Benaud followed Sheerlock precisely. He saw that Jones had held on.
‘Jones!’
Then Sheerlock switched shots to the umpire, Billy Bowden, who slowly raised his crooked finger.
‘Bowden!’
Pause.
Then to Kasprowicz.
‘Kasprowicz the man to go and Harmison has done it.’
Sheerlock changes shot to Lee.
‘Despair on the face of the batsman.’
And then Sheerlock goes to Vaughan and England.
‘And joy on the faces of every English player on the field.’
And that was all he said, at the end of one of the greatest cricket matches of all time. It sounds easy but it isn’t. The temptation is to explode with rhetoric but Benaud knew less was more. Such were the pictures that words were superfluous. Mind you, he sure sounded excited.
At this point, most of England’s cricketers became demented. Flintoff, however, had taken note of Lee on his haunches, head bowed and stricken by defeat. One warrior stooped to console another, offering a hand in tender support. Many a camera was firing away but not all upon the chivalry between Flintoff and Lee. One that did allowed its owner, Tom Shaw, to flog the picture far and wide. It is the image by which we best remember the series. In the Telegraph, Boycott said, ‘Of all the wonderful things to come out of this match, the nicest was that as soon as England won, Flintoff went straight over to Lee to congratulate him on his efforts. Flintoff had been trying to knock his block off all morning, remember. This was a great piece of sportsmanship.’
Martin Johnson wrote, ‘There is no more vibrant form of the game than Test cricket . . . the survival kit for a spectator used to be a sandwich tin and coffee flask, now it is incontinence pants and blood pressure pills.’ Matthew Hayden said, ‘For a long time now the cricket world has been waiting to see us in a dog fight. Well, we have that fight on our hands now and we won’t shy away from it.’ Marcus Trescothick: ‘I have never felt physically sick at the end of a cricket match before. We came in expecting to have such a great day but when Australia needed only a handful of runs I was thinking: “Oh my god, how are we going to get over this?”’
As for Vaughan: ‘I knew then. I could see it in the players’ eyes. The belief flooded the dressing room, especially Fred. I thought, “If we bat first in the next two games, we’ve got a great chance.” I did a complete 360 from Lord’s. I suddenly just knew.’
In the commentary box, Gary Franses sent a text to Jeff Foulser, chairman of Sunset and Vine, the company producing the coverage for Channel 4. It said, ‘There’s a DVD in this—The Greatest Test.’ The ECB agreed. We had week to get it on the market—editing, voicing, packaging, distribution, all in a week. By the time we got to Old Trafford, The Greatest Test was in the shops and selling out—55,000 had gone by the end of the series. Then, in September, we made a ten-hour box set of the whole series. It sold more than any sports DVD ever in the UK—about 670,000 copies. Gary also made Hidden Ashes, a gem that runs for an hour and shows the sights and sounds of the summer that did not make it to air on the live coverage at the time. Who would have thought it? Three cricket DVDs out of one series. Edgbaston made it all possible.
Edgbaston was the best cricket match I have ever seen.
THIRD TEST, OLD TRAFFORD
It took ages to get into the ground. The traffic queues snaked the streets of Stretford and Trafford Park. In the end Michael Slater and I got out, dumped the car for twenty quid in someone’s front yard and walked—or ran, actually. We rehearsed late and suddenly the toss was upon us. Vaughan won it, batted on a beaut of a rock-hard Peter Marron pitch and made 166 himself. Surprisingly, McGrath was back, seemingly immune to the detached ligaments in his right ankle. The second ball of his tenth over bounced more than Vaughan expected, which might have been a bit of luck because Gilchrist could only finger-tip the thinnest of edges over the bar. The third ball ripped through the England captain’s extravagant drive and uprooted his off stump. Had Steve Bucknor not spotted McGrath’s overstep, history might be different. Vaughan’s fling with Lady Luck seemed to lift his batting spirit. The regal air returned, the Vaughan of Australia 2002–03, peeling off exemplary cover drives and the swivel pull that has driven bowlers to distraction. He stroked Jason Gillespie out of the series and by the second evening was hugging his great mate Giles, whose 3 wickets then helped reduce Australia to 214 for 7, 31 short of avoiding the follow-on. But, please, who enforces the follow-on anymore. Get modern, Mark.
