In 1995 Alan Wells was a man on top of his game. He had played for Sussex for 14 years and was adored by the fans, seemingly every season being mentioned as a possible England call-up, and seemingly every season just not quite doing enough. I reckon he'd have been a hero, had he played long enough. He was a dashing thumper of medium pacers, with something of Graham Gooch about his uncomplicated technique. The straight, full ball wasn't a potential wicket-taking delivery: it was in the slot and prone to going back over the bowler's head. Had he got in the team, his Herculean folds of hair would probably have meant he had the housewives' favourite role sewn up. He was the old head captain of the successful England A Tour to India, where the team remained unbeaten.
Finally, with England wishing to strengthen their batting, he got his call up at number 6 for the final Test of the series against the West Indies. This was something of a tradition of the time - a one-off chance for someone to prove themselves, and then get on the plane for the Winter tour.
Do you think people might struggle to perform under that pressure? 14 years of graft, of consistency, of making the right noises when asked about his England prospects, and it all came down to one chance (it was a flat pitch - England barely had a second innings) I remember sitting around and watching this, rooting for him, thinking about how nervous he must have felt, and Curtley Ambrose raced in.....and this happened.
Thing is, a good score might not have done him any good at that time. In 1994 Joey Benjamin played the last Test of the Summer, taking 4-45 against South Africa (a performance much overshadowed by Malcolm's 9-57 in the second innings, such that it's not to be found on YouTube). It got him a place on the plane to Australia, where despite numerous injuries, he carried drinks for the whole tour.
I don't even want to mention this one's name. I kind of feel like another searchable voice on the Internet saying how sad it is isn't what he wants, nor deserves.
I've been working through Trescothick's biography and was struck by these lines:
'Sometimes, watching from the other end, he would amaze you by doing things you never saw coming. He would shape to leave the ball, then, with hands as quick as a cobra's strike, blast it through midwicket for four. Why Dermot (Reeve, then Somerset coach) wanted to change his technique I'll never know, but that was the beginning of the end.'
There's little for me to say, other than that I've read and heard rather more than I saw. The stories suggest he really was destined to be one of the all-time greats. In the Ian Botham Stand they thought he was the best they'd ever seen. And some of them had seen Richards.
The stories also suggest the seeds of failure were always there. Atherton recounts walking out with him on his debut and the crowd cheering - he said 'That's the noise they'll make when you come back with a hundred,' and his response was 'They won't if I make 0.' To Atherton it's very telling. I guess it was, but then he failed. I think more than anything he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A few years later and he and Trescothick would have opened for county and country - I have no doubt.
Actually it was a recent chat in the curry house that lead me to that story. I played in that league briefly when I was 16. The standard was incredibly varied. One moment you'd face some geriatric, the next Stuart MacGill was bowling (admittedly that's a somewhat extreme example - fuck knows why he decided to play there. And yes since you ask, I faced one over and didn't get near a single ball). It was pretty tough, basically - the pitches were a bit crap for a start.
92.75! Ridiculous....and sad, I guess. I hope he's happy.
From Ranjitsinhji to D'Oliviera to Pietersen, one of our strengths as a nation has been our ability to assimilate and integrate the talents and styles of immigrants (I'm talking purely in cricketing terms, but evidently the 'How Cricket Makes You Left Wing' post isn't a million miles away). That tendency took a while to reach the upper echelons of the game.
For much of my childhood, English cricket was ruled with a stubborn conservatism. It's an attitude that drips from the top to the bottom. How many terrible coaches told a young CC and his schoolmates to stop getting their bowling spanked around with the words 'slow it down, and find your line and length', as if it's some sort of exercise like darts, totally ignoring the fact that rhythm, control in the action (which you don't get by thinking about it as you do it) and muscle memory are the keys to accuracy?
There is no greater embodiment of that tendency than my bete noir - Ray Illingworth. There's a possibly apocryphal story about Glenn Hoddle becoming exasperated at an England training session by his players' inability to carry out a volleying exercise he'd devised for them, and humiliating them by doing it for them. It's the kind of thing Illingworth would have done - a great player in his day and a good captain on the field, but those traits only served to rob him of any sense of the need to innovate. Why bother, when it worked for you?
