The Botham Report

The statistics do not lie. England’s ten-year record shows that we cannot compete against the best Test playing nations in the world. When we win, we win against New Zealand and India. But we’re quite capable of losing to anyone.

English cricket is in crisis, of that there is no doubt. Not only are England’s performances on the field in international and Test cricket simply not good enough, but the county clubs are living in a fool’s paradise if they believe that they can exist through county cricket alone. During 1996, of the eighteen county cricket clubs, eleven received more than half their income from the Test and County Cricket Board from Test match receipts and television revenue. In the case of Derbyshire and Glamorgan, the figure they received was seventy per cent.

The counties depend for their survival on the England team performing properly, performing well and winning. If they continue to languish near the foot of the table of international cricket rankings, then it’s not only sponsors like Tetley who will switch off.

The new England and Wales Cricket Board was able to broker a deal with Vodafone, to fill the gap caused by Tetley’s withdrawal, but no one inside the Board was in any doubt that it was only the presence of MacLaurin at the head of the game that encouraged Vodafone, of which he was a non-executive director, that English cricket was worth the gamble. Nor should they be under any illusions that unless things change substantially for the better, this may be the last big-money payday of its kind.

By the start of the 1998 summer season no sponsors had been announced not only for the new national league and Super Cup tournaments in 1999, but also for the experimental triangular one-day tournament with South Africa and Sri Lanka for that very season. And perhaps most damagingly no sponsor to replace Texaco, the company who had poured vast sums into one-day internationals since 1984.

If the results of England’s national team do not start to improve hugely and quickly, it is not merely the sponsors who will start to switch off.

Indeed whether or not the ECB succeeds in its bid to have Test cricket de-listed and put on the open market, when the Sky TV contract worth £60m is up for renewal, unless English cricket proves that it is serious about wanting to take the professional support seriously and take it forward with real and innovative change, I can imagine the following conversation taking place between the man chosen to replace MacLaurin after he has walked out in despair at the intransigence of the counties.

***

ECB man to Sky negotiator: ‘Would you mind awfully if we had that £60 million again, please?’

Sky negotiator to ECB man: ‘Sixty million for that? You must be joking. Come back when you’ve got something to sell.’

And then the game will be bankrupt.

I intend to trace how England’s fortunes have dipped over the past ten years since that excellent victory under Mike Gatting’s captaincy was achieved in 1986–87. I will highlight the mistakes, the arrogance, and the misjudgements that have plagued English cricket over the past ten years. I will discuss how counties have done a great disservice to the English national game by putting their needs ahead of the requirements of the Test side at most, if not all times. I will discuss the short-sightedness of those in charge of the English game in the past ten years of hurt. And I will suggest measures which I believe can be put in place immediately so that the job of rebuilding English cricket can start in earnest.

TEN YEARS OF HURT 1987–1997

INTRODUCTION

‘From the moment when 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.’

Winning the 1986–87 series against Australia down under should have created a platform from which England could seek to dominate world cricket for a decade.

Instead it might just have been the worst thing I and my colleagues 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.

ONE

FROM HEROES TO ZEROES

‘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.

What really riled Imran in 1987 was that although the TCCB had agreed to a request by the Indians, in that same summer of 1982, to have Constant taken off the list for their three-Test series with England, when the Pakistan management made the same request now they flatly refused on the grounds of prejudice. To a certain extent I can understand Imran’s feelings. Although it may have been feeble of the Board to bow to India’s wishes in 1982, not to comply with the Pakistan request was at best inconsistent and illogical and at worst bound to inflame any perceived sense of injustice they may have harboured.

The news of what had happened was leaked during the second Test at Lord’s, in which Constant was standing and he stood again in the final match at The Oval. Both times Haseeb Ahsan publicly criticised Constant over his umpiring and at one stage described him as ‘a disgraceful person’.

But this was by no means the only spark of controversy in a series that left everyone with a nasty taste in the mouth. Off the field there was trouble at Edgbaston during the third one-day international when some idiots, fuelled by booze and racial prejudice, fought with Pakistani youths on the terraces. Then in the first Test at Old Trafford, a rain-ruined match going nowhere, Pakistan managed to bowl 11 overs in an hour after tea on the second day. When Micky Stewart, the manager, commented on this, Imran reacted by saying: ‘We get slagged off and called cheats and I object to that.’ Then came the incidents at Headingley that some might say seemed to support the description Imran objected to. Both involved the Pakistan wicket-keeper Salim Yousuf.

