Jimmy Anderson, my best mate, blew the Edgbaston Test wide open by taking 6–47 in 14.4 overs before limping off with a side strain halfway through his ninth over in the second innings. Steve Finn, branded as ‘unselectable’ by Ashley Giles on the 2013–14 tour of Australia, had his moment of redemption, compensating by taking another six wickets.
We were way ahead of the game and needed only to chase down 121. I got out cheaply and when Adam Lyth was dismissed in the afternoon session on the third day, we were 51–2, and playing at run-a-ball pace. Great for the fans, but terrible for my blood pressure. I even asked Reg, our security man, for permission to run in a nearby park as Belly, who had found his form, led us to an eight-wicket win.
Suddenly, it was the Aussies’ turn to be put in the stocks. Lehmann was forced to deny he had angered his players, and broken the spirit of their ‘family first’ policy, by not recalling Haddin after he missed the Lord’s Test to be with his daughter Mia in a London hospital. Michael Clarke’s captaincy was being picked apart. Batting coach Michael Di Venuto was urging the team to toughen up.
My priorities were revealingly different. ‘Lads, we’re in a situation probably no one thought we’d be in,’ I told the team, in what was a messy dressing room. ‘Don’t go and finish yourself tonight. By all means enjoy the win, but please, please, please, don’t go and get blind drunk.’ Once they dispersed, I phoned Stokes, put him in charge of the night, and told him to decide when they had had enough.
He got them back to the hotel by midnight. They were on a promise. Win the Ashes by pressing home our advantage at Trent Bridge and I wouldn’t care if they turned up legless at the Oval. As things turned out, the performance in Nottingham was 100 per cent proof. To be batting before lunch on the first day, after bowling Australia out for 60 on winning the toss, was intoxicating.
Stuart Broad’s spell of 8–15 in nine and a half overs that morning was the most impactful I’ve ever seen. There’s usually one partnership, to stem the bleeding. I don’t think even he could believe it, especially since it’s now safe to reveal that he wanted me to bat first. To do it on his home ground, knowing he shouldered primary responsibility in Jimmy’s absence, was the mark of the man. No one delivers every day, but the best choose their moments.
The atmosphere in the changing room during the interval was dreamlike. Adam Lyth hit the last ball of the morning session for four, and no one seemed remotely interested in eating. It had the feel of Melbourne 2010, a sense of disbelief, tempered by the unspoken knowledge that if we batted properly, the Ashes would be ours.
Play long enough, and there is always something to bring you down to earth. I remembered, with a pang of regret and alarm, being in an Essex side that once lost to Yorkshire, after bowling them out for 50 in the first innings. Rooty, unbeaten on 124 at the end of a surreal first day, provided reassurance, pivoting the reply by sharing a fourth-wicket stand of 173 with Jonny Bairstow.
We weren’t going to mess it up. We needed only twelve overs to wrap up a win, by an innings and seventy-eight, on the third morning. It was grey overhead, but the celebrations were colourful, almost karmic. Farby ensured that due deference was paid to Peter Moores. Lehmann, who had incited Australian crowds in 2013 by hoping Broady would be sent home ‘crying’, had to watch him pick up the most obvious man of the match award imaginable.
I was very emotional in a post-match interview with Michael Atherton and was in contemplative mood during a press conference staged in a claustrophobic, overheated squash court. I felt for Michael Clarke, whose captaincy had ended tearfully, in the same setting, but I also carried the spirit of those who had been alongside me over the previous two years.
Without being selfish, this felt like my team. The scenes, walking round the ground, signing autographs and posing for selfies three hours after the match, were the manifestation of a long-held idea. These guys had bought into the principle of reconnection. They were what I envisaged, when I spoke of us being England players, 24/7.
Changing an image is not a whim of administrators, or PR flim-flam merchants. It comes from the hearts of those who prove themselves under competitive pressure. We might have been loved as the world number one team, who beat all-comers during a heady spell, but it was cupboard love. The mood soon shifted when it was our turn to be hammered.
