The Shorter Wisden 2013 (24 page)

In any event, when Strauss’s team left for the West Indies for his first series as full-time leader, it was the only case in modern times of a captain – not a manager or coach
– being in overall charge of an England tour. In an emergency, Strauss was to decide. This was a measure of the chaos in English cricket after the sudden and simultaneous departures of
Pietersen and the coach Peter Moores.

Strauss, however, is a skilful juggler: he can keep three cricket balls on the go. He was lucky, too, in having Andy Flower, of like mind, elevated from batting coach to team director after a
caretaker role in the Caribbean. Even so, it was a magnificent achievement to regain the Ashes in 2009. Australia scored eight centuries to England’s two; Australia had three bowlers who took
20 wickets or more, England none; Australia averaged 40 runs per wicket, England 34. These stats add up to the biggest steal in Ashes history. And by The Oval, it was a patchwork that Strauss led
into the field: Andrew Flintoff was on his last legs, Alastair Cook and Paul Collingwood had played only one innings of note apiece, and Pietersen was not even there, absent injured since the
Second Test at Lord’s.

Yet Strauss took England over the line, leading from the front, changing the culture. For example, he instituted the practice after a day’s play of toasting a team-mate who had scored a
hundred or taken five wickets, following a brief speech by someone who volunteered. He understood the importance of celebrating as a side.

He had read up on Churchill before taking over, and learned from Vaughan how to put his players at ease so they performed their best. Still, Strauss was a born leader. He did not have to raise
his voice: everyone listened because he was so clear in thought and word. Graeme Swann, who stood at second slip alongside him, said: “It was a calming, almost fatherly feeling to know that,
in the middle of a maelstrom, he would make the right decision.”

Strauss was manifestly not in it for his own glory: it was typical that the England record he set was for the most catches (121) by a non-wicketkeeper, which benefited the team far more than his
reputation. He was in it to instil his values and beliefs about what was best for England – but only after listening, not dictating. He had a sense of humour, at least until the job weighed
him down in 2012, and therefore of perspective. He never forgot what a privilege it was to represent what became his country from the age of six, or the sacrifices his family made. His manners were
always exemplary: he was never confrontational, never thought himself above the law, never looked down on anyone. He would talk with, and ask a polite question of, even the most anorakish England
fan. And he became statesmanlike in his pronouncements about wider issues, such as match-fixing, or those beyond sport.

Cricket was not an end in itself. He did not love batting like, say, his former partner Marcus Trescothick, which is why he retired from all cricket as soon as he had finished with England. For
him, cricket was the means for undertaking challenges and stretching himself. It could have been another sport. When his prep-school headmaster sent a letter to the warden of Radley College, Dennis
Silk, about the 11-year-old preparing to enrol there, he wrote four pages on the promising rugby of this young fly-half. Only as a postscript did he add: “He also has the makings of a useful
cricketer.”

It was this love of a challenge which enabled Strauss to compose two or three of the most valuable innings ever played for England. His 129 in the deciding Oval Test of 2005 kept them in the
game, when no other specialist batsman made 50 in their first innings: typical, again, that everyone forgets Strauss and recalls Pietersen’s 158 in their second. His 161 at Lord’s in
2009 gave England the psychological lead; and they were soothed by his brace of 55 and 75 at The Oval in the last Test. So long as Strauss was in, England were winning on all these momentous
occasions. One false move and they would assuredly have lost the match and series; yet Strauss walked the tightrope while millions watched, without looking down.

Once Strauss got the team culture right, everything flowed from there – like hanging wallpaper properly from the picture rail. His record as England’s Test captain by the start of
2012 was 21–5. He had led England to No. 1 in the rankings by supplanting India 4–0. Sir Leonard Hutton and Michael Brearley, if you count the 1978-79 tour of Australia during World
Series Cricket, had been the only other England captains to win Ashes series home and away (Percy Chapman won the Oval Test of 1926 after Arthur Carr had drawn the first four, then won again in
Australia). But they played when England were the only country with a professional domestic circuit. Strauss made them No. 1 on a level playing field.

