THE BEST LAID PLANS… ARE THOSE YOU COME TO LATE
TWENTY FIVE YEARS ON, IT REMAINS THE BEST WE’VE HAD
With Andrew Strauss already triggering plans for England’s 2019 World Cup campaign with his recent series of North versus South matches in the UAE, it might interest him to know that England’s strategy for the 1992 World Cup came together just days before the tournament began.
Obviously the squad was mostly picked when a pre-campaign tour of New Zealand was organised, though that trip included three Tests as well as three one-day internationals to get our eye in.
That preparation proved crucial in refining our plans, though many of the tactics came about from nimble thinking and a willingness to take risks, the chief one being the late arrival of Ian Botham who had spent the festive season in panto alongside Max Boyce in Jack and the Beanstalk.
Beefy turned up with a carton of sunglasses from his sponsors and a Yuletide paunch just in time to play the second and third one-dayers, huffing and puffing his way through some training sessions beforehand.Yet something curious happened between those matches that saw him shift from number five in the first one, where he made 28 off 43 balls, to opening the innings in the last one, a role he had not performed for five years.
Modern teams are rarely open to experimentation, but, as we’d already won the series, Graham Gooch, who’d opened with Graeme Hick in the previous two matches, dropped down the order.You have to hand it to Beefy; if people were sceptical that he could rekindle his glory days of pinch-hitting from 1986/87, they were quickly won over as he belted 79 at better than a run a ball.
With fielding restrictions in place for the first 15 overs, Gooch was won over by Botham’s argument that he was the man to take advantage, and he went on to open throughout the tournament. The gambit could scarcely be hailed a success though, the 192 runs he scored in the Cup coming at an average of 21.3, with a top score of 53 made against Australia in Sydney.
If that was a late decision, so too was the one to give me the new ball. At the outset, my ambition was to be a regular team member who would bowl either first or second change, take one end for the death overs, and bat at seven or eight. That all changed on that tour of New Zealand when Phil DeFreitas was injured for the second one-dayer in Dunedin, and I was given the new ball.
I don’t know whether there was anything unusual about the Kookaburra balls of that vintage, or whether it was the cool breeze blowing through Carisbrooke’s ‘House of Pain’, but the ball swung big. If you look at the scorecard, my figures of one for 31 off 10 overs with two maidens do not look overly impressive, but Gooch was at close hand and could see how uncomfortable the batsmen were facing such lavish swing. He gave me the new ball again in the next game and this time I took two for 11, sealing my role as opening bowler for the World Cup.
While taking a long-view plan of events has its place, flexibility and the ability to think and make adjustments on the hoof is more important. If anyone would have suggested two weeks before that World Cup that Beefy would have opened the batting and me the bowling, they would have been frogmarched off to the nearest asylum. But Gooch and his think-tank saw distinct possibilities and went with them.
If those two things were settled by the time we reached Perth for our first World Cup match, they were about the only things that were. A hamstring injury to Allan Lamb meant we were without our first choice batting order, while Gooch was still not sure which spinner to play between Phil Tufnell and Richard Illingworth. In the end Tufnell played in four of the first five games before giving way to Illingworth for the remainder.
Lamb’s problem kept him out until our seventh match, against New Zealand, which meant that when Gooch was injured in the field against Sri Lanka in Ballarat, we were missing our two most experienced batsmen for the group stage match against South Africa in Melbourne. Fortunately, by then, the team were playing slick one-day cricket and South Africa were despatched despite the barmy rain rule (which took away the overs conceding the fewest runs from the side bowling first) doing its best to foil us.
The inevitable hiccup in form arrived when we returned to New Zealand, who’d learnt well from the defeats we’d inflicted on them before the tournament. In a change of strategy, and with all their group games at home, they’d decided to play on slow, grippy pitches, opening the bowling with a spinner, Dipak Patel, and having at least 30 of their 50 overs bowled by slow-medium cutter bowlers like Gavin Larsen and Chris Harris.
By the time we played them they were second in the table having been beaten just once. But with Gooch still out injured and Lamb ring rusty, we were never in the hunt after making 200 at Wellington’s Basin Reserve. Had we won, though, we’d have set a new world record for consecutive victories in 50-over internationals.
If that defeat did not overly bother us (we’d already qualified for the semifinals), losing to Zimbabwe in Albury was embarrassing. Although missing Chris Lewis, Dermot Reeve and me through injury, we were only chasing 131. I’d damaged a rib muscle and was unable even to train so I spent the match doing commentary with Mike Gatting, who’d been hired by BBC. It was grim viewing.
