The Autobiography

by Alastair Cook

  The theory of sports psychology was introduced in Under-19 training camps, but I had still to be convinced of its practical application. That wasn’t a reflection on Bawds’s professionalism; scepticism is invariably deep rooted in sport. Some of the rah-rah, happy-clappy slogans passed off as leadership maxims in the corporate world would, frankly, be laughed out of an international dressing room.

  I played the role of slightly sour old pro. We were about to pull up to the ground when I presented the psychologist with a challenge: ‘I want to have more confidence. I want to feel able to back myself more. When you’ve watched me work, come back with something that is relevant to me, not token bullshit.’ With hindsight, it was probably no surprise he confided to friends: ‘Crikey. He’s going to be hard work.’

  I probably hid my self-doubt better than most. The guy who is struggling, deep in the bush, usually gives himself away. He has an almost hollow-eyed expression, the vacant stare of someone who is searching, worrying, losing trust in himself. He doesn’t consciously detach himself from the group, but there is a subtle difference in outlook and approach.

  Sometimes, the intensity of international cricket acts like a depth charge. A newly promoted player sustains his county form through a heady mixture of euphoria and adrenaline. Then reality is detonated. His faults are analysed by the opposition, the intensity of accountability builds, and confidence is hammered. Before he knows it, the international game has beaten him.

  Sam Robson is a case in point. I was very impressed when I first saw him at close quarters. He was well organized, gutsy. He scored what was to be a solitary Test century in his second appearance against Sri Lanka in 2014 but was quickly worked out in the subsequent series against India by Bhuvneshwar Kumar, an English-style bowler who could swing the ball both ways.

  That was puzzling, since Sam had faced similar bowlers, operating at around 80 or 81 mph, for Middlesex. Generally, new players are surprised by the extra pace and bounce of international cricket, since the ball in the county game comes through lower, between knee roll and hip, but he kept getting out in the same way. He was under pressure for his place on the winter tour in the last Test at the Oval.

  I sensed him alongside me as we were going through final preparations on that glass-fronted dressing-room balcony. I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw, to my alarm, that he was transfixed by a TV screen along the corridor, which was showing his dismissals in sequence. It was almost as if his fate was sealed by auto-suggestion. He got out in familiar fashion and was unfortunately dropped.

  My rudimentary understanding of my fear of failure was expanded by Bawds on an Ashes tour that began with the familiar ritual of a serious night out after getting off the plane in Perth. We had a couple of hours’ sleep before, apart from Straussy – our captain and token grown-up – we reported for action at 6 p.m. The group straggled back to the hotel between 3 and 5 a.m.

  Spare the sermons, because this was team bonding in its purest form. Without exception, we were running in the park at 11 a.m. that day. A snapshot from the session remains one of my favourite photographs; it is obvious we are hanging, but everyone is committed to putting the hard yards in. A cricket team isn’t formed in a pub, but good habits and practices can be confirmed there.

  No one had been less forthcoming to our team psychologist than me, but over ninety minutes or so I opened up to him for the first time in that bar in Adelaide. I was honest about my battles with myself. Everyone talked about my mental strength and thought I had cracked the most difficult aspect of the game, but I had big doubts each time I went out to bat.

  It was strange. For someone who consciously struggled to articulate deeper thoughts and personal motivations, the words flowed like a torrent. I admitted to walking out thinking, ‘I don’t want to be here today. I can’t be bothered with the effort of scoring runs.’ That inner voice would tell me: ‘We’re on a green seamer. It’s not flat, it’s not your day. They’re going to get you out.’

  I had issues with public speaking and was astonished to find in the book that someone as accomplished as Obama, a new president at the time whose speeches were characterized by their fluency and emotional impact, had admitted to underlying unease. ‘Is it normal?’ I asked Bawds. ‘It can’t be, surely?’

  It was.

