann went in at number eleven with ten runs still to make. Mann blocked a few balls then hit an over-pitched ball for six and soon finished off the game. ‘Never shall I forget the roar that followed this hit,’ wrote John Nyren in his dotage.
Afterwards Mann said to his captain: ‘If you had let me go in an hour ago I would have served them in the same way.’ John Nyren, however, thought his father had made the correct move: ‘The old tactician was right, for he knew Noah to be a man of such nerve and self-possession, that the thought of so much depending upon him would not have the paralysing effect that it would upon many others. He was sure of him, and Noah afterwards felt the compliment.’
Extrovert players will talk on the eve of battle; the introverts fall silent.FN59 Whatever type of personality, the best will avoid this ‘paralysing effect’ and not waste their energy in fruitless anxiety. They will control their fear and the ‘what ifs’. They will practise discipline and self-reliance, as preached by the young master in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. It is the teammate who distracts or needs help who is a menace, almost as dangerous as the enemy, reducing your chance of survival.
Uneasiest of all is the head that wears England’s crown at the toss in Brisbane. The captain cannot bowl a spell then retire to fine-leg, or bat then do a crossword. The match, perhaps the series, hinges on him – and it may boil down to his single decision, whether to send his batsmen or bowlers into battle. It has to be one or the other, unless he loses the toss. Bat or bowl. Fight – but not flight – for if he resigns he will be remembered for a lifetime and beyond.
To switch to the nautical metaphor which has long been applied in cricket, I think the captain of an England team on a turbulent first day of an Ashes series must feel like the skipper of a sinking ship. If he is a batsman himself, he tries to save as many of his crew as he can by partnering them at the crease and helping them score runs; he also has to steel himself at the sight of players who are drowning, never to get into the series.
Doug Insole, Essex’s captain of the 1950s, defined the captain’s role as ‘a public relations officer, agricultural consultant, psychiatrist, accountant, nursemaid and diplomat’. Michael Brearley wrote the definitive treatise in The Art of Captaincy, soon after he retired from playing and became a psychoanalyst; but when he captained England in Brisbane in 1978–79, Australia were a much reduced side because Kerry Packer had signed their best players for World Series Cricket. I recall the air of inevitability as what was in effect Australia’s Second XI batted first, and so naively that they were rolled over within a couple of sessions. For other England captains like Hutton and Nasser Hussain, the decision to send Australia in after winning the toss in Brisbane went a long way towards defining their lives.
I doubt whether anybody in the world is subject to such intense scrutiny as the England Test captain in an Ashes series. A leading actor is exposed for as many hours, live, but not to millions watching on television. A politician can carefully stage-manage his relatively few public appearances before the nation: he does not have to spend the best part of 30 hours a week in front of television cameras, as the England captain has to do if he bats well. When Britain’s prime minister goes to the House of Commons, Question Time is no longer than the press conferences an England captain has to do before and after a Test match; and the prime minister in Parliament does not have more than 20 television cameras ready to capture any false move, or more than 600 people who can boo.
Test batsmen have to walk along a tightrope suspended across Niagara Falls. They have to keep on doing it until their nerve fails and they know their time has come. The extreme risk they take – if they nick off cheaply three or four times, their international career may be over – makes for compulsive viewing; and if that batsman is also the captain, the fascination is even greater. The wonder is that so often they reach the other side.
Hussain, before the toss at the Gabba in 2002–03, was so consumed with tension that in the players’ tunnel – not a long dark tunnel, as one might imagine – he went past Mike Atherton, his oldest friend in cricket, without noticing him. Atherton had retired from playing and had just arrived in Australia as a commentator, so they had not met for weeks. Hussain, haunted, walked straight past him.
Australia ended the first day, after being sent in, at 364 for two. On the third evening I had to ghostwrite Hussain’s column for the Sunday Telegraph. Immediately and bravely he admitted his mistake, and did not seek to blame anybody else for his decision. But it took years of being ribbed in his retirement before he could begin to laugh it off. One evening, when he and Atherton were talking to each other at my dining table, I overheard them agreeing that what each of them would be most remembered for was their one big mistake. Which would be most unfair, were it true.
Tim Noakes, the professor of sports science at Cape Town University, who was employed by South Africa’s cricket board for the 1996 World Cup and other occasions, told me in an interview on England’s tour of South Africa in 2004–05 that no sport is more draining, mentally and physically, than a Test match for a top-order batsman. To perform his best, he has to be alert to every cue throughout the five days, or at least until he has batted twice, whereas the bowler can switch off when his side is batting. So how much more draining for the top-order batsman who is captain? When Andrew Strauss scored 110 at the Gabba in 2010–11, it was the first century on the ground by an England captain; and to get that far, after making nought in his first innings and seeing Australia rack up 481, and after losing so much sleep, Strauss for the first time in his career tried a well-advertised energy drink at lunch on the fourth day, just to keep going.
At the other end of the batting order, when Bob Willis led England in their 1982–83 Test in Melbourne – a match on a knife edge throughout until England won by three runs– he walked off the field one evening, through the dressing room and across Yarra Park to the team hotel, took the lift straight up to his room, lay down on his bed and fell asleep with his boots on.
Better than any press conference for getting inside the head of England’s captain before the opening Test of an Ashes series in Brisbane is Henry V’s speech on the eve of Agincourt.
But at least the batsman who is paralysed by nerves, like one of Noah Mann’s teammates, is not exposed to public humiliation for long; and the close fielder, dreading that the ball will come to him, may be moved away from the bat after he has dropped a sitter. For the bowler, especially in a one-day match in which he is depended upon to bowl his quota, there may be nowhere to hide save retirement.
