England need to be more English to beat Australia
The Daily Telegraph, 17th August 2009
You would never guess that the Ashes is poised 1-1.
Listening to and reading all the pundits, you would think that Australia were winning 10-0. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the score is Australianism 10, Englishness nil. Whenever something awful or disastrous needs to be explained about English sport, out pops good old Englishness. An English batting collapse, English body language, English comfort zones, and – my favourite – the English county system.
What happens when England win, like in the great victory at Lord’s? Are they not English then as well? Don’t be ridiculous. Quite the reverse. It was the hapless opposition who were being English. When Australia capitulated at Lord’s they were merely imitating England in a momentary loss of identity.
So when England lose, they are being English, and yet when Australia lose they are also being English? Exactly!
Once you understand the logic, it all makes perfect sense. The great thing about long-term causes, as Marxist historians mastered long ago, is that they don’t have to be right all the time. When the facts don’t fit the theory, just go quiet for a bit and wait for the wind to change.
Sounds nasty, this disease of Englishness. Is there a remedy? To the key opinion-makers in English cricket, who are mostly English ex-players and have been accused of exactly the things they now describe in others, the debilitating Englishness of the England team is attributable to the structure of county cricket, which has too many games, too many players, is too soft, too lazy, too fat, too rich (add pejorative adjective of choice).
Any scrap of gossip that fits the “Englishness-is-the-problem” thesis is held up as clinching proof. Justin Langer’s amusing and occasionally derogatory character sketches of his former England opponents should have been pinned on the England dressing-room wall and viewed as light entertainment. Instead, Langer’s perfectly natural comments prompted yet another round of national navel-gazing.
There is, of course, one very good reason why Australian has more positive connotations than English. Since 1989, Australia have won 35 Ashes Tests to England’s 10. So Australia have been better at cricket over that period. But how much of that is attributable to a crop of great Australian players, and how much to Englishness? And within Englishness, what can be altered, such as the make-up of county cricket, and how much is innate?
This is the nub of the issue. To the cabal of reformist ex-players at the heart of English cricket, county cricket explains everything that goes wrong for the national team. Any success, like the 2005 Ashes victory, is attributable to Team England having “escaped from the mediocrity of county cricket”. All failures, on the other hand, can be traced back to the “bloated county system”.
I am not so sure. Once, when England’s fast bowlers were not protected from over-bowling on the county treadmill, I think the argument had some validity. But now I think the problem of Englishness is much more about perception than reality.
What is a typical English cricketer? Laconic, understated and elegant, David Gower was the quintessential Englishman. But so too was the brave, industrious and professional Graham Gooch. Andrew Strauss, calm and phlegmatic, is deeply English. But so is the extrovert and fun-loving Andrew Flintoff.
Englishness is not an individual characteristic at all. It is a group diversity.
Why does this matter? Because the real problem with English cricket is not that we are too English, but that we aren’t brave enough to embrace Englishness.
I don’t mean belting out Jerusalem. I mean allowing ourselves – as a team, as a nation – to be hard to pigeon-hole, happy not to announce ourselves with a macho and over-simplistic mission-statement. Englishness is being amused at someone else trying to define you.
If there is one characteristic which unites great cricketers it isn’t that they all play like Australians. It’s that they play like themselves. If Australia has produced more great players, perhaps that is because they have been better at playing naturally, better at focusing on the task at hand rather than acting the part.
Copying the Australians is easy. Playing with your own true voice is much harder. But if all 11 England players turn up to speak for themselves at the Oval staring on Thursday, to deliver their own set of lines on this the grandest of sporting stages, we may yet see that there is still life in Englishness – if only we could trust in it.