Self-doubt set in last year. Trying to retain their status – an arithmetical calculation – may have distracted England from winning the next Test. His playing of spin improved after
the 3–0 defeat by Pakistan in the UAE – and he was already the only England batsman to score two centuries in a Test in Asia – but the mental side was more important to him than
technical competence. He felt he was past his prime; and he had shown by resigning the one-day captaincy after the 2011 World Cup that he would never linger once he had concluded he had given his
best.

He was still enthused by the problem-solving side of captaincy, at which he was masterful. But he felt worn down by attending not only to every player, but to all the members of the management
team, and had too little energy left for his own game. And that was before Pietersen rocked the boat with his “provocative” texts to the South African tourists, so that instead of
concentrating on squaring the series at Lord’s and celebrating his 100th Test, it was back to fire-fighting. Of all England captains, Strauss did not deserve his end to be like his
beginning.

Only Hutton, from my reading of England’s history, has had such a beneficial effect. He took over in a similar state of chaos in 1952, as both the last resort and the first professional
captain since the 19th century. England had been thumped by Australia since the Second World War, and had thumped no one in return, yet he transformed them into the team of the 1950s. Both Hutton
and Strauss conserved runs in the field, identified players of inner strength, and built a team in their own image.

Both were criticised for being too cautious. Let Strauss speak for both in response: “Based on my own experience, if you starve batsmen of runs they will get edgy, and are likely to get
themselves out. That was my philosophy, but if a bowler came up and said, ‘I want an extra catcher,’ I would say, ‘Perfect, let’s go along with it.’ Normally, though,
the bowler hated going for runs. Jimmy Anderson, for example, felt his best way was to starve batsmen, and the way to get the best out of a player is to let him do what he wants. You don’t
tell Jonathan Trott to score more quickly, because he averages 50 and knows what he’s doing.

“It’s very easy for commentators and the public to say, when the ball flies through fifth slip: ‘You should have had a fielder there.’ But that is a bit facile. It is
your strategy that wins you games and series, and the most important part of captaincy is to create an environment in which you make best use of the players you have.”

Hutton and Strauss: archetypal northern pro and southern amateur type. Poles apart on the surface but, from what I saw when ghosting them, very similar: both outwardly calm, quiet and shrewd
problem-solvers who knew their own mind and the direction in which England’s cricket should head. I like to think of it as an endorsement, or seal of approval, that Hutton’s grandson
Ben was Strauss’s best man.

When Hutton looked back on his captaincy, after half the Establishment had hoped he would fail so that an amateur could be reinstated, he used to say, with the pauses that were characteristic of
his speech: “I never... I never wanted... I never wanted to make... a smell.” And, miraculously in this age of intense media scrutiny, Strauss did not do so either: there was no howler,
no on-field incident that went undefused, no gesture to any umpire or opponent, not a single word out of place in a press conference or captured on a stump mike. He was dutiful, and selfless in his
service to his players and country, until the last.

Scyld Berry, editor of
Wisden 2008–11,
is the cricket correspondent of the
Sunday Telegraph,
where he ghosted Andrew Strauss’s
column.

FAREWELL (3): RICKY PONTING

G
IDEON
H
AIGH

“Catch, Ted,” said Ricky Ponting. “Catch, Ted.”

It was late in Australia’s morning training session ahead of next day’s Perth Test against South Africa. The small knots of onlookers had moved on; only a handful of players
remained. Still in his pads, Ponting was sitting on a bench after a long stint facing net bowlers and throwdowns, and watching a helmeted Ed Cowan practise his short-leg catching with coach Mickey
Arthur. “Catch, Ted,” he would repeat as each hit went in. “Catch, Ted.”

Nothing so unusual about that. In his long career, Ponting had made a habit of being among the last to leave training. Except that, unbeknown to those beyond the team and their immediate circle,
he had just a couple of hours earlier confided that this, his 168th appearance – equalling Steve Waugh’s national record – would be his farewell Test. It remained at that stage
Australian cricket’s best-kept secret. “Catch, Ted,” he repeated. “Catch, Ted.”