The yips which can affect bowlers is more than nervousness. It is a psychological crisis, indeed a collapse. According to my research, bowlers of all types have completely lost their accuracy and self-confidence, to the embarrassment of everyone on the field, but left-arm spinners more than any other. India’s Ravi Shastri – who went through the experience when playing for Glamorgan and came out the other side, not least because he had his Test-class batting to fall back on – was very clear about the best way to rehabilitate. It had to be step by step: firstly by bowling in the enclosed safety of the nets without a batsman; then in the nets with a batsman; then in the middle without a batsman, and so on. Once he is playing competitively again, the left-arm spinner should begin his spell over the wicket, and bowl a few economical, confidence-building overs, before switching to round. From what Shastri said, the umpire at the bowler’s end can unwittingly form a roadblock: running between him and the stumps, or behind him, is one more hurdle at which the nervous left-armer can baulk. Hence, start over the wicket.
After his postgraduate research into the yips, Mark Bawden became the psychologist for the England team. He told me that a general rule applied to bowlers, of whatever type, who suffered the yips. Their sudden loss of accuracy and confidence stemmed from some traumatic event when young, perhaps not related to cricket or sport at all. Only if they dealt with this fundamental issue would they recover their bowling. Insole underestimated a captain’s tasks: in addition, he has to be a psychologist and consultant psychiatrist.
The perfect psychological state for a batsman in a Test match is widely agreed to be what Michael Brearley defined as ‘relaxed concentration’. A fast bowler might want to rouse himself from a state of lethargy by means of anger. Shane Warne, the master of spin-bowling psychology, would pick a verbal fight with an opponent if he wanted his competitive juices to flow. For Test match batting, relaxed concentration is ideal.
Brearley told me a story against himself to illustrate how he had been relaxed and concentrating, but not in the right way. We were waiting at Hyderabad airport in Sind, little more than a landing strip, the day after England’s second Test against Pakistan in 1977–78.FN60 He and Geoffrey Boycott had been skilfully batting out the last afternoon against Pakistan’s spinners, notably Abdul Qadir, until a draw was assured: Imran Khan was not playing, so there was no chance of a late burst of reverse swing, not that anyone in England knew the term. The one issue remaining before the close was whether the two England batsmen could make their century.
Boycott, in order to reach his milestone, called for the extra half-hour. A loophole in the regulations, which was closed as a result of this incident, allowed a Test side to take an extra half-hour even when no definite result was obtainable. Thus Boycott sailed into port and was 100 not out at the close. With a different objective in mind, Brearley started blocking, and was eventually dismissed five minutes before the close for 74. He never made a Test hundred.
‘I became obsessed,’ Brearley admitted at Hyderabad airport. ‘I became obsessed with the concept of purity in the not-out.’ The unblemished, the unbeaten, the pure. But the muse of cricket does not like blocking: it is too negative for her taste. We must bat, and look for runs, even when aiming for a draw.
By the time he retired, though, Brearley had taken captaincy to new heights. In 1981 he unbound Prometheus’s batting at Headingley and Old Trafford. On the last afternoon at Edgbaston, as his last resort, Brearley inspired Ian Botham to pluck five Australian rabbits from his hat for one run. It was the force of Botham’s liberated personality that swept Australia aside, not the intrinsic merit of his medium pace. If a self-effacing person had apologetically bowled exactly the same deliveries, Australia would have swept to victory and a 2–1 lead.
Brearley also pioneered the tactic of getting inside a batsman’s head by standing in the crease of a new batsman as he walked out and took guard. Then he would tell one of his fielders to drop back to deep square-leg, because the batsman could not hook the ball down.
In The Art of Captaincy, Brearley observed how the professional game had become far more aggressive in his time, and how the aggression stemmed from several sources: from opponents, crowd, media, as well as from the players in his own team. And it is up to the captain – who else? – to deal with these changing social mores. ‘He is responsible for the appropriateness of his team’s degree of ruthlessness, including his own.’ He also mentioned the letters he received from followers of the game who deplored the manifestations of this aggression.
But not all international cricket is riddled with aggression and sledging. Even a match between England and Australia can pass without a word of abuse. If the bowler is hit for four, she takes it out on herself. If her fielder drops a chance, she reacts with a sympathetic smile.
If or when men’s international cricket begins to pall, through over-aggression or match-fixing, I look forward to going back to the old-fashioned virtues of the women’s game. So do others, I suspect. When, as the editor of Wisden, I broke a taboo by selecting a woman as one of the Five Cricketers of the Year, I received the grand total of one irate letter: it was, perhaps predictably, from an MCC member in Manchester. If we reach the age when we no longer have a taste for the behaviour of alpha males, cricket can still offer a form of the game to suit us.
The mind filled with relaxed concentration enters, at its apogee, the trance-like state called ‘the zone’. It is not for the bowler: he puts so much physical exertion into his pace or spin that his mental condition cannot remain untroubled for long hours. But the batsman who enters the zone feels he can go on for ever.
Mike Atherton entered this zone while he batted for 643 minutes against South Africa in Johannesburg and scored 185 not out to draw the second Test of 1995–96 for England. Owing to the dictates of work, as Atherton was then a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph, I was first to speak to him when he walked off, as soon as he had crossed the boundary line, because our sports editor wanted him to write about this historic innings.
