M Atheron: A job I held dear but knew I had to give up (29 Mar 1998)

29 March 1998

A job I held dear but knew I had to give up

By Michael Atherton

ON THE evening I resigned a couple of ex-England captains rang me at the team hotel, which was nice of them as there are only a certain number of people who know exactly how you feel in those circumstances. One of them was Ian Botham, who said that he had felt like a new man after he had resigned.

But I haven't felt any such feeling of relief. Relief implies that the captaincy was a real burden and I am keen to emphasise it was not. Inevitably you have more on your mind if you are the England captain, and that is a weight of sorts, but not a burden. The job was something which I held very dear for 4.5 years.

My overwhelming emotion was disappointment at losing the match and the series as well as the captaincy. I am disappointed that people's last Test memory of this winter will be our last seven wickets being blown away in Antigua for 26 runs, because the players deserve a much more favourable review. We had the chance to win three Tests - the two in Trinidad and one in Barbados - and not many teams who tour the West Indies can say that.

After the game I had a beer with Brian Lara. We go back more than 10 years as he captained West Indies in the Youth World Cup in Australia while I captained England, and we have always got on well. He agreed that the series had been such an even one that for England to lose 3-1 was cruel; but there you go.

I like to think that the England team now is a better one than when I took over, when we were losing matches which we should have saved. In 1993 Graham Gooch, David Gower, Mike Gatting and Allan Lamb as well as Botham were all coming to the end of their careers, and had to be replaced by rookies. Now we have a hard-core nucleus of the likes of Alec Stewart, Jack Russell, Graham Thorpe, Nasser Hussain, Angus Fraser, Phil Tufnell and Andy Caddick.

But one frustration of my captaincy is that we haven't really sustained anything over a considerable period of time. In other words we have enjoyed successful Test matches, while no one series stands out. We have had pockets of outstanding performances, followed by pockets of disturbingly poor performances.

This stems, I believe, from the nature of the players that England have. We have some very good, top-notch Test cricketers like the ones I have mentioned, but no one quite in the bracket of Lara or Curtly Ambrose. So we have to play consistently at our maximum over prolonged periods, and under my captaincy we haven't managed to do that. We can have three great sessions in a row, then a bad one if a great player like Lara or Ambrose inflicts one on us.

Yes, this inconsistency and inability to finish a game off has been the greatest frustration of my time as England captain, not Ray Illingworth, nor the ball-tampering issue, nor our system of county cricket. Bulawayo, Auckland, Trinidad, Old Trafford against New Zealand in 1994: we should have won 17 Tests at least, not 13.

The sort of cricket we must aim to play consistently was typified by the Barbados Test. We got to 400 in difficult circumstances, pulled together in the field and bowled them out for 260. It took a disciplined performance all day long to do that, and we must realise we don't have someone who can take five or six wickets in a session like Ambrose.

This nature of our team is part of the reason why I couldn't carry on as I was: England cannot afford any passengers not pulling their full weight. Mark Taylor went 20 or so Test innings without scoring a 50 but he had a team that was winning, and it's much easier to hide if your team is winning. Technically I am not playing any differently to how I've been doing for the last three or four years. So the cause of my lack of form has to be mental and connected to the captaincy. Several batting captains have struggled in recent times, like Taylor, myself and Richie Richardson, and Hansie Cronje, who hasn't made a Test hundred for a couple of years for South Africa.

This England team is a hard-working, disciplined outfit. Australia are undeniably stronger than us at the moment, but I am still adamant that we can compete with teams like the West Indies and South Africa. When conditions were even over here, we certainly lived with the West Indies.

When I took over, I thought I would have the chance to develop my own team. That was the brief I was given at any rate when I was made captain by Ted Dexter, who was chairman of selectors then, with Keith Fletcher the team coach and Dennis Amiss another selector.

Within a year Ray Illingworth was chairman of selectors, with Brian Bolus and Fred Titmus on the panel, and a year later the panel changed again, and now we have David Graveney in charge. My point is that we must have continuity at the top for there to be continuity and stability down below. Under the present regime there is every prospect of that being achieved.

During my stint as captain I've been fortunate to work with many people who have given so much to English cricket. Ted Dexter, whose initial phone call while I was in the Lake District sparked off my captaincy, was much maligned. In time it will be seen that he was a far-sighted, even visionary chairman of selectors, whose England committee has been reintroduced today.

Keith Fletcher was a much tougher man than people imagined and possessed a shrewd cricket brain. He is the best judge of a young cricketer I know, and I remember when Illy arrived on the scene and banged an early drum for Shaun Udal's off-spin, Fletch quietly and often said: "Crofty's your man for the future." David Lloyd is the coach I have had the closest relationship with: ebullient and fiercely loyal, everybody knows, but do they realise how committed and hard-working he is? England are fortunate to have such a coach.

