Decline and fall (14 August 1999)

14 August 1999

Decline and fall

Ted Dexter

What a lucky man I was when I was first chosen to play for England, against New Zealand in July 1958. I joined a winning team with a powerful, unchallenged captain, Peter May, at the helm. Other names to conjure with were none less than Tom Graveney, Godfrey Evans, Fred Trueman and Brian Statham to name just a few. A series was already won and the great P B H himself was at the other end when I made a few runs. Pity the plight of a newcomer coming into the side for next week's final Test against New Zealand at the Oval by comparison.

This is not supposed to be a historical document. I am certainly not a trained historian and my memory is selective to say the least. So be prepared for a series of snapshots on the background to England's Test cricket over the past 40 years which may tell a story overall.

My own Test debut was decided by a selection committee ruled by past amateurs of independent means and total independence of action. G O (Gubby) Allen and R W V Robins were definitely 'old school' characters who took a view about certain cricketers. Either they had class or they did not. This meant occasional gross errors like the branding of Derbyshire's legendary fast bowler, Les Jackson, as a mere slinger. On the other hand, it meant continuity of selection unaffected by any clamourings of the media. Gubby would watch the first three days of a Test but nothing was going to keep him away from his golf at The Berkshire on Sunday morning.

It was quite a shock when selection fell into the hands of the 'professionals'. And there was a sea change in the way teams were selected. When May and I retired, instead of replacing us with the next generation of players in their early twenties, established county players who previously could not make the team were now drafted into action. This is not to say that the selectors were wrong at the time because a principal beneficiary was John Edrich, who enjoyed a hugely successful career. However, a sea change it was and the beginning of current selection upheavals.

It should be remembered that the only Tests of national importance were those between England and Australia. The West Indies, India, Pakistan, South Africa and New Zealand were all regularly beaten in England and on overseas tours other than to Australia, where victories were infrequent due often to understrength teams because players had other commitments. England's record against Australia has never been above par, but the ability to win most home series meant that public confidence and interest in the Test side remained high and, very importantly, there was no great pressure to replace players who might be having a lean time.

The age of the jet aeroplane had arrived and overseas players were admitted to our county game, so fairly quickly all these lesser opponents gained experience and national pride drove the players and their administrators to improve their international teams.

Frank Worrell galvanised the West Indians, persuading them to put their inter-island rivalries aside. Imran Khan did much the same for a factionalised Pakistan and the chance to play major cricket more regularly was bound to throw up major cricketing talents, such as Sunil Gavaskar for India and Richard Hadlee for New Zealand, bringing these countries unprecedented success. All the time, England were obviously the prime target for these teams as they strove to even the score.

The next major upheaval was the wholesale export of the first division of Test players to Kerry Packer's cricket circus in Australia. Now there was a complete break in continuity.

The special requirements of batting at Test level had been handed down from generation to generation of which pool of wisdom I was certainly a beneficiary. My first captain, May, would make his feelings known from the players' balcony if it looked as if there was any lack of concentration and he was certainly an inspiration for anyone as a partner in the middle.

But with no such established leadership, it was not long before the accepted norms had been cast to the winds with orthodoxy a thing of the past.

When England were forced to pick what was actually our second XI for the official Test matches, it was probably a case of papering over cracks that had already started to appear. With our full-time, now fully professional domestic cricket circus, it was obvious that our newly constituted team, including the mere youngsters Ian Botham and David Gower, would be superior to other countries, who were picking their teams from far smaller pools.

Botham registered the fastest 100 Test wickets but was lucky to miss the normal learning period when inexperience with the ball is met by the current 30 best batsmen in the world.

Along the way, England had also forfeited a major element in what had always been a considerable home advantage. All our championship cricket was played on pitches which were left uncovered when it rained. Some people hanker after a return to those days, believing that rain-affected pitches provided high-quality training for batsmen and an incentive to bowlers. But there were more fundamental factors involved.

Pitches had to be prepared on comparatively light, porous soil so that play could start again quickly. To provide some pace and to bind the surface, there was much more grass and you only have to look at photographs of the Fifties and early Sixties to see that there is no difference in colour between the pitch and the rest of the square.

Visiting Test batsmen often failed to come to terms with the vagaries of low seam movement and the best of these pitches at Edgbaston contributed any number of Test victories for England. For various reasons, but principally to conform with worldwide practice, home Test pitches became fully covered and in due course all our county games fell into line.