We weren’t faultless, but on that day at Trent Bridge we illustrated a truth that had needed time to be taken on board. This was an accessible England team; we were bigger than the result, but not bigger than the game of cricket. We might not have played at our best consistently, but we played with gratitude. We were desperate to make our mark and didn’t allow egos to get in the way.
The changing room was mobbed. Rooty conducted a TV interview sitting on a table, wearing a rubber Einstein facemask, and doing Bob Willis impressions. People saw our human side. We were not robots, after all. We were genuine. I felt trusted as a leader, despite getting so many things wrong in the previous couple of years, and trusted the group in return. I looked around and saw individuals who had given something of themselves.
Stokesy had taken six wickets in the second innings. At his best, he is touched by genius. At his worst, he has had to grow up, fast. When I watch him now, I feel I played a small part in his development as a player and a person. He doesn’t need me to hold his hand any more, but at certain times in his career he valued me being there, if he needed a second opinion.
I hope he learned a little from the way I went about things, when the scrutiny was intense and intermittently unfair. He has certainly changed radically after being cleared of affray following a street brawl outside a bar in Bristol in 2018. He knew he should not have been out on the town, in the middle of a series. It could so easily have been a horrible, defining moment.
He has learned his lesson. I see how he trains, how he prepares, how he cares about playing for England. The penny has dropped: he may be a maverick talent, but he will not be indulged. I needed the support of senior players, up to and including my spell as captain. People like Jimmy were there for me when I doubted myself.
I needed time to mature, to cultivate the humility to admit my shortcomings. I got a lot of things wrong, and learned that if you put your hand up, and admit your faults, it is possible to forgive and forget. You can’t choose your teammates, and you are thrown together in an intense environment for up to four months, but if you love the game you will discover a set of values to live by.
Everyone has their individual priorities. International sport incorporates processes designed to manage pressure. Clashes are common because you are living on the edge. Conversely, it is also too easy to become lackadaisical. I respond if I see standards slipping, because if I do not do so the omission will grate on me. That doesn’t mean to say, though, that I have a monopoly on wisdom.
This seems as good a time as any to apologize to a member of the England support staff on the 2018 tour of New Zealand. I won’t mention him by name, on the assumption he knows who he is. We were awful for being bowled out for 58, and I criticized him for not being there on the first day because he was looking after his children due to his wife’s illness.
‘If this was an Ashes Test, you’d have been here,’ I said, in a fit of pique and unworthy self-assurance. He denied it vehemently and, for forty-eight hours, we clashed massively. I have never shied away from stating uncomfortable truths as a captain, but on that occasion, I was completely wrong.
Family, you see, does come first.
13. Sanctuary
At first glance, anyone pausing in the lane to look across the adjoining field on a mild evening in early summer would have concluded the pressure of international cricket had finally got to me. There I was, walking in a circle, gesticulating wildly and shouting ‘Baa’ at a flock of around 200 sheep.
As hard as this is to believe, there was method in my apparent madness. Baa was a pet lamb that came running at the sound of its name. He slept in the house alongside Bonnie, the black Labrador, his c
ompanion on a daily basis around the house. Baa lived in the garden until he began to eat the flowers and was banished to the field.
I know, I couldn’t get my head around it either.
Baa came with the territory when I first met Alice and stopped off in Bedfordshire on the way to training sessions in Loughborough, or to play squash with friends in the area. We had started seeing each other in my final year at school (Alice was in the year below), and we had kept in touch in our gap years, when she went travelling and I played grade cricket in Australia.
We began spending more time together, as she prepared to go to Reading University and my cricket career gathered momentum. The farm visits were just to see Alice as I didn’t have much interest in agriculture at the time and had never had dogs at home in Essex, but I enjoyed the tranquillity of long country walks. It must have looked weird, a lamb trotting alongside a Labrador without a care in the world, but it represented a strange normality.
