The Fighter: Nasser Hussain
Playing With Fire
Nasser Hussain (2004) – Playing With Fire, London: Michael Joseph
Given that he started the 90s as one of England’s promising youngsters, one of the original ‘young lions’ featured in Sky’s promo video, and ended it as the team’s beleaguered captain, it seems appropriate that we should end our look back at the decade with Nasser Hussain.
Hussain was left to flounder during his first summer as captain, as an underperforming team increasingly struggled to overcome a cycle of poor decision making, public disappointment and low morale. As the boos rang out at The Oval, with England – unofficially, at least – the worst Test team in the world, there seemed little possibility of achieving a swift turnaround in fortunes.
Hussain had yet to commence his partnership with Zimbabwean coach Duncan Fletcher, with whom he would do just that over the next 12-18 months. Although confirmed in post during the summer of 1999, Fletcher would not commence his duties until the winter tour of South Africa, for which the selectors, mindful of public demand for change, had selected a weak squad packed with unproven players.
Despite this inauspicious start, Fletcher would prove to be the calm head that England needed: a good technical coach and man-manager, with an awareness of the English domestic game but also the strength of character to trust his own judgement.
And while Hussain was not spared from criticism after ending his first Test series in charge in defeat, the fact that his predecessor and the previous coach had already paid the price for an early exit from a World Cup on home turf bought him a little bit of time to turn things around.
It now seems odd to recall that Hussain’s reputation as a spiky dressing room character meant that he was at one point considered an unlikely captain. The origins of a single-minded focus on his batting – a desire to meet his father Joe’s ambitions took a hit when he lost control of his leg-spin as a youngster and had to reinvent himself as a batter – are given significant focus in Playing with Fire, but Hussain argues, with some success, that players mature and are able to adapt when given positions of responsibility.
That said, there are some parallels in some of Hussain’s tales from county cricket with those relayed by Mark Ramprakash, himself an outside candidate for the captaincy when Alec Stewart was sacked: rather than look back on these incidents with a calm head and the benefit of hindsight, the reader retains a strong sense that the author still thinks he was right. (1)
Hussain was always highly rated as a young batsman, earning a call-up for the final Test of the doomed 1989 Ashes without playing, before earning a debut, and battling hard, on the winter tour of the West Indies that followed. Thereafter, chances proved harder to come by, with a brief run in the team against the 1993 Australians the only real opportunity until he proved up to the challenge of filling the troublesome number 3 slot when recalled to the team to face India in 1996.
On paper, Hussain was not perhaps the ideal choice for first drop, and whispers about technique possibly counted against him in those early days, ignoring the fact that determination and character are also significant requirements for success at the highest level. The favouring of the more technically correct Ramprakash over Hussain on the 1993/4 tour of the West Indies was possibly a mistake, in hindsight, with coach (and former Essex colleague) Keith Fletcher later nominating it as a significant regret from his time in charge.
Hussain’s Test return in 1996 followed an impressive showing as captain of the ‘A’ tour to Pakistan the previous winter, and after a good summer with the bat, he was named Mike Atherton’s vice-captain, and continued in the role under Alec Stewart. Hussain was the right man to drag England from the bottom of the Test rankings once he succeeded Stewart as captain, and having found an ideal foil in Fletcher, the two soon restored the team to respectability.
After delivering consistent success both home and away, Hussain faced heightened expectations, and the next big obstacle: The Ashes. He was unfortunate that his captaincy coincided with the period when that great Australian team of the era was at its height, and that his team was disrupted by injuries and absences – including his own – and his generation of players coming the end of their careers.
Ashes defeats prompt media inquests and English soul-searching like no other, and at times Hussain seems torn between buying into this and rejecting it: he bristles at the piousness of Steve Waugh’s Australians and any suggestion that their excellence was drawn not from skill but pride and patriotism, as if the Aussies won because they wanted it more and not because they had Warne, McGrath and an assortment of talented, hard-hitting batsmen at their disposal.
On the other hand, he also appears preoccupied with finding a way to overcome these world-beaters, obsessing over ‘mystery spin’ and fast bowlers as the possible key to success. As with many captains, an away Ashes proved to be the beginning of the end, having followed a tetchy summer in which the presence of Hussain at number 3 in the one-day batting order somehow became a major media talking point.
After scoring a hundred in the 2002 Natwest Series final, with a celebration directed towards his commentary-box critics (‘My three-fingered salute to my one-day critics… one finger each for Agnew, Botham and Willis!’) his sense of triumph was undermined by India chasing down England’s total, prompting an equally memorable celebration from opposite number Sourav Ganguly, whirling his shirt around his head in an apparent reply to a similar effort from Andrew Flintoff the previous winter.(2)
Hussain is good on Botham here, and after being baffled by his contributions to selection discussions as an ‘official observer’ in 1999, is brave enough – and possibly has enough credit in the bank – to dismiss the popular view that the former all-rounder would have made a good selector: ‘Yes, Ian Botham is a top man who cares passionately about English cricket, but there was never any consistency in his arguments. He’d say one thing one day and then suddenly he’d be saying that the same bloke he had been pushing for a year was now complete rubbish.’
He is also honest enough to admit that his own judgement on players was not the best, unlike his predecessors who seemed to have very firm views, although he was fortunate to have informed guidance from his coach: when left to his own devices during the rudderless summer of 1999, he preferred to back players that he knew and trusted, even if some, like Ed Giddins and Ronnie Irani, ultimately proved to be short of Test class.
Irani also later figures in some political manoeuvrings at Essex, involving Australian Stuart Law, from which, in Hussain’s account at least, Irani emerges with little credit. Hussain is also interesting on the topic of one-time mentor Graham Gooch and his tendency to favour younger players, perhaps to a fault. Having possibly owed his early Test ascension to his Essex hero, he later finds himself on the receiving end when, no longer England captain and back in the ranks, Gooch – now his county coach – decides to leave Hussain out of the Essex one-day side.
Playing With Fire is adorned with admiring quotes – as these things tend to be – from colleagues and media pundits. The book’s author deserves them: with some help, and some luck, Hussain was the man to drag English cricket away from the failures of the 90s and towards a more successful future. For those of us who watched those sorry scenes at The Oval in 1999, it was more than we could possibly have dreamed of.
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Young Lions Sometimes Roar: Watching Bad Cricket (And Playing Cricket Badly) in the 90s by Ben Richards is out now.
Notes:
(1) Hussain, storming into the Essex dressing room after being dismissed by a yorker from Surrey’s Tony Murphy, announces: ‘That’s what f**king happens when your bowlers practise their skills.’ Unsurprisingly, this did not go down well.
(2) This does rather sound like the stuff of YouTuber call-outs rather than the behaviour of international cricketers, but it did all happen. After Hussain eventually departed the one-day team, following a politically difficult World Cup overshadowed by controversy surrounding a possible trip to co-hosts Zimbabwe, his replacement Michael Vaughan enjoyed a new-captain bounce but proved equally unsuited to limited-overs cricket, departing after the next tournament in 2007 with an average in the late 20s.
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