Everything is built up to that first ball, that first over. Brain fades, such as Steve Harmison’s opening delivery in 2006, which went straight to second slip, enter folklore. While I was waiting for Jonathan Trott to join me, I was thinking, ‘Nought for one. Big series. Oh my God.’ I suspect I fooled no one with my stilted attempts to radiate inner peace while practising a forward defensive.
Here’s the funny thing: my mind was very clear. The Gimp never takes a day off, but I had him under control. I didn’t have to listen to his snide whispers, his mocking insinuations. He had been hammering me, but I simply stepped around him. I knew he would still try to cause me grief when pressure was applied, but the release of being able to manage him allowed me to concentrate on my batting.
We’d had more than three weeks to acclimatize. I failed in the first warm-up game, but something clicked when I scored a century in the second, at Adelaide. It never ceases to amaze me how confidence feeds off itself, so that it feels self-generated. I scored another ton in the final warm-up; I had averaged 26.21 in ten Tests against Australia up until then, compared to an overall Test average of 42.78, but I felt ready.
Looking back, that first morning marked a turning point. It was the first time in my career that I consciously stood up to the pressure. I delivered. I picked the length. I refused to dart at anything wide and waited patiently for anything steered into my pads. It wasn’t a flawless innings, a copybook century. I was dropped at point by Xavier Doherty on 26, and had made 67 when I was fifth out, setting up a hat-trick by my current Essex teammate Peter Siddle.
Most immediately, my feeling of freedom helped sustain our spoiling operation once Australia had taken a 221-run first-innings lead. The fallout from the final ball of the fourth day was another indication that I belonged. Though my execution was nothing special – a full toss by Doherty despatched through a big gap for the boundary that took me to 132 not out – I was operating on another level.
When you are on that sort of score overnight, you allow yourself a Happy Hour. It’s a very special feeling. You know you are delivering. You allow yourself the luxury of enjoying the warmth of the welcome back to the dressing room, and scroll through the congratulatory messages on your phone without getting carried away by the back-slapping. You permit yourself the simple pleasure of a beer, and burger and chips.
There are not many days like that in Test cricket, so make the most of them. I went to bed around 9 p.m., absolutely knackered from being on the field almost four days straight, but woke before midnight, and never got back to sleep because my mind was racing. When I got up the next morning, that familiar ache, in the pit of the stomach, reminded me it was time to do it all again.
Cricket is like snooker, in that the trick is being able to reset after periods of inactivity. A snooker player is defined by his production in the World Championship, where games can extend to more than ten hours over two days. He needs the discipline to avoid concocting disastrous scenarios when he is in his chair, waiting for the other guy to clear up, or make a fateful mistake.
Andy Flower cut to the chase in the team meeting on the fifth morning. ‘Lads,’ he said, ‘we haven’t saved this game yet. Cookie and Trotty. You’ve got a responsibility to set the tone. That first hour is so crucial. If we get through that they’ll start to go. You know the job isn’t done yet.’
There we were, straight back under the pump. Little more than twelve hours after sitting contentedly in that dressing room, nerves were kicking in. We were on the edge of the precipice again, living on the thinnest of lines, operating on the finest of margins. It is stressful, but seductive. Of course, it is uncomfortable. That lack of comfort is comforting, if that makes sense.
Someone unaccustomed to high-performance sport might criticize Flower’s intervention as a coach applying unnecessary pressure. I regarded it as a routine reminder, a statement of the obvious. I did have a responsibility to others. It was my turn to carry the load, just as others carried me when I was out of nick. It is the essence of being an individual in a team game.
Australian culture is built on the concept of mateship, an acceptance of unconditional assistance that historians have traced back to the first days of settlement. The term was even considered for inclusion in the Constitution. I have huge respect for that aspect of their national heritage, and identify with it strongly, because it distils an important element of what we do for a living.