Matilda, the ewe, lived a similar life. Drunky Monkey is another pet lamb, a survivor of twins, Drunky and Monkey. They had a traumatic birth and acquired their names when they struggled to stand for twenty-four hours due to extreme dizziness. About a year later, one of them dropped dead. Since they were identical, no one knew how to distinguish the victim. The lucky one inherited both names.
That sort of practicality sums up farm life, which grew on me quickly. Pet lambs aside, the family lamb around 2,000 sheep with a further flock that do not lamb. It’s a serious enterprise on the mixed farm and I learned to take things in my stride, especially during lambing season. The first ten days of life are the most critical, so prompt attention, however improvised, is important.
Like most sportsmen, I love my food. I walked into Alice’s mum and dad’s kitchen one Sunday evening and had my appetite whetted by the smell of pork, roasting in the top oven of the Aga. However, I then saw, to my great surprise, a lamb sitting in the warming oven, wrapped in a towel to keep it warm. I’d never seen anything like it, though for Alice’s family it is second nature to do anything to keep a lamb alive.
It was suffering from hypothermia, one of the biggest dangers for new-born lambs, and to keep them warm is vital in those first few hours. Older sheep produce body heat from digesting their food and have thick wool. Lambs are vulnerable, since the so-called ‘brown fat’ they are born with will only keep them alive for a few hours. Common-sense care, especially on a Sunday with the roast dinner almost ready, is why that lamb was sitting in the Aga!
For five weekends during the lambing season the farm is open for families to come and see the farm in action. I always find it fascinating chatting to people who, like me, have had no farming experience and through these few days get to see the caring nature of farmers, which isn’t often talked about.
Farming gives me perspective. It has helped to shape me and provides an antidote to the shallowness of celebrity and scrutiny that comes with top-class sport. Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful for the material rewards and personal satisfaction cricket has given me, but they need to be balanced with an awareness of the world that is around me.
I still joke with my father-in-law that I’ve never done a proper day’s work in my life. I’ve farmed and played cricket. Though we both know that they are both incredibly hard work, I don’t think they can count as a job when you enjoy them as much as I do. My favourite time of the farming year is lambing, when over the last few years I have probably been around the most.
Though the lambing season starts as early as December in some areas, our busiest period is between mid-February and mid-April. I usually volunteer for late-night sessions in the lambing shed. It is a silent, hypnotic place, in which sheep, many of whom are first-time mothers, spend the night in individual pens with their offspring. At the risk of sounding soppy, helping a ewe to give birth is magical, a special feeling.
The lamb emerges with a splutter, shakes its head instinctively and can need to be cajoled into breathing using a piece of straw to clear mucus from its nasal passage. You need to act fast, and also disinfect its navel to prevent potential infection. The mother licks it dry before it rises, on matchstick thin legs, and totters around in search of the teats.
These are perilous moments; the lamb must suckle to get life-giving colostrum milk. It is golden, packed with essential nutrients, proteins and antibodies. A lamb needs 100 millilitres in its first few hours.
Occasionally you will need to help with the process if the ewe is unable to give birth by herself. You try to let the process happen naturally, but sometimes a helping hand is important. You push your hand gently inside her, never entirely knowing what you will find. In an ideal situation you ensure the legs emerge before the head, in a movement like a swan dive. Once the head and shoulders pass through the pelvis, the lamb slithers out.
Nature, like international sport, can be simultaneously cruel and wonderful. There was one story last winter that illustrates this. I had just started the evening shift when I noticed a sheep struggling. You try to give the sheep more time, but I quickly realized that it would need some assistance. Unfortunately, the forward twin was entangled with its brother in the womb and had died, but, given the constricted space, I couldn’t untangle them. I was gutted, as no matter what I tried for the next hour or so I couldn’t help the other lamb.
