When cricket hit the big sixes but left its players down and out
CRICKET, played with a smile, has brought the nation together. What better time to watch this documentary, which charts the rise and fall of an English team pushed to the edge by a coach who thought winning and niceness were incompatible?
In 2009 English Test cricket was a joke. After two years with Zimbabwe’s Andy Flower as coach, England were number one in the world. The granite-faced Flower explains how a Bavarian boot camp turned his men into legends. What doesn’t kill you, etc.
Director Barney Douglas has a slick, corporate style that, initially, grates. How many shots of exotic shorelines does one film need? It doesn’t help that narrator Toby Jones sounds like he’s doing a Jeremy Clarkson impression.
Most disturbing of all, though, is the dynamic between the men, seen boozily celebrating in various locker rooms. There’s a pecking order and the top chickens are so obviously Kevin Pietersen and Graeme Swann (“Swanny”). The bottom chicken? The team’s only non-white, a Sikh, Monty Panesar. His colleagues, between guffaws, point out that he couldn’t bat and was terrible at fielding. He’s the comic relief.
Thankfully, the film’s second half deconstructs what’s gone before. Flower’s regime was divisive and punishing — it led to Monty comfort-eating while a permanently tearful Jonathan Trott self-harmed via a machine that spat out cricket balls. Steven Finn got into a “bad place” and even jaunty Pietersen was worn down by the pressure to succeed. As a result, he would lash out at the team’s earnest captain, Andrew Strauss. Says Strauss: “It was like someone continually punching me in the stomach.”
Douglas contextualises such extreme behaviour. In archive footage, Australian bowlers talk derisively about “soft cocks” and take aim at their opponents’ bodies with a vicious gleam in their eye. Elsewhere, Flower eloquently discusses the unhealthy impact of “old colonial hierarchy”. The abuse isn’t personal, it’s systemic.
Which makes what Strauss did next all the more impressive. As head of the England Cricket Board, he hired the mild-mannered Australian Trevor Bayliss as a coach and backed easy-going Eoin Morgan to lead the one-day team. The new mantra for Morgan’s culturally diverse group: it’s OK to lose, it’s OK to be yourself.
This film makes us appreciate the revolution that’s taken place in English cricket.