Herding Cats Read online

  As captain, you know that not everyone is going to perform well each week and that one or two may even have a miserable afternoon. You hope that at least four will do well, which both makes victory likely and means that the dressing-room won’t be too morgue-like afterwards. There are players who struggle week in, week out but you keep giving them the chance because you know you must. The principles of Sunday cricket demand it. You need to coax at least one good performance out of them each season, if they are to be seen again. It could be a great catch or even a solitary boundary in an otherwise undistinguished innings. But you need the right conditions, opposition and luck here.

  A weak batsman is unlikely to make runs on a terrible pitch and a poor bowler will suffer even more on a perfect track and outfield. So you need to choose the location carefully. (There are matches that lend themselves particularly to this – in our season, it will be one of the gentler fixtures that bookend our fixture list. In September you are hoping that certain players will do well enough to overcome the season’s doubts.) You also have to make sure that they make themselves available for the game against the side of librarians or satirists.

  All too often players don’t think sensibly about the games for which they will put themselves down. We have a core of stalwarts who play almost every week. I played more than 130 consecutive matches before missing my first one. Nick has played perhaps ten fewer and Jon, Tom and Tony have all been there for three-quarters of them. A number of others play in half our games each season, and then we have the stragglers: the players who will play once or twice a season and yet will somehow take up as much administrative time as those who play every week.

  The highlights of my career as captain are almost always the unexpected performances. You ask someone to perform a role each week, whether it be keeping wicket, opening the batting or bowling first-change. Often you don’t expect them to succeed at it but you keep asking because they’re there and what else can you and they do? There are days when it feels like an exercise in futility when the opener returns to the pavilion, having been out in exactly the same way as he has all season. His cries of pain cut you, too. The truth of captaincy is that you expect different things from everyone. In Test cricket players hope to average 40. You would be very happy with double figures from a number of your batsmen. Anyone who manages 30 is a good player, anyone averaging over 40 has self-esteem issues and should be playing at a higher level.

  But just sometimes it all works out. A couple of years ago, Tony walked out to open at Wormsley, the spectacular ground that the late Sir Paul Getty built in the Chilterns. The game was part of a festival uniting cricket and literature and the opposition were a side of actors assembled for the day. Decent players but lacking that week in, week out hardness. The Wormsley pitch and outfield are a batsman’s paradise, offering even bounce and value for every shot. Up until that day Tony’s highest score had been 99, made as a teenager in Yorkshire league cricket, on a pitch that couldn’t have been further from this idyll. Thirty years later, he had lost all hope that he’d ever reach that magic landmark. His family were there and over the years they must have questioned his devotion to cricket, why he had to play the game that sent him home so often in a state of frustration. Or worse. That day everything went his way. His bottom-handed shots in front of the wicket, so often the cause of his downfall, looped over the fielders and raced to the boundary. On the back foot, he was utterly dominant, cutting and pulling. Suddenly he was in the nineties. We couldn’t quite believe it. Only Sam and Joe had made hundreds for us. Then it was done. There were tears, celebrations and more. He limped into the pavilion moments later, retiring hurt from yet another of those hamstring strains that affect players who obstinately refuse to stretch and warm up. It was one of our happiest moments as a team.

  For this to happen to one of the most popular players – and the one who suffered most visibly when things went wrong – only made it more memorable.