We walk miles in one another’s shoes. Deeply hidden aspects of Trotty’s character emerged only in extremis, but I had a natural affinity with him when he described the experience of playing well as a drug. During a long innings we’re all chasing the dragon, the natural high of excelling without conscious effort. The craving fluctuates, as pressure surges and recedes.
The rearguard action in Brisbane was a case in point. Trotty was in the nineties just before lunch on the fifth day. I got a couple of bad balls and suddenly accelerated to 197 not out. I could see him looking at me intently. His inner monologue might as well have been written in neon, across his forehead: ‘I wish I’d get one of those …’
It was a flat wicket. We were well set, against an old Kookaburra ball. Yet he suddenly became a little skittish. I got to 199, clipped what should have been a simple single into the leg side to bring up my double hundred, but we both stuttered because he couldn’t immediately envisage the run, though it was obvious.
He avoided running me out, and I repaid the favour by running as hard as I have ever done to turn a comfortable two into the three that completed his century. Tension sprayed out of him. He was punching the air, with his bat in his hand, halfway down the wicket on his third run.
That’s international sport, right there. Happiness, insecurity, joy and fear, a mixture of contrasting emotions endured or enjoyed in the space of a couple of minutes. We are always teetering between success and failure: before that innings Trotty had been practising privately with Graham Gooch on a bowling machine, deep in the bowels of the stadium. He was seeking a ray of light in semi-darkness.
Those disparities explain why I love my sport so much. Trying to suck the marrow from the bones of your career is a complex process. Perversely, it is easier to talk about the negative stuff, the hard times, because the accompanying emotions are so raw that they are easily understandable. It is much harder to put it into words when things go well, because the feelings are so individual and intimate.
You strive to be the best you can be, knowing you will never play a perfect innings. You are living to gauge your response to the game’s harshness. The pressure of applying your skills in daunting circumstances is a challenge, a buzz. The feelings are irreplaceable, and impossible to reproduce. That’s probably why so many sportsmen struggle at the end of their career.
People talk about respect in sport, as if it is a demand to genuflect before the athlete. It’s much more subtle than that. Peers express it too, through actions rather than words. You can inspire by example, even in an international dressing room. When we saved that Brisbane Test, you could sense others in that room thinking, ‘This tour and this team will be different.’
At the highest level, sport strips away superficialities, and reveals the essence of the individual.
Confidence bubbles to the surface in unlikely ways, at unexpected junctures. We lost the toss in the next Test, at Adelaide. It was blisteringly hot, and the prospect of a long day in the field was daunting. Within thirteen deliveries, Australia had lost three wickets for two runs. The Brisbane bounce had squashed them.
Matty Prior had been nagging Trotty to work on his fielding. His point, that the standards he set in county cricket were inadequate in the international arena, paid dividends on the fourth ball of the day. An inside edge on to Shane Watson’s pads leaked into the leg side; he set off to run, hesitated, then bolted down the wicket.
Trotty took four paces to his right, swept up the ball on the run, steadied himself, and hit the stumps on the full, from just in front of square leg, with a ri
ght-arm throw. Simon Katich was well short, out without scoring, and Trotty was rewarded for hours of solitary practice. No wonder he ran around with his arm in the air as if he had scored the winner at Wembley. It remains one of his favourite moments.
Jimmy Anderson had, together with Steve Finn, bowled brilliantly without due reward on the third morning at the Gabba. It was payback time. With the following delivery he had Ricky Ponting caught, first ball, at second slip by Graeme Swann. Again, there was just enough swing to take the edge from the first ball of his second over. Swanny’s safe hands swallowed up what remained of Michael Clarke’s confidence.
That was the process of psychology in action. The scorecard in Brisbane refused to recognize Jimmy’s excellence, but he gained inner strength from the small moral victories and narrow margins of supposed failure. He carried self-belief and a secret sense of security in the next game, when the theories played out spectacularly well.
