The perfect honeymoon
At the end of a celebrated year for English cricket Matthew Hoggard takes Emma John through the highs before the lows
At the end of a celebrated year for English cricket Matthew Hoggard takes Emma John through the highs before the lows
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Matthew Hoggard screws up his eyes and wrinkles his nose. It is the thing he does when he is about to make an understatement. "It's been..." he pauses, here it comes "... an interesting year." He smiles, remembers back to where it all began. "This time last year we would have been on honeymoon in Malaysia." He and Sarah have just celebrated their anniversary with a trip to the Maldives.
Those two trips have bookended a period more significant, more hair-raising, more wonderful than any that English cricket has known for decades. As we nurse our shattered nervous systems back to health, it is easy to forget there was life before the Ashes. "People are already talking about t'next sodding Ashes as well," grumps Hoggard. "It's ridonculous." (Yes, that really is what he said.)
Beginnings
The little urn has been stalking England ever since they boarded the plane to South Africa in November 2004. Looking back, there is something very familiar about that winter series, the way that in every Test the advantage boomeranged back and forth until you wanted Jon Snow to appear and tell you what it all meant.
Hoggard believes the experience helped form a crucial part of England's Ashes success. "There's always that little opportunity when the game's in the balance and it takes one team to seize the moment, to come out on top," he says. "Australia have been very, very good at that over the last four years, knowing when whoever wins this next session wins the game. Thankfully after coming away and winning you instinctively know when that moment comes, when to put your foot on the pedal."
Sometimes, even winning was not good enough - remember Michael Vaughan calling England's victory in the first Test "shoddy"? - and the personal workload was high for Hoggard, the designated donkey of the bowling attack. With back-to-back Tests (including one in the furnace of Durban that gave a new meaning to the phrase Christmas sweater), and Jacques Kallis superglued to the crease, he might have had a face as long as Angus Fraser. But no. "Although it was a very tough series, it wasn't so stressful," Hoggard remembers. "Maybe because it was away from home. You didn't have all the English papers, and English people coming up to you in the streets saying `What's going to happen tomorrow?' The pressure was more on South Africa than us." Off-field he hung out with old team-mates from the days he wintered with Free State. "I spent a lot of time with friends I haven't seen for years. It was nice to catch up," he says, then laughs. "And to tell them that we're beating them in the Tests." He saw to that, of course, with his nine wickets at Johannesburg.
Lest we forget, the Ashes was not England's only piece of history in 2005. That series win against South Africa was their first there for 40 years. And the best news was, England had not peaked. "We knew we weren't playing at our best," says Hoggard. "It was nice to come away thinking, `If we're not playing at our best when we win this, what's it going to be like when we actually do hit the top?'"
Gladiators and divas
England were never going to discover the answer against Bangladesh. Gladiator games traditionally need a warm-up act and here were the Christians being thrown to the lions, an easy feast for seam bowlers. Does he have any fond memories of that series? He chuckles. "End of it. I had an ankle injury going into the second Test and I was in a little bit of pain so I was just relieved when it was finished and I didn't have to bowl."
Australia arrived like a diva, trailing scandals and haughty asides, before tripping up on their own skirts. They never even reached tepid in their warm-up matches, then lost to Bangladesh in their first NatWest game. Yet there followed a one-day series fraught with meaning. A tie in the Lord's final confounded commentators and bamboozled bookies. The NatWest Challenge, otherwise known as Jason Gillespie's rehab, seemed grounds to have the ECB charged with treason. Hoggard, left out of the squad, missed it all. He shrugs in that affable way and says it is not as if he missed much in the dressing room: "It's like soaps. If you watch one of them you know everything that's going on." Maybe so but he soon added his own plot twist. He has claimed that his musings on Glenn McGrath's antiquity were over-hyped but they were still calculated to wind the Aussies up.
Did he regret them when McGrath took a devastating 5 for 21 on the first day? It is the only time Hoggard gets slightly snappy. "Not at all. I still stand by them," he says. "I didn't say anything about the first Test. He was fit as a daisy then. Glenn McGrath over five Tests is not a spring chicken any more. If you get into his third or fourth spell in the innings, then he's not as potent as he is in his first or second."
The irony was that after all the pre-match tension Lord's was the least interesting of the series, the unwelcome ghost of England past. "Fine time to not play very well," agrees Hoggard. "We knew people were thinking same old England, talk the talk but don't walk the walk." One bookmaker was now offering odds of 50-1 for an England Ashes victory. Within a couple of hours the deal had disappeared. Whether Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh got in no one knows.