  We talked about the private trials, during the night before and on the morning of a game. I confessed to an ache, deep in the gut. A poached egg on toast for breakfast felt like it had the consistency of cardboard. I relied on my natural stubbornness to get through the first half hour of an innings, when I would settle down, but the anxiety never truly left me.

  When I was out cheaply, I had too much time to think, because my chance to atone might take two or three days to arrive. I maintained the façade of strength and imperturbability, but the game regularly beat me up. My life as a batsman was black and white: if I scored runs, I was a success; if I didn’t, I was a failure.

  I just offloaded. Bawds explained I had become consumed by what I couldn’t do, rather than dwelling on what I could do, what I had done. He sought to reconnect me, remind me of the virtues that had made me a good player. Everyone suffers from fear and self-doubt. My values, my love of family and trust in friends, were still strong. My priority was to reset and rebuild my relationship with myself.

  Bawds asked what I wanted to achieve. That involved coming to terms with the facts of an athlete’s life. The nerves would always be there. Why waste energy trying to fight them? It sounded so simple and basic. I confessed that I longed to be free, to push aside the negative thoughts and be able to concentrate on the most important thing, the ball coming towards me.

  Commit and watch the ball.

  I wanted to be decisive. I wanted my battle to be not with myself, but with the opposition collectively and the bowlers individually. I couldn’t go on being stuck in the crease, neither forward nor back, not committed to a defensive shot or an attacking flourish. I was half-hearted, unresponsive and unsatisfied.

  Bawds asked me to expand on my feelings, to explain what I experienced when I was at my most confident. I answered flippantly but revealed a central truth. I felt most secure in bed, the night before an innings. It was my refuge; nothing could get me there. Though Alice stayed with me from time to time, I was usually alone. There were no distractions.

  I felt at peace, savoured the silence. It was the lull before the storm. Bawds stimulated my imagination by suggesting that in those moments of respite I should start to write down who I wanted to be, what I wanted to do, the following day. How did I want to bat, knowing that the nerves would still be there, nibbling at my stomach lining? The sense of liberation was immediate.

  I just want to score runs.

  I want to be able to clear my mind, so I can concentrate on the ball.

  I want to be decisive, go out there with my shoulders back.

  I want to leave the ball well.

  I want to fight.

  Bawds told me to go through the checklist when that dread came over me. I added technical details to the mantra, relating to individual bowlers and distinctive situations. To give a specific example, I reminded myself to open up to an inswinging bowler, to concentrate on hitting the ball in certain areas, rather than being obsessed by playing straight.

  It may sound almost pedestrian, but it worked for me. Two days later, I scored a century in the Adelaide warm-up game and felt renewed. Sometimes I would read the piece of paper containing my inner thoughts, screw it up and throw it in the bin. Other times I would take it to the ground, secrete it in my kit and study it when those familiar doubts began to bite.

  Psychologically, Bawds felt I had forgotten what made me successful. My immediate response was to suggest my unnecessarily flawed technique didn’t allow me to do so. The aim of playing straighter, being more still at the crease, might have worked on flat wickets in Bangladesh, but as soon as the ball moved, I needed greater dexterity.

  When it nips about you have to ride it, a
djust your hands. I was so rigid I was nicking it, with hard hands, to the slips or gully. I was trapped between theory and practice. I kept finding the fielder, banging balls at mid-on and mid-off. I had lost that intrinsic skill of being able to work the gap. I needed not to improvise, as such, but to rediscover the balance between risk and reward.

  As a team we began to focus on what Andy Flower described as our super-strengths. These were definitive aspects of our talents, that separated us from the rest. Mine, as a batsman, were the consistency of the cut shot and the pull shot. How had I adapted those strengths as my career had progressed?

  My leg-side play was efficient. If they bowled short at me, I didn’t get out that often and generally hit the average ball for four. If they bowled straight, at the line of middle stump, I wasn’t hitting the boundary as often as I had when I turned up on the scene. Certainly, in those early days, anyone who bowled at my legs was punished.

