Driving Ambition - My Autobiography Page 5

  It was a baptism of fire, and I would never again make the mistake of staying in the room when he was dismissed. In less volatile moments, I came to admire, respect and immensely like this gritty little fighter from Western Australia. He was passionate, he was driven, he hated the lazy, in-your-comfort-zone attitude displayed by so many county cricketers. He demanded hard work and commitment and then went about setting the right example. Perhaps he was a little intense, and maybe it scared some of the players enough for it to affect their performances, but I couldn’t help but be impressed by his attitude.

  It was also scarcely believable that he was prepared to spend his rare days off, away from his wife and young daughters, feeding balls into the bowling machine for myself and Ben Hutton. He was desperate to succeed as a Middlesex captain and would stop at nothing to achieve that aim. If that meant trying as hard as possible to hone the techniques of two talented but extremely inconsistent youngsters on his day off, then so be it. The fact that he was ultimately unsuccessful in his aim had as much to do with the prevailing culture at the club, which tended to shun hard work and commitment in favour of nights out, alcohol and not being seen to try too hard, as it did with Langer’s methods.

  By the beginning of the 2001 season, both Langer and Mark Ramprakash, his predecessor as captain, had left the club, leaving a huge hole in terms of run-making and experience. The daunting task of captaining a side which had been rooted to the bottom of the table the previous season, and without its only two consistent batsmen, had been assigned to Angus Fraser, the highly popular ex-England medium-pacer, who was very much in the autumn of his career.

  Gus was a Middlesex legend. No one had ever questioned his commitment, and even though he was renowned for being grumpy, he was well respected by team-mates and opposition alike. He also sowed the seeds of a Middlesex revival and in doing so showed me what leadership was really about.

  Although he was not quite the bowler he once was, he was able to lead by example because he was so passionate about the club. For him, wearing the three sea axes of Middlesex was just as important as brandishing the three lions of England. Where he really excelled, though, was in his empathy with the other players. He genuinely cared about those who were playing under him. He was interested in them as people and not just as commodities that could be traded depending on their output. After the poor returns of the previous few seasons, he wanted to make people proud to be playing for the county again and to foster a happy dressing room.

  He cared enough, however, not to be frightened to have the difficult conversations, or to remind people when they didn’t perform to the expected standards. All in all he was, and still is, a tremendous example of what a professional cricketer should be like. Unfortunately his tenure was cut short by an opportunity to take over the cricket correspondent’s job at the Independent, but he has always been a great source of help and advice to me, whether at Middlesex or as I made my way into the England ranks. It is no surprise to me that he has done so well in his new role as Middlesex Managing Director of Cricket.

  Angus Fraser’s departure meant that a successor was required to captain the club. The decision faced by the committee at Middlesex was far from simple. On the one hand they had a couple of seasoned veterans, no doubt keen to fulfil one last challenge in their careers, in the form of Paul Weekes and Phil Tufnell (OK, Tuffers probably wasn’t exactly the type to captain the club). On the other hand, there was the young, ambitious, slightly naive vice-captain, who had only been in the side for a couple of seasons.

  I was twenty-four years old, barely established in the side and had no real experience of captaining any team since school. Looking back, it was quite a risk on the part of the club, and I was blissfully unaware of quite how unprepared I was to take on the job, but in June 2002 I was appointed Middlesex captain.

  3

  A TASTE OF CAPTAINCY

  I am dripping in sweat. The notorious Monday-morning preseason fitness session has just finished. Today we were put through our paces in my least favourite exercises. The instructors call them SAQs (short for speed, agility, quickness), but what they really are is a number of sets of gruelling shuttle runs. They vary in distance, but there is very little rest in between and the constant changing of direction has given me sizable blisters on the balls of my feet.

  Usually, around this time, the endorphins start pumping through the body and the warm afterglow of knowing you have put ‘gas in the tank’, to be used later in the season, kicks in. Today, however, I am feeling frustrated and angry. The source of my displeasure is not my performance in the session, nor for that matter my team-mates, all of whom are looking fit and eager for the season to begin. No, the real problem I have is that Phil Tufnell, our most experienced player, has called in sick for the third Monday in a row.

  No one has ever mistaken Tuffers for a fitness freak, and at the age of thirty-seven the thought of running up and down a sports hall in Finchley is unlikely to motivate him to get his ageing bones out of bed. The problem for me, though, is that everyone has noticed him not being there. The trainers are concerned that he is likely to risk injury if he is not fit enough at the start of the season. The players are all rolling their eyes, shaking their heads and muttering comments like ‘He is taking the ----.’

  Captaining Middlesex for the first full season, I am not only keen that the players should be fitter than ever, but also that everyone should be treated equally. If you treat some people as if they are special or different, you are sowing the seeds of your own downfall.

  Faced with this unsavoury situation, there is only one course of action available to me. I decide to bypass the offer of the coach, John Emburey, to give Phil a buzz, as I feel it will be more powerful if it comes from me.

