The Gaffer: Alec Stewart
Playing for Keeps
Alec Stewart (2004) – Playing for Keeps, London: BBC Books
As someone who believed firmly and unwaveringly in the captaincy of Mike Atherton, whose ultimate failure to drive his team to achieve greatness was down to factors beyond his own control, the notion that he simply might not have been the best choice in the first place rarely, if ever, entered my head.
Moreover, he seemed to have the backing of the majority of players in his team, whose own retrospective accounts of the mid-90s usually tallied with each other: Atherton was a good captain, who did his best, and ultimately ran out of steam after battling the structural and cultural issues afflicting English cricket for longer than most others could stand.
Alec Stewart was the other candidate, and the apparent front-runner, back in 1993, having stood in when Graham Gooch was unavailable during the winter tours to India and Sri Lanka. At the time, Stewart appeared to be the more conservative choice: the vice-captain associated with the previous regime, and though Stewart was by then more established in the team than Atherton,(1) his place – and role – still remained slightly uncertain.
This is the reason that the man himself gives for not especially coveting the captaincy, and being relieved that he did not get it at that stage. Not for the last time, this period of Stewart’s career coincided with the need to serve as an attacking opener or middle-order wicketkeeper-batsman, depending on the needs of the team. The ‘needs of the team’ were usually that England were behind in the series, and wanted to alter the structure of the side to force a positive result – a gambler’s mindset if ever there was one, and a strategy that usually failed.
If Stewart’s own form suffered, this constant flip-flopping did usually at least guarantee him continuity of selection during troubled times, and under Atherton he remained a constant presence in the side, except when sidelined by a succession of finger injuries in 1995, and a single match against India in 1996, when he was dropped for Nick Knight.
After Knight was injured and immediately replaced again by Stewart, the latter secured his immediate Test future via a remarkable run of form, initially as an opening batsman during the summer of 1996 against India and Pakistan, with Jack Russell keeping wicket, followed by a fruitful winter as wicketkeeper-batsman in Zimbabwe and New Zealand.
The pressures of the combined role during the 1997 Ashes proved significant, however, and he spent the following winter in the West Indies as a specialist opener, apparently rejuvenated yet again. Still, after replacing an exhausted Atherton as skipper the following summer, Stewart not only took back the gloves, but also the one-day captaincy from Surrey team-mate Adam Hollioake.
Stewart again seemed like the less exciting choice (and Nasser Hussain had been Atherton’s most recent vice-captain) but his place in the team was more secure than five years previously, and he could certainly be assured of the support of senior colleagues. By that point, Devon Malcolm and Dermot Reeve, both less enamoured of Atherton’s captaincy than some others, had both written in their books that they considered Stewart the more sensible choice in 1993 and a positive, attacking captain in general.
Sure enough, Stewart immediately delivered what had been sorely lacking under the previous regime: a victory in a marquee five-Test series against major opposition. The 2-1 win against South Africa was achieved despite constantly shifting selection and negligible contributions from a variety of all-rounders and spin bowlers, and was heavily reliant on contributions from senior players.
It proved that, if anything, the England management in the 90s were often guilty of overthinking selection. By comparison, South Africa, who were considered the second-best side in the world at that point, rarely seemed to agonise about the makeup of their team in quite the same way as their opponents, relying on six batsmen, a wicketkeeper and four bowlers, and sometimes operating with no spinner.
The bubble was burst by a late-summer defeat to Sri Lanka on a spinning pitch, during which English thoughts had already turned to the winter’s Ashes, which they also lost comfortably. While England didn’t capitulate, they struggled against a largely Warne-less Australia, bowled out for low scores by backup spinners Stuart MacGill and Colin ‘Funky’ Miller.
England also erred in not picking their best players: Phil Tufnell, Jack Russell and – particularly – Andy Caddick, who had taken over 100 wickets for Somerset in 1998. Stewart writes here that he has no regrets over the non-selection of so-called ‘high-maintenance’ characters, arguing that Tufnell’s bowling had reduced in effectiveness and that Caddick’s attitude in the West Indies the previous winter had irritated him, as well as coach David Lloyd.
Stewart’s lack of patience for difficult characters represented a more straightforward approach to captaincy which was at odds with the introspection of the English game and its tendency to overcomplicate things. He cites his time playing grade cricket in Australia as the most important part of his development, and while other English captains of the era may also have admired the Aussies, Stewart was the one most able to apply their approach and mindset to his own game.
Perhaps this made those English fans and media accustomed to the team’s ongoing psychodrama rather suspicious of Stewart’s captaincy once results started to go against him. Certainly, Playing for Keeps offers little in the way of substance or deep insight, but that is nothing to hold against the author – cricketers are players first and writers second – especially if their book represents them, and what made them successful, accurately.
The pre-World Cup wrangling over pay and subsequent early elimination in 1999 would have been difficult for anyone to survive. Stewart wonders about being a caretaker captain and questions why he was sacked from the Test leadership on the