Driving Ambition - My Autobiography

by Andrew Strauss

  About the Author

  Andrew Strauss was born in 1977 and spent his early years in South Africa, Australia and England. He learned his game at Radley College and Durham University, and made his first-class debut for Middlesex in 1998 before becoming captain in 2002.

  Strauss wrote his name into the record books when he became only the second England batsman to score a century at Lord’s on his Test debut, in 2004. He played in the 2005 Ashes victory and was appointed England captain in 2009. Under his captaincy, England regained the Ashes in 2009 and held on to them in 2010–11, the first series win on Australian soil for 24 years. In 2011, he led his country to the No. 1 spot in the ICC Test world rankings for the first time. After captaining England in 50 of his 100 Tests, he retired from all forms of cricket in 2012. He was awarded an OBE in 2011. Andrew Strauss is married with two children.

  DRIVING AMBITION

  My Autobiography

  Andrew Strauss

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Andrew Strauss 2013

  The right of Andrew Strauss to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781444722161

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Also by Andrew Strauss

  COMING INTO PLAY

  TESTING TIMES

  WINNING THE ASHES DOWN UNDER

  For Ruth, Sam and Luca

  CONTENTS

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Also by Andrew Strauss

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  1. Opening Up

  2. All the Gear, No Idea

  3. A Taste of Captaincy

  4. One Glorious Day in May

  5. Touring

  6. Heroes

  7. Disgrace

  8. Dropped Like a Stone

  9. Letting Go

  10. Everything Changes

  11. My Turn

  12. Changing the Culture

  13. A Year to Remember

  14. Stepping Over the Line

  15. The Holy Grail

  16. The One-Day Riddle

  17. Number One

  18. Time to Go

  19. The Future

  Career statistics

  Index

  Picture Section

  Photographic acknowledgements

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Writing a book is not unlike playing cricket. As an author you need to show a fair amount of discipline to get a book finished, just as a cricketer needs to spend hours experimenting and honing a technique. More importantly, to be successful, any cricketer needs a strong support network, from coaches and team-mates right the way through to an understanding family, and an author is no different.

  Many thanks have to go to everyone at Hodder, especially Roddy Bloomfield, for the gentle prodding, advice and persuasion they have given me along the way. It was certainly needed.

  Given that I have had the opportunity to look back at my formative years while compiling the book, it would be remiss of me not to thank my parents for all the help, advice, nurturing and taxiing they bestowed upon me over so many years. They have lived and breathed every moment of my career, almost certainly going through more anguish and stress than I ever did.

  I am also immensely grateful for the endless hours put in by the many coaches who worked with me over my career. Philip Spray, Andy Wagner and latterly Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower deserve particular mention.

  For anyone who is fortunate enough to play international cricket, team-mates become something of a surrogate family during the many weeks away on tour. I have been particularly fortunate to share a dressing room with not only some fantastic players, perhaps some of England’s finest ever, but more importantly some great blokes. They have all played a positive role of some sort in forming my career.

  Last, and certainly not least, I would like to mention Ruth, my wife. Luckily, neither she nor I had any idea just how difficult it would be to combine the job of an international cricketer with a ‘normal’ family life. It takes a special person to deal with all the ups and downs and significant commitment required to be a successful cricketer. She has been a fantastic source of help, advice, solace and sympathy, while all the time having to put up with the considerable needs of our two young boys, Sam and Luca. Hopefully I will be able to share some of that burden now that I have retired, and finally finished the book!

  1

  OPENING UP

  On an isolated farm in the rugged, bleak highlands of the Orange Free State, a young midwife is tenderly looking after her baby when she hears a knock on the door. She is immediately nervous. Her country is at war with the British, her husband has been captured and sent to Ceylon as a POW, and there are reports of women and children being rounded up by British soldiers to be taken into holding camps. Their farms are usually then scorched to the ground to ensure that the guerrilla forces combating the British are unable to replenish supplies.

  She hesitantly opens the door. Immediately her worst fears are confirmed. A young British officer stands in front of her. He announces curtly that she is to pack up any belongings that she can carry and prepare to be moved out of her farm the next morning. She has until then to get things in order.

  As soon as she closes the door, a feeling of panic rises within her. What should she do? There have been rumours that the conditions in the camps are harsh and that food is in short supply. The alternative, though, seems just as unappealing. She could load up her horse and cart, take her young baby and attempt to make the journey to a town thirty miles away, where there are friendly faces. However, it is getting dark and, in the high altitude of the veldt, temperatures can easily drop to minus 5 degrees centigrade. It is a long shot, to say the least.

