From Gooch through to Cook, the men proud to withstand the opening salvo in England cause
Peter Hayter, The Cricket Paper’s esteemed correspondent, looks back over his years of reporting on England Test cricket around the world and identifies the greatest players over this period, starting this week with the opening batsmen
Graham Gooch
(Tests – 118. Runs – 8,900; 100s – 20; highest score 333; average – 42.58) Seemingly lugubrious by nature, and, when he let his moustache grow to Zapata length, in appearance, Gooch was the man to bat for your life.
England’s highest Test run-scorer, until recently overtaken by his protégé Alastair Cook, began his international career with a ten-ball pair against Australia in 1975.When he finished it, two decades later, he was rightly regarded as one of their all-time best.
Gooch’s path to greatness opened up when videos recorded by his first wife Brenda’s Auntie Grace, which showed him how much he was crouching and falling over towards the slips led to him working with the England coach Ken Barrington on changing his stance to upright, with bat raised. Purists hated it, but how it worked for him.
Amid further scepticism, this time from Test colleagues like Ian Botham and David Gower, Gooch also threw himself into a physical fitness regime designed to enable him to play at his best for longer and compile ‘daddy’ hundreds, including his England record 333 against India at Lord’s in 1990.
Gooch held most spinners in low regard and never attempted to hide that fact, his retirement after the 1994-5 Ashes tour hastened by his frustration at not being able to put Shane Warne in his place.
And in his pomp he dominated the world’s best quicks, as he did in his masterpiece, an unbeaten 154 out of 252 all out on a juicy Headingley pitch in 1991, against a West Indies attack comprising Malcolm Marshall – whom he regarded as his toughest opponent – Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh and Patrick Patterson, his brilliance helping England win by 115 runs.
Mike Atherton
(Tests – 115. Runs – 7,728; 100s – 16; HS 185*; ave – 37.70) Stubborn, narrow-minded and inflexible, according to his own England ‘supremo’ Ray Illingworth, quoted in The Sun on the eve of the 1995-96 tour to South
Africa, Mike Atherton used all of those character traits to play the innings of his life in the second Test in Johannesburg.
This was Atherton’s finest hour, or, to be precise, ten hours 43 minutes, during which he blunted Allan Donald and Shaun Pollock in the best match-saving knock ever played.
He was already on medication for his chronic back problem, but Atherton sprinted from the field into the arms of waiting teammates, received a humble handshake from Illy and he also survived the “Cane (rum) and Coke” challenge laid down by Sir Ian that went on well into the Jo’burg night.
Atherton, whose friends joke he took up cricket after giving up a career as a George Formby impersonator, prided himself on being invulnerable to sledging, preferring either to ignore the rantings of nutters like Merv Hughes, or maintain silent-eye contact until the bowler was forced to look away in order to walk back to his mark.
He needed all of that sang froid during his confrontation with Donald during the fourth Test against South Africa at Headingley in 1998. Atherton declined to walk when he gloved one to ’keeper Mark Boucher and then had to withstand a ferocious barrage from the world’s fastest bowler with ball and mouth. Atherton and England prevailed.
Atherton’s contribution to Ashes cricket post-1995 was mainly to get out cheaply to Glenn McGrath, but at his durable best he made blocking a pleasure to watch.
Alec Stewart
(Tests – 133. Runs – 8,463; 100s – 15; HS – 190; ave 39.55) The perfect foil to Atherton’s blunting, Stewart’s run-scoring was all the more impressive when you consider his extra responsibilities as wicketkeeper and, later, captain.
Super fit, agile and largely injury-free, the Surrey man was given his chance once his father, Mickey, took over as England coach. But any mischievous suggestions of nepotism were soon dispelled and, over time, his free-flowing attacking batting made such notions laughable.
Passed over for the England captaincy in favour of Atherton in 1993, a year later he led England’s response to being bowled out by Curtly Ambrose for 46 in the third Test against West Indies in Trinidad by scoring a century in both innings of the fourth in Barbados.
Soaking up ironic cheers when he and his partner took England’s opening stand to 47 in their first innings, Stewart attacked Ambrose & Co making 118 and 143 to help set up victory by 208 runs.
By the time he made another century in his 100th Test, against West Indies at Old Trafford in 2000, his popularity and reputation were sky-high and who better than Stewart to overtake the record of his mentor, Graham Gooch, as England’s most capped Test cricketer (118 caps), and at Lord’s to boot.