  It was time to confront the Gimp, the imaginary tormentor who had been on my shoulder since childhood. He had grown with me from those games in the back garden, where he’d whispered idly about the shame of losing to my brothers. At that stage in our lives, though, he was a little more innocent, markedly less intense.

  Rationalizing my relationship with self-doubt was the key to the longevity of my international career. I stopped stubbornly fighting it, grinding away at it. I knew the Gimp would continue to play devil’s advocate and attempt to sour any success. He’s a cheeky bastard who won’t leave you alone, a cartoon figure who dusts himself down and springs back at you when you’ve punched him a thousand times.

  Everyone has one.

  It had taken eight years, from 2003, to understand him. I accepted him without welcoming him. It’s no longer a case of flight or fight. There are days when I’m better than him and days when I go to bed angry because he has beaten me. He will never stop telling me I’ve lost it, that everyone will notice when I don’t get runs tomorrow.

  I’ve gone through a lot as a cricketer, managed to deliver decent results under intense pressure. I had a clearer mind, a rediscovered ability to concentrate completely. By focusing solely on the ball, and the conditions, instead of being deflected by self-imposed distractions, I began to enjoy the battle of the game of cricket. It was engrossing, fulfilling.

  That doesn’t mean to say Bawds and I agreed on everything. His insistence that it didn’t matter whether I got 0, 10 or 100, so long as I had followed The Plan, was a step too far. In his world, I can take off my pads having made 3 and be satisfied. In my world, if I score 3, or something similarly underwhelming, ten times on the trot, I haven’t got a job.

  It is all very well trusting the process, but results matter. It is a numbers game, and that involves delivering for the team. I understand the concept of the scorebook not telling the full story, but reality is telling me something entirely different. Once the umpire gives me out the circumstances are irrelevant. I’m out. It is how I deal with results that is most important.

  I appreciated the underlying strategy, of attempting to reduce fluctuations in form. We all ride the wave scoring runs; the better players crash off, climb back on, and re-establish themselves quickly on the next wave. I knew what Bawds was getting at when he tried to draw a distinction between a hundred in which I’d played relatively poorly, being dropped four times, and a fluid twenty, when I was beaten by a brilliant delivery, but I spoke from experience.

  I used my 105 against Pakistan at Lord’s in 2006, in my first Test in England, as a reference point. I was dropped twice, the first time on 0, by Imran Farhat. Danish Kaneria spilled a simple return catch. Umpire Steve Bucknor failed to detect a thin edge off the spinner when I had made 43; there was no DRS and walking wasn’t in the playbook.

  Those escapes, lucky or not, ultimately didn’t matter. Having three figures against my name helped me, as a young player, to feel I belonged. I wasn’t very accessible in those days. Even such a lovely guy as Marcus Trescothick, who opened with Michael Vaughan in that Test, mentioned to me, ‘You don’t do pleasantries very well, do you?’

  I’m not that bothered about pleasantries in my cricket. I’ve always been single-minded, driven by doing things my own way. I shared my deepest thoughts with Bawds in 2010 because I trusted him. He wasn’t what I’d call a tick-the-box psychologist. He wasn’t giving me cliché after cliché. He really understood where I wanted to be and how to get there.

  He put me in touch with Nick Matthew, the former world number one squash player, calculating that we were similar characters. I had played the game a lot as a youngster and understood the nature of Nick’s success. Like myself, he got the most from his natural ability. He worked tremendously hard and ground down the opposition. He had an innate durability to work through unpromising situations and daunting deficits.

  I became increasingly self-aware. I was suited to a team environment, since I was one of those characters who was rock solid 99 per cent of the time. I had learned to develop a game face after watching Michael Vaughan and Andrew Strauss; you could never tell, at first glance, whether they had made a duck or a century.

  I realized that was so important. The last thing a team needs is for a bloke at the top of the order to be too up or down. There are a lot of times when the odds are against you, and you can’t give away too much about private thought processes. I think such self-containment comes from my mum. My dad is very sociable but self-effacing; he once went an entire tour of Sri Lanka, sharing rooms in a travel group, without telling any of his companions that I was his son.

