I still remember getting into a lift going up to my hotel room after the Perth Test, where the Ashes were finally surrendered. As I shuffled my way in, it was obvious that I was sharing my journey with some distinctly unimpressed England fans. The St George crosses that were daubed on their faces, giving them an almost clownlike appearance, were in direct contrast to the sombre and morose expressions beneath the paint. I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, but it was impossible. As we made our way up the many floors of the hotel, the uncomfortable silence was broken by one of the supporters.
‘You know, you should be ashamed of yourself. You and your team-mates are a disgrace. I was embarrassed watching an England team play with so little fight.’
Each word hit home like a dagger to my heart. No one felt more disappointed than me. There was nothing that I could really say in my defence, other than ‘We are trying our best, you know.’ The words sounded hollow.
I felt incredibly angry with those fans. They did not know all the turmoil we were going through. They did not appreciate the stresses and strains that went into playing an Ashes series. The pressure had certainly contributed to Marcus Trescothick having to go home, in effect ending his England career. What about the sleepless nights worrying about what the next day might have in store? What about walking out to bat with the hopes of your family, your friends, your fellow players and your country on your back? Could they appreciate that?
Of course they couldn’t. That wasn’t the point. They had saved up their money and travelled 10,000 miles to see a famous English victory on Australian soil. They got the opposite. They were entitled to feel short-changed. I realised that my anger did not actually lie with them; it lay with myself and the rest of the team. We had let ourselves down.
I made a vow that if I ever came back to Australia on a cricket tour, it would be different.
By the time the tour reached Sydney for the fifth Test, the wheels were well and truly off. It was no surprise that Australia won the last game of the series so comfortably. They were so far in the ascendancy that the series was close to being a mismatch. Also, they were in no mood for charity. It was the final game in the careers of both Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath. They were not interested in signing off with a defeat.
The one-day series that followed defied belief. It was clear that as a group we were completely shot to pieces. There was very little hope for us in a series that was supposed to be our final preparation for the World Cup that followed in the West Indies. In order to keep us all vaguely sane, the management of the side, with Michael Vaughan back as captain once more, decided to place our emphasis on just having a bit of fun. That meant turning our back on all the pressure and expectation, trying to enjoy our cricket, having a few beers in the evenings and all in all trying to appreciate Australia as a country.
The change of tactic certainly didn’t bring any immediate relief. The way the tournament worked, we would all play each other four times, and then the top two teams would go through to a best-of-three final. Each week we would play New Zealand on a Tuesday and Australia on a Friday. For the first three weeks of the tournament, Friday became our bogey day. We were hammered by Australia in Melbourne and Brisbane – and even faced the acute embarrassment of losing to the Aussies in a day/night game in front of a full house in Adelaide before the floodlights needed to be turned on.
Thankfully the games against New Zealand were much closer affairs. We were like two second-division teams going at it hammer and tongs, playing for second place. We could not hope to compete with our Premier League rival, Australia. At the end of the group games, we had beaten New Zealand twice and lost twice, and we only made it through to the final because we had somehow managed to beat Australia in our final group game in Sydney on the back of a brilliant hundred by Ed Joyce. New Zealand didn’t beat Australia at all.
My abiding memory of that final group game is of watching the Australians going through a gruelling two-hour fitness session on the day before, no doubt getting themselves in tip-top shape for the rigours of the World Cup that was about to follow. We, on the other hand, were spending most of our time on the beach or in the bar.
Nonetheless, we made it through to the best-of-three final and proceeded to pull off one of the most outrageous heists in the history of ODI cricket. Paul Collingwood inspired us with a brilliant 120 in Melbourne and followed it up with 70 in Sydney as we surprised everyone, including ourselves, by walking away with the spoils, despite everyone knowing that we were a vastly inferior side. Talk about the unpredictability of sport.