It's almost too painful to go into his flaws in detail. Read Dermot Reeve's autobiography. Reeve (and Bob Woolmer) was winning almost every one day trophy going with Warwickshire in the mid-1990s and was called up to the England team for the 1996 World Cup. His teams won because they experimented. He's rated highly enough to be a coach in the IPL today - half the things you see there seem to have eminated from the teams he lead. Every player was encouraged to master the reverse sweep so they played it as well as the conventional one. They bowled slower balls every other delivery. They were obscenely good in the field.
Reeve had plenty to offer the England team. But Illingworth blanked him at a team meeting and that was the end of his input. Illingworth's attitude seemed to be that public opinion alone had got him into the team - what use were the thoughts of a mediocre medium pacer who did a bit of slogging down the order? Where Sri Lanka revolutionised the opening overs of the innings, where other teams opened with spinners and batted like the end was nigh, England opened the batting with Mike Atherton and the bowling with Peter Martin.
I'm aware this is quite a long preamble. Let's get to Devon Malcolm. Now, of course we all know how good he was when in the mood:
I remember watching this. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I couldn't take my eyes off the TV. It's still the most electrifying spell of bowling I've ever seen. Forms a nice contrast to the Asif clips: nine batsmen, all utterly terrified, beaten by nothing more than sheer pace.
Why couldn't he do it all the time? Why was such a colossal talent such a colossal failure (and he was - an average touching 40 is pathetic given the ability he had)? Well, he had a tendency to spray it all over the shop, of course. That's not the coach's fault. But a talented coach would have tried to find a way to recreate that spell. Instead, less than a year later, Malcolm was bowling a match-losing spell at the last wicket pair in the final Test against the very same team. Long-eared bunny rabbit Paul Adams and decentish keeper-bat Dave Richardson took him for runs all over the park. Evidently this played a part. That article is somewhat misleading. No, he wasn't racially abused in the BNP sense, it was just chummy Ron Atkinson-style insensitivity. Whatever, it didn't help.
Of course much of the blame lies with Malcolm himself. But my God, even aged 15 you could see how badly he was being mismanaged. He fell away at the point of delivery when he started his career. He fell away when he ended it. Jimmy Anderson's been coached through about 15 different actions in that amount of time.
More to the point, it was clear he should have been deployed in spells of three or four overs at most, with the remit to go and kill someone. If he went for runs in the process then, well, shit happens. Brett Lee was used in much the same way by Ponting. Of course it's a lot easier to let a quick off the leash when Glenn McGrath's going for bupkis at the other end, but if you're going to pick a bowler like Malcolm, you've got to accept the limitations.
Team psychiatrists - much maligned back then, not least by Illingworth, the sort of pig-headed old fart who couldn't have that soppy nonsense, of course - could have tapped into the well of anger and aggression that inspired him that magical night at the Oval. In more enlightened times, this is all the kind of stuff we did with Steve Harmison, to good effect for a while. It's a big, balls-out gamble, because if it doesn't work, you may as well not have picked anyone at all - and maybe it was easier given the other bowlers around Harmison, but that's certainly not why Malcolm never enjoyed such treatment.
It's just rarely, if ever, the English sporting way. We like the goalkeeper who isn't necessarily the best shot stopper, but at least he cuts out the howlers. Ultimately, we always seem to end up playing a big lad up front, and of course John Terry's a natural choice for captain. Mike Tindall has played more games for us than he would for most other countries. Kevin Pietersen (average: 48) has attracted much more opprobium than Atherton (average: 37) did in his whole career (I know there are plenty of mitigating factors behind the discrepancy but the point stands).
I remember one of Devon's last Tests: Edgbaston 1997. He was older and a little slower and he bowled a tight line at a slightly reduced pace and got some outswing, and did rather well. At heart I guess he was the bowler he'd always wanted to be that day. Within the 90s team culture, that extreme pace was nothing but a curse. In a way Dean Headley and Simon Jones - the Jimi Hendrixes or Jeff Buckleys of English fast bowling - are the lucky ones. They burned bright, they burned fast. Poor Devon ended up being Oasis. But it wasn't all his fault.