From that unpromising position Warne made 90, many of them in a fruity partnership of 86 with Gillespie, a bowler who once made a double-hundred in a Test match. (Oh, cricket, what a box of tricks you are.) Warne doesn’t do Test hundreds; he ensures he is caught on the leg-side boundary if anywhere near. He had been missed twice by Jones G on the wet Saturday, during which only fourteen overs were possible. But what overs they were! The cricket lurched around, unpredictable as a drunk, and Jones found himself on the wrong end of the spectator’s derision. Warne simply observed that he was out of his depth. It was in the aftermath of this match that Flintoff was moved to defend England’s wicket-keeper.
What else in this match for the insatiable Warne? Test wicket number six hundred, that’s what else. Trescothick was the victim, Gilchrist the man who caught it from the back of the West Countryman’s bat. Warne acknowledged the crowd by holding the ball aloft and kissing his wristband, a gift from a pretty girl—his daughter, Brooke. The band signified strength and reminded us that whatever else kept popping up in Warne’s colourful life—and throughout the summer, the break-up with his wife was tabloid news—he only had to cross the white line to remind everyone of a ferociously competitive spirit and those sublime cricketing gifts.
Strauss made a hundred with a sticky plaster on his ear, having been smacked on the side of the helmet by Lee in the first innings. Ian Bell and Geraint Jones hit a succession of shots that suggested they were growing into this Ashes stuff, before Vaughan declared, leaving the old enemy 108 overs to make 423. The two gum-chewing left-handers, whose series had not gone well, negotiated the new ball safely enough. They were to fight another day, the last day.
On the third evening of the game, I went round to the Australian dressing room to get a shirt signed for Chance to Shine, as agreed with Warne. The attendant called for him and out he came in undies, dragging on a Marlboro Light. He was immensely proud of the 600th wicket and of Brooke’s present to him. Reluctantly, he said no to the shirt because, apparently, the guys had heard some of my commentary and thought I was barracking for the Poms. You can’t win. But he signed it, and the following winter the others happily agreed to sign a bat. Their reaction was a curt reminder of the bubble in which a team lives through a demanding period of televised sport. The scrutiny wears down even the most temperate. We all needed to take a breath. At this point, England, and Warne, were holding up best.
By 9 am on the fourth morning the ground was full—20,000 more people were stuck outside, me among them. Lancashire had decided to sell tickets for a tenner each and reckoned that might attract 15,000 people. Forty thousand came, many of whom camped out for the night. At 7.30 am the streets were alive with cricket fans, all heading one way. When the gates were shut, desperate men were shoving £10 notes through the bars, begging for a seat. Like Flintoff, who had driven from home, we skipped down a one-way street to avoid the logjam. This time I completely missed the rehearsal and went pretty much straight on air with the preview show. I vowed to get up earlier at Trent Bridge. Those already inside the ground were beyond excited.
It was a day for the ages. The scoreboard read Australia 371 for 9 when it was done: match drawn. But, as so often with cricket, that score hardly told the story of a bewitching series of events. Lee finished exhausted on the ground for the second consecutive Test, this time hammering the turf in joy after surviving the final 24 balls with Glenn McGrath for company. The ninth man out was Ponting, who played one of his, or anyone’s, best i
nnings. That he made 156 was worthy enough, but that in so doing he continued to provide an uncommon sense of threat to an otherwise rampant England made his demise all the more painful. Caught at the wicket down the leg side, he walked from the field imagining that the match was to be lost and surely felt he did not deserve that. Rarely can a man have felt lonelier in this ‘team’ game. Solitude is no state for an Australian team sportsman. Australians are in it for one another and for the identity of their land. This is borne out by the team song, ‘Under the Southern Cross I Stand’, and the rewritten last line—‘Australia, you fucking beauty’. Ponting is the definitive article of this inherent ‘Aussieness’. He is a defender of the faith, blindly on occasions, but the brilliance of his batting and fielding and the sheer force of will he has brought to the Australian cricket team are among the game’s most convincing achievements.
