Leadership has a wider social significance in South African sport, so the job is never easy. Hashim Amla considered giving up the captaincy when we won the first Test in Durban by 241 runs and stepped down after batting for 707 minutes in scoring 201 in the drawn second Test at Newlands in Cape Town, which is one of my favourite places to play cricket.
He was succeeded by AB de Villiers, whom I had known since we were kids, making our way in the Under-19s. I even got him out once, with a speciality delivery that rolled along the floor and hit him on the toe. We kept in touch as our careers progressed. He gave up wicketkeeping on becoming Test captain and could probably have done without us winning in Johannesburg, to take the series, in his first match.
Broady was a force of nature in their second innings, taking five wickets while conceding a solitary run in thirty-one deliveries as we bowled them out for 83. James Taylor, at short leg, took two miraculous catches, but attention was rightly seized by a definitive personal performance, a showcase for one man’s skill, physical fortitude and sheer bloody-mindedness.
There was a lot of talk at the time about rationalizing the workload of bowlers like Broady and Jimmy. They were doing huge mileage and placing great strain on their bodies. At first, I simply could not believe the statistics. If we spent a long time in the field, they could be doing up to thirty kilometres a day, running in on unyielding ground, in temperatures of 35 degrees. Something like four times their bodyweight would go through their knees and ankles, six times in relatively quick succession, on a regular basis. Little wonder that, given the application of such forces, Jimmy had his back issues. The hardest thing about dealing with Broady was trying to change his mind. He took advice as if he was being asked to drink curdled milk.
I obviously played an awful lot of cricket with them both. The mind games worked out evenly. As captain, I had to balance their comfort zones with my wider views and responsibilities. Ultimately, as the ones delivering the ball, they knew what they wanted to do. Occasionally, that didn’t involve factoring in what I wanted them to do.
The captain has the final say when a bowler asks for a field change but must calculate the degree of dissatisfaction disagreement will cause. Broady, for instance, always wanted an extra cover with far greater enthusiasm than I could muster. Having one stubborn man telling another stubborn man what to do is not the recipe for an easy life. Our stand-offs on the pitch usually involved an agitated form of semaphore. Broady would be waving his arms this way and that, demanding positional changes. I love bowlers who know their own minds, but there are limits. Whereas others would be a bit more malleable, he didn’t like taking no for an answer.
I had to strike that balance between being a dictator, a diplomat and a disciple. I knew that if I gave in to him consistently, there would be murmurings about my authority. Equally, I couldn’t risk alienating him, or suggesting to the others that I was inflexible. Ultimately, I loved him. Whisper it, I still do. Anyone who gives so much deserves a certain latitude.
The South Africans restored a modicum of pride by winning the final Test at Centurion. Morkel got me out in both innings – for 76 and 5, respectively. Kagiso Rabada, aged only twenty, took thirteen wickets in the match. We were obviously disappointed, but it meant that, to a degree, everyone had something to celebrate when the teams congregated in the home changing room afterwards.
This was a session with a difference, because it featured a fines meeting. It was a bit like a rugby players’ court and operated on the principle that anyone could impose a punishment, on teammate or opponent. The explanation didn’t have to be particularly plausible, but it carried consequences if it wasn’t deemed impressive. We enjoyed each other’s company and were happy to share the stick.
As captains, AB and I were nailed early, and often. I fined Quinton de Kock, because he missed the Wanderers Test after twisting his knee falling over, supposedly walking his two Jack Russells the previous afternoon. Dane Vilas, his replacement, arrived an hour after the match started, despite a police escort, at the end of a comical 1,000-kilometre dash to Johannesburg by plane and train from Port Elizabeth.
Their media officers had tried to hush it up, but Dean Elgar, the South African opener, obviously hadn’t been briefed on the cover story, and blurted out the tale of two little dogs. I slaughtered Quinton, light-heartedly suggesting that was the worst excuse I’d heard for getting pissed on duty. Rabada chimed in, fining Nick Compton for batting with only one eye open, like a drunk trying to find his way home. It was a great couple of hours, harmless fun, sporting banter as it should be.