  Bowling

  There is a scenario that every amateur captain dreads. When it happens, not only do you lose a game there and then, but the repercussions can last for years. This disaster has befallen all of us at some point – and to the unfortunate more than once. The last instance I saw went like this. It is a perfect summer’s day in August, a day expressly designed for cricket. The sun is shining down on the fields of wheat that encircle the pitch. I am playing for another Sunday side who have travelled to Somerset for this game. We bat first and set a respectable target, thanks to a fifty from a heavily bespectacled batsman, a former mainstay of the team, who now lives in New York and plays just once a year. The opposition needs 180-odd in 30 overs, which looks to me like a stiff task. Our bowler prepares to send down the first delivery of their innings. I haven’t seen him play before – and nor, crucially, had our skipper – but he cuts an athletic, lithe figure in his whites and was an obvious choice to open the bowling. I’m demoted to first-change but can understand why. He has paced out an extraordinarily long run-up and is now holding the new ball, seam upright between long artists’ fingers, visualising the batsman’s imminent demise. Looking at a bowler you can often tell what they’re going to bowl and how well they’re going to do it. This guy exudes competence. The batsman is no doubt experiencing that touch of apprehension, as many of us do at the prospect of truly fast bowling. Will, the Authors’ wicketkeeper, is also playing and shuffles back a bit further behind the stumps, where first slip joins him.

  The bowler begins his approach towards the bowling crease. His run-up is a thing of beauty, his action textbook, and before we know it the ball has thudded into the keeper’s gloves. First to react is the umpire who signals a wide. The batsman continues to stand motionless – there is no shot that can be played at a ball that passes four feet above your head. Now the fielders are really paying attention. What will happen next delivery? Surely the ball must have just slipped out of his hand early. The bowler runs in to the crease again, a little faster now, and this time the ball comes out too late, bouncing halfway down the pitch next to the one we are using. Another wide is signalled, on the horizontal axis.

  The next ball is the best of the day, fast, pitching on middle and hitting the top of off stump, rendered all the more devastating by the previous two wides. Suddenly the field relaxes. It’s OK, everything’s back to normal, the first two balls were aberrations. The batsman trudges off, to be replaced by another who takes guard with narrowed eyes. Which version of the bowler will he get? The next three balls are all very fast and very wide again. Our keeper is diving in all directions, brilliantly, but one gets past him and reaches the boundary. At this point, the bowler, somewhat shaken, asks the umpire how many deliveries remain in the over. “Five” is the answer. He seems surprised – we aren’t. We know this is just beginning.

  Now we’re looking expectantly at our captain. In another era, he might have pulled out a hip flask and offered the suffering bowler something restorative. But he has no brandy, no tonic. There’s nothing much a leader can do in this situation. A few encouraging words and some gentle handclaps aren’t going to help here. Brearley’s degree in people isn’t going to put this man back together. Genghis Khan would be at a loss. The bowler decides on another approach. He will cut his run-up and bowl leg-spin. Even the 12-year-old on the opposition knows that this won’t work. Sure enough, this doesn’t stem the stream of wides and full tosses. Having hit several boundaries, the batsmen start to manipulate the balls they can reach for singles just so we can get to the end of this over. Thirty runs have come off it – it could easily have been 40 or 50 – and the momentum is all with the other side. We never get it back.

  These are the defeats that stay with you. Our keeper will remember it for the finger he broke, trying to stop one of the faster wides. The captain won’t forget his one decision that cost us the game. But the bowler may never play again. No other sport has anything as scarring as the experience he underwent. It’s not someone else doing this to you – you are entirely responsible for
your own downfall. In tennis you can only double-fault consecutively four times. This is more like taking part in an unending one-man penalty shoot-out in which you miss every single spot kick and fail to save any of the other team’s. You’re wrestling your demons and losing, very publicly.

  In professional cricket they call this getting the yips, when a player’s fine motor skills desert them. Suddenly they struggle to complete the most basic motion of their sport, from which they’ve previously made a living. The Surrey spinner Keith Medlycott and Scottish all-rounder Gavin Hamilton both experienced the yips, and baseball pitchers, golfers and darts players have also struggled with it. At our amateur level it is just another part of the game. Every team has a player or two it’s happened to. We currently have three. As a captain I’ve witnessed it time and time again. You’re never quite the same afterwards. No one has yet found a solution to the yips. They continue to plague players at all levels of cricket, and can surface at any time when the pressure is on. There is nothing a captain – however insightful, experienced and brilliant – can do to help.

  The first question was, who should open the bowling?