  My parents gave me the space as a boy to become my own man. Choir school taught me about an individual’s responsibility to the group. Boarding schools were hierarchical, but I never experienced the bullying that characterized earlier generations. That’s not to say it didn’t exist, but sport was my passport, spiritually and socially.

  As a leader of men, I tried to set the example of being low maintenance. I rarely saw the physio, unless I had an obvious problem. I identified most closely with the bowlers, who were prepared to act selflessly and put the hard yards in – I barely had a massage, because I believed they needed the release more than me.

  Captaincy entailed dealing with emotion, which is so often a by-product of stress. It also involved an investment of faith. In the most pressurized moments, basic themes, such as trust, unity and generosity of spirit, came to the fore. They won us a pivotal Ashes Test match, at Trent Bridge in 2013.

  Australia began the fifth day needing 137 runs to win, with four wickets remaining. What transpired also involved the application of a combination of learned skills, raw cunning, natural talent and nerveless defiance. It was tense, relentless and draining. My role initially involved the learned skill, slip catching.

  Mark Waugh and Graeme Swann spring to mind, but there aren’t that many natural slippers, who have an innate sense of movement to get into the right position for the catch. It looks easy, but you must work at it. The ball is coming at 90 mph, and you might not have had a sniff all day. The natural thing is to snatch at it.

  The ball does hurt, incidentally, especially when it hits the end of your fingers on a cold day. April cricket in England can be horrendous; it explains why our catching techniques are worse than those of the Australians or South Africans, who field in warmer conditions, where the sting is not so painful. It is no surprise we are starting to integrate catching gloves into training.

  In simple terms, your hands have to be relaxed, yet firm. You need to move your body, keep your weight forward and align your eyes to the line of the ball. Our eye-testing programme at Loughborough confirmed I had very good lower vision, but I struggled getting to the ball low to my left because of a basic lack of flexibility.

  I was a pretty efficient catcher when the ball came to me at shoulder height but dropped more than I should in the bread basket. Though I struggled with some of those easier chances, I forced myself to improve through repetition. I would take literally thousands of catches, from mac
hines, off the face of a bat or off a trampoline net. I fielded at gully, short leg and mid-on with England before settling on slip because I felt, as captain, I could exert greater influence standing there.

  So much for the theory. The outcome, on that particular morning in Nottingham, was that I took three slip catches, to remove Ashton Agar, Mitchell Starc and Peter Siddle. They were all off the bowling of Jimmy Anderson, whose unbroken thirteen-over spell was only curtailed by cramp. Natural talent, you see, is never enough.

  Jimmy’s willingness to sacrifice himself is as fundamental to him as the accuracy of his orthodox and reverse swing, cutters and slower balls. It gave us insurance against the defiance of Australia’s final pair of Brad Haddin and James Pattinson, who took them to within twenty runs of victory at a delayed lunch interval.

  That was where the raw cunning kicked in. Jimmy, as the senior bowler, demanded to know who was going to bowl on the resumption. I deliberately said nothing, and smiled, knowing the message would get through. Jimmy understood, and broke into a huge grin. Words were superfluous; we both knew he was restored, relaxed and ready.

  Sure enough, Haddin drove away from his body at Jimmy’s eleventh delivery of the afternoon session. Matt Prior claimed a catch behind. I reviewed it when umpire Aleem Dar turned down our appeals. We formed a joyful scrum when the giant screens revealed a faint hot spot mark on the bat. We had won by fourteen runs and were being mentioned in the same breath as the boys of 2005, who had a two-run cushion at Edgbaston.

  Jimmy, having secured his second five-wicket haul, was rightly named man of the match. Would things have turned out differently had I been sitting in the dressing room at lunchtime, stressing, fiddling and fussing? Probably not, but I was at ease with myself. Bawds approached me afterwards and asked if I had deliberately limited myself to a smile at that key moment.