After one last surveillance of the practice area, Ponting shouldered his backpack, tucked two bats under his arm, and began wending his way to the dressing-room – the same one from which
he had emerged 17 years earlier, a fresh-faced youngster of 20, to make his Test debut against Sri Lanka. Twenty minutes later, it was official. Amid a gathering sense of anticipation and occasion,
Ponting walked into a room in the bowels of the WACA, accompanied by his wife, his daughters and finally his team-mates, who ringed the back wall. There had been tears earlier, Ponting admitted:
“I tried to tell them a lot, but I didn’t get much out. As I said to the boys this morning, they’ve never seen me emotional, but I was this morning.” Now he was more
composed, and there was relatively little theatre, certainly when compared to the lusty salaams that accompanied the departures of his eminent contemporaries Steve Waugh and Shane Warne. Fifteen
minutes later, the journalists were composing their obsequies. It had all been disarmingly matter-of-fact – very much the Ponting vein.

And thus did an era pass that had been a long time in the fading: the era of Australian dominance, of which Ponting, and not merely his bustling, bristling batting, but his hairy-armed,
spitting-in-his-hands presence, had been a personification. Australia had ceded their No. 1 Test ranking in August 2009, and their No. 1 one-day ranking three years later. Since then, all that had
remained had been Ponting – and now he, too, was to go.

He had opened up in that time a sizeable gap between him and the next-highest Australian Test run-scorer, Allan Border. And even if his form had been more variable than of yore, an Australian
order with his name in it could not help bear a strong look; he drew, of course, on a massive estate of international runs in all conditions and all climes. But the clock had been running down. He
had passed the captaincy on to his dauphin, Michael Clarke, with promising results. Yet the wins were coming harder, and wins were what mattered to Ponting above all else.

“Seriously,” he had said to Cowan just before the Sheffield Shield final earlier in the year, “you don’t really think I give a toss about hundreds, do you?” Cowan
had joked to Ponting about the possibility he might emulate Sachin Tendulkar and score a hundred international hundreds. In reply, Ponting had enumerated all the trophies and garlands Australia had
won in his career – a lengthy list. Winning: it wasn’t everything, but to Ponting it had always been the main thing.

The Test would not be kind to Ponting in either individual or collective terms. He was pushing string uphill with his batting, and made only four and eight. He looked on in the field as
Australia gave up 569 in South Africa’s second innings. The tributes flowed almost for the game’s duration. An especially moving one came on the final day, when South Africa’s
captain Graeme Smith formed his fielders into two lines so as to applaud him to the wicket, partner Cowan joining in; when he was out, every member of the visiting team went to him individually to
shake his hand; there were further impressive displays of cricketing confraternity as the game ended. But you got the feeling Ponting would have swapped them all for a win, even just for a few
extra runs.

If desire could be bottled, it would be distilled from essence of Ponting. Sometimes in his career, more of that had seeped out than even he could handle. He had a way of remonstrating with
umpires that recalled the Mike Gatting school of diplomacy, although it often looked worse than it was: Ponting tended to be a barrack-room lawyer rather than a potty-mouthed pouter. The first
thing he expressed when he sat down at the end of the match, in the same room in which he had started it, was his disappointment at the result and regret that he had not made a few more: “It
has been a hard week, and we haven’t got the result we were after and I haven’t got the result I was after.” The desire was still there; it’s just that the capabilities
could no longer stretch to the same height.

Now he was prepared to take questions about his career, about which he had earlier been reticent. His daughter Emmy was sitting on his knee and, in the way little children have of objecting
passively to their parents doing something when they should be available for play, stuck her fingers in her ears. Everyone else in the room, though, was spellbound. Normally, press conferences take
place in a fairly formulaic fashion: they pretend to answer; we pretend to listen. Ponting’s press conferences, though, were not like this. He was one cricketer who always gave straight
answers to straight questions, and the impression of having thought about them. This was no exception. And as he spoke, there was otherwise complete silence. You could almost hear the tape
recorders rolling.