According to the vet, there was nothing I could do, so I reluctantly went to bed around midnight fearing the worst. I left for training early next morning, and couldn’t believe it when Alice called to tell me the ewe had lambed naturally and she and the lamb were fine.
It has been fascinating to learn the nuances of farm life over the past decade, and this has been imperative to keeping my brain from always thinking about cricket. The old shepherd’s trick of bonding a lamb to a ewe whose lamb has died is to remove the skin of a dead lamb, and place it over the skin of an orphan lamb, in the hope it will be accepted by an adoptive mother. Instinct is powerful; a ewe will violently reject any lamb with an unfamiliar scent. If she allows it to suckle, you know you have had a successful adaption.
Another method is when the ewe’s head is restrained for a short time, so that she cannot turn to see and smell which lamb is suckling. Her milk passes through the orphan, giving it her scent, and eight times out of ten she accepts it as her own. All the hard work, and consistent care, put in over the previous year is rewarded.
The breeding year begins in September, when the tup, the male, is put in with the females. His chest area is raddled, covered with an oil-based paint, which rubs off on the hindquarters of a receptive female. The paint colour is changed every two weeks, so that a timeframe of conception can be calculated and give a rough idea when she will give birth. A pregnant ewe will not accept a secondary attempt to mate. The ewe is then scanned ten weeks later, to see how many lambs she is carrying; the number is denoted by different-coloured dots.
The rearing process is surprisingly personal. You get to know the lambing shed, such as which ewes or lambs are vulnerable and need a careful eye over them for a few days. You begin to recognize lambs as distinctive individuals before they are turned out into a field. When it is very busy and 60–70 sheep are lambing every day for a few days, it’s all hands to the pump. I once lambed for twenty-one consecutive nights when Alice wasn’t feeling too great in the early stages of her pregnancy with Isobel. I was so tired. It made batting for ten hours in the Abu Dhabi heat seem fairly easy in comparison.
All this takes place on the family farm, about a mile from where we live. We graze sheep at home, along with cows, one of which did some freelance landscaping when it broke into the front garden. That’s Jimmy Anderson’s worst nightmare. Quite frankly, he’s terrified of cattle. For some reason, he didn’t believe me when I told him they quite liked being stroked.
I must admit it took me time to trust horses. Perhaps that stems from Mum’s childhood warning never to stand behind one. It could also have something to do with Norman, one of Alice’s horses. He would gallop towards
us as we entered his field to get him in for the evening. The first time I saw this, I turned and ran for my life and hurdled the five-bar gate like Colin Jackson, only to turn round and see Alice rolling about laughing at me!
I had learned to ride horses in Argentina, even though, like skiing and skydiving (which I tried in New Zealand in 2008), it was one of the pursuits forbidden by my ECB contract. It may have led to a questionable show of false confidence on tour in Sri Lanka. We were playing in Dambulla, in the dry Central Province. The stadium, built in 167 days overlooking a reservoir on ground leased from a local temple, held 30,000 but didn’t have great training facilities. We staged an improvised shuttle session in a nearby field, and some of the lads were spooked by the sudden interest of several horses. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said as they began to get skittish, ‘they’re only curious and having a bit of fun.’
Understandably, the session was swiftly abandoned. When I mentioned my calmness in such unfamiliar circumstances to Alice, I thought she would be impressed. ‘I would have run away,’ she said with a wry smile.
You obviously always have to be careful with farm animals, but luckily enough I never had to report back to cricket with a farming injury, although once a pig somehow managed to butt Alice, splitting her nose and leaving her with two black eyes. You can imagine the comments when she turned up at the families’ hospitality box the following day.
She was brought up on the family farm, where they farm sheep, free-range turkeys for Christmas and arable. Since university she has worked on the farm alongside looking after our three children. The farm gave her flexibility, in the form of the odd midweek day off in the early days of our relationship, and a month’s grace in later years, when she had the scope to come out on cricket tours.
The Autobiography Page 19