I’m often asked to summarize the basic attraction of being a professional cricketer. That’s hard to put into words, but it has something to do with shared experience. I’ve literally travelled the world with the likes of Jimmy and Broady. We’ve laughed a helluva lot, cried occasionally, celebrated and commiserated together. We’ve even posed naked together, helping to raise awareness of testicular cancer as part of the Everyman Campaign. You don’t become family, but you do become extremely close friends. Cricket holds you close, grips you tighter than is sometimes comfortable, because it is a game of emotional contrasts that lasts a long time. I understand the primeval satisfaction of walking off a rugby pitch, battered and bruised, after eighty-odd minutes in the trenches with your mates, but that’s an entirely different feeling from sharing a close, hard-fought Test match with a bunch of blokes who are continually on edge.
You feel absolutely drained. I’m mates with Dylan Hartley, the England rugby captain, and he gives me some tap about being in a sport that involves following the sun. To someone involved in brutal, personalized combat, in near-perpetual winter, that seems an attractive alternative. Try batting beneath a helmet for six hours in intense heat. Try putting yourself through a modern bowler’s workload. Even fielding for long spells, relatively static but switching concentration on and off, takes it out of you.
The punishment was self-inflicted, but I have never seen someone play through the pain Ben Stokes endured from a succession of ill-fitting boots in Perth during the 2013–14 series. They fell to bits, and he was basically sandpapering his toes. He got through two pairs of protective socks in each session and was scraping his flesh on rock-hard ground during his follow-through. At the end of the day you could almost see bone beneath flayed skin. Obviously, it was excruciating, but you’d have never known it by Stokesy’s demeanour. He just got on with it. Having hand-made, specially measured boots, like most internationals, didn’t occur to him early in his career. He was the roughest of diamonds, raw and impulsive, biffing the ball all over the place in practice and playing with an almost reckless abandon.
That 2016 series in South Africa was, for him, a landmark of sorts. His 258 off 198 balls in Durban was extraordinary. It was the second-fastest double century in Test history, off 163 balls, and the fastest 250 in history. No England batsman had hit more sixes in one Test innings – eleven. He shared a record-breaking stand of 399 with Jonny Bairstow, whose unbeaten 150 was also a powerful statement of intent.
As strange as it seems, such startling statistics throw us off the scent. Stokesy is driven by the team, rather than obsessed by individual recognition. I genuinely don’t think he cares about himself, so long as England are winning. That selflessness has turned him into the hardest-working England player in recent years, irrespective of the mistakes he has made growing up in public.
I wasn’t in the West Indies in 2014 when he infamously broke his wrist punching a locker after getting out for 0 in the third one-day international in Antigua, but wasn’t particularly surprised. His wildcat approach always had an element of self-reproach, and he impulsively abandoned a promising rugby-league career as a teenager.
Everyone tends to forget he played two T20 internationals on that tour, with his hand in bits. Peter Moores did the groundwork, helping him to channel his aggression positively, but lasting change comes from within. Lesser characters would have been intimidated by his implosion in the 201
6 T20 World Cup final, when he conceded four successive sixes to give the West Indies an unlikely win, but he continued to front up.
Any team in an office, classroom or building site, works on human chemistry. The DNA of the team I eventually handed over to Joe Root in the spring of 2017 was unique, since no side is identical, but it contained a familiar balance of personalities. Moeen Ali, and to a slightly lesser extent Jos Buttler, emphasized its chilled, more free-spirited nature. They didn’t want to win with any less fervour, but they were more relaxed about the process. Mo is particularly placid. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him angry, except when Liverpool lose. The closest I’ve got to winding him up is by questioning his football pedigree and allegiance. He bites, gently, when you suggest he seems such a butterfly he was probably a Manchester United fan in his youth. When pressed, he will point you to a YouTube clip of him and Jimmy being given a tour of Anfield by Jürgen Klopp.
