Irresistible Gough is catalyst for success (30 December 1998)

30 December 1998

Irresistible Gough is catalyst for success

By Mark Nicholas

GLITTERING, star-studded heroes every one of them. The disparaged England team won the fourth Test match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in thrilling, pulse-racing, heart-stopping style. After the pasting they have taken since they landed Down Under, Alec Stewart's men will have danced through the streets of Melbourne last night as champions of the moment. Their moment, no one else's, their kick in the whatsits to the critics who have scorned them and the cynics who have written about the Ashes as if it had become an Australian sinecure.

Injections of humility are in order for you, for me and for all the world who have changed the subject of cricket in conversation, who have stuck knives in the back of a group of cricketers who had more up their sleeve than anyone could ever have believed. They are men who demonstrated their character when it was most desperately needed, keeping alive hopes of drawing the series.

This Australian summer of sport is alight again now, marauded as it has been by the tragedies of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race. Australians, who revere sport, needed a lift wherever, whoever it came from and this magnificent match has done what it can to brighten the spirit of the country. Australians do not mind as much as they pretend that England have won; many are privately pleased. It's game on again, so raise a glass back home for the glorious improbability of it all.

On Monday I wrote that the bowling in support of Darren Gough was not up to scratch. How Dean Headley and Alan Mullally turned that idea on its head. How gallantly Headley stuck to his task as the long, late afternoon wore on; how cleverly Mullally worked the Waugh brothers over without capturing either wicket as his due prize. Yesterday's Headley is the one who takes hat-tricks for Kent; yesterday's Mullally is the one who wins championships for Leicestershire. These tall, slim but deceptively strong bowlers pinned Australia to the wall and showed us why the selectors were so sure in the first place.

What a day of it was for Mullally. Runs to begin with, incorporating joyful high jinks with his bat against Glenn McGrath; sharp, athletic fielding to follow, fielding that had Australians asking if he was the same bloke they had been watching for weeks; and bowling that will shut up the locals until the New Year is upon us. Mullally, the duck-maker, turned Mullally the match-maker . . . his 16 runs were more than the total difference between the teams.

What a performance from the previously uncertain Dean Headley who came back from a hammering in the first innings to rise above another loose start and trap Michael Slater plumb in front, to see Mark Waugh nicely caught at slip, to deal swiftly with Darren Lehmann and Ian Healy and to add two of the tail to his impressive list of victims. If Headley were to always bowl with such fire, his future would be cast in stone.

None of this though could have happened without England's pivotal cricketer, without the effervescence and sheer never-say-die attitude of Darren Gough. Had England not had Gough in this match they could have forgotten about it. He is the catalyst, a cricketer who wins positions with his personality. This makes him irresistible and yesterday, in an emotional and epic charge to victory, he inspired the whole England team to become, for a day, irresistible too.

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