  I pick up the phone.

  ‘’Allo,’ comes the weary and slightly irritated voice of Phil Tufnell. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Tuffers, it’s Straussy here, mate. I’m ringing to find out why you weren’t at training this morning,’ I say, trying to keep calm but sound sufficiently annoyed at the same time.

  ‘I’m not feeling well,’ he replies in a completely unconvincing manner, as though we both know that it isn’t the reason for his non-appearance.

  ‘Well, mate, it looks like too much of a coincidence to me. Listen, I desperately want the team to move forward, and getting fit and doing the hard yards together is an important part of that. I understand that you are never going to be the fittest on the staff, and I also understand that this is probably the last thing you feel like doing at the moment. We need you to be here, though, even if you aren’t going to be at the front of the pack.’

  I begin to gain a little confidence, the more I speak.

  ‘It is really important,’ I go on, ‘that the younger players understand and realise that everyone is in this together, and if you aren’t here, then it is impossible for us to do that.’

  There is a pause at the other end of the line, as if he is taking it all in. I am curious to see how he is going to answer.

  ‘---- off, Straussy,’ comes the response, and with that the phone goes dead.

  Welcome to the joys of captaining Middlesex at that time.

  The reason for including this story in the book is not to settle a score with Tufnell. I knew him well enough by then almost to expect the reply I got. Tuffers had challenged all the captains he had played under. He certainly didn’t respond well to authority, and successive captains, from Gatting all the way through to Fraser, had made their minds up that the on-field performances just about made up for the odd bit of hassle you had to deal with along the way. Also, it had to be said that Tufnell could be genuinely brilliant in the dressing room. He was interesting and funny, the sort of guy that team-mates loved having a bit of banter with, and when bowling, in particular, he had a surprising amount of passion in his performance.

  Shortly after this episode, and thankfully before things really came to a head, Tuffers got the infamous call from the producers of I
’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse, knowing full well that his cricketing career was almost over, and he made the wise and merciful call that he was, indeed, a celebrity and that he should get out of the Middlesex dressing room just before the 2003 season started. It proved a smart move on his part, allowing him to go on to a very successful career in the media.

  What the story illustrates, though, is quite how difficult it can be for a twenty-four-year-old, whose credentials for the job are shaky to say the least, to establish himself as a leader.

  Looking back, I probably relied too much on John Emburey early in my tenure. Embers is truly one of the best people I have ever met in cricket. He is kind and generous, and hardly anyone I have met has a bad word to say about him. I like him immensely. However, his philosophy on the game was formed through watching and playing in the incredibly successful Middlesex sides of the 1970s and 1980s. He was generally suspicious of newfangled ways and tended to take comfort in old-school values and traditions. I, on the other hand, had seen Australia get to the top of the world rankings and stay there. My time playing Grade cricket had affected my thoughts and I was certain that we had to do things differently and drag the club forward. I liked the idea of Middlesex leading the way in innovation, with other coaches looking at us, nodding their heads and scribbling notes to remind them of our well-thought-out way of going about things. Embers and I were probably never destined to be the most natural of bedfellows. Deep down our philosophies were too different. Also, I have to admit that although I had a strong idea of where I wanted to get to, I was far less clear about how to go about it.

  If you throw into the mix the disparate group of players we had at our disposal, the situation became even more complicated. Our two nominated overseas players, Joe Dawes and Ashley Noffke, were steeped in the Queensland way of doing things, and both felt that the club had to drag itself into the twenty-first century. Many of the older players in the club, however, were less convinced of the need to move away from what we had always done, despite the lack of success in recent years. Caught between these conflicting groups were plenty of young, impressionable players who were just looking for a sense of direction.

  Nothing was simple, and in those days I probably didn’t have the skills or the ideas to make things happen. It was a stressful period. There was so much to learn in a short space of time: man-management, tactics, how to give an inspiring talk in public, how to deal with your own time. I had no training in any of these things and unsurprisingly I didn’t get it all right.

  One of the more intriguing aspects of the job was enduring the monthly Cricket Committee meeting. Beforehand, John Emburey and I would meet to prepare a report into how the side were doing and to outline our plans for the coming month. John would then present the report at the meeting and we would have to answer questions from an array of past players or interested members. The ages of the committee members ranged from forty-five to ninety, although unsurprisingly there was a strong majority of the older, retired brigade.

  Discussion usually drifted away from questions about what was going on with the side to lectures about how we ought to play, followed by nostalgic reminiscences about how good the game used to be. On more than one occasion I was dumbfounded when committee members decided that the reason for all our ills was either that we used helmets (which meant that we ‘neglected to watch the ball closely enough’) or that we were playing on covered wickets (which meant that our techniques were ‘not up to scratch’). I understood that the members were trying to help and were passionate about the club, but the notion that we were somehow going to win the Championship by discarding our helmets or lobbying the ECB to bring back uncovered wickets was absurd.