  Should you have decided to bowl first, you are faced with other problems. In Sunday cricket you’ll be dealing predominantly with three types of bowler – those who know where they’re going to put each delivery; those who think they know where they’ll put each ball; and those who have absolutely no idea. You will open with the first type and bring the second on as change bowlers. If the match situation allows, you can risk the last for an over or two. You have to set very different fields from each one and handle them in very different ways. The first can set their own field, since they will know better than you what they are trying to achieve. The second will start setting their field, which you will have to rearrange halfway through their second over. The last kind of bowling can be strangely effective – since they’re surprising themselves, they will surprise the batsmen. It’s how a bad poker player can occasionally beat a good one – if he doesn’t know the strength of the hand he holds, then how can you read him?

  Hopefully you will have two decent seam bowlers to open the bowling. They might not be Wasim and Waqar but they should complement each other, with one moving the ball in and the other out, at slightly different speeds and with nagging accuracy. You would settle for just the latter, though. The opening bowlers set the tone for the day ahead and there is nothing worse than the sight of one of them spraying the ball around. Pace is not important at this level of cricket. If you’ve got it, then great. But accuracy and the ability to out-think the batsman are far more useful. The best Sunday bowlers invariably use guile to get their wickets.

  Many of us walk out to bat, our nerves jangling. The sight of a tall, fast bowler makes them jangle all the more. Nothing settles these nerves better than a good first shot – it doesn’t have to be a boundary, just something off the middle of the bat. Gradually you settle into the innings. The keeper and slip will be waiting for the first sign of weakness to pile in on you. Playing and missing or edging the ball will only encourage them to start sledging you and bring on what Steve Waugh described as mental disintegration. The average Sunday cricketer doesn’t need any outside assistance with this. You’re capable of mentally disintegrating quite well yourself, thank you. No need for the terrible banter that passes as wit in some cricket. The moment you lose respect for the bowler and his ability to take your wicket you are in trouble. It makes you at least three times as likely to be dismissed.

  Bowlers rarely exploit this deliberately. With ball in hand, we crave to be feared, like an Ambrose or Walsh. Physically we are more in the mould of Ian Austin, the generously proportioned Lancashire seamer who ambled up to the crease and surprised the batsman by being much better than his waistline would suggest. We have a number of bowlers who are similarly better than you’d think. When Nick takes the ball, batsmen tend to focus. He looks like a cricketer and they know he’ll get them out if they don’t play sensibly. When Tom measures out his run-up, he looks more like a drunk motorist asked to walk in a straight line by a policeman than a sportsman. The batsmen are not always respectful. Mark Waugh might have asked, “Mate, what are you doing here?” as he famously did to the surprise England call-up Jimmy Ormond. (It should be remembered that Ormond’s two Test wickets were Rahul Dravid and Ricky Ponting, who scored 26,666 runs between them at the highest level. And he silenced Waugh with the memorable comeback that at least he was the best cricketer in his family.) Tom is not the best cricketer in his family but over the years he has beguiled hundreds of batsmen who thought they would hit this bespectacled man out of the park. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Tom often comes on as first-change, after ten or 12 overs. The batsmen heave a sigh of relief as the openers take their sweaters and retire to the outfield. Now they prepare to face the next pair of bowlers, who will surely be worse. The ball will have lost some of its hardness and shine and runs will be easier to come by. Now they can up the rate, and put 200 on the board.

  The choice of first- and second-change is key for the captain. Just occasionally, if you suspect the opposition have sent out two blocking openers, you might promote your weaker bowlers and keep your usual openers back for the middle order. When handling the opening bowlers, a captain has one last thing to consider, which is that you will need your best bowlers against their best batsman, particularly early on. Even the greatest cricketers are vulnerable early on and if they are allowed to settle in against some friendly bowling you will suffer later in the innings. The moment the star batsman comes in, you should react accordingly.