His cricket is a serious business. It runs through his family and radiates through his community. He is such an important figure as a man of faith and perspective. He has a fatalistic attitude that things are written. If he gets 0 today, it could be his destiny to score a century tomorrow. Succeeding does matter to him, profoundly, but he gives the impression it doesn’t. His attitude that, ‘Look, it’s just a game of cricket,’ has rubbed off on a few people around him. He still cares, of course, and in a purely playing sense I feel sympathetic towards him, because he has been here, there and everywhere in the batting order. He is cricket’s answer to a Post-it note, a utility player who can be stuck anywhere on the scorecard. He doesn’t make a fuss.
It has been a tough gig. He came in, under Moores, as a batsman who could bowl a bit of spin. When Graeme Swann retired, and Monty Panesar waned, he was thrown into the breach. He worked incredibly hard, with Mushtaq Ahmed’s help, to become a very, very good off-spinner. They shared a cultural link, a respect for seniority that has, in turn, been passed on to Adil Rashid. Someday, someone is going to make a buddy movie called Mo’n’Rash. Their families lived about fifteen miles apart in northern Pakistan, and they played against each other in their early teens. As they have grown older, they have derived stability and guidance from their religion. They are inseparable.
Rash has taken time to bed in at the highest level, but as a leg-spinner he is an integral member of England’s white-ball team. In broader terms, Mo suggests that English cricket’s failure to make the most of the talent pool containing second and third generation Asian immigrants is a complicated issue that will work itself out, with time. Together they represent powerful proof that international sport can be a multicultural, unifying force.
It also has a certain impatience, reflected in the attitude of some of those on the fringes. I was pulled up short at the end of that 2016 tour of South Africa when a radio reporter asked me whether, having won two Ashes series, and won in India and South Africa, I was considering stepping down. ‘You’ve achieved everything as a captain,’ he said. ‘Are you going to stop?’
On the one hand, that sort of question to a professional sportsman is abrupt to the point of being offensive. On the other, I knew what he was getting at. He wasn’t quite reading my mind, but I was nibbling at the fringes of the issue with increasing interest. Losing the last four Tests in India in the run-up to Christmas that year took me to a tipping point.
To be fair to everyone concerned, I had to signal my intention to continue as captain through the following winter’s Ashes series in Australia. I ignored the background noise of pundits like Geoffrey Boycott calling for me to stand down and concentrated on the inner voice that occasionally speaks sense. I’d had a record run of fifty-nine Tests in charge. The time was right to return to the ranks. Rooty was ready to lead. We both had the maturity, and mutual respect, to make things work. I had just exceeded 11,000 runs in Test cricket and felt confident of adding more. It meant a lot when Andrew Strauss, my old opening partner, spoke about my determination, conviction and pride.
Joe had had his moments. I don’t know what went on in that Walkabout bar in Birmingham back in 2013, when he was supposedly punched by David Warner. I’d left by then and, frankly, didn’t bother to find out because I couldn’t have cared less. It was blown out of proportion and as relatively sensible adults they made up.
He retained the cheekiness that made him claim that catch against me on his debut. He could still be mischievous, and push people to the limits by teasing them unmercifully, but as soon as he took the captaincy, he understood the responsibilities of the role. All of us learn on the job, to a greater or lesser degree.
He came to me for a chat before his first series, against South Africa. It might seem the most natural thing in the world to do, but it was also one of the most difficult, because of what others might read into it. I lived up to my immediate promise, that I would be there as a sounding board, if required, and I would do nothing to tread on his toes. It had to be his team, in his image. He said certain things in certain team meetings, particularly about our batting, that I would not have said. It’s not wrong that we should hold diametrically opposed views on something we knew so well; there are two sides to every argument. I didn’t air my side because I didn’t want him to feel I was putting him under any pressure.
We spoke about general principles, but he had to find his own way. It took between two and three years for me to feel truly comfortable in the job, which is roughly where he is now. That initial spell takes a lot out of you, particularly mentally. You almost wish you could programme the lessons, reset and go again.
We live and learn. We stumble, fall and rise again. We separate the myths and cherish the realities. We discover what is important, and what is an indulgence. I have never forgotten Andy Flower’s observation when he told me I was the new England captain in that meeting room in Southampton: ‘Just because you’ve got the armband, it doesn’t mean you know everything.’
