could have done for the game in this country because the successes we achieved under Mike Gatting’s captaincy merely served to paper over the cracks.
The feeling created by our performances down under, that everything in the English garden was rosy, turned out to be an illusion. Complacency was allowed to set in and complacency is death.
Australia reacted to their defeat by setting out long-term, clearly-defined goals to revive their fortunes at international level. They had lost to the Poms just once too often for comfort, realised a plan needed to be devised and stuck to it. Their rise to the status of unofficial world champions demonstrates just how well they put their strategy into practice.
We, on the other, hand proceeded as usual merely to look from one Test match and one Test series to the next.
Indeed, it was not until Mike Atherton was appointed captain to succeed Graham Gooch in 1993 that any kind of long-term selection strategy came into play. Atherton was appointed with a mandate for change, carte blanche to pick young players for the 1993–94 tour to West Indies and let them develop individually and as a team, no matter what short-term setbacks they might suffer. How long did the plan last? Three Test matches. In came Raymond Illingworth as Chairman of Selectors and, over the next two seasons, back came Graham Gooch, Mike Gatting and John Emburey as players. There’s long-term strategy for you.
From the moment England secured the Ashes back in 1987, it took ten years to persuade the men in charge of our game that change had to come. Ten years of complacency. Ten years of waste. Ten years of hurt.
When I review the performances of the England team during the decade in question one thing is immediately obvious, namely the apparently huge difference in the level of the talent available to England as opposed to that emerging elsewhere.
To the naked eye, the difference in quality is startling. While a steady stream of competent batsmen and the occasional high-class act like Mike Atherton have emerged, England have failed to produce one consistent world-class Test bowler, pace, swing, seam or spin, for a decade. When you look around world cricket the difference between the top cricketing nations and England in this respect tells it own story.
Just ponder this list of world-class Test match winners operating during the period in question – Shane Warne, Merv Hughes, Terry Alderman, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Mushtaq Ahmed, Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh, Allan Donald and Anil Kumble – and compare them with the best England have had to offer.
But great players are made as well as born. It is clear that, for too long, England players have reached Test level in spite of our domestic system rather than because of it. Thank goodness Lord MacLaurin understands that success is not merely cyclical and that change is absolutely fundamental for the future well-being of cricket in this country. In Raising the Standard, his plan to take English cricket back to the world summit, all those measures he is seeking to implement below first-class level demonstrate his clear sightedness and vision and, given a late change of mood among the most reactionary clubs, at the time of writing the possibility existed that he might even be given a mandate for real change.
But my reflections on England’s struggles in the period 1987–1997 also concern the mistakes, the short-sightedness, the selfishness and the plain incompetence of those individuals who, despite all the constraints placed on them by the shortcomings of the county game, could and should have made a difference.
‘It was all a total fiasco. From Ashes winners eighteen months earlier England ended the summer of 1988 as the laughing stock of world cricket.’
It had started so brightly. Mike Gatting’s success in leading England to victory on the 1986–87 tour down under represented a tremendous personal achievement. Written off as ‘can’t bat, can’t bowl, can’t field’ no-hopers during the warm-up matches, we stuffed those words down the throats of our critics once the serious business started and won the Test series 2–1. There is no doubt that Gatting’s captaincy was a major factor in the transformation.
Emphatically a player’s captain, Gatt understood right from the start that if you treat cricketers like adults, giving them enough leeway when appropriate and a few hard words when necessary, you are far more likely to gain their confidence and get the best out of them rather than by simply attempting to impose your will on them. Even when early results tended to suggest otherwise, he knew that there was no cause for alarm and certainly no need to panic, and he was comfortable with the knowledge that, in terms of preparation, most senior Test players know what is best for them and don’t need telling. Our results, winning the Ashes and the World Series competition, spoke for themselves.
Yet within little over a year after we returned from that wonderful tour, Gatting had been sacked and the England team thrown into turmoil. A year and a bit later he made the decision to turn his back on the England team by signing up for the 1989–90 ‘rebel’ tour to South Africa. The story of how Gatt fell from grace underlines the confusion and lack of leadership from the top that dogged our national summer game for the best part of a decade.
Ever since Ted Dexter led the first England party to tour Pakistan in 1961–62, there had been rumblings of discontent over the standards and motives of the home umpires. England won the first Test ever played between the two countries in Pakistan, but from that initial success until the present day, we have never won there again. Prior to England’s 1987 tour, no player or official had ever spoken out publicly on the subject, but a succession of England touring parties had considered this more than mere coincidence.
The build-up to the eruption that occurred at Faisalabad in the second Test of that 1987 tour had started during Pakistan’s visit to England to play five Tests during the previous summer.
The trouble began even before a ball was bowled, when the Pakistan team, through their manager Haseeb Ahsan, officially objected to the TCCB over the presence on the Test umpiring panel of Ken Palmer and David Constant. Constant had been in the bad books of the Pakistan captain Imran Khan ever since their previous visit to England in 1982, when Imran believed he made a poor decision in the deciding Test of a three-match series at Headingley that he was convinced cost his side the match.
I happened to be batting at the time the incident occurred. After having bowled Pakistan out for 275, we were heavily in the mire at 77 for four with Imran himself bowling beautifully in conjunction with their leg-spin wizard Abdul Qadir. I decided that the best form of defence was attack and took on Qadir and my approach paid off as I made 57 out of a stand of 69 with David Gower in just over an hour. My efforts to break free of the Pakistan stranglehold were frustrating for Imran and his players, and their mood was not helped when Qadir felt certain he had found the edge of Gower’s bat for a catch behind when he had made only seven. Had Gower gone then, Pakistan might well have seen off the tail and gone on to force victory. But Constant turned down huge appeals, Gower survived to make 74 and drag us to 256. I then took five wickets in their second innings of 199 and, set 219 to win, we got there by the narrow margin of three wickets, thanks in no small measure to the forty-two extras contributed by the Pakistan attack.
From where I was standing I honestly was not certain whether Gower had hit the ball or not, and neither, I am sure, could Constant have been. If he made a mistake, it was a genuine error, the kind that all umpires make because they are human. Imran saw it differently, as evidence, in effect, that he and his side were cheated by biased umpiring. Afterwards Imran hit out at Constant, claiming the decision had cost his side the match, and he carried those thoughts with him for the next five years.