To repeat that old line, trotted out by coaches since time immemorial: you can’t win a Test match in the first hour, but you can certainly lose it. Michael Hussey and Brad Haddin helped Australia to 245 and left us with a single over to survive before the close. For some strange reason, the terms of engagement for that series had shifted, so that the final over had to be completed. Normally, if a wicket fell in that time, it was close of play. No offence, but I wasn’t having the theory that Jimmy should go in as night watchman, in case of early calamity.
I said to Straussy, ‘Fuck it. Let’s front up.’ He normally took first ball, but I offered to do so. He refused, after a bit of confusion. I was relieved, deep down, because I reasoned he wouldn’t get off strike that evening. The first ball hit his thigh pad – Wham! – so we jogged a single. Instead of being a spectator from the other end, I had to grind through the final five deliveries. Flower’s determination to put us under pressure in training had paid off, because we didn’t want to take the easy option of delaying that pressure by asking Jimmy to give another demonstration of his darkest art.
It is all too easy to put back that appointment with destiny. I lost count of how many times the Gimp whispered: ‘I hope we lose the toss and bowl.’ The law of Sod being what it is, Straussy left a straight ball and was bowled with the second delivery of the following day, when the heat eventually took its toll.
Trotty’s face was grey, almost waxy with tiredness, when he got out just before tea after we had put on 173 for the second wicket. During that interval I lay on the floor of the dressing room in a foetal position, completely drained. If there ever was someone to come to the fore in such a situation, it was Kevin Pietersen.
He was brilliant. He had been sitting for hours with his pads on, a showman in full make-up waiting in the wings for his cue. He hadn’t been in the greatest touch on that tour, but when he emerged, he had an aura about him. He had clearly decided that this was his time. It is how I wish to remember him: expressive, powerful, creative, and so, so competitive.
We proved the attraction of opposites. By the close of the second day I had progressed to 136 not out, having broken the England record for runs scored and minutes at the crease without being dismissed, 371 in 1,022 minutes. When I was eventually out for 148, he had completed his first Test century in nearly twenty-one months.
My skill was in setting games up. His was in finishing off the opposition. He could single-handedly turn a game in four hours. He absolutely hammered them down, making a personal best 227. When he was on, he was extraordinary. There was a savage beauty to his batting. It was honestly a pleasure to be alongside him. Boy, could he run. His cricket brain was fantastic, calculating angles and recognizing space. He played shots beyond my scope.
My modus operandi when I was playing well was to suck up the pressure, wait for the bowler to stray into my area. Soak it up, take them down. When I batted with KP I concentrated on accumulation, rotating the strike with singles and hitting the occasional boundary. He would typically take between 60 and 70 per cent of the deliveries.
The opposition focus would be on him, which is just how he liked it. He was a big bloke, a massive presence. This isn’t a show of false modesty, because I enjoyed applause as much as anyone, but I never really wanted to be the centre of attention. Kevin wanted to be the big shot, the star on centre stage. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just what makes him tick.
He’s the actor who wants to be in the spotlight, delivering booming lines and memorable speeches. I was happy to be the stage assistant. That’s why our partnership worked so well. People with his capacity to dominate an occasion are few and far between. They are invaluable when they are fully focused.
The disparity in our philosophies of life was underlined by the subsequent week off, in Melbourne. I asked to play in a low-key two-day game at the MCG, because I wanted to maintain the synchronization of my batting. I was in the form of my life, and Goochy reinforced the value of simply hitting the ball, to keep the rhythm going. Flower readily excused me from fielding duties.
KP was certainly different. He hired a lime green Lamborghini, which he parked outside the Langham Hotel. I am a bit of a car nut but would be wary of Mother Cricket biting me on the arse for having the nerve to do that. I loved KP for doing so. The last thing I would want to do is shout about a double hundred; he drove around town in a motor that demanded attention.
