Guest Spot

The forgotten centurion

Andrew Strauss was a key batsman in many of England's memorable wins (and draws), but it's unlikely you'll remember his contributions off hand

Daniel Brigham
03-Nov-2014
Anyone remember the Strauss hundred from the Oval Ashes Test of 2005?  •  Getty Images

Anyone remember the Strauss hundred from the Oval Ashes Test of 2005?  •  Getty Images

Many things could have stopped Andrew Strauss becoming a cricketer.
He broke no school records, was never tipped for greatness. A fiercely competitive nature - he cried whenever he lost a tennis match - was obscured by a reputation as a bit of a lovable dunce. Travelling to his first audition for Middlesex, he got his enormous cricket bag jammed in the barriers at Marylebone station during rush hour. In Strauss' first season at Middlesex, Don Bennett, the county's legendary coach, said he'd give him a few throwdowns in the nets. Off Strauss went to retrieve his kit from his crumbling Ford Fiesta, only to open the boot and realise he had left it outside his front door at home. Bennett's reaction was to call him a "useless public school ****". A county career, let alone an international one, seemed a long way off.
And yet, and yet.
The gawky dunce transformed into one of cricket's great leaders, becoming one of only three Englishmen to lead his team to Ashes wins both home and away and helping turn a divided dressing room into the No.1-ranked Test team in the world. His legacy is that of a great captain - or a great leader - first, a good batsman second.
Yet his importance as a batsman - his Test average in wins stands at 49.61, in losses at 25.23 - shouldn't be underestimated.
Despite a booming voice that sounds like someone trying to have a conversation with you through a letterbox, and a clumsiness that led Matt Prior to reveal that Strauss would often walk out after lunch with food spilled down his whites, Strauss' batting, like his captaincy, was calm, coordinated and understated. He accumulated his 21 Test centuries by stealth, often under the radar as more emphatically crowd-pleasing team-mates - Marcus Trescothick, Michael Vaughan, Ian Bell, Kevin Pietersen, Andrew Flintoff - naturally sucked all of the attention towards themselves.
Perhaps this explains why Strauss' batting is underrated by many. From the moment he scored a century on Test debut against New Zealand at Lord's in 2004 - a match best remembered for Nasser Hussain's Hollywood retirement, his last shot in international cricket a boundary that simultaneously brought up his century and won the Test - Strauss' great hundreds are often remembered, if at all, as a support act.
His dominance in South Africa in 2004-05 - when he hit three centuries and top-scored in six of the ten innings against an attack of Pollock, Ntini, Steyn and Kallis that foolishly kept feeding his back-foot strengths - was peak Strauss. Yet ultimately the greatest hundred of that series will be remembered as Marcus Trescothick's blistering second-innings 180 in Johannesburg that, backed up by Matthew Hoggard's 7 for 61, put England 2-1 up. *Matthew Engel, not one for hyperbole, called that Test "one of the most riveting of modern times" - so riveting that his match report in the Wisden Cricketer ran out of room to discuss the deeds of Strauss, who had scored a punchy, vital 147 in the first innings. Without him, England's first-innings deficit of just eight runs would have become insurmountable.
It went on. Strauss' role in the 2005 Ashes is often mentioned, at best, as an afterthought. When most people talk of The Oval, we remember Pietersen. We remember the urn being lifted. We remember the sense of dread on the last day. We remember Flintoff's five-for dragging England back into the game. We remember Shane Warne's drop.
In a room overspilling with memories, hidden in a corner is Strauss' first-innings 129. He called it the best hundred of his career and, in a total of 373 in which only Flintoff also passed 50, without it England wouldn't have won the Ashes. As those around him were slowly asphyxiated in cricket's jaws of death between defence and attack, Strauss batted serenely. He drove Warne - who had prematurely taken to calling him "Daryll" in reference to his bunny Cullinan - he cut Brett Lee and Glenn McGrath, he pulled Shaun Tait, and received a lengthy standing ovation from an Oval crowd unaware that in four days' time they would be witnessing one of the all-time great innings from Pietersen - but it would be no more important than Strauss'.
Three of his best hundreds came in India. Without a fifty in his first eight innings on the subcontinent, Strauss, once ungainly and uncouth against spin, finally found his poise in Mumbai in 2006 to create history. In the third and final Test, his smart 128 against Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh pushed England to 400 and set up their first Test win in India for 21 years to level the series. This time, the man to overshadow his efforts was the ageing, balding Shaun Udal, bewilderingly outfoxing Sachin Tendulkar and taking 4 for 14 on the final afternoon.
Two years later Strauss' momentous twin centuries in Chennai were quickly forgotten as Tendulkar, batting with an irresistible force behind him, scored an emotional, match-winning 103 two weeks after the Mumbai terror attacks. Strauss' pair of hundreds would have won most Tests; instead they were the only ones he ever scored in defeat.
While captaincy ultimately blunted Strauss' ability to regularly influence matches with the bat, he still had two great centuries left in him. Australia, both times, were the victims. In the 2009 series, Strauss' first as an Ashes captain, he reacted to England's fortunate escape in the opener in Cardiff by hitting 161 in the first innings at Lord's to set up a victory best remembered for Flintoff's 5 for 92.
Then, 18 months later, he again responded well to Ashes adversity, in Brisbane. After almost out-Harmisoning Steve Harmison by cutting the third ball of the series straight to Mike Hussey at gully, in the second innings Strauss reacted to the cavernous 221-run deficit not by slipping into its depths like so many Englishmen before him but by hitting a positive 110 that helped change the course of the series. It was inevitable, really, that his innings was eclipsed by Alastair Cook's double-century and his unbeaten 329-run stand with Jonathan Trott.
Strauss departed cricket as he had entered it: unexpectedly, quietly and, of course, overshadowed, this time by the Textgate saga. The boy who didn't score a century until he was 15, the man who his Middlesex team-mates had called Barry Big Pants, will be remembered for his captaincy and leadership. In time, though, we should cherish him for his unheralded place as one of England's best and most substantial batsmen.
* 09:42:25 GMT, 4 November, 2014: An earlier version of this sentence did not specify that it referred to Engel's report for the Wisden Cricketer

Daniel Brigham is a sportswriter and editor. @dan_brigham