What Root can learn from the five men who seized urn down under
⮞captain can utilise tactical smarts of Hutton and Brearley but it means little if England cannot find a prolific batsman
Joe Root has one thing in common with the five post-war England captains to win the Ashes in Australia – Len Hutton, Ray Illingworth, Mike Brearley, Mike Gatting and Andrew Strauss – only Yorkshiremen and Middle Saxons succeed on “the toughest tour”. Inauspiciously, he also shared it in 2017-18 and it did him no good at all as the tourists succumbed to a seventh trouncing in their past eight visits.
Each of those victorious captains had something Root, and before him Alastair Cook, Andrew Flintoff, Nasser Hussain, Alec Stewart, Michael Atherton and Graham Gooch lacked: a prolific batsman or, in Illingworth’s happy case, batsmen – plus a well-balanced attack, shrewdly deployed with what James Anderson, a winner in 2010-11, calls “aggressive patience or patient aggression, I’m not sure which”.
Hutton followed the Jardine/larwood template with Frank Tyson, “the fastest bowler I have ever seen”, according to Sir Donald Bradman, who took 28 wickets at 20.82, with stalwart support from Brian Statham, Trevor Bailey and the two spinners, Bob Appleyard and Johnny Wardle. Hutton made only one half-century in a hard-fought, low-scoring series, but his hardboiled approach, devastating Alec Bedser by dropping him after the first Test, despite him carrying England’s attack for the previous nine years, and tactics, establishing control with his slow bowlers and using Statham’s movement and Tyson’s pace judiciously, offer Root encouragement: treasure Mark Wood and do not flog him, banish sentimentality when dealing with veteran seamers and value Jack Leach.
If Leach can match the economy rate of 2.7 in a five-man attack that Graeme Swann managed when taking 15 wickets in a four-pronged unit 11 years ago, Root can exert a parsimonious grip on the scoreboard that can play with shot-making batsmen’s minds. In the absence of the Barmy Army to needle and browbeat them, he needs all the weapons he can muster.
Illingworth, in 1970-71, had a perfectly calibrated side. John Snow was masterly as an enforcer but the reclaiming of the Ashes after six drawn or lost series was also built on his top-order strength: Geoffrey Boycott made 657 runs, John Edrich 648 and Brian Luckhurst 455. In the absence of a 25-plus wicket strike bowler, Root could discover the strategic smarts of Brearley and Mark Taylor, but it would not make a jot of difference unless he and at least one other player can gorge themselves on runs.
He could become intuitively brilliant with his field placings and bowling changes, but his greatest contribution to their chances of winning would be scoring like Wally Hammond in 1928-29, Chris Broad in 1986-87 and Cook in 2010-11. One player scoring heavily will not be enough. England will need two to go above 400, as Patsy Hendren did with Hammond, David Gower with Broad and Jonathan Trott with Cook.
Root will need luck, too. Brearley was an inspirational captain but he was fortunate to retain the Ashes 5-1 in 1978-79 against a rump Australian side following the defections of more than a dozen established Test stars to Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket. Brearley led the side impectest cably yet their 3-0 drubbing a year later in the reunification nonashes series shows how little impact on the series result even the very best captain has when comprehensively outgunned.
Gatting took a leaf out of Brearley’s book with his handling of the spinners and, indeed, made a better fist of managing the singular Phil Edmonds. On that tour only three England batsmen averaged more than 40 compared with six Australians, but Gatting’s team won crunch sessions: Ian Botham’s final Test century on the second afternoon of the first turned the screw, Graham Dilley’s five-for on the third morning helped to enforce the follow-on and at 1-0 up with two to play, Botham and Gladstone Small took five wickets apiece to demolish Australia by teatime on Boxing Day. They partied hard all tour, but were simply tougher whenever a momentumchanging opportunity arose. That Australia team were on the up, but lacked the know-how to win consistently and the one England faced in 2010-11 was stuck in a rebuilding cycle. Strauss, without the raw pace of Michael Vaughan’s 2005 side, cut his cloth accordingly, but there was little novelty about their approach other than suppressing the run rate while in the field. The three Tests they won were achieved in the most route-one manner imaginable, with first-innings scores of 620 for five in Adelaide, 513 at Melbourne and 644 at the SCG. Although there are limited lessons to be learnt that do not rest on talent and selection, there are plenty to be heeded from the catalogue of failures that have littered the past 40 years. Do not, for example, go into a trance while bowling and have Botham change the field behind your back like Bob Willis in 1982-83. Try not to put the team before your own health as Gooch did when a mistreated cut to his finger turned septic and could have cost him his hand in 1990, forcing him to miss the first Test.
Do not treat your best player like a pariah as Gooch did with Gower, or Cook with Kevin Pietersen in 2013-14, nor declare when a notoriously sensitive team-mate is on 98 and loitering nervously before a breakthrough century, as Atherton did to Graeme Hick in 1994-95. Do not burden yourself with too many jobs as Alec Stewart did as captain, wicketkeeper and top-order batsman in 1998-99 or ever put Australia in to bat at the Gabba like Hussain four years later.
A night on the turps might appeal but do not drink heavily to leaven the stress as Flintoff did during the 2006-07 whitewash and watch the squad split into cliques or, crucially, suffer your dressing room being turned into a casualty ward so that you whizz through 16 players (as in 199091 and 1994-95), 17 (1998-99 and 2002-03) or God forbid, 18 (2013-14). The injury list, like so much else, will be down to luck. To win the series England will have to hold their catches, find some movement with the ball and hope Root remains in peak form, continuing his annus mirabilis with more centuries to add to the six since the start of the year.
If he manages that, the captaincy will take care of itself.