  She looks at her young son, barely two months old, and shudders at the thought of him in a camp, completely at the mercy of his captors. She makes her decision. She is going to risk the night-time journey.

  She rushes to gather as much clothing as possible and proceeds to strap the young boy to her body. She goes to the stables to ready the horse and pack the cart, and within an hour she sets off from her farm in the middle of nowhere. She will have to navigate by the stars, hoping all the time not to be disturbed by British patrols. She is risking her life, and that of her young son, in the hope of remaining free.

  I often wonder what would have happened if that young woman had decided against making such a difficult journey. She was my great-grandmother and the young son in her arms was my grandfather on my father’s side. Over the course of the next two years, more than 26,000 women and children were to perish in those holding camps, as malnutrition and disease swept through them. It is very likely that neither she nor my grandfather would have survived. It would have spelled the end for this particular line of the Strauss family.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, after such a bitter conflict, the relationship between the British settlers in South Africa and the A
frikaners has never been an easy one. There has been too much blood, too much conflict. I find it very surprising, therefore, that my grandfather, who was brought up for long periods solely by his mother while her husband was in exile in Sri Lanka and St Helena, would choose to marry an Englishwoman. I am certainly not sure what his father, who had spent the majority of his life fighting the British, would have made of it. Nevertheless, that is what my grandfather did. My grandmother’s family had come from Kent to manage a sugar estate in South Africa and she met my grandfather when she started working for the bank in Durban of which he was the manager.

  Somewhat bizarrely, as it was really quite rare, my mother’s family was also a mixture of English and Afrikaner. Her mother’s family was of Scottish and German descent, an interesting combination, to say the least, and they had decided to bring up their children at English schools and with English customs. Her father’s family, however, had sailed to South Africa in the mid-seventeenth century, probably from France, and had become as Afrikaans as you could get. The surname Botha, somewhat akin to the English name Smith, gives you an appreciation of his lineage.

  I suppose my family were mongrels at a time when tensions between the English and Afrikaners remained high. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, political debates in South Africa centred on two main parties. The Nationalists, who were to introduce apartheid to South Africa, represented the interests of the Afrikaans speakers, whereas the United Party espoused more moderate, Anglophile politics. There were great debates in parliament and on the streets about where the country was heading, but for the majority of white South Africans, that was where their political lives ended. The plight of the majority native black population was not a subject for serious discussion.

  My parents met, as I suppose many couples did in those times, through an introduction by mutual friends. My mother was training as a teacher, whereas my father, being a few years older, was already making his way in the insurance industry. It might seem strange nowadays, but my father had to buy my mother out of her teacher-training contract in order to get married. Married women were not allowed to work full-time and so choices needed to be made.

  They were both keen on their sport. The climate and the physical South African culture meant that sport was encouraged by the family and in schools. Rugby, football and cricket were the games of choice for my father, while my mother concentrated on tennis. I get the impression that neither thought of taking their sport more seriously than playing for club teams and socially, but nonetheless it was very much part of their lives and, by osmosis, the lives of their children.

  I came into the world on 2 March 1977 in Johannesburg. Being the youngest of four children, I was almost guaranteed plenty of attention. My three sisters, Gillian, Sandra and Colleen, were eight, six and five respectively, and they were no doubt delighted to have a little baby brother to play with. The novelty soon wore off, but by and large we all got on well. It was, it has to be said, a comfortable upbringing. The house we moved into when I was aged two was spacious and came complete with tennis court and swimming pool. It probably sounds like a privileged existence, but it was not all that uncommon for white South Africans, who tended to spend most of their time outdoors, to have facilities of that nature.

  A South African childhood revolved around three things: school, outdoor activities and holidays within the country. The television channels only came on air at 6 p.m., and the lack of programmes for children, and the fact that the language alternated between English and Afrikaans, meant that television played little part in our lives. Most of the time was spent swimming in the pool, hitting balls on the tennis court and running around in the garden.

  The annual trips to the Kruger National Park, the largest wildlife reserve in South Africa, and down the coast in Natal were always highlights. Every time I go back to South Africa and visit the wildlife parks, I have a strange sense of déjà vu. My childhood visits must have indented my soul in some way, and as a result I have developed a real passion for the vast wilderness of the African bush.

  My father and mother were both fairly strict. South Africans have a straightforward attitude to most things and they call people out on bad behaviour. Although none of us children could be considered to be truly rebellious, there were plenty of scoldings from my father, in particular, who fulfilled the main role of family disciplinarian.