You know what? He was right.
16. Names and Numbers
‘After twenty-five years in cricket I’ve decided to move on. Cricket has given me everything I have. Thank you for being a part of this journey. This game taught me how to fight, how to fall, to dust off, to get up again and move forward. It has been a lovely journey. See you on the other side.’
With that message to his 4,650,000 Twitter followers, Yuvraj Singh announced his retirement from international cricket in early June 2019. In a flourish of which Bollywood would be proud, it was accompanied by a twenty-three-second, slow-motion video in which he turned his back to the camera, stroked the shoulder of his blue India shirt, number 12, and walked off, out of shot.
The greats of the Indian game, led by Virat Kohli, paid tribute. Yuvraj earned his immortality in 2011 by helping Sachin Tendulkar win his World Cup. He accumulated 362 runs in the tournament at an average of 90.50, took fifteen wickets and was named man of the match four times. That was the year he was diagnosed with lung cancer; his survival spawned a charity that has done untold good.
How should any of us be remembered? Yuvraj was a player of his time, a powerful left-handed middle-order batsman and left-arm spinner who excelled in white-ball cricket. Stuart Broad will probably not thank me for reminding you that Yuvraj hit him for six sixes in an over at the 2007 World T20, which India won. He played forty Tests, 304 one-day internationals and fifty-eight T20s.
Good numbers. I did not know him that well, but one line in his retirement speech – ‘it’s been a love–hate relationship with the sport in retrospect’ – will have resonated with many cricketers. It reminded me of a conversation we had, playing together for MCC in a T20 tournament in Dubai in March 2015. He congratulated me for having recently passed 10,000 Test runs.
‘You’re going to go down in the record books as a legend of cricket,’ he told me, out of the blue.
It’s difficult to know what to say to that. Half-jokingly, I replied, ‘You’re laughing all the way to the bank.’
His response was instant: ‘I’ll swap
it all, to have your Test career.’
The finality of the statement took me back. He didn’t qualify it by saying he would swap an awful lot to have my set of numbers. He was all-in. His comment wasn’t really about me. It was a reflection on the status of the most traditional form of the game, by a player whose wealth and reputation were formed during the IPL revolution.
Yuvraj won the IPL twice. His final achievement was to help Mumbai Indians become champions in 2019. I’ve never played in that tournament, never experienced its fireworks and fervour, though I have an inkling what it would feel like, because of the amazing atmosphere generated in India by one-day internationals.
Call me short sighted, but I didn’t immediately recognize the importance of the IPL. I didn’t see it transforming cricket, in micro time, as it has. I was wrong. I may look back and wonder whether I could have changed my game to fit the franchise format, but it is not a matter of enduring regret. Test cricket was ingrained in me from childhood.
The skill factor in modern T20 cricket is extraordinary. Barriers have been broken down. Things that were once considered impossible are now commonplace. The game has changed beyond recognition. In the land of the high-stakes shootout, the gambler is king. The contrast to the early days of one-day cricket is like comparing a Model-T Ford with a Bugatti Veyron.
When the sixty-over World Cup was brought in (the number of overs was reduced to fifty in 1987), there seemed little point in chasing 260 to win. That sort of challenge intimidated teams, who would have a glorified net in reply. As the game evolved, we were taught to hit pockets. Graham Gooch was a pioneer. Mark Ramprakash mastered the shot over extra cover for two or four. It required skill and nerve, but there was a decent margin for error.
It was not the done thing to take on the man on the boundary. It was deemed too risky to attempt to hit the ball over the head of the fielder at deep mid-on. Far better to advance down the wicket to fashion a chip shot, like a golfer, over extra cover and into the gap for a couple. It was essentially cautious batting for relatively limited reward. Coaches were insurance salesmen. Now they’re circus ringmasters. If you’re caught in the deep, you’re expected to shrug your shoulders, admit you mishit it and try again next time. Nowadays the big shot is perfected in the nets, like a booming drive on a golf range. The odds are overwhelmingly in its favour.
The Autobiography Page 23