Often underrated as a batsman, his cover-drives and pulls could be sumptuous.
Trescothick was living the dream – who could have imagined that it would all be over within 12 months
Marcus Trescothick
(Tests – 76. Runs – 5,825; 100s – 14; HS – 219; ave – 43.80) Monday September 12, 2005, 4.30 in the morning, the foyer of the City Grange Hotel near Tower Bridge; Marcus Trescothick is sitting on his own waiting for a cheese and ham toastie and for the papers to arrive. The Somerset and England opener had ordered them all and, just to make sure their first Ashes victory since 1986-87 really had happened, was going to read them all, too.
This was Trescothick living the dream he had dreamed ever since he could remember – playing cricket, batting
and winning with the Three Lions on his chest.
In that moment he could not have imagined, no one could, that it would all be over within 12 months due to the mental health issues that brought a premature end to his brilliant international career.
Teetering on the edge of mediocrity at Somerset after failing to live up to his early promise, Trescothick’s 167 against Glamorgan at Taunton in 1999 so impressed their coach Duncan Fletcher that when he took over the England job he sent for him and never regretted it,
In style and technique, if not in physical appearance, the bulky ‘Banger’ looked like a left-handed Gooch and, when the force was with him, batted like him, too.
Perhaps his best innings was the 180 at the Wanderers with which he set up a series-clinching win over South Africa in 2004-05, but while he failed to reach three figures in the ’05 Ashes his counter-attacking contribution was immense, the highlight the belligerent 90 in the second Test at Edgbaston that helped them make 407 in the day. (Tests – 100. Runs – 7,037; 100s – 21; HS – 177; ave – 40.91) Strauss’ England career began and ended at Lord’s, but in vastly contrasting circumstances.
In May 2004, in the first Test against New Zealand, he scored a century in his debut innings and had reached 83 in his second when his captain Nasser Hussain intervened by running him out. Hussain went on to help win the match with a hundred of his own and promptly stepped down, though possibly not out of remorse for the stricken rookie.
In August 2012, after his team had been torn apart by the Kevin Pietersen textgate affair, a 2-1 defeat to South Africa persuaded him that his 100th Test should be his last and a measure of how much they had come to rely on his runs at the top of the order is that, even now, four years on, England have still not found a satisfactory replacement for him as Alastair Cook’s opening partner.
Strauss was a three-time Ashes winner and made significant contributions in each series; in 2005 his second hundred of the series in the final Test at the Oval has never received the credit it deserved for the part it played in England’s win. In 2009 his brilliant 161 at Lord’s helped establish a position from which Andrew Flintoff bowled the Aussies to bits and in his Ashes farewell Down Under in 2010-11 his battling 110 in an opening stand of 188 with Cook helped salvage the draw that gave England the push to go on and win a series there for the first time since 1986-87.
But he would never have enjoyed such riches had he not rescued his career with 177 against New Zealand in Napier in 2008. Changes were being called for under the regime of new coach Peter Moores and his head was on the block. A Strauss century was never a thing of beauty but he made the absolute best of what he had. ( Tests – 133. Runs – 10,599; 100s – 29; HS 294; ave 47.32) For those who grew up watching cricket on BBC and Channel Four it is a sobering thought that none of the 10,599 Test runs scored by Cook, nor any of the 29 Test hundreds since he made his first on debut in India in March 2006, has been seen live on terrestrial television in the UK.
Some consider it is because of that disconnect with the general sporting public and because his obvious qualities of determination and stubborn humility are largely unknown to them, that his opponents were able to mount such a laughably inaccurate but effective campaign against him over his role in the termination of KP’s England career.
That first hundred, only a few days after arriving in Nagpur from the England A tour in West Indies as emergency replacement for Trescothick even earned him a marriage proposal from a pretty young Indian fan in the crowd.
Acutely aware of his limitations as a batsman, and his strengths (he reckons he has two shots, neither of which is a cover drive), Cook has always been at his best when concentrating on exploiting the latter.
But he, too, feared he was one more failure away from the end of his career when he walked out at The Oval to bat in the second innings of the third Test against Pakistan in 2010, with even former coach Duncan Fletcher insisting he should be dropped for the upcoming Ashes tour.
His knock of 110 saved him then and he starts his second decade as England’s most reliable batsman and his fifth year as captain aiming to return in 2017 for one final crack at Australia.
Andrew Strauss That first Cook hundred in Nagpur earned him a marriage proposal from a pretty young Indian fan in the crowd Alastair Cook