In a bid to get fit for our semi-final against South Africa, Lawrie Brown, England’s physio, had taken me to various experts who’d jabbed the affected area with cortisone. It didn’t seem to help and I was unable to play in the game, which remains infamous after the rain rule left South Africa needing 22 runs off one ball.
What South Africa’s apologists fail to mention when they claim Kepler Wessels’ team were robbed is that they had only bowled 45 of their allotted overs, the go-slow deliberate as they would have faced a total of around 300 otherwise. To my mind, their cynicism got its just desserts.
Having prevailed, despite not being at full strength, it gave us great hope of winning the final at the MCG. I was picked to play only at the 11th hour after a late fitness test on the morning of the match, Gooch trusting my assessment that with painkillers I could manage ten overs provided they were in no more than two spells.
The match began well and despite the intransigence of Steve Bucknor over two plumb lbw shouts I had against Javed Miandad, we felt we were well placed at the 30-over mark as they’d only scored 96 for two. But Imran Khan and Miandad had played a canny game and along with a smidgen of complacency on our part, and some powerful hitting from Inzamam-ul-Haq and Wasim Akram, 152 runs were added in the last 20 overs.
Their eventual score of 249 was not out of reach, but I still sensed everything would need to go our way if we were to raise the Cup. When Botham went for a duck to a controversial caught behind off Akram, an ominous feeling took hold which never let up until Illingworth was dismissed in the final over and we’d lost by 22 runs.
Imran used Pakistan’s victory to raise funds for a cancer hospital in Lahore in memory of his mother – as noble a cause to arise from sporting victory as there has ever been. For me, knowing a great deed came of it made defeat – and Bucknor’s bloopers – that little bit easier to take... but only a little.
You have to hand it to Beefy. Hoping to rekindle his pinch-hitting glory, he belted 79 at better than a run a ball
Twenty-five years on, for The Cricket Paper’s Derek Pringle and countless others, the pain may have subsided but the memory remains sharp. On March 25, 1992, a sultry evening at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, in front of nearly 90,000, the majority of whom were Aussies present in hopeful anticipation of seeing the Poms get duffed up, the Essex all-rounder was in the process of securing an England World Cup final victory for the first and, as it would have turned out, the only time thus far.
Pakistan might not have been there at all, but for the rain that had saved them against England in the group match in Adelaide, where they were bowled out for 74, with Pringle recording the extraordinary figures of 8.2-5-8-3, after which skipper Imran Khan succeeded in making a team out of an eccentric mix of individuals by urging them to “be as a cornered tiger and come out and fight”.
Choosing to bat first in light of the controversial rain rules which would almost certainly penalise the chasing side should the predicted showers arrive, Imran must have feared the worst when Pringle, swinging the white Kookaburra ball as he, Chris Lewis, Phil DeFreitas and Ian Botham had done all tournament, did for his openers Aamir Sohail and Ramiz Raja, leaving his side 24-2.
Then, when the first man to play for England wearing an ear stud slipped the ball past inside the forward push of Javed Miandad for a second massive appeal for lbw in quick succession, this time everyone in the ground, the estimated one billion TV viewers worldwide and all of us in the Press box sited directly behind Pringle’s arm, maybe even Imran himself, watching from the non-striker’s end, thought the game must be up.
Everyone, that is, except the umpire, Steve Bucknor.
The West Indian official kept his finger firmly down. Javed and Imran put on 139 for the third wicket, setting a platform from which Pakistan made 249-6, good enough to make sure England are still searching for their first World Cup or global ODI trophy. Not that our man wears that moment like a dagger to the heart, but, every time Pringle and Bucknor have bumped into each other since, the following conversation has taken place.
Pringle to Bucknor: “Javed still not out, Steve?” Bucknor to Pringle: “No, Derek. Still not out.”
And if you remain unconvinced that Pringle and England were robbed, what you are about to read should settle the matter once and for all.
Two winters ago, just as Eoin Morgan’s side were preparing to disappoint their supporters once again in the 2014-15 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, I happened to be hosting a charity fund-raiser somewhere in the City of London, at which I invited Derek to retell the story.
After the event, we were approached by a smartly dressed City-type brandishing his mobile phone.