After bowling us out for 136 in our first innings, Pakistan made 353 in reply. Chris Broad, whose batting in Australia the previous winter was a huge feature in our success, played at Imran’s second delivery and the ball brushed his left hand after he had removed it from the bat handle. The laws state that the hand has to be in contact with the bat for a catch to be given. Without the benefit of television replays the appeal from the bowler was probably made in good faith, but what made the dismissal so unsatisfactory from England’s point of view was that replays of the catch itself clearly showed that the ball bounced fractionally before arriving in Yousuf’s gloves. Still, no one was too put out at this stage. Sometimes keepers and slip fielders genuinely do not know whether or not the ball has arrived on the bounce and, when considering whether a guy has attempted to deliberately pull a fast one, most players will give the fielder or keeper the benefit of the doubt. There was no doubt at all, however, over Yousuf’s actions some time later. I edged a short delivery and instantly and instinctively looked around to follow the flight of the ball. I could see quite clearly that Yousuf dropped the ball, scooped it up again after it had hit the ground, then claimed the catch. I’m not proud of what I said to him, but it was a knee-jerk reaction in the heat of the moment. I called him, to his face, a cheat, although there might also have been a couple of adjectives thrown in for good measure. The umpire Ken Palmer intervened and had his say and I fully expected Imran to admonish his player for such a blatant offence which, after all, reflected no credit on him as captain. Nothing was forthcoming from Imran, although he did claim later that he would have reprimanded Yousuf had I not sworn at him!

All in all we were more than happy when the series was brought to a close, though disappointed with the 1–0 defeat, and in hindsight it would have been better all around had there been a cooling-off period of a few seasons before we met up again.

That was not to be, as almost immediately after the 1987 World Cup, in which we finished runners-up to Australia, Gatting led his men to Pakistan for a three-Test series, to be followed after Christmas by the Bicentennial Test with Australia and then a further three Tests in New Zealand.

And here is where Gatting and England were badly let down by the Test and County Cricket Board and most particularly by its chairman Raman Subba Row and chief executive A C Smith. It didn’t take a genius to work out that there were likely to be repercussions over what had happened that summer. To me, the fact that the Board did not see fit to try and prevent trouble before it started smacks of complacency.

Instead they dispatched the players with little more than a cheery wave and let them walk into a political minefield unprepared and unprotected, and when the explosions began they made a ridiculous hash of clearing up the mess. It was obvious that Pakistan were desperate to win, more so than usual because of their third successive defeat in a World Cup semi-final, this time to Australia and most importantly this time in Lahore, and by the time Gatting and company arrived rumours were rife that Haseeb Ahsan, by now a Board member and the chairman of the selectors, was intent on orchestrating revenge for having his request to remove Constant and Palmer ignored by the TCCB.

Tit for tat ensued when the Pakistan board ignored England’s protests over the appointment of the controversial umpire Shakeel Khan to stand in the first Test in Lahore and it did not take long for their dissatisfaction to boil over. England were convinced that several decisions had gone against them in the first innings; then at the start of the second Chris Broad decided to take matters into his own hands. Given out caught at the wicket by Shakeel Khan, Broad simply refused to walk and told all and sundry why. ‘I didn’t hit it,’ he said. ‘You can like it or lump it, I’m not going. I didn’t hit it and I’m not out.’ In fact, more than a minute elapsed before Broad was eventually persuaded by his batting partner Graham Gooch that no matter how unfair he thought the decision, it wasn’t going to be overturned.

That was bad enough, but after the game things really got out of hand. Quite clearly Broad’s actions were unpardonable and worth at least a heavy fine. But Peter Lush, the tour manager, driven no doubt by a sense of loyalty to his players, totally misread the situation. Instead of fining Broad he issued what he called a stern reprimand, then appeared tacitly to support the player’s actions by criticising the umpiring and calling for neutral officials. All of which gave Gatting the green light to stir things up even more after the match had ended in an Abdul Qadir-inspired defeat. ‘We knew what to expect,’ said Gatt, ‘but never imagined it would be so blatant. They were desperate to win, but if I was them I wouldn’t be very happy about the way they did it.’