In an eerie omen for what was about to follow in the World Cup, our celebrations that night were curtailed by an armed gang smashing their way into our city-centre hotel in Sydney at about three in the morning, robbing the reception, relieving Dean Conway, our physiotherapist who was standing in the foyer, of his wallet, and sending those of us who were still enjoying a celebratory drink into a blind panic. The gang saw us in the bar area and started to make their way towards us. Reg Dickason, our security man, was forced into action for just about the only time that I was involved with the team. His cunning plan to get us all out of the predicament: to open the back door and tell us all to run as fast as we could. Fortunately the plan worked and we weren’t followed by the gang. Perhaps the gods were reminding us that there wasn’t much to celebrate after losing all five Tests and five of the ten ODIs we had played.
England have never won a World Cup. There are many reasons for this. Perhaps it is to do with the very different type of limited-overs cricket that is played in England, where the swinging and seaming ball necessitates far more caution than elsewhere in the world. We have always struggled to match the sheer power and positivity of some of the other teams in more benign conditions. Also, it is fair to say that limited-overs cricket in our country is not the main event. Cricket enthusiasts in our country worship Test cricket and endure ODI cricket. In other parts of the world it is the other way around. That emphasis, however, means that limited-overs cricket is relegated to a far lesser status when it comes to scheduling, preparing and practising. County teams still stumble into one-day fixtures, unsure of who they are playing against, often knackered after the completion of a four-day fixture the day before and with only an hour before the start of the game to make the necessary adjustments in mindset and technique to switch into one-day mode. That is certainly not a recipe for high-quality cricket.
It is also true that the schedule – with England teams attempting to cope with the two-month World Cup campaign almost immediately after spending three months playing a tense and fatiguing Ashes series away from home – has to be a significant contributing factor. In both the World Cups I played in, I felt as if we were competing with one arm tied behind our back. As our old psychologist Steve Bull always used to say, ‘It is impossible to peak and then peak again.’ Olympic athletes structure their training to make sure they come good for one event. They would never contemplate the idea of competing in the Olympics and then at a world championship a month or two later. The body and mind just can’t cope.
In March 2007, we arrived in the West Indies after barely a week at home, hopeful that our one-day series victory in Australia may just have inspired us enough to pull off something similar in the World Cup. In truth, though, the feat was always going to be unlikely. The players were running on empty, mentally and physically exhausted, and struggling to cope with the idea of two more months in hotel rooms.
Duncan Fletcher, our coach, was reaching the end of his tether as well. It was clear to us all that his uncomfortable relationship with the media was close to breaking point. He was getting more and more paranoid about what was being said and written, often wondering aloud how certain pieces of confidential information were finding their way into the pages of the tabloids. He was also getting exasperated by what he termed our lack of nous when it came to one-day cricket. He just couldn’t understand why we weren’t making better decisions under pressure and paying more attent
ion to the little things, such as batsmen backing up properly or fielders making sure they were throwing the ball to the correct end. It was clear that he felt everything he was saying was going in one ear and out of the other.
He was also struggling with discipline. Following the Australian ODI series, something of a drinking culture had been established in the side. There was a sort of reverse logic being clung to that we had won the series in Australia because we had all gone out and had a few drinks – that must have been the secret to our success. Maybe it was, but it was never going to work long-term and it all came home to roost in the World Cup.
Immediately after losing the first match against New Zealand, with forty-eight hours before a vitally important game against Canada, the players really shouldn’t have been going out at all, but such was the habit that had been established over the preceding weeks that most of the lads were out and about in the bars of Saint Lucia. No doubt some of the holidaymakers and supporters wouldn’t have been overly impressed with our lack of professionalism, but it was only when one of the newspapers got a tip-off that Andrew Flintoff had been rescued from the sea at about 4 a.m., having capsized a pedalo, that the proverbial really hit the fan.