Jack Russell, England’s wicketkeeper and Atherton’s partner for the last four and a half hours, was triumphantly celebrating their re-enactment of Rorke’s Drift. Atherton was quiet and calm: not visibly tired at all, far from drained, just serenely calm. He spoke first, about the South Africans: ‘They didn’t seem to be trying very hard.’ Save for the last few minutes, it had looked to everyone watching as though they had been busting a gut for almost two days to dismiss Atherton, so I think what he specifically meant was: ‘They didn’t try much by way of variation in their bowling or field-placings.’ He looked as though he could have gone back out to the middle, taken guard again and batted until the animals in the safari park came home.
It is a state which neither the young nor the old batsman attains. Atherton was aged 27 and a half, almost the same age as W.G. Grace when he had his purple patch. If he ever enters the zone, a player will do it when his surroundings are fairly familiar, when he is at or near his physical peak, before his end is in sight.
For a programme on television about ‘the zone’, Atherton later underwent some tests in an attempt to explain how his innings of a lifetime came about, but nothing much more scientific emerged. After he had retired, I had first-hand experience of his essential character. When he was playing, it was manifested not only when he was batting: simply to overcome his degenerative back condition and colitis, and get on the field, he had to take such strong painkillers that the day after his final Test he collapsed and had to be taken to hospital to have his stomach pumped out.FN61 On this occasion, we played a game of chess for more than an hour, and he fought a rearguard action, ditch by ditch, without admitting defeat or resigning, and in that time he played one attacking shot. Stubbornness personified.
At a laughably lower level, at the opposite end of the spectrum in a friendly club game, I – just once – entered this zone. I went in at number seven with an hour and a half to go, and for the first half-hour we chased the runs until my partner was out, then, with nothing much to come and six wickets down, we had to aim for a draw. Looking back, I realised it never once occurred to me that I would get out, having spent the whole of my batting career being afraid of doing so. Losing a partner was no cause for disappointment, as Atherton had observed after the Johannesburg Test: he was too far above the battle to notice, too inwardly certain of success to think for one moment of failure. A blessed state, never to be recaptured – except perhaps by those like Hashim Amla and Mohammad Yousuf who have been able to call on religious practices to achieve this state of mind.
The bravest cricketer, in my eyes, is the one who is not only physically brave. He is morally brave as well, in telling us the truths we need to know.
Of all those who have played cricket, nobody could have been more courageous than Siegfried Sassoon. In the First World War he fought at the front, and led his men from the front, and won the Military Cross. The citation read: ‘For conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy’s trenches. He remained for 1½ hours under rifle and bomb fire collecting and bringing in our wounded.’ Having been there and done it, he risked court martial and the firing squad by his public statement that it was a war that should not be fought.
It was many years after the Great War before Sassoon found solace, in marriage and male friendships, in writing prose and verse, and on the cricket field at Heytesbury in Wiltshire. Although he had bought the estate, he did not exercise his right as lord of the manor to captain the village team. Instead, tall and stiff with war-wounds, he fielded at mid-on or mid-off; and when the ball was hit in his direction, he put his feet together, as if standing to attention once again, and let the ball strike his legs. I would have thought the last person who deserved to be injured while playing cricket was Sassoon.
Of England cricketers, the bravest in my estimation has been Marcus Trescothick, and not so much when he was opening the batting for England and facing the first bowlers to clock 100 mph, such as Shoaib Akhtar and Brett Lee. Principally, having been there and done it, he risked ridicule when the stress became too much and he told us so.
Trescothick’s predecessor as a Somerset and England opening batsman, Harold Gimblett, had set down on a tape-recorder the manic depression he had endured. He was brilliant enough to have had a long career as Hutton’s opening partner, but only managed three Tests before the Second World War. He scored 67 not out on his Test debut, and finished with more first-class hundreds than anyone for Somerset to this day, including Trescothick. But the public scrutiny, even before television, was too much and he became ever more depressed. Gimblett recorded his thoughts on tapes and left them to the author David Foot to publish after his overdose.FN62
I have to admit a soft spot: from second slip I watched Trescothick in a game during the season when, aged 15, he scored 4000 runs, mostly for Keynsham. He was very quiet as he played his cover drives and scored about 27. Having performed for his country for six years at home and abroad, Trescothick went a stage further than Gimblett and publicly admitted his torment while still alive, while still a player. Like a peacetime Sassoon, he was brave enough to tell us what we needed to know about the professional’s touring life, his anxieties and fears and panic attacks, alone in hotel rooms far from home. He thereby removed our rose-tinted spectacles.
Professional cricketers tend to view luck as a powerful force, a divinity that can shape their ends. And if a batsman is facing up to a bowler, and in the split second before the ball hits the pitch an earthquake strikes, and the ball hits a crack which has opened up and shoots through to pin the batsman, let us call that luck – or, rather, sensationally bad luck. Or if a batsman cops a poor umpiring decision at a formative stage of his career, I would say he too is unlucky: he is a victim in spite of having made no mistake.FN63
But I would argue that luck is perceived to be far more prevalent than it is. If the average county batsman faces 50 balls of fine outswing and survives in spite of numerous play-and-misses, he is deemed to have enjoyed a lot of luck or ‘arse’. In order to repeat his luck in his next innings, this batsman wears the same socks, perhaps unwashed, and puts on his equipment in the same order, in what can snowball into a host of superstitions. But I would say that if this batsman goes through exactly the same scenario one hundred times, there will be an occasion when he nicks the first ball and is caught, and another when he survives the whole spell of 50 balls, and dozens of outcomes in between. This is the nature of cricket. It is simply a verbal shorthand to say he was ‘very unlucky’ when he was dismissed first ball, and ‘very lucky’ when he survived.
