‘I felt I could hit the ball wherever I wanted’
➤ Twenty years on, Mark Butcher recalls pummelling the Australian attack for 173 to win a Test he almost did not play
Before the Headingley Test of 2001, Mark Butcher was almost dropped. During the previous Test, when Australia thrashed England to retain the urn at Trent Bridge, Butcher had been out drinking late. Nasser Hussain and Duncan Fletcher, England’s captain and head coach, seriously considered discarding him.
Instead, on his drive home from Lord’s to Chelmsford, Hussain asked England’s senior players for their views; they convinced him to retain Butcher, who had taken a tumultuous route to just be playing in the 2001 Ashes. After making his Test debut in 1997, he had scored centuries against South Africa and Australia the following year. But he was far too inconsistent and, with his marriage disintegrating, floundered on the tour of South Africa in 1999-2000. “I had a few flashes where I played pretty well and felt comfortable,” Butcher recalls. “By that South Africa tour, my personal life was in an absolute state.”
With an average of 25.1 from 27 Tests, he was dropped. It was the prelude for Butcher to work with his father – former England batsman Alan – on rebuilding his technique. In his first incarnation as a Test cricketer, Butcher had become “stodgy” and “quite easy to bowl at”. At Surrey’s indoor school, beginning in January 2001, the two remodelled his technique. The tweaks aimed to help Butcher become “more neutral” at the crease, more fluent scoring through the off side and have “a scoring option for the ball wherever it was”.
None of this was done with an England recall in mind. “It was with a view to not walking away from playing the game altogether,” he says. With Surrey’s array of batting talent, Butcher was worried about just retaining his county spot. In the summer of 2001, the changes began to help but, while he was averaging an unremarkable 34.3 in the season’s County Championship, an injury crisis opened up a Test berth.
The start of Butcher’s Ashes return was inauspicious: he arrived for training 24 hours late. After living in a friend’s spare room, he had planned to move on a Tuesday; at the time, he had not even considered that it was two days before the first Test. When David Graveney, England’s chairman of selectors, called him to tell him about his recall, Butcher said: “I’ve got to move in on this day. Is it all right if I turn up late?”
After hitting 38 and 41 on his recall at Edgbaston, Butcher was the lone England player to have a night out with the Australian players. “It taught me that they’re not superhuman – they have the same hang-ups and foibles as you do. If more of our lads had known that, things might have been a bit different.” By the fourth Test, Butcher was England’s top run-scorer in the series, after hitting 83 in the second innings at Lord’s. It had not been enough to stop a magnificent Australian side from cruising to a 3-0 lead. The Ashes retained, Australia had designs on a 5-0 whitewash. After rain disrupted the fourth day, Adam Gilchrist – Australia’s stand-in captain, with Steve Waugh injured – declared, to set England
315 runs in 110 overs. After rain returned, they needed another 311 from 90 overs on the final day.
England had only successfully chased more once in their Test history. Yet when Butcher was interviewed on the final morning, he said: “It’s very important you go out there with a positive attitude, and look to try to win the game.”
Even survival looked beyond England as they slipped to 33 for two after 10 overs, losing both openers on a pitch with uneven bounce.
‘I learnt Australia were not superhuman – they have same hang-ups and foibles as you do’
Butcher got off the mark when a delivery from Glenn Mcgrath reared up, hit his bat handle and soared over the slips; he was also dropped behind by Gilchrist. Yet with Australia striving for wickets and deploying aggressive fields, England reached 118 for two at lunch, with Butcher on 55, supported by Hussain. Australia had a default for how to respond: bowl Mcgrath and Shane Warne in tandem at the start of each session. But after lunch, Mcgrath was uncharacteristically awry to Butcher, the England batsman taking 23 from 21 balls across five overs. When Brett Lee came on, Butcher greeted him with consecutive boundaries – a regal off drive and then a crisp flick from outside off stump of such nonchalance and timing that, Butcher says jokingly, it could have been played by Brian Lara. “I sort of flipped it, Lara style, over square leg for a one-bounce four. And I’m walking down the pitch to Nas with a bit of a Cheshire Cat grin on my face. And he went, ‘F------ concentrate’.” A raucous final-day Headingley crowd began to sense what was possible.
“They were loud and boisterous and the Aussies started to make the odd fielding mistake,” Butcher says. The most significant was when Butcher was on 97, and charged down for a single to mid-on: the fielder’s throw, and a slow pick-up
from short leg, allowed him to scramble back into his crease after a full-length dive. After Butcher clipped Warne for three towards the Western Terrace, he could revel in his first Test century for three years; the only shame was that, after his near run-out, he had “a massive streak of dirt all over the pad and up my trousers” as he celebrated. For Butcher, what followed was a glorious blur.
“It all happened in a flash – by then, every ball’s a coconut and I’m just having to go at everything.” His shot-making had reached resplendent levels.
Most of Test batting is about coping with what Butcher calls “impostor syndrome – where you just think I’m not really good enough”. Now, as England hurtled towards their target, Butcher felt invincible. “All of those hours facing 100mph tennis balls in the indoor school at the Oval came together. It was just brilliant. It was the greatest feeling in the world that you could hit the ball wherever you wanted.”
Sports scientists talk of the zone: a state of mind where athletes attain such fierce concentration and immersion in what they are doing that they rise to a higher plane. Butcher offers a lucid description. “One of the issues that all performers have is that you can be quite self-aware – you can be aware of your movements, your body and lots of external things. When you’re in the zone, you just feel nothing. Your eyes are doing all the work for you and then transferring information to your body. And your body has been trained in such a way that you can do all this stuff automatically. It’s a very cool place to be, because it occurs to you in that sort of state that you can pull off pretty much whatever you fancy. The only thing is to stop yourself from being overly confident and taking the p---, really.”
Only when he punched Warne for three through point – high-fiving the spinner on his way back to completing his 173rd run to clinch victory – did Butcher release himself from his state. “The concentration had been so, so fierce up until that moment, I just lost it a bit, just wide-eyed and mouth open. It was a pretty magical moment.” His only regret was that, in the euphoric post-match television interview, he forgot to thank his father: “The whole thing was only possible because of the old man.” Butcher need not have worried. Watching on TV, a proud father saw his son play, as Gilchrist hailed “one of the greatest Ashes Test innings of all time”.