Apparently England went to New Zealand in 1997 and the below happened, which was quite interesting. Good video if you like watching Alec Stewart playing ludicrously elegant shots, which I do. Oddly I can almost remember every innings of the 93/4, 94/5 and 95/6 winter tours, but I couldn't even have told you who we played in 97 before I stumbled on this, while clicking around Rob Moody's awesome archive. I guess I must have discovered girls, or weed, or something that year. Anyway, looks like I missed out.
We had so many players who, on song, looked fucking amazing during that period. That made the fact we were rubbish harder to take. Look at the Tufnell spell in the second innings of the first Test. And he averaged about 40 with the ball? Ridiculous. And that comment by Botham about 7 mins in. Jesus. Sums up everything that was wrong with our cricket at that time.
We had so many players who, on song, looked fucking amazing during that period. That made the fact we were rubbish harder to take. Look at the Tufnell spell in the second innings of the first Test. And he averaged about 40 with the ball? Ridiculous. And that comment by Botham about 7 mins in. Jesus. Sums up everything that was wrong with our cricket at that time.
This series immediately preceded the 1997 Ashes, which remains the quintessential demonstration of how 11 good individual players can add up to a fucking shit team when there's no coherent strategy in place to get them to gel and iron out mistakes. Won the first test, drew the second, then got bummed for three matches. (The dead-rubber sixth counts for shit.)
ReplyDeleteAs you say, the players were brimful of talent but they kept making the same mistakes in every test: Atherton's tendency to have a nibble early on, Stewart's utter haplessness against spin, Crawley's general fragility, etc etc etc.
More than that, though, you never had the sense of the side pulling together as a unit. Stuart Broad made this point very well in a piece he (ghost) wrote for the Mail this week -- one of the main reasons England are so successful now is that the bowlers bowl as a unit, allowing them to build pressure consistently over after over. Watching England in the 90s, far from supporting the guy at the other end, Caddick and Gough looked like all they cared about was outdoing each other.
On a side point, interesting to hear Mark Nicholas commentating on this and sounding like a 'normal', if slightly anodyne, posh commentator rather than the pseudo-Wodehousian oaf that bounces around our screens nowadays.
Interesting, and I totally agree...I found that 97 Ashes series fascinating. After the first Test, in which we played to our absolute peak and the Aussies looked slightly undercooked, Glenda absolutely tore through us at Lord's before the Test was rained off. The Aussies then beat us convincingly but every time there seemed to be key chances (remember Thorpe dropping Elliot at Headingley?) before Steve Waugh or Ian Healy or some other bastard would make a match-winning ton. In the end 3-2 was actually quite fair. That last Test showed Tufnell/Caddick at their best - with the pressure off him and on the opponents.
ReplyDeleteAgree entirely about Gough and Caddick. In their own way I imagine both were pretty difficult characters in the dressing room.
That said, I often wonder about the concept of bowling as a unit rather more than I do about batting. You can bat as a unit as England do now - openers/3 get the team through the tricky bit, middle order look to accelerate, lower order bat even more aggressively. So it has tactical significance.
But if all of your bowlers are just bowling well or a couple are bowling well at the same time - isn't that basically bowling as a unit? That said I remember when I was a kid at school me and an off spinner always liked to bowl in tandem - I don't like too long a break between my overs, I always felt that we posed totally different challenges as bowlers, I made a bit of rough for him to bowl into etc...but ultimately it just came down to us doing what we'd be trying to do anyway - hit a consistent line and length.
I suppose fundamentally it's about all the bowlers focusing on accuracy as a group. But then the best bowlers have always been accurate. Tricky one.