'Nearly man' is perhaps pushing it for a bowler who reached number 2 in the ODI rankings at one time. But like so many bowlers of the 90s, Mullally is best known for promising so much more than he delivered. We'd heard all about this guy before he made his Test debut, and it sounded exciting: a pacy chap with English nationality who'd played most of his cricket in Australia. Well, from the moment we saw him we knew there were some problems:
1. He really wasn't that fast.
2. He was left handed, but he didn't have an inswinger, which is almost essential. Instead he had the most useless of all balls, the outswinger delivered from over the wicket. It meant on the rare occasions he did get the ball in the off stump channel it usually veered away when it could have taken the outside edge (this did make him very economical, hence the ODI success). After a couple of predictably wicketless but cheap spells, he'd usually come round the wicket, by which time the away swing had dried up and everything drifted into the pads.
3. He couldn't bat or field.
And yet I loved Alan Mullally. The main reason was that, like every proud Australian Englishman, he had a bit of mongrel about him. He might not have been that good, but he wasn't going to let that stop him competing as hard as he could. It made a stirring counterpoint to the Caddicks and Tufnells who really should have been good, but rarely summoned the aggression they needed. He was the kind of guy who sarcastically wrung his hand in pain when Rahul Dravid, on 150 and mostly scored off him, didn't time a straight drive back at him. He bowled non-stop bouncers at Sachin Tendulkar no matter how many times he was obliterated out of the ground.
He averaged five with the bat. Look how he got out to Glenn McGrath, almost exclusively:
Where other players edged immaculately delivered leg cutters, Mullally tried to hook him for six. It's called backing yourself.
Ah, so much to love. If anyone bowled on John Crawley's legs, he'd put them away for four every single time, with the absolute minimum of fuss. He was the unequivocal master of the leg glance. Stick two men, three men, four men out on the leg side - whatever, he'd pick the gap. If they bowled anywhere outside off, he either left it, blocked it or got out. Never has there been a batsman with such a specific skill set.
Having started badly against South Africa, he came into the '94 Ashes side. The Aussies hadn't seen much of him and in the Third Test at Sydney he made a pair of 70s, all exclusively scored with the leg glance. Channel 9 showed his wagon wheel. It looked like a bicycle wheel with one spoke. The Aussies cottoned on, bowled everything outside off stump, and he barely scored a run.
In 1998 he was back in the team to play Sri Lanka. Muralitharan was at his peak. He'd not yet mastered the doosra, but his off break spun like a top. With the exception of Graeme Hick, no one else could get near him. There was only one shot you could play with the ball turning like into you that: the leg glance. So that's all Crawley did. He hit 156, almost entirely off his pads, and all in a losing cause. But then he was forced to play Australia again, who bowled outside off stump all the time, and that was that. Back to county cricket, where he suddenly looked a different player.
So much to love, so much redolent of 90s England cricket. He couldn't field for toffee. He was much fatter than a man his build should be. There was the lingering suspicion he was only in the team because he was the skipper's mate from school. The sight of him smoking a fag on the Lord's balcony. The entirely-predictable nickname ('Creepy').
But above all, the vital lesson: if you can do one thing well enough, it can take you a surprisingly long way.
Oh Mark. I know how good you were. I saw it at the Oval in 2007 for Surrey. It was a racial salad of an innings, a little bit of something from each of your heritages. You had the high left elbow English forward defensive. The subcontinental flick through midwicket from off stump. The Calypso smash over cover when you got a wide one. The Viv Richards 'don't bowl there to me' pull for six. God, it was beautiful.
Not that there's much evidence of that kind of stuff on YouTube. I expect most people, like me, turned the telly off when they saw you walking out for England with that worried look on your face.
"When I was 18 cricket was a game. I used to go in and try and hit Malcolm Marshall over the top. [He did so successfully, too.] Then it became a job as I became more seasoned and expected to perform. People look to you to produce. From the age of 21 I started every season thinking if I play well, I could play Test cricket. I put pressure on myself. But there were a lot of people with one Test cap. The axe could fall at any time. It was really tough. More recently I've realised I hadn't enjoyed the game as much as I would have liked and so I've been determined to enjoy the game more."
You know what Matthew Maynard, batting coach, told KP at lunch at the Oval in 2005? Just go out there and play your natural game. Ashes on the line, team struggling for a draw against the best team in the world, and he gives him a license.
It could - no, it should - have been you he said that to, old boy. You were just a couple of years too early.