“Derek’s right,” he announced with disarming certainty. “Really? What makes you say that?” “I’ve just been on the phone to Pakistan,” he said. “I told my mate there what Derek said and asked him what he thought about it.” “Oh, yes. And who’s your mate?” “Imran Khan,” he explained. “He said, ‘tell Derek he’s right. Javed was definitely out’.”
It may be of little comfort to England, Pringle or his captain Graham Gooch, who afterwards said,“It’s not the end of the world, but it’s close,” but from the perspective of the interested observer, the crushing disappointment of their subsequent failures has made the events of that night far more memorable than might have been the case had Javed been given out and a routine victory duly achieved.
That instance of ill-fortune created a context in which what followed looked, felt and was more real and vivid and Technicolor than any other international cricket I have reported on save, perhaps, Brian Lara’s 1999 match-winning 153 not out against Australia in Barbados and almost all of England’s breathtaking 2005 Ashes victory.
Take the moment when, on nine, Gooch dropped Imran off a skier, or the sight of Inzamam-ul-Haq and Wasim Akram plundering 52 in six overs to make a game of it. Take the look at Botham’s eyes when he played and missed at a ball from Wasim only to find that the umpire Brian Aldridge had decided he had played and hit, the ball actually brushing the bottom of his sleeve on the way through to Moin Khan. “Why don’t you send your mother-inlaw in now?” asked Aamir at short-leg, pay-back for Beefy’s Les Dawson-ish comments about Pakistan being an ideal holiday destination for mothers-in-law, which along with his disappointment at getting out for a duck in the last big game of his career may also have contributed to his decision to smash his bat to smithereens afterwards. “I realised there would never be another chance for me (to win the World Cup),” he wrote in is autobiography. “The prize had
been right in front of my nose and it had been snatched away.”
And no one who witnessed them “live” could ever forget the consecutive deliveries that effectively settled the issue.
Dark rumblings regarding the practices used by Pakistan to encourage reverse swing had already been heard and would boil over the following summer when the sides rejoined battle in the 1991 summer Test series, with claims and counter-claims of balltampering eventually, sadly, leading to a bitter and expensive court case between Botham and Imran.
Depending on your point of view, the ability of Wasim and Waqar Younis to impart reverse-swing on an old ball was either genius or black magic. Either way the late movement that flummoxed Allan Lamb and, next ball, Chris Lewis, first one way then the other, was, as near as makes no difference, unplayable. The look of incredulity all over Lewis’ face as he dragged himself from the crease spoke a million words.
There was the unbridled joy of the Pakistan players cavorting across the MCG outfield, and the sound of Imran dedicating victory to his mother’s cancer hospital, and then thanking the England team for helping to give him “one of the proudest moments” of his life.
All in sharp contrast to the red-faced frustration sweeping across England’s beaten players, Alec Stewart, Lamb, Graeme Hick, Dermot Reeve, Pringle, DeFreitas and Richard Illingworth and, looking as crestfallen as any, top-scorer Neil Fairbrother.
Later stories emerged of the depth of the devastation Robin Smith had felt at the decision to omit him from final XI to make way for an extra bowler, his supposed vulnerability against the spin of Mushtaq Ahmed costing him a place
Look at Botham’s eyes when he played and missed at a ball only to find the umpire decided he had played and hit
in favour of Hick or Lamb. Like Botham, none of the above came close to making a World Cup final again. Unlike Botham, most of them thought they might.
Even what had previously seemed like the nonsense of Gooch, Botham and other England players walking out of the pre-final dinner in response to a comedian in drag sending up the Queen now seemed weirdly significant.
The rest of that evening and early morning remain a bit of a blur, for reasons relating to the booze, taken in the company of a number of those beaten players, which made my lunchtime interview with Gooch at a Melbourne beach seafood restaurant the next day doubly painful.
To his credit, Gooch declined to blame ill-luck or umpiring mistakes, or make any attempt to find excuses.
Priding himself on having helped raise the standards of England’s fielding in partnership with coach Mickey Stewart, he was angrier with himself for dropping that difficult catch than anyone or anything else.
“We were beaten fair and square,” was not exactly what my newspaper had had in mind for their headline, nor me for my story but, typical of him, it was all Gooch had.
One thing is certain, however. Neither of us could possibly have imagined that succeeding where he and his players had failed would prove beyond every England captain and every England team that came after them for the next 25 years … and counting.
Javed still not out, Steve?