The last days
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Ten days later, at Edgbaston, cricket had become an extreme sport. "The closer and closer they got you thought shit, how the f*** have we lost this?" As Brett Lee and Michael Kasprowicz bore down on the victory total, Hoggard was aware of a weird new feeling. He did not know if he wanted to bowl or not. The decision was made for him - warmed up twice, he was never thrown the ball. Looking back, he wishes he had been. "You're either the hero or the villain but give me the chance of being the hero."
That is a key element of the way England works now, he says. It is a team of 11 potential heroes. "It's not the same two or three people performing every time to win us games. Everybody over the last 18 months has won us a game. Nobody gets jealous, nobody gets pissed off that somebody else has done it rather than them. It's just fantastic team spirit that nobody cares. If you're having a lean spot, you know it'll be your day tomorrow."
As England celebrated their dramatic win, the Australian team knocked on their dressing-room door. "They came to say `well done' with a few beers and I thought, `We've got their respect.' In Australia they were quite arrogant and England were `just another side that we're steamrolling' but now, coming into our dressing room, they knew that we could stand on a level footing. That helped me quite a lot, thinking, `They know that we can actually beat them'."
But that knowledge brought a previously unknown expectation and pressure. Hoggard, normally "a very chilled out, stress-free sort of person" became a man even his wife had never met before. "Very annoying," is how he describes his Ashes persona. "I'm a quiet person anyway, so when I'm stressed I'm even more quiet - and very rude and sarcastic."
Sarah followed the team to each game throughout the turbulent summer. She helped to bring an element of normality into an otherwise surreal three months. "We were on the front page, back page, middle page," says Hoggard. "It was difficult when everybody was talking about it. You did think about it most days." He tried to switch off as much as possible, even missing the Edgbaston party to snatch a day at home between the back-to-back Tests.
Old Trafford's final day offered the flip-side to Edgbaston's breathless thrill. Now, as England swooped for a game that had been rightfully theirs since bowling Australia out 142 behind, the tailenders had the final say. "It was devastating," says Hoggard. "I think I'd have preferred to lose by a long way than get so close and not win. Because the emotion ... you're going in expecting to win and it's such a massive disappointment when you don't get there." And yet, as they watched Lee and McGrath celebrate their escape, something magical happened. "That's the moment when we realised we could actually win the Ashes."
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Endgames
Talking to Hoggard about Trent Bridge is like talking to a war veteran about Dunkirk. You get the impression that part of him is still there. "That last afternoon was absolutely horrid. We were chasing something shit like 130 but I knew there was going to be a twist in the tail. Everyone could tell. So I went in and hid in the physio's room getting Kirk to treat every part of me that didn't need treating. Just to try and not watch the cricket. And every cheer ... " He cranes his head out of an imaginary window, then breathes a sigh of relief. "It's four. Then `wooooah' - it's a wicket.
"Waiting to bat was horrendous. Nervous as hell, white as a sheet. But as soon as I went out on to the pitch it was just, oh, piece of piss, we only need 12 or 16 or whatever and I knew that - this sounds very cocky - but I knew that we'd do it. I knew I'd still be there. It was such a funny feeling. Nerves just went as soon as I crossed the line. The crowd, everything, was out of it. It was just ball, bat, leave it, hit it." He giggles. "And let Ashley score the runs."
His own shots - a clipped two and the cover-driven four that as good as ended the game - he is still replaying with his imaginary bat. Beers were rushed out on to the field in cool boxes. "We did go a little bit crazy, through relief mainly. Two-one up in the Ashes, who'd have f***ing thought?" The series was already an epic, the three-movie deal with Peter Jackson a formality. Now it just needed the big finish. And a Hollywood audience would have settled for nothing less than Kevin Pietersen's one-man-against-an-army onslaught. Not that Hoggard saw much of it. He had enough practice at this final-day malarkey to know he could not cope with the view from the balcony. "Me and Giles were playing cards out in the back room."
Of the infamous drinking marathon that followed victory, Hoggard's memory is a tad faulty. He does, however, remember that Duncan Fletcher wore a rare smile, before going to bed early. "You don't want your boss there when you're celebrating," he jokes. "It's like taking your teacher with you. Go on, bugger off!"
He is pragmatic about the commercial demands that have flooded his - and every England player's - diary since and game enough when a photographer tries to coax a trademark grin out of him with "You're just a big teddy bear, aren't you?" Instead of throwing him out of the window Hoggard hides his reflex grimace in a smile, double-checking that the sponsor's label he wears is as visible as possible.
But all this attention is not really his cup of tea and he prefers disappearing into the quiet anonymity of village life. "You're easily forgotten. I tend to keep myself to myself and I'm not that recognisable." With that hair? Yeah, sure. But even if he does not want to wallow in the glory, it must be nice to wake up thinking of the little urn, and a history-making year. He giggles and says it took him about two days to put the Ashes behind him. "I can forget things very quickly."
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