  The most heinous charge against Kevin Pietersen was that he texted friends in the South African team with tips on how to get Andrew Strauss out. This accusation might have been untrue but in the Sunday game the code of honour is looser. We all know each other’s weaknesses and delight in exposing them in the nets. Every year we play against Joe’s regular team. He alternates between playing for us and them. Both captains know how dangerous he is once he’s set and so we throw everything into trying to get him out early on. Our best bowlers put in a sustained burst, bowling as fast and furiously as they can. Yet knowing that someone is vulnerable to the short ball to the body early on is all very well; you still need the bowler to deliver it. We’re mostly too old and too slow. And Joe has seen it all before. These encounters between team-mates usually end in the batsmen’s favour. The exception was the year when I found a young tearaway novelist who, on a pudding-like pitch, found the bounce to dismiss him early on.

  Is the captain in the best position for deciding when to bowl himself?

  Brearley found much to admire in Raymond Illingworth as a captain, and one terrible flaw. He once asked a Leicestershire team-mate how Illingworth managed to keep the respect of the dressing-room when he tended not to bowl when the conditions didn’t suit him. Their other off-spinner, Jack Birkenshaw, had far more overs on batsmen-friendly tracks. Bowler-captains will always risk under- or overbowling themselves and it takes a brave team-mate to suggest to you that it’s time to take yourself off. I’ve tended neither to be the best nor the worst in our attack. I usually take the new ball. Then you are matched against the best batsmen and rarely get soft wickets, scything through the opposition’s underbelly. You tend to bowl at the hardest times, when you can both earn and forfeit the respect of your team-mates, running in to bowl at a much stronger player.

  My worst experience of this was in Sri Lanka. We had an incredible and eventful tour, with eight matches in nine days. But we were short of bowling even when we landed, and that much cricket in such a short space of time took its toll on our squad. In our second game, on a lovely ground outside Galle as egrets stalked around the outfield, I was hit for what is still a club-record 37 runs in an over. I’m still not sure how this happened but cannot blame the yips. My first two balls were full tosses on leg stump, both no-balled by the square-leg umpire and both hit for six over his head. With 14 runs on the board and six deliveries y
et to come, it was relatively straightforward for the batsman to beat Sobers’s 36 in an over. I cannot even claim that my assailant had played Test cricket. He was a fine player but not of that class.

  If that day was a nightmare, another was a dream. We were playing in a charity game at the Honourable Artillery Company’s ground in London. Lined up against us were Mark Ramprakash and Devon Malcolm, as well as the former Kent wicketkeeper Steve Marsh and Somerset opener Philip Slocombe. We put out our strongest side, reinforced with the New Zealand bowler (and children’s author) Iain O’Brien. It was one of those days when almost everything went right for us. Sam and Joe both hit centuries, the latter hitting Devon Malcolm for six off the last ball of the over then sensibly letting Sam weather the inevitable short balls in the next. We put on a record 290 off 30 overs and sat down for tea not quite able to believe what was happening. We took the field and started well. Taking an early wicket isn’t always a good idea if it brings Mark Ramprakash to the crease. He came in at number three and played some beautiful, checked drives that raced to the boundary. He had only retired from first-class cricket the year before and looked in ominously good form, as everything hit the middle of the bat. But from nowhere Nick produced a terrific outswinger which he edged to first slip where it was put down. Suddenly the game came alive.

  Another wicket fell and Ramprakash was joined at the crease by a batsman who owed his selection more to his charitable work than his batting. The newcomer looked wobbly and then nicked one to Alex behind the stumps. We all went up but the umpire’s finger stayed down. Alex was outraged, pointing out to anyone who’d listen that this was a charity match, but found himself immediately slapped down by one of the greatest batsmen of his generation. In Four More Weeks: Diary of a Stand-In Captain, Ramprakash wrote that he understood why Mike Atherton and Alec Stewart stopped playing cricket once they retired from the professional game, because “there’s always some muppet who will come up with a comment to spoil your day”.