Perhaps in earlier eras that sort of behaviour was expected, but with more money and more public interest in the game, there was no way the media were going to let us off this particular faux pas. If we had been winning, we might just have got away with it, but we weren’t. Cricket was on the front page of the newspapers for the wrong reasons, and the player in the eye of the storm was none other than the guy who four months previously had been proudly leading the team out to Australia full of hope and expectation, Andrew Flintoff.
The negative publicity that surrounded the team that week, with cameraphone pictures being sold to newspapers and Andrew Flintoff being dropped for disciplinary reasons, sounded the final death knell for what was an already futile bid to win the World Cup. We performed pitifully in every respect throughout the tournament, failing to beat any mainstream opponent, before a consolation win against the West Indies in our last ‘dead rubber’ game. I had my first taste of being left out of the side, with Ed Joyce being preferred to me for the first half of the tournament, but my disappointment was as nothing compared to that of Duncan Fletcher. After a torrid winter, it was clear that heads were going to roll and, having given his all to the side for seven years, Duncan knew his time was up. He resigned on the eve of our final game in an emotional team meeting and in doing so brought an end to an era.
It felt extremely unfair to me that Duncan Fletcher left England cricket on those terms. In effect, he was paying the price for a winter in which the players were simply not good enough or lost form at just the wrong time. He had given so much to the team, which we should never forget was languishing at the bottom of the world rankings when he was brought in, as a relatively unheard-of replacement for David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd. To have overseen the transition of the team from those particularly humble beginnings into the side that overpowered the mighty Australians in 2005 was an incredible achievement.
He had to fight tooth and nail for many of the advances that we see as routine now. In the days just after the introduction of central contracts, the counties still felt a huge amount of ownership over the players, as well as an unhealthy cynicism about what happened to them while they were on England duty. Fletcher was bloody-minded enough to lock horns with the counties and effectively bypass them when it came to picking and working with England players.
His belligerent attitude to the counties made him few friends but was sorely needed. Anyone looking at the players that county cricket was producing could see that there were some fundamental flaws in the system. People weren’t being prepared to play international cricket; they were being prepared to face a barrage of 70 mph bowling if they were batsmen, and simply to last through an interminable season if they were bowlers. Neither bore any relation to cricket at the highest level.
Where Fletcher made his greatest impact, in my opinion, was with the relatively small number of players that he worked with on a day-to-day basis. Players like Michael Vaughan and Marcus Trescothick are often cited as great examples of his coaching ability at work. Plucked from relative obscurity, they were transformed into high-quality international players under his tutelage. I would argue, though, that his methods rubbed off on many others too. Mark Butcher and Graham Thorpe significantly improved their play against spin under Fletcher, and I will always be grateful for the help he gave me in gaining a better understanding of the game of cricket.
His methods were all based on logic. He wasn’t into new fads or ideas. He took the concepts of batting, bowling and fielding back to first principles, treating cricket as a game of angles. By doing so, he was able to debunk some of the myths. For example, he would always argue that playing with the spin was a flawed method of dealing with spin bowling. At times it was far safer to be meeting a spinning ball with the full face of the bat, which in effect was playing against the spin. That technique definitely helped me against Shane Warne in 2005.
His reliance on using angles gave him a really good insight into opposition players’ strengths and weaknesses. In an era when the statistical data on players was not as complete as it is today, he was streets ahead of any other coach I encountered in terms of dissecting a player’s technique and compiling plans to make life difficult for them. He would notice things that no one else would.
For example, I remember sitting in a team meeting in 2004 discussing Herschelle Gibbs. Herschelle was a particularly talented player, seemingly with the ability to hit the ball to all parts of the ground. We were all debating where we should be trying to bowl at him when Fletcher intervened.
‘Guys, it is pretty clear where we need to be bowling at him. Look at his bottom-hand grip. With a grip like that he is going to find it very difficult to hit the ball straight back at the bowler. If we can angle the ball in to hit middle and off stump, he is likely to get bowled.’
We all started studying Herschelle’s bottom-hand grip in great detail, having never noticed anything unusual about it before. Needless to say he got out bowled more than once in that series.