Nobody foresaw what a major effect this change would have on England's playing standards, coinciding as it did with the growth of limited-over competitions. First there was just the knockout, now the NatWest, but the National League (Benson & Hedges) and a Sunday league (John Player) came along hot-foot with old routines totally disrupted.

The list of damaging effects on our playing standards is a long one but foremost must be the change in recruitment criteria for young cricketers entering the county game. Where there was a choice between a promising slow bowler and a bits-and-pieces player who could bat and bowl a bit and run like hell in the field, it was the specialist who missed the boat.

The same went for any studious batsman who happened to a bit slow over the ground. You only need to miss one or two such specialists in each generation to substantially weaken your Test side.

These various strains were fully evident to me within the first weeks of what turned out to be a 4.5-year stint of selecting Test teams and trying to put in place better training systems. I saw at first hand the two distinct types of County Championship match that had emerged in the light of full-covering pitches and both of them were at odds with the game I had stopped playing 20 years before.

Given fair weather and a well-prepared pitch, it was obvious that the slightest interruption for rain or bad light would mean a drawn game, which suited neither side in the chase for championship points. So captains would take an early decision to play out the match to a prearranged formula with the last-day climax of a run chase. What fun it all was as the daily sponsorship revenues soared.

Committees congratulated themselves on these feasts of quick scoring, which kept their members entertained, while the players took the view that they were happy to do whatever paid the bills. The fact that captains and bowlers no longer needed to plot and scheme for every wicket was lost in the general euphoria.

The other way to win for a county with a good attack was to coerce manufacturers into providing a special type of cricket ball which could knock off the opposition in a day and a half, let alone three.

Without the administrators noticing, or perhaps with a blind eye turned, the seams on certain batches of balls became thicker by degrees to the extent that they would change direction dramatically on any surface. All a bowler needed to do was sling the grenade down the other end with reasonable accuracy and the batsman was almost bound to be blown away sooner rather than later.

Not surprisingly, these twin strands in the game persuaded a generation of batsmen that life at the crease was best spent in the fast lane, getting a few quickly in a run chase or cracking half a dozen fours before the bowlers had settled down.

It was at Lord's in 1989, when I despaired of all the non-straight England bats on display in pre-Test nets, that Kim Barnett enlightened me. "You have to realise, chairman, that we are all whackers of the ball. At Derby I hype myself up to hit my first fifty off the new ball. If I get 80 before lunch, I have as good as won the game," he told me. The sad part was that he had got an impressively quick 80 against Australia the week before at Headingley but England had lost the match.

Selecting the right men for Test cricket was therefore a bit of a lottery. I was not the first chairman to find it so, with May standing down after the year of the four England captains - Mike Gatting, John Emburey, Chris Cowdrey and Graham Gooch. Wisden's comments were these: "England's selectors did not seem to know where to turn - in all, 23 players were chosen - a manifesto for failure. At the end, England were without an obvious captain or a single player who had established himself during the series."

Such was my inheritance, because when May was outvoted by other selectors in the matter of Gooch to captain England in India, the tour was cancelled on political grounds because of the Gooch/South Africa connection.

All this was a far cry from the settled, more comfortable days of the Sixties. One other thing that my predecessor warned me about was the huge influence of injuries on selection, which was certainly borne out during my time. Here I tend to blame the compression of tours assisted by fast air travel with few rest days, though why England players should be more prone to break down than those from overseas is not clear. The fact that the last, rather dismal, Test against New Zealand was played without our leading bowler, Darren Gough, and our captain, Nasser Hussain, shows that nothing much has changed in this regard.

Clearly, there are no quick fixes. With the sacking of Gooch and Gatting from the selection panel, it is faintly alarming to realise that the immediate future rests in the hands of a foreign coach, a fledgling captain and a chairman of selectors with no experience of playing the game at Test level. Chairman, coach and captain was exactly the selection format that I started with in 1989 with about four variations in between. Logic suggests that it is not the number or make-up of the selectors but the players, because of their background, who are letting the side down.

The counties continue a policy of self-interest, resisting changes which might lift the standard, like a well-funded regional competition. Instead, they have voted back the old style early-season league which was long ago identified as a block on proper Test preparation. Central contracts will do nothing to improve that situation because who will our top players find to give them proper practice if they are not playing for their counties? So the muddle continues, with no obvious happy ending in sight.

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