CMJ: Hussain moves up a gear as the fine-tuning pays off (14 June 1997)

Saturday 14 June 1997

Hussain moves up a gear as the fine-tuning pays off

Christopher Martin-Jenkins.

THEY clapped Nasser Hussain more than half way to the middle when he walked out to bat at Hove on Thursday, before the public address announcer called out his name and despite the fact that Sussex were in trouble. There was an almost tangible gratitude in the applause.

This pale, slim son of an Indian father and English mother, level-eyed and long nosed, quick to ire, quick to smile, with the almost ascetic look of a man who has driven himself hard to achieve his ambition, had made a double hundred against Australia six days previously.

Only six other Englishman have done that. The last was David Gower, a batsman who fulfilled his youthful genius as soon as he came into the England side and sailed, more or less, on fair winds ever after. Well, no one has calm waters through- out a long professional career, but Hussain has suffered more storms than most and he, too, has a touch of genius. When he went to Barbados with an under- 13 Essex Schools side and made his first century - for Dover Beach Cricket Club against a Desmond Haynes Invitation XI - those instinctively knowledgeable Bajans knew he was something special.

So, albeit with a quieter voice did Keith Fletcher, who first saw him in the indoor nets at Ilford when he was 10. He was more of a leg-spinner then but Fletcher always knew him as a natural batsman too. "The thing about Nasser is that he`s wanted to play for England since he was a tiny tot," recalled the Essex guru this week. "He`s always had flair and he`s always had the sense to play the way he wants to play."

In other words he has never sacrificed his ability to hit with rare timing and a hint of the exotic in the area either side of cover point. In voice, attitude and commitment, Nasser sounds and feels English, but there is undeniably a touch of the best and wristiest Oriental batsmen in the way that he lac- erates his cuts or eases his drives through extra with the body moving like a wave into the stroke. This is the instinctive precision of a squash player slicing a ball into the nick above the tin.

Like every batsman his strength is potentially his weakness and, if there is a secret to the final step he took last week to the level of an undisputably high-class (as distinct from great) Test batsman, it is his decision to analyse his approach to the off-stump ball in microscopic detail when he came home from New Zealand. Already, during three months of attention to fitness, diet and technique at and around South Africa`s Stellenbosch University during the winter of 1994-95, he had spent hours studying his batting style on video recordings and working on sharpening his eyesight with the American vision specialist, Ken West.

Back home this February he had time for reflection on the ups and downs of a busy and productive 12 months. Captaining the A tour in Pakistan (370 runs from eight innings at an average of 52 for an unbeaten side) had been the prelude to his first two Test hundreds, both against India. The tour to Zimbabwe and New Zealand had been, for him, only a qualified success, although his value to England as vice-captain and inspiring fielder was greater than the figures suggested.

He looked particularly at his innings of 64 in the second Test in Wellington. The videos showed that he had begun to move a little too far to the off, causing him to play at balls he could safely have left alone. In the spring he worked for hours with Graham Gooch, Fletcher and Geoff Arnold, fine-tuning his judgment of when to drive, when to leave alone.

Not that at the age of 29 and still playing, on Fletcher`s insistence, in much the same way he always has, it should come as any surprise to Hussain that good bowlers will fire away at or just outside his off-stump, hoping that one of those famous angled-bat slices will fly into the arc between wicket- keeper and gully. "All I have done really," he said at Hove yesterday, "is to work on keeping my bat squarer in defence."

Fletcher approves: "His defensive shots now go straighter down the pitch. But I`ve encouraged him to remember how many runs he scores on the off. He`s got good hands." Shrewd eyes narrow for a while, then he adds: "Soft hands too, so when he does occasionally nick it it often falls short of the slips."

Fletcher admits now that he and his co-selectors were probably wrong not to play Hussain in the Test side in the Caribbean last time, after his return to the England team against Australia in 1993. Although he had not played a big innings before Edgbaston last week - and England had left him out of their one-day side - Hussain himself knew he was in decent form, but last Thursday and Friday was the stuff of schoolboy dreams.

"It doesn`t come any better than a 200 against Australia. It was the best innings of my life, for sure. But I`ve still got plenty of things to work on. I`d like to turn myself from a good Test batsman into a very good one. We are playing for the Ashes. This is very important to us. We`re leading 1-0, but we`ll be up for it again at Lord`s. The test of how good we are will be when the likes of Waugh and Taylor get in on a flat one. We`ve shown each other that we can play and that we`re a good team."

He was speaking, quite unconsciously, like a captain and although he is a contemporary, from the Combined Uni- versities class of `89, there is no doubt that he could, when the time comes, succeed Mike Atherton. The sudden bouts of broiling indignation, which sometimes got him into trouble during and after his first international cricket as a 21-year-old in the West Indies, are traumas of the past. The England vicecaptain of last winter was mature, fiercely loyal to Atherton when his form had deserted him, but shrewd, also, in his tactical advice.

Source :: The Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/)