In his brightest moments he had a zest for cricket, for living to the max. I still smile when I recall his childish glee at taking a rare Test wicket, with the final delivery of the fourth day at Adelaide. I caught Michael Clarke, going backwards from short leg, and KP nearly flattened me with the ferocity of his embrace. It was like being hit in the midriff by a tightly packed hay bale.
That Adelaide Test revealed other aspects of character. Straussy shielded us from the worst of the weather forecasts on the final day: the ground was under water within an hour of Swanny guaranteeing victory by bowling beautifully on a turning wicket. The Barmy Army, congregated around the scoreboard, went, well, barmy.
They were unaware of the background to another definitive performance by Stuart Broad, who bowled in the first innings with a two-inch tear in a side muscle. The public perception of him as an impossibly handsome, occasionally petulant, preening blond couldn’t be further from the truth. He is as tough as they come; that act of self-sacrifice put him out for two months.
If anyone doubts him, just because he is a pretty boy, they are making a fundamental mistake. He is a hard nut. I’ve never forgotten his resistance to pain in India, where he forced himself to play despite detaching the fat pad on the sole of his foot. The specialist who scanned the injury said he had never seen anything as bad. He should not have been walking on it, let alone going out there, on hard ground, day after day, putting the miles in. Outstanding.
Why, then, did we get hammered in the subsequent Test at Perth? As in Kingston, and Headingley, we power-washed our working principles and practices with a no-holds-barred dressing-room debate. Flower chaired it brilliantly, asking challenging questions of individuals without being confrontational. It wasn’t a destructive ‘you were shit’ distribution of blame; we analysed things honestly, collectively and with appropriate humility.
We reached a consensus that we had probably made the classic mistake of thinking we were a better side than we were. We had one eye on the outcome, rather than the process. The experience within the group meant there was no panic. It was a harsh reality check, but it didn’t affect mutual trust or confidence. We looked around, and still believed.
We discovered we were not yet good enough to answer the spell of bowling that can change a Test match. In this case, we were blown away by Mitchell Johnson. He bowled very badly at Brisbane, was dropped for Adelaide, but was nigh-on impossible to combat at Perth, where he had the Fremantle Doctor, the area’s cooling afternoon sea breeze, coming in over his shoulder.
Again, fine margins were decisive. He canted the seam slightly, at an angle of no more than five or six degrees, to produce de
vastating swing, back to the right-hander and away from the left-hander. I’m still not sure he meant it, because I was looking for certain clues in his wrist action that never materialized, but he got it spot on.
The following fortnight was our sliding-doors moment. Had we failed to stand up as a side, and forfeited the Ashes, we would have been lost, taunted and tainted by an historic missed opportunity. Not many England teams had gone into the Boxing Day Test at Melbourne with our chance to prove our progression.
First, of course, we had Christmas Day, my birthday, to negotiate. It’s weird, being in work mode on a day most of the world takes off. It’s the only day when both teams train simultaneously. It doesn’t feature the sort of Christmas spread where you can gorge yourself silly, but there’s still turkey, oysters, and pizza and chips for the kids.
Andy Flower ruffled a few feathers by hosting a pre-tour lunch for wives and partners, at which he expanded on their responsibilities and explained the practicalities of an international cricketer’s life. There would be times, for instance, that we would travel ahead of our families, because of recovery programmes and training schedules. Alice would never cause an issue for me but found it something of an eye-opener.
The party hat was on, but my mind was elsewhere. As cold as it seems, you’ve got to have a very clear appreciation of boundaries. There were days when I’d get back from the ground and want to slob out, even though Alice had looked forward to dinner. There were other days when she kicked me out of the door; I enjoyed the release of normality, instead of hiding away.
It is easy to forget we are dealing with people, rather than cartoon characters. Australia as a nation yearned for reassurance in the build-up to that match, and turned to Ricky Ponting, as a symbol of hope. He was front, back and centre of the papers. They recreated him as Punter, the superhero who would save the day by batting through the pain of a broken finger.
The Autobiography Page 12