  I came out of those meetings feeling as if I had just lost two hours of my life for no reason, and I am delighted that the club has now moved away from the committee system, which was antiquated and past its sell-by date to say the least, to a more dynamic executive board structure, in which the Director of Cricket is given free rein but is accountable for his performance.

  All in all, it was a steep learning curve, which served me extremely well in the years to come. In fact, if there was one experience that I had in county cricket that prepared me for Test cricket more than any other, it was captaining Middlesex. I had to learn to deal with distractions; I had to learn to speak coherently; I had to learn to think about the game in a different way; and I had to learn to understand that my team-mates were all different and treat them accordingly. In short, I had to grow up.

  That is not to say that times were all bad. For the most part, we got on very well. Our wives and girlfriends all became good friends and would regularly come to Lord’s to support us while we plied our trade on the field and then meet us in the Tavern after the game. We were becoming a family again and our performances on the pitch were promising. In 2002 we managed to achieve promotion into the first division for the first time since the two divisions had been introduced. We would also manage to avoid relegation in 2003, finishing sixth, and thus on the surface at least things were going in the right direction.

  People unaware of what was going on behind the scenes would no doubt have described my captaincy as ‘leading from the front’. Over the two seasons, I scored over 2,700 runs, showing that my game was developing and also that the captaincy was not weighing me down too much. In this I was helped by some remarkably consistent performances from a number of other batsmen at the club. Sven Koenig had come in from the highveld of Gauteng and taken to English cricket like a duck to water. Ed Joyce was beginning to make waves as an elegant, Gower-esque left-hander, and the likes of Owais Shah, Ben Hutton and David Nash were all contributing on a regular basis.

  Our bowling, though, was far more of a concern. Angus Fraser and Phil Tufnell had both left big boots to fill, and our young bowlers were struggling to make inroads on flat Lord’s wickets. We drew far too many games as we weren’t able to force results and, looking back now, some of my tactics, such as bowling wide of off stump to 7–2 fields, were never likely to yield great results.

  More than our inability to take wickets, however, I was increasingly irked by the way we were going about our business. By the end of the 2003 season, I knew deep down that if Middlesex wanted to start challenging consistently at the top of the first division, then we had to make some difficult changes. It was not a task that I was particularly relishing, as it would no doubt knock a few noses out of joint, but I was determined that over the winter we would take the necessary steps.

  In the space of a few short months, however, my life was about to change.

  4

  ONE GLORIOUS DAY IN MAY

  My heart is beating too fast. I am struggling to subdue the rapidly rising feeling of panic. Desperately trying to keep myself in check, I repeat to myself quietly, ‘Think of the process, Strauss, think of the process.’

  I am shadow-batting now, going through the complete array of shots. Forward defence is quickly followed by a cut shot, then a pull. All the time my feet are bouncing up and down, like a boxer prancing around the ring. I feel the adrenalin running through my veins. I am alert and alive. I vaguely remember a sports psychologist saying that ‘nerves should be welcomed; they are your body’s way of telling you that you are ready.’

  Well, if that is the case, then I am definitely ready. I am more than ready. I play a couple of imaginary leg glances, while at the same time taking some deep breaths. My team-mates, with one exception, are busy taking off their boots or changing into tracksuits. For the bowlers, in particular, their job is done. New Zealand have been bowled out. It is time to relax.

  I glance at Marcus Trescothick, my opening partner. He looks tense. He is not moving around like I am, but rather sitting down, staring into space, as though he is going through a mental checklist. I know, having seen him on television many times, that he keeps his emotions in check. This is his way of preparing for battle.

  Shortly there will be nowhere to hid
e. The warmth and comfort of the dressing room is about to be replaced by the cold, harsh reality of Test cricket. My mind wanders briefly. The question ‘What will it be like out there?’ drifts into my consciousness. I force myself not to think about it. I will find out soon enough.

  I spent most of last night thinking about that very question. In between the tossing and turning, self-interrogations such as ‘Am I really good enough for this?’ and ‘Am I going to be able to cope with the pressure?’ constantly played out in my mind. I assured myself that I could deal with it all, but as the night wore on, my conviction diminished somewhat.

  I continue to jump around, conscious now that some of my team-mates are looking in my direction. Players make judgements on their peers in many different ways and for many different reasons. They are looking at me, evaluating how calm and ready I look. If I fail, I know that there will be a dinnertime comment along the lines of ‘He looked too pumped up before he went out. I knew he wasn’t going to get any.’ Again, I can’t dwell on this sort of stuff now. I have to keep my mind on the job.

  I hear the sound of a bell in the background. ‘That’s the worker, lads,’ one of the bowlers calls out.

  ‘The worker’ refers to the bell that sounds in all grounds to tell players and umpires that the game is starting in five minutes. I look at Trescothick, he gives me a nod and we both start moving towards the dressing-room door – the same door that I nervously entered for the first time at Middlesex seven years previously.