When the players arrived at the Montgomery Biscuit Factory at Sahiwal to play a three-day match against the Punjab Chief Minister’s XI the mood darkened. Several of the players had nights they will never forget, however hard they try – wrapped from head to toe in clothes in order to keep the bat-sized mosquitoes at bay, they sweated and sweltered and never got a moment’s kip. And by the end of the experience the entire party were convinced that they were the victims of plain sabotage. Instead of laughing at their situation, they got more and more stroppy, to such a point that the slightest provocation was bound to lead to an explosion.

It came three deliveries from the end of play on the second day of the second Test in Faisalabad and involved Gatting and the umpire Shakoor Rana – a man whose reputation for upsetting visiting teams was established when Jeremy Coney, the New Zealand captain led his team from the field during the Karachi Test in 1984–85 in protest at his decisions – and the fall-out eventually led to Gatting’s removal from the position of England captain.

Gatting was first accused by Shakoor of moving a fielder without letting the batsman know, an allegation flatly denied by Gatting himself. According to Gatting and several fielders close to the incident, Shakoor then called the England captain a cheat and swore at him repeatedly. Gatting, fuelled by all the real and perceived injustices that he felt he and his side had had to put up with, swore back. While this made for gripping television, the behaviour of both men was wholly out of order.

By the following morning, the seriousness of the row became obvious when Shakoor refused to take the field unless and until he received a full apology from Gatting. Gatting, I understand, would have been happy to do so as long as Shakoor also apologised and plans were underway for a joint statement to be issued, until, wound up, it is believed, by the Pakistan captain Javed Miandad, who had taken over following Imran’s first official retirement, Shakoor changed his mind. Gatting would not apologise unilaterally so, with the two sides stuck in stalemate, a whole day’s play was lost.

When it became clear that the umpire would not allow the game to continue the England management and those at Lord’s had two options. The first was to bend over backwards and bow to whatever demands Shakoor imposed on them, even to the point of forcing Gatting to apologise against his will.

Coincidentally, the next day, the rest day in the match, was also the occasion of the TCCB winter meeting at Lord’s. Finally, understanding that the efforts of Lush to talk with high ranking Pakistan Board officials had come to nought, they issued the following statement:

‘It was unanimously agreed that the current Test match in Faisalabad should restart today after the rest day. The Board manager in Pakistan, Peter Lush, was advised of this decision and asked to take whatever action was necessary to implement it. In reaching their decision the members of the Board recognised the extremely difficult circumstances of the tour and the inevitable frustration for the players arising from those circumstances, but they believe it to be in the long-term interests of the game as a whole for the match to be completed. The Board will be issuing a statement on the tour when it is finished, but in the meantime the chairman and chief executive will be going to Karachi for the final Test next week.’

Peter Lush read the following statement:

‘The Test and County Cricket Board has instructed me as manager of the England team to do everything possible to ensure that this Test match continues today and that we honour our obligations to complete this tour of Pakistan. We have tried to resolve amicably the differences between Mike Gatting and umpire Shakoor Rana following their heated exchange of words which took place on the second day. We all hoped this could have been achieved in private and with a handshake. Umpire Shakoor Rana has stated that he would continue to officiate in this match if he received a written apology from Mike Gatting. The umpire has made it clear he will not apologise for the remarks he made to the England captain. In the wider interests of the game Mike Gatting has been instructed by the Board to write an apology to Shakoor Rana and this he has now done.’

[viz:

Dear Shakoor Rana,

I apologise for the bad language used during the 2nd day of the Test match at Fisalabad [sic].

Mike Gatting 11 Dec 1987]

The players had agreed to refuse to carry on if Gatt was forced to apologise but in the end settled for a strong statement of their own, expressing full support for Gatt and their anger at the Board for forcing him to act against his will.

The second option, which the Board did not take but to my mind should have done, was to tell the players to pack their bags and prepare to come home, while informing the Pakistan Board that unless they put a stop to all this nonsense by instructing Shakoor to issue his apology, they would call off the remainder of the tour.

Once back in England the Board should quietly have reminded Gatting of his responsibilities and told him that any further breaches of discipline from him and his players would result in the ultimate sanction of suspension.