From what John Nyren tells us about Hambledon, cricketers in the Age of Enlightenment had no such belief in luck. And in the absence of verifiable scientific evidence, rare in cricket, I see no rational case for arguing that luck – as we define it in the case of an earthquake damaging the pitch – plays a significant part. In Test matches, for instance, no captain has been very lucky with the toss over a prolonged period, or very unlucky. Of those who have captained in 40 Tests or more, Peter May has won the highest percentage of tosses, 63 per cent; and the late Hansie Cronje won the lowest percentage, 41 per cent.
If a fielder drops a catch, I dislike hearing teammates say ‘bad luck’. The ball has either been too fast for his reactions, in which case some other term of sympathy might be justified; or, more likely, his catching technique has been faulty. If the non-striker is run out while backing up, after the striker has hit a straight drive, I do not think him unlucky but wonder if he has ever practised sliding his bat back or diving for the crease. Ed Smith, who represented England in three Tests, wrote that he could be considered lucky to have attended Tonbridge School, which has produced numerous fine cricketers on its fine pitches; but I would call this circumstance, or happenstance.
Again, the professional batsman who is dismissed for 13 may want to read something into it; or the Australian batsman who is dismissed for 87; or the team that loses a wicket when the score is 111 or 222 or 333. But by the end of his career, almost every cricketer has been rewarded almost precisely in accordance with his skills and efforts – unless he has fallen victim to superstition.
Or to hubris. What I remember from the only occasion I interviewed Jacques Kallis was that he said, almost vehemently: ‘Even a bowler from the fourth XI can bowl a ball that gets you out.’ Anyone in cricket, however exalted, can be brought down by anyone, however lowly – not most of the time, true, but always in theory and very occasionally in practice.
The longer the contest between two teams, the greater the psychological element. The axiom is that a limited-overs match is won by ‘the side that plays better on the day’. But in a series of three or more Tests, the principles of traditional Chinese warfare come into play, and a Test match is transformed into the sport’s highest and most fascinating form.
Western military thought has paid relatively little attention to the psychological element; so, too, traditional cricket thinking. Clausewitz enunciated the theory of building up your forces at the decisive point until you outnumber your enemy, then victory will assuredly follow. When Douglas Jardine employed Harold Larwood to bowl bouncers at Australia’s batsmen in 1932–33, Bodyline was Clausewitzian. The equivalent in modern cricket is to make a big first-innings total, pile on ‘scoreboard pressure’ and have a fresh bowler always available, or at least keep the batsmen tied down.
Sun Tzu by contrast, in The Art of War, stated that the objective of Chinese military strategy should be psychological mastery of the enemy. Once you have achieved this, success in battle is a fait accompli; and if success is achieved with no battle at all, so much the better, for China’s resources are thereby preserved.
The victorious army
Is victorious first
And seeks battle later;
The defeated army
Does battle first
And seeks victory later.
The Chinese board game of wei qi encapsulates this way of thinking. The aim is to encircle or surround your opponent. Chess, the western board game, is Clausewitzian: you overwhelm your opponent by marshalling superior forces at the decisive point.
Unintentionally, the strongest Test teams have copied Chinese strategy and combined it with western military tactics. West Indies established such a psychological mastery through the 1980s and into the mid-1990s that they exuded the impression that, to win, they had only to turn up. England’s coach, Micky Stewart, said in his retirement: ‘In all my time in sport I’d never experienced top players, really top players [he implies Ian Botham], speaking in such awe of their opponents.’ No wonder West Indies won 14 out of 15 Tests in a row against England, drawing the rain-affected other. In a five-Test series the psychological superiority was reinforced even further, game by game, defeat by defeat.
When I ghosted Hutton, I had not read The Art of War, and my guess is he had not either. Yet I believe he was one of the first captains, if not the first, to combine western and Chinese strategy. In the 1953 series against Australia, he avoided a showdown with their fast bowlers, Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller, as he had none of his own: thus did a weak Chinese emperor avert a decisive battle with barbarian hordes. In post-war Tests, Australia were 11–1 up against England. Hutton slowed the over-rate down, and wore his opponents down, month by month, until he caught them on a turning Oval pitch made for England’s finger-spinners, of whom Australia had none.
When he arrived in Australia for the return series in the autumn of 1954, Hutton was as politely inscrutable as a Chinese diplomat in ceremonial robes and long moustaches. By then he had acquired some fast bowlers, while Lindwall and Miller had aged, so he could have been overtly aggressive. Yet he enacted Sun Tzu’s dictum: ‘Feign inability. When deploying troops, appear not to be.’ The Australian press corps were predisposed to Hutton because he was the first non-amateur to captain an England tour of Australia since the 1880s, and they were further disarmed when he declared: ‘We’re here to learn a lot from you.’ He added that his party contained no bowlers of real note and, for that matter, no batsmen of real note. Only when Frank Tyson bowled bouncers at their unhelmeted heads did the Australians realise what was hitting them, and their psychological mastery was lost.
To reach number one for the first time in the era of ICC rankings, England had to make a similar psychological leap to defeat Australia in 2010–11. They had lost their five previous Ashes series in Australia, and by huge margins, with three Test wins (all when the Ashes were not alive) to set against 18 defeats. And though he had not read The Art of War, Andrew Strauss used the same principles as Sun Tzu had advised and Hutton had used. If he did not feign inability, he made no public statements about the prowess of his team to alert the enemy. Instead, his side dominated the three warm-up games to such an extent that they generated apprehension in the Australian media and public; and when they scored 517 for one wicket declared in their second innings at Brisbane, England gave the impression of invulnerability and gained the psychological lead, even though the first Test was drawn.