  I remember my first school very well, not least because it was a girls’ school. My sisters all attended the junior school of St Andrew’s in Johannesburg and for some unknown reason they allowed boys for the first year of preschool. I was one of a handful, all of whom had sisters at the school. My report from that year highlighted the fact that I was good with balls, but that my concentration tended to wane when it came to handwriting. When you combine that with a report from my swimming teacher that I ‘seemed to prefer winning to adopting the correct technique’, I think it is quite easy to see that my character was pretty well developed by the age of four.

  All in all they were happy days: a comfortable lifestyle, a great climate and plenty of innocent fun, especially when I finally joined a boys’ school, St John’s, at the age of five. I tended to concentrate on sport when I could, playing football for a local club and doing plenty of swimming at school and at home. We were settled, my father was doing well at his insurance company and we seemed to have the world at our feet.

  * * *

  On the surface, at least, it seems a somewhat strange decision on the part of my parents to leave the country when I was seven years old. Perhaps they were influenced by their own nomadic childhoods, when they both moved around the country frequently. They no doubt also saw it as the last opportunity to take the family abroad while all the children were relatively young.

  While the decision was not driven by the political situation in South Africa, it is true that by the mid-1980s the world’s attention was increasingly turning to the policy of apartheid and the minority white population’s treatment of the other, majority, ethnicities. Things were getting fraught, with international sanctions as well as frequent demonstrations putting more pressure on the government to address the concerns of the black population. As is so often the case, though, if you weren’t directly involved in it, your life continued pretty much as normal.

  My father’s job was the practical reason we left South Africa and made the long journey to Melbourne. His company were looking to branch out into the Australian market and my dad was given the opportunity to set things up over there, with the option of coming back to South Africa two years later. For young South Africans, who in those days didn’t get the opportunity to travel the world in the way it is possible today, it must have seemed like an opportunity too good to miss.

  For most people, the idea of living in Australia sounds like a dream come true: blue skies, barbecues, a relaxed lifestyle and a carefree existence. For us, having come from a way of life that was very similar, Melbourne didn’t seem quite as exotic. For starters, the weather was not all it was cracked up to be. Johannesburg surely has one of the best climates in the world: hot, but not unbearably so in the summer, with frequent thunderstorms in the afternoon to freshen things up. The winter is one long stretch of blue skies and no rain, with the temperature remaining at a comfortable 20 degrees centigrade. Melbourne, however, more than lived up to its reputation for having four seasons in one day – with temperatures sometimes swinging between 45 and 10 degrees centigrade. For the first time in our lives, we also had to deal with unpleasant, rainy weather in the winter. I think we all found it quite hard to adjust to. God only knows what it would have been like if we had gone straight to the UK from South Africa.

  Adjust we did, though, and in many ways living in Australia was an adventure. My parents, who were clearly keen to experience as much of the country as possible, took us on trips as far north as the Queensland rainforest, as well as dragging us up the mountains in Northern Victoria for some surprisingly good skiing. I found the transition from South
African to Australian school an easy one to make, and even my sisters, who were at a much more awkward phase in their development, approaching teenagehood, seemed to adapt well to the new surroundings.

  Our house was not nearly as grand as the one we had left in South Africa, and there were no maids and gardeners to maintain it, but it was nice enough, in a Melbourne suburb called Balwyn North, and there were plenty of sports facilities nearby. By then, as I approached eight, sport was taking up more and more of my life. Being decidedly small relative to my peers, in South Africa I really hadn’t had the size or strength to hit cricket or tennis balls with any real consistency, but over in Australia all that began to change.

  At school Aussie Rules football was the sport to play. Victoria was the hotbed of the sport and it was every boy’s duty to make sure they kept the game alive and flourishing. The game was a little bizarre to me, with its high tackles and punching the ball to pass it being in complete contrast to the rugby that I had watched endlessly in South Africa. My father, who no doubt saw the game as sacrilege to the holy game of rugby, signed me up to one of the only rugby union clubs in Melbourne and ended up doing the coaching for the team as well. He always took an active interest in my sporting exploits, and it is in Australia that I have my first memories of kicking the ball with him in the garden and practising my cricket shots, trying to emulate Dean Jones or one of the other Aussie cricketers.

  Cricket, in truth, played a relatively small part in this sporting paradise. I played for the team at school, but at that age games were few and far between. I have one vague memory of us winning a game with one of my team-mates taking a hat-trick, but I can’t remember anything of my own contribution. My strongest memories of the sport came from playing Test Match Cricket, the board game with a little ball-bearing rolling down a chute, to be hit by a batsman controlled by a player flicking a lever. Hours were spent playing Test matches at my house or that of my mate, Christopher. Scoring a fifty or taking a wicket was always accompanied by a wild celebration, copied directly from those we watched on TV from the likes of Allan Border or Bruce Reid.