In so many ways, Duncan Fletcher had the ability to surprise and inform us with his theories on the game. Whether it was the ‘forward press’ against spin, or using the theory of aerodynamics to help us understand reverse swing better, he was a treasure trove of cricketing information of the type you will never find in an instruction manual. Having, with notable exceptions, listened to coaches throughout my career up to that point largely spouting clichés and half-truths that weren’t really relevant to my game, it was all a huge eye-opener for me.
His greatest achievement, in my opinion, finally led to his downfall. What English cricket was crying out for when he came into the job was an identity. Too many players either followed their own agendas, making sure that they kept their place in the team, or felt uncomfortable in a largely foreign environment. In conjunction with Nasser Hussain and then Michael Vaughan, Fletcher was able to create a feeling of togetherness amongst the England players. He loved nothing more than to let everyone know how different the approach of the England side was from that of the counties, and by being constantly reminded of how far ahead we were, we largely bought into the concept of ‘Team England’. Also, because he was loath to talk to the media in any capacity, he created an aura about the set-up. The media were intrigued to know what was going on behind the scenes, especially when players started talking about what a profound effect he was having, but they could never put their finger on it. It all helped us to feel that we were part of a special bubble and in doing so created genuine team spirit in the side.
In the end, he probably created too many enemies for himself. Over the years he had taken on the ECB, the counties and the media, and there were a few people queuing up to see him go when the England team eventually fell from their pedestal. It is probably also true that some of the players in the team found
him hard to communicate with. He was essentially a quiet, introverted leader and communication was not his strong point.
Undoubtedly, though, he dragged English cricket from the Dark Ages and I am absolutely certain that the team would never have enjoyed the many successes of recent years without his contribution. I was not the only one to shed a tear when he walked away.
England in Australia 2006–07 – The Ashes
1st Test. BCG, Brisbane. 23–27 November 2006
Australia 602–9 dec (R.T. Ponting 196, M.E.K. Hussey 86, J.L. Langer 82; A. Flintoff 4–99) and 202–1 dec (J.L. Langer 100*, R.T. Ponting 60*)
England 157 (I.R. Bell 50, A.J. Strauss 12; G.D. McGrath 6–50) and 370 (P.D. Collingwood 96, K.P. Pietersen 92, A.J. Strauss 11; S.R. Clark 4–72, S.K. Warne 4–124)
Australia won by 277 runs.
2nd Test. Adelaide Oval, Adelaide. 1–5 December 2006
England 551–6 dec (P.D. Collingwood 206, K.P. Pietersen 158, I.R. Bell 60, A.J. Strauss 14) and 129 (A.J. Strauss 34; S.K. Warne 4–49)
Australia 513 (R.T. Ponting 142, M.J. Clarke 124, M.E.K. Hussey 91, A.C. Gilchrist 64; M.J. Hoggard 7–109) and 168–4 (M.E.K. Hussey 61*, R.T. Ponting 49)
Australia won by 6 wickets.
3rd Test. WACA, Perth. 14–18 December 2006
Australia 244 (M.E.K. Hussey 74*; M.S. Panesar 5–92, S.J. Harmison 4–48) and 527–5 dec (M.J. Clarke 135*, M.E.K. Hussey 103, A.C. Gilchrist 102*, M.L. Hayden 92, R.T. Ponting 75)
England 215 (K.P. Pietersen 70, A.J. Strauss 42) and 350 (A.N. Cook 116, I.R. Bell 87, K.P. Pietersen 60, A. Flintoff 51, A.J. Strauss 0; S.K. Warne 4–115)
Australia won by 206 runs.
4th Test. MCG, Melbourne. 26–28 December 2006
England 159 (A.J. Strauss 50; S.K. Warne 5–39) and 161 (A.J. Strauss 31; B. Lee 4–47)
Driving Ambition - My Autobiography Page 11