In the second Test at Adelaide, in a chess-like conflict at the decisive point, England’s spinner Graeme Swann out-bowled his opposite number – seven wickets for 161 runs against Xavier Doherty’s one for 158 – to achieve victory by an innings. England lost the third Test in Perth. They were indeed overwhelmed, but in public Strauss shrugged off the defeat, and reaffirmed England’s existing strategy: big individual centuries, unerringly accurate bowling with seam or swing movement on a fullish length, and occasional interventions by Swann, especially against left-handed batsmen. ‘The highest form of warfare is to attack [the enemy’s] strategy itself,’ according to Sun Tzu. England, under pressure, adhered to the one they had devised.
So when England were beaten in Perth, Australia’s players and public were still presented with a strongly united front. When England’s opening bowler Stuart Broad pulled a stomach muscle during the second Test and was ruled out of the series, three possible replacements bowled on the Adelaide Oval straight after the match. Whenever England lost a man, his successor seemed stronger; whenever Australia dropped a player, his replacement seemed weaker. In the only public act of indiscipline, Kevin Pietersen borrowed a Lamborghini in Melbourne and was fined for speeding. In Australia such an episode could be explained away as laddishness.
While England seemed to have no doubts, Australia appeared riddled. Should their captain Ricky Ponting be replaced by Michael Clarke? The Australian selectors did not sing from the same song-sheet and one, Greg Chappell, was ready to be quoted whenever he disagreed with his colleagues. The front page of The Age in Melbourne was bordered in black after Australia’s defeat in the second Test, preparing readers for the worst. The inconsistencies of Australia’s leading bowler, Mitchell Johnson, were seized on by England’s supporters, who constituted half the crowd at times, and who mocked Johnson in a lyric which almost became the anthem for this series: ‘He bowls to the left/ He bowls to the right/ That Mitchell Johnson/ His bowling is shite.’ In addition to music, dance was another form of affirmation that the series would end in England’s favour: the players began to dance ‘the Sprinkler’, not too soon because cricket hates hubris.FN64 But it was there, rehearsed and waiting, as soon as the celebrations could begin.
By the end of this series in Sydney, England had convinced all concerned that every factor was working in their favour. Even the weather was abnormally cool and rainy – well, English – and allowed the tourists to get away with four specialist bowlers and no all-rounder: the first time they had won an Ashes series in Australia since the First World War with such a limited attack. England’s retention of the Ashes was perceived to be inevitable, a fait accompli. ‘Shi’ is the Chinese term for the understanding and exploitation of all factors, so that victory is like water flowing downhill on its swiftest course, along the path of least resistance.
The same happened to England, in reverse, a year and a half later. When South Africa toured in the summer of 2012, they did to the hosts exactly what England had done to Australia. It was a series of only three Tests, and one that most commentators – including the neutral Shane Warne – prophesied that England, as number one in the Test rankings, with home advantage, were going to win. But South Africa established psychological mastery in their first innings of the series, at the Oval: this speeded up a process which might otherwise have taken several Tests to unfold. Their innings was even more monumental than England’s second in Brisbane had been. England’s bowlers were exposed as impotent. Hashim Amla scored South Africa’s first triple century, Graeme Smith and Jacques Kallis masterful centuries, in a total of 637 for two declared. England’s batsmen were picked off by South Africa’s attritional seamers and new-ball bursts at the decisive point by Dale Steyn.
In violation of Sun Tzu’s principle, England discarded their strategy in the second Test at Headingley: the defeated army sought victory after losing the psychological mastery. England selected four pace bowlers, dropped Swann and sent South Africa in on a pitch that soon offered turn. England were playing chess, and chess alone. They were trying to attack South Africa at what they hoped would be the decisive point: the fullish length at which a ball would swing conventionally under cloud cover at Headingley.
England failed to win; the match was drawn; cracks widened and doubts deepened in the home side. Strauss, before the series, had contemplated that it might prove to be his last; and once self-doubt sets in, the decline accelerates. According to Chinese military theory, the emperor could help by offering baits to the leaders of barbarian hordes threatening China, pacifying and disarming them; it did not allow for his abdication.
England’s façade of unity was shattered when Pietersen told a press conference at the end of the Headingley Test: ‘It’s hard being me in the England dressing room.’ Achilles was sulking in his tent, announcing that he did not want to play for England again in limited-overs cricket. Instead of focusing on the third and final Test at Lord’s, England were engaged in firefighting and crisis-management, dropping Pietersen and having to explain why. The South Africans concentrated on giving their tailenders a rare chance to bat, in a practice game in Derby. Vernon Philander, who had not made a fifty for many months, scored 68 not out. In the Lord’s Test a few days later he scored 61 and 35, took seven wickets, and was player of the match. South Africa won by 51 runs and took the series 2–0. Strauss resigned and retired from all professional cricket a week later. The result seemed as inevitable as water pouring downhill – whereas at the start of the series, when South Africa had no psychological mastery, it had not.
A wounded animal finds a place to lick its wounds. It takes time out from the fight, to die or recover. The England cricketer who is on a losing tour of Australia has nowhere to hide his vulnerability except an inner-city hotel room, air-conditioned, without windows that open, looking out on concrete and streets; nature is not available to console. Luxurious, yet a luxurious prison. If he escapes it to avoid ‘hotel fever’, the player returns to the hostile environment where taxi-drivers, front pages, golf club members and airline staff all point a finger and say, loudly or silently: ‘You loser.’ There is no hiding place unless he is given special permission to leave the city, an admission of weakness in itself. Tasmania used to perform that function, when a week across Bass Strait was relief, and a couple of friendly games against weekend amateurs in countryside reminiscent of home, at Launceston and Hobart, was part of England’s schedule. Now, only one hiding place exists, or rather a semi-sanctuary.
