Strauss is now a leader by example
The Daily Telegraph, 20th February 2009
The disappointment of not forcing victory in Antigua Test should not obscure what a massive boost this Test was for Andrew Strauss. His first innings 169, made under huge pressure, signals the way England should approach the next two Tests – and their Ashes campaign this summer.
In the first Test, Strauss failed twice as England were humiliated and bowled out for 51. As a captain, you feel the burden of the whole team’s disappointment. Humiliation is different from defeat. It makes people look for underlying causes, and though the deeper issues might not be there, the search can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Self-doubt spreads easily, and a humiliated team can quickly turn in on itself. As a captain, you sense people looking at you for a way forward.
Sometimes there is only one available strategy: play well yourself. You have thought about what went wrong. You have listened, encouraged and strategised. You have deliberated over team changes and tactical nuances. You have wondered how the team will respond after such a disastrous defeat. You are exhausted and close to the edge.
That’s not even the hard bit. The difficult thing is the next realisation. That although words and planning might help, they count for little compared to your own performance as a player. As if the psychological burden was not enough already. Now the captain has to burrow to the bottom of his stockpiles of resilience, he has to dredge up the last scraps of self-belief and defiance he can muster. Things begin to look dauntingly clear. Days of analysis crystallise into one shockingly simple phrase: “I have got to get runs.”
This was Strauss’s position going into the Antigua Test. Like many players who have been in dire straights before him, the hard-won insight with which he emerged was a simple one: the best way out of a tight corner is to attack, and attack from the start. I have never seen Strauss use his feet to spinners as early or as often as he did in Antigua. Instead of waiting for fate to come to him, he was dancing down the wicket to meet it.
When players are pushed to the limits of their psychological range, it is amazing how often they decide the best policy is to attack. That is what Andrew Strauss did brilliantly in Antigua. He came out punching and it worked. Strauss is not by nature an extravagant player – so trying to bat like Kevin Pietersen was not an option. Instead, he played his own game – deft, crisp, uncomplicated – but at its most aggressive and carefree. He was himself, but himself with front foot forward, quite literally.
He was nearly out LBW, he was dropped, he was missed at slip. But instead of retreating into his shell at these near- misses, Strauss looked increasing certain that a hundred was his destiny. A hundred seemed certain – itself a triumph. When he is projecting an aura of inevitability, a sportsman knows he is mentally at his very best.
It may not have been, as many people have suggested, Strauss’s most valuable innings. Strauss also scored a first- innings hundred in the drawn 2005 Oval Test which secured England the Ashes. But that was the opposite kind of innings. The Oval demanded a calm head, a resistance to hype, a revving down rather than a revving up – the kind of territory, in other words, which often Strauss often enjoys.
This Antigua hundred was different, an assertion of will, a bending of events to his own script. Sometimes it isn’t enough to “not let the pressure get to you”. You have to grip the day and stamp your mark on it – a more egotistical trait that is less naturally suited to Strauss’s temperament. Strauss’s 169 was the kind of knock that can define a captaincy.
But it does prompt the wider question: why wait? Very good players are often able to summon something special when they most need it. The greats seem to live all the time in that defiant psychological range. Perhaps that is what makes them great: the ability to get their retaliation in first, before anything has even gone wrong.
England might consider the approach now. If Strauss demonstrated a superb attacking mindset with the bat in the first innings, the team as a whole could not match it in the second. It wasn’t not enforcing the follow-on which cost England victory, or any lack of effort in the field. The problem was allowing their own second innings to meander.
Maybe fear of being bowled out too cheaply and losing – which would have amounted to humiliations in consecutive Tests – subconsciously made England keep the brakes on. After the debacle at Jamaica, perhaps restoring some self- respect and an air of normality was the first priority in Antigua.
But that leaves England with a simple equation for the rest of the series – two Tests remaining, two wins required. Like a captain in need of runs, the options for the team have narrowed to one: only winning will work. After his fearless 169, the captain has never been in a stronger position to tell them how to do it.