Of course, many people talk of my relationship with Raymond Illingworth. Now I don't want to end on a bitter note, like many player-biographies do. Illy could be a difficult man to work with, but we had some enjoyable times as well. We often had different ideas about the way the team should develop. His insistence on playing an all-rounder at No 6 defied the resources we had. His relationships with players were sometimes soured by directing criticism through the media. I have always felt the direct way was best.

Illy was also a cricketer from a different generation, and while cricket does not change in the basics of batting and bowling, players are now given the back-up to help them make the most of themselves. There have been sports psychologists, physiotherapists and nutritionists and the rest of it, to give players the best opportunity to perform, ever since David Lloyd took over as coach.

As a former England captain - or even when I was the current one - it is not in my sphere to worry about our county system and whether it can produce those great cricketers which we lack or not. It is for our administrators to sort it out. All I can say is that our system produces mediocrity.

The on-field part of the England captaincy was the easiest. Mike Gatting always said that I should have captained Lancashire before England, but to my mind county cricket is a long way removed from Test cricket and often very defensive. So I was happy to learn on the job, as it were, and another frustration is one that occurs in other walks of life: that you have to give something up when you know a hell of a lot more about it than when you started.

One example is bowling. Four years ago I would look at Phil Tufnell, say, and ask if he was going to take five wickets in the next Test. Now I look at bowlers as a unit. Tuffers will be disappointed that he hasn't taken more wickets in this series but as I have tried to stress to him on this tour, his contribution has been much more. In Trinidad, when we won, and Andy Caddick took five wickets, Tuffers and Angus Fraser bowled a long time for very few runs against Jimmy Adams and Shivnarine Chanderpaul to create the pressure.

Something else which made a lasting impression on me was a dinner I had in Adelaide with Ian Chappell on the last tour of Australia. In the previous Test we had bowled on both sides of the wicket, and the fields that I was setting betrayed the fact that I was setting them for the bad ball. Now I don't worry if bowlers occasionally bowl badly - that is uncontrollable for a captain.

Captaincy is all about the right balance of attack and defence, and obviously you hope to get it right more often than not. If anything, I would say that I err on the over-attacking side, which wasn't the case four years ago. When I have a tricky decision, I ask myself: which is the attacking option? Or at least I did until last Tuesday.

I have always believed that at its heart good captaincy comes down to having respect. You need respect in three areas: as a player, as a decision-maker and as a human being. As a player you need to maintain your form; you hope your decisions are more right than wrong; and your dealings with players as people must be direct and honest.

Then you go about ensuring your team plays the kind of cricket you want it to play. I wanted my team always to believe they could win each and every game, but also to instil into them that if you can't win the match you need to have an 'over my dead body' attitude that you were not going to lose. I also wanted my teams to play hard but fair cricket, and it is sometimes disappointing when I hear people say that my teams were mean-spirited and ungenerous. I certainly don't play the game like that.

Off the field I regard the media side of captaincy with some indifference. By that I mean I understand that it is important for the captain to do his media duties as part of cricket's exposure, but what they say doesn't bother me or interest me at all. You only win with the media if you have a winning team. In Trinidad Brian Lara made a complete clanger by opening our second innings with Nixon McLean and Kenny Benjamin, not Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, but he got away with it.

I suppose I got resentful about certain sections of the media during the ball-tampering issue. That marked the end of the honeymoon period for me, and at 25 I was a bit naive. What surprised me most, though, was how the England captain has to be seen to be beyond reproach. On this tour the V-sign at Philo Wallace was one of those unfortunate things. A few verbals were flying in a pretty intense moment and it came out slightly wrong. On Tuesday night I had a drink with him and said I hadn't meant to stick two fingers in his face, and he said 'no problem'.

I do believe in socialising with the opposition, after playing hard on the field, and in saying 'well played' after someone has made a hundred. I wouldn't say I was mean-spirited, but I have never been showy. There was some media nonsense about me not applauding 50s or 100s but I was probably thinking about something else, and then when it became an issue I was stubborn enough not to do it for a time.

When I get home after this tour I will have to sit down and ask myself what my aims are: it might be the number of Tests I want to play, or the number of runs to score, or team goals. But I am certain that I want to score heavily for Lancashire for a start. I used to average over 50 for them, but as an England captain you don't have to make county runs to stay in the side. I also used to come back tired from Test matches, but as I am no longer captain I will have to make a stack of runs.

I would also like to play for England for the next two or three years, at the selectors' whim, and to play in every England side, Test and one-day. I want to score heavily again, not wash my hands and walk away.

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