England’s Ashes series of 2013–14 was the complete opposite of their 2010–11 series. On their earlier visit, after the first four days in Brisbane, they had not appeared vulnerable save on two occasions: firstly, when they lost the third Test in Perth, but even then they shrugged off their defeat and reaffirmed their strategy; secondly, when Paul Collingwood announced his retirement, and then it was towards the end of the last Test in Sydney, when England were on top and no whiff of vulnerability was going to alter the outcome.
The first shot in the next series was fired by Australia’s coach, Darren Lehmann. During the first Ashes Test of 2013 at Trent Bridge, Stuart Broad had edged a catch to Brad Haddin, who was standing up to the stumps, and who deflected it to slip. Broad did not ‘walk’ and was given not out. ‘That was just blatant cheating,’ Lehmann said in an interview with a Melbourne radio station, then added: ‘I hope the Australian public give it to him right from the word go for the whole summer, and I hope he cries and goes home.’ For orchestrating Australia’s campaign in the return series, Lehmann was fined by the ICC: but those several thousand dollars he may have subsequently considered the best money he has ever spent.
Australia’s media had been quiescent, almost defeatist, in 2010–11. This time they played their part in regaining the Ashes. England arrived in Brisbane to find the local daily newspaper, the Courier-Mail, taking the lead. Broad’s name was blanked out of their reports. Even when he took six wickets in Australia’s first innings, he was referred to as a ‘27-year-old English medium-pacer’. After the match the newspaper tried to laugh off their campaign, but it did not come across as fun at the time. Lehmann’s psychology had identified the target for the media and crowds to aim at. I doubt whether the England players knew how few people were involved in such journalism. A couple of cricket correspondents, and a newspaper editor or sports editor who might know very little about cricket, can give the impression the whole country is against you. But this campaign served to rabble-rouse all right. When Broad made his first appearance of the series – and I was sitting in the crowd, not the sealed press box – I estimated at least one-quarter and maybe one-third of the Gabba’s 40,000 spectators chanted: ‘Broad is a wanker!’ A section of every crowd continued to do so up to and including the very last day of England’s tour.
Broad’s spirit as a bowler was never broken: he was England’s best and most successful bowler in the series, with 21 wickets. Whether his spirit as a batsman was affected, I am not so sure. His highest score was 42: not bad for a bowler-who-can-bat, but England needed their number eight to keep out Johnson, and to face more than 172 balls in the whole series. Nothing, except perhaps dropped catches, so gnaws away at dressing-room morale as the lower order being constantly blown away. Broad’s batting might or might not have been affected by the hostility of the crowds and media; it was by the bombardment of Johnson, Ryan Harris and Peter Siddle. Kevin Pietersen, after seeing the rejuvenated Johnson go after Jonathan Trott in Brisbane, admitted to being ‘petrified’.
Translate Sun Tzu’s creed to Test cricket, and the quickest way to make your opponent betray vulnerability is to hit him. Sport, for men, is war by surrogate means. This is what Johnson, Harris and Siddle began to do. Even if the England batsman reacted with contemporary stoicism – not the traditional keeling-over and much rubbing, surrounded by sympathetic opponents – he knew that he had been hit and a gap in his defence had been found. Even if the ball had not hurt him because of his protective equipment, the batsman had become vulnerable because he knew he could be hit again, soon.
Cricket offered a test of courage long before Bodyline or the invention of the helmet in the late 1970s. Old Nyren tells us, in so many words, that David Harris obtained bounce like nobody else at Hambledon, and on the rough pitches of the late eighteenth century he was quick enough to draw blood: ‘His balls were very little beholden to the ground when pitched; it was but a touch, and up again; and woe be to the man who did not get in to block them, for they had such a peculiar curl, that they would grind his fingers against the bat; many a time have I seen the blood drawn in this way from a batter who was not up to the trick’ – who, in our terms, played with his hands too low.
Helmets made batting a different game, and even more of a batsman’s. He could be hit seriously, but not fatally like George Summers of Nottinghamshire in 1870, until the totally unexpected death of Phil Hughes. Helmets made for a fair compromise in the balance between danger and safety. But batsmen then took advantage to innovate shots like the scoop and the ramp, which the survival instinct would never have allowed without a helmet.
One after another England’s batmen were hit during the first three Tests of the 2013–14 series, until the Ashes had been regained and Australia’s fast bowlers could husband their energies. The exceptions were the captain, Alastair Cook, and Pietersen, and they were bombarded with verbal criticism instead. I had never before seen the full set of antagonism from every source. In the 1980s in the West Indies, England had faced all-out aggression from the bowlers and the crowd, but not the fielders, who remained silent, and the local media, which was too small to signify. On England’s tour of Australia in 2006–07, they had faced all-out aggression from Australia’s bowlers and fielders and crowd, but not quite to the same extent from the media, who had not been officially orchestrated as Lehmann had. By the time Trott flew home after the first Test in 2013–14, Australia’s media had fired a quiver of arrows, surprising those who knew only its meekness of the previous tour.