As things turned out, Ponting got the draw he deserved. Balls whistled past heads, bats, gloves and bails as Flintoff and Harmison strained every sinew but simply could not take the final trick. Upon the umpires calling time, the Australian balcony leapt about with a manic zeal. Out in the middle, Vaughan gathered his men and said, ‘Look at that balcony, lads, and watch the mighty Australia celebrating a draw with us. We’ve got ’em now.’
Martin Johnson wrote, ‘It was like the Colosseum inside Old Trafford, with the crowd roaring for lbw every time the ball hit the pad and the umpires getting booed—like the old Roman emperors—if they gave the thumbs-down.’ Derek Pringle wrote, ‘In setting up the endgame, Strauss battled a cut ear and indifferent form to make 106. As he swished his bat and removed his helmet at reaching the milestone, the field dressing on his left ear recalled Van Gogh’s harrowing self-portraits, though Strauss did have a smile on his face.’ Simon Hughes said, ‘Australian cricketers are like cockroaches. You can damage their legs, cuff them on the head and poison their knees, but you can’t crush them. Their spirit is unbreakable. Left for dead overnight, they have regenerated and are back hunting their prey.’
I remember all of us being utterly exhausted.
FOURTH TEST, TRENT BRIDGE
By now, the whole of Britain was across the cricket. Channel 4 was averaging an unprecedented five million viewers a day. At Warner Music off Kensington High Street, Nick Stewart, head of one of the record divisions, called me to say that every single television in the building was tuned in to Channel 4. He wondered if we might explain things a little more deliberately, because the audience had morphed from long-term devotees of the game to newbies in drainpipe pants who needed lbw deciphered. A family of friends who, previously, had not been enamoured of cricket, came with me to Trent Bridge and stayed for the entire match. We scalped a couple of last-minute tickets for them and they rabbit on about it to this day.
If the abiding image of the series was Flintoff consoling Lee at Edgbaston, Patrick Eagar’s wonderful photograph of the horizontal Strauss catching Gilchrist in the slips during the Australian first innings at Trent Bridge runs a close second. The vignettes between Flintoff and Adam Gilchrist had been required viewing long before Strauss gave us the old razzledazzle. At least, they had been if you were English. The key, as Vaughan points out, is that Flintoff wanted to bowl at Gilchrist. More than that, he wanted Gilchrist to know that he wanted to bowl at Gilchrist and he wanted the Australian dressing room to know too. He might have been the only bowler of the day with such a desire, given the physical and mental damage inflicted on so many by the man Benaud called ‘the cleanest striker of a cricket ball I have seen’. This time, the ball moved a little away from the Australian off the pitch and found the thickish outside edge of a bat we had once thought only had a middle. It flew to the left of Strauss at second slip, just above waist height, and Strauss flew with it. From our perfect view in the commentary box, Strauss, horizontal and at full stretch, appeared frozen in time. As I write I can see it, and feel it. Commentating, the usually understated Atherton repeated, ‘What a catch!’ Until it dawned on everyone that it had really happened. Fred lifted Straussy high off the deck, as if it were a line-out. The great Gilchrist, Straussed and Flintoffed.
Harmison’s height and bounce, Simon Jones’s pace and late swing, Hoggard’s control and consistent outswing made for a handful. But a fully fit Fred, so immensely strong and bullish, was the game-breaker. Fred hit the pitch hard, the bat hard and the gloves hard. He bowled a nasty throat ball and a searing yorker. Above all, he made the ball swing, especially the older ball, which he reversed late and dramatically from around the wicket at Gilchrist. You could argue that the series needed some Gilly gunfire to make it whole, but that would be to deny cricket its right to defy the odds.
Surprising things happened at Trent Bridge. It is a most wonderfully atmospheric cricket ground. Ponting had Vaughan caught at the wicket, for example. I repeat, Ponting was the bowler and Vaughan was caught at the wicket: some death! Flintoff batted in orthodox fashion and inspired the best from Geraint Jones, who batted a bit like Ponting. Then the England new ball kept hitting Australian pads and the umpires kept raising their finger: Damien Martyn and Ponting were both lbw victims, having edged the ball onto their pad. Such deaths! In the second innings, Ponting was run out by a substitute fielder of whom no one had heard. They have now. It was Gary Pratt, of course. What a death. Surprising things happen at Trent Bridge, and spiteful things too. Ponting was not in the least bit pleased. His view was that England had played loose with substitutes all series and, marching up the pavilion steps in high dudgeon, he gave England coach Duncan Fletcher a mouthful. Fletcher retained a splendidly impassive mask. Pratt was on for Simon Jones, whose injury was genuine, so much so that Jones didn’t play again in the series. Martin Johnson wrote something like, ‘Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Ponting run-out, there were two Pratts involved.’