Sports psychology makes much of visualisation: ‘Never go somewhere your mind has not gone before.’ Yet in addressing their horrible record in Brisbane, where England have won only twice since the Second World War, no priority has been given to playing a warm-up fixture in Brisbane or, at any rate Queensland, which has a time zone one hour earlier than Australia’s other eastern states: dawn comes soon after 5 a.m. On the four occasions that England have won a Test in Brisbane, they have always played a preliminary game in Queensland. They have thereby adjusted to the different time zone, the greater heat and humidity, the more American way of life.FN65
Even though they did not play a game in Queensland before the opening Test of 2010–11, at least the bowlers missed England’s last warm-up game in Hobart and flew ahead to Brisbane to acclimatise. In November 2013, it was back to the schedule of flying in on a Monday, albeit from the closest city, i.e. Sydney, visiting the Gabba on the Tuesday – for the first time for some of the touring party – and trying to feel settled by the 9.30 start on Thursday morning. In 2006–07, England’s players did not arrive until the Monday evening, to be greeted by jet-lagged wives and disoriented infants.
Whenever England’s team bus has pulled up in Vulture Street outside the Gabba, only the toughest have been prepared for a five-day battle. Anecdotal evidence suggests the bus has usually been silent on the way to the ground. If sleep loss has not had an effect already, the subtropical humidity and heat soon will. It is an alien world, far from home. When five minutes remain before the start of the Ashes series, a bell does not ring; an alarm buzzes. Australia have not been defeated in a Test since 1988 to date at the Gabba, and England have seldom had any psychological mastery.
After the first Test of 2013–14, whenever Cook looked at his ranks of men, one or other dropped out of the firing line, unable to perform. If a senior player is exposed on a tour of Australia, he is mortally wounded and will never make a full recovery: he knows he is no longer good enough, if he ever was. A junior player who is seriously wounded can be withdrawn from the firing line and survive to fight another day.
England’s strategy of bouncing out Australia with tall fast bowlers – of whom four were tall, though none so fast as Johnson or Harris – was shelved after the first Test. Defeats at the Gabba and the WACA in Perth were perhaps predictable, given England’s record on those grounds, but not at Adelaide. It was a drop-in pitch, but its characteristics were the same as the traditional ones: essentially benign for batting.
If a touring batsman cannot score runs in Adelaide, he will not score runs anywhere in Australia – and England’s didn’t. Johnson dismissed Cook with a perfect away-swinger that hit his off-stump (Cook having been bowled in a smaller proportion of his dismissals than any top Test batsman), then with a perfect bouncer. Cook scored three and one, the lowest match total by an England captain in an Ashes Test in Australia since Willis, a specialist bowler; and Johnson finished with the best innings figures of any pace bowler in a Test at Adelaide, seven wickets for 40. He swung to the left/ He swung to the right/ That Mitchell Johnson/ His bowling was right – right up there with the all-time great fast bowlers.
In other sports the vanquished can bow out quickly if not gracefully. For an England captain who has lost the first three Tests in Australia, hell is far from finished. He can save face, as Hussain did by spurring on his men to win the fifth Test of 2002–03, or else make history and be remembered for ever as one who was whitewashed. But winning a dead-rubber Test in Australia is no longer as simple as it was. When England finally won their first Ashes Test after the Second World War, at Melbourne in 1950–51, the crowd was cheering England home, according to E.W. Swanton in Elusive Victory. By 2013–14, ‘chivalrous’ had been replaced by ‘ruthless’.
If cricket was not such a psychological sport, I would not watch much. Results come and go, some won, some lost, but what is perennially fascinating is how elite performers react to the most demanding circumstances. Cricket was boring when Australia had an opening batsman called John Dyson, who wore a helmet that obscured his face like the man in the iron mask and blocked all day. No human or cricket interest there. We are fascinated by human reactions to extreme situations.
During that series of 2013–14, watching the England captain being eaten away was the most distressing – or nearest to distressing – experience I have had in journalism. The fresh face of a young Cook became a middle-aged mass of worry lines. He was torn in all directions, by each succeeding crisis, and had no time left for himself. His men could desert their posts; not he. England’s captain has to go down with his ship, and the process takes a lot longer than for his naval compeers – around three months. Cricket is further from enjoyment than it can ever be. Cook’s haunted eyes, instead of picking up the cues, looked straight ahead. After the tour, I reflected on whether I had projected my own feelings: boarding school is three months without a hiding place. But I think not.
Our response should be nothing less than admiration for those England captains who have led their country through the psychological minefield of a losing tour of Australia and yet succeeded in keeping their own game together. Since Willis, all England captains – losing or winning – have scored their share of runs in Australia. Of losing captains, before Cook averaged 24, only Andrew Flintoff had averaged below 35 in the Test series – and he, as an all-rounder, took 11 wickets in addition to averaging a presentable 28.FN66
Who have England’s mentally toughest batsmen been? You could argue that those who scored heavily against West Indies in the 1980s, or in Asia in the last generation, should be ranked in this category. But the environment which has been extremely demanding through the ages, and has thus provided the same measuring stick for all, has been Australia. And a simple pattern emerges: of the ten England batsmen with the highest averages in Tests in Australia, seven have played for Surrey or Yorkshire, England’s two most successful counties in terms of winning the County Championship: winning habits, tough environments and tough club cricket, into which the youngster has been thrown at the deep end against men, to sink or swim.
Should sport be allowed to cause an individual so much torment that he mentally disintegrates? The case for and against can be argued, but it is too late to change the schedules. Besides, if an Ashes series did not cause so much torment, it would not cause so much joy for the winning captain, players and supporters. The difference is that for an Australian captain losing in England there is somewhere to hide: he can play a practice game at a small county ground against modest opposition, or find a part of London where he is not recognised, and rain will normally ensure at least one draw somewhere. For his English counterpart in Australia there is no escape. The grim inevitability of Greek tragedy takes hold – except that in having to fall on his sword, out of a sense of honour, he is like an oriental emperor.