The oddest thing was the follow-on, such a quaint and distant notion. Kolkata 2001 had put the heebie-jeebies up all captains whose team led by more than 200 on the first innings. It is easily forgotten that V.V.S. Laxman played one of history’s four or five greatest innings to set up the Kolkata great escape story. The statistics in favour of the follow-on are compelling: between the first Test match in 1877 and the end of the 20th century, captains went for it on 225 out of 261 opportunities, from which 168 matches were won and only two lost. Since 2000, captains have taken the option on 84 of the 136 possible occasions and Kolkata was the only embarrassment, albeit a nasty one. Mind you, there are good reasons against it nowadays—the prevalence of back-to-back Tests and the lack of the long-lamented Sunday rest day, among them. In Vaughan’s case, the only reason against enforcing was Warne and the danger of allowing him to bowl last on a dry and tired pitch.
But Vaughan is not much spooked by history. Neither had he allowed his men to play the series in fear of Warne—though, by heaven and hell, Warne was trying to convince them otherwise. For the first time in almost exactly twenty years, an England captain took the follow-on plunge. An hour later, Simon Jones limped off. Two and half hours later, the Aussies were 129 for 1. Vaughan says he was pretty spooked then. Finally, after 78 overs of Australian batting in the match, Ashley Giles was thrown the ball. From this point on, the left-arm spinner played a telling part in the narrative.
(I must quickly tell a Giles story. A local Midland potter was a Giles fan and made a limited edition of celebratory mugs in honour of his testimonial year, each imprinted with the words ‘Ashley Giles: The King of Spin’. Except that when they came back from the factory there was a misprint. An ‘a’ had crept into the word ‘spin’ so Giles was now anointed the King of Spain, a moniker that stuck.)
Immediately, the King of Spain coaxed a mistake out of Justin ‘Alfie’ Langer, who prodded to short leg—a wicket that disturbed the rhythm of the Australian rearguard action. Then Martyn called Ponting for the Pratt single. At the close, Australia were still 37 behind with the top four back in the hutch.
The fourth day was as good as anything at Edgbaston three weeks earlie
r, or at Headingley or Edgbaston in 1981. It tested our patience and challenged our emotions. It simply could not be trusted. Both teams fought as if they knew the wounds of defeat would not heal in time for the Oval. People who had paid chunky sums of money for tickets were caught looking away or wandering round the cricket for a breather. Everyone, everywhere was on edge.
Some cope with this better than others. Warne copes with it better than anyone. Indeed, you might argue that he breathes the oxygen of ‘edge’. After Clarke and Simon Katich had added exactly 100 together, Warne hit Giles into the crowd a couple of times while making a fuck-you 45. Lee, who had landed a blow or two that needed fetching from the street in the first innings, merely hit roofs and stanchions this time around. England were left with 129 to win.
The omens of Headingley 1981 were suddenly upon us. That famous day, Australia had required 130 but crumbled to defeat by 18. At Edgbaston two weeks later, the same Australians had required 151 and, withered by Ian Botham’s spell of 5 wickets for 1 run in 28 balls, lost by 29. Usually the English crow about Headingley 1981; now nobody dared to enter conversation about it. The facts were that Australia had enforced the follow-on, reduced England to 135 for 7 and then been royally beefed to all parts of Headingley—an innings that drew the phrase ‘into the confectionery stall and out again’ from Benaud, in one of his more elaborate moments of commentary. Yet, even after Botham’s stupendous assault—you name it, he hit it—there were just the 130 for Kim Hughes’s team to make. John Dyson set off at a canter and the Australians reached 56 for 1. Famously, Mike Brearley switched Bob Willis to bowl down the hill and, well, we know the rest. Now, at Trent Bridge 24 years later, England made 32 against the new ball in five overs. Which was when Ponting called upon Warne. Or maybe Warne called upon Ponting.
A Beautiful Game Page 33