That semi-sanctuary? It is not much of one. But there is one place where an England player on a losing tour of Australia can retreat: behind sunglasses. Towards the end of their 2013–14 tour, a remarkable division occurred between the England players. The senior ones wore sunglasses in the field most of the time; the junior ones with nothing to hide, like Joe Root and Ben Stokes, did not.
A one-off Test, or a one-day series, does not allow time for all these psychological factors to interplay. Players can hide even in a three-Test series: a batsman can fail in all six innings and still live to fight another day in the next series, without being dropped. A five-Test series is make or break for the protagonists, and therefore the most fascinating drama. A proper Test series between two well-matched teams is a combination of chess and wei qi, of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, of western and eastern strategy. Nothing less.
BODY LANGUAGE
STRAIGHT UP
Eng v WI, 5th Test, the Oval, 1984
Arms which are extended vertically to the full are a gesture of celebration (it is what the football supporter does when his team scores a goal), and this is what the fielder does when, anticipating the umpire’s verdict, he confidently expects the batsman to be given out. When he raises his arms without extending them fully or vertically like the second slip here, the fielder is expressing doubt and asking the umpire. More often than not, in my observation, the umpire will share this doubt and say ‘not out’.
Here the bowler, wicketkeeper and first slip are reinforcing the fully extended arms by leaping into the air as well in an act of celebration, before the verdict, such is their confidence. The first slip fielder, the West Indian captain Clive Lloyd, may even be conveying a subliminal message by making himself into a shape like a raised finger. Short-leg too is pointing his finger skywards, as he expects the umpire to do, so unanimous are the prosecutors. The case for the defence is not strong: Allan Lamb, the batsman, is halfway to bending the knee in a movement that could be interpreted as an act of submission.
THE GUILTY LOOK
Eng v Aus, 2nd Test, Lord’s, 1981
Ian Botham, in his last match as England captain, is given out lbw for 0 by umpire Ken Palmer. By looking at the umpire for a verdict, one way or the other, Botham is expressing his belief that it is a close call, almost inviting the verdict of ‘out’. Botham has opened himself up, not even using his bat in self-defence, and is doing nothing visibly to protect himself, perhaps knowing that the end is coming. Having made a pair he resigned after this match, at the same time that he was replaced as captain by the England selectors.
Batsmen have since learned to look away when an appeal is made against them, or to re-mark their guard to show they are staying, or even turn their back on the umpire (which may not be good psychology as the umpire may feel he is being ignored and decide to teach the batsman a lesson). Thereby they send out the message: this appeal is to be disregarded, it is inconceivable that I am out, and I dare you to say otherwise.
THE GRANDEST GESTURE
Eng v Aus, 2nd Test, Edgbaston, 2005
After Australia have lost by two runs, Andrew Flintoff bends down to speak to the defeated – although personally unbeaten – batsman Brett Lee and places a hand on his shoulder in consolation. By descending to the same level as his opponent, by this act of self-abasement, Flintoff has acknowledged Lee as a warrior of equal valour. Or has he? Is the act of putting his left hand on Lee’s shoulder something more? Is Flintoff thereby saying, after England have levelled the series at one-all, that he and his team are on top now, and have the upper hand, and the power to offer solace in defeat to the fallen?
TOUCHING THE HEIGHTS
Eng v WI, 3rd Test, Old Trafford, 1988
High fives by Courtney Walsh, the tallest of these West Indian bowlers, and Curtly Ambrose, but not by the shortest, Malcolm Marshall. The gesture was popularised in American basketball and volleyball after a player had scored. In this context, it demonstrates to opponents and spectators the outstanding physical attribute that has made the West Indian fast bowlers of the 1980s so omnipotent: their height.
SOLIDARITY
Eng v SA, 4th Test, the Oval, 2008
Whereas the fist-bump was originally an American gesture of some flamboyance, punching gloves at the end of an over – or after hitting a boundary – has become an undemonstrative, very English style of gesture. It quietly sends the message: we are hereby reconnecting and reaffirming our partnership, we are here for each other, the bond is unbroken. I would date its introduction to the England team to around 2000, when central contracts were introduced.
THE HUNTER FINISHES OFF HIS KILL
Aus v SL, World Cup SF, Port Elizabeth, 2003
This is the most primitive piece of body language seen in cricket. The gesture has been called ‘the chainsaw’, but the sawing of wood is meaningless in this context and to my mind it is a euphemism. The action is that of a hunter finishing off his opponent or prey with a spear or sword. It was pioneered by Brett Lee of Australia and Dale Steyn of South Africa, and its savagery no doubt added to the fear they generated. In this case Lee had another reason to celebrate: this wicket – that of Marvan Atapattu – was taken with a ball timed at 160.1 kph or 99.5 mph. Both fast bowlers gradually shelved the gesture, whether it was because they aged or because they joined the Indian Premier League, where they often bowled against their fellow-countrymen: after dismissing a national teammate, the gesture would have been too bloodthirsty.
THE CARMODY FIELD – OR LOOK BEHIND YOU!
Aus v NZ, 2nd Test, Eden Park, 1977
An expression of one team’s complete psychological dominance over another: Dennis Lillee bowling at Auckland with nine slips. Lillee is telling the New Zealand batsman that he is not capable of hitting the ball in front of the wicket, and that he will be caught off one of his fast outswingers. Lillee ended up with match figures of 11 wickets for 123. The Carmody field was devised and used on a regular basis by Keith Carmody, the captain of Western Australia, in the 1940s, when even Australian batsmen from the eastern states were surprised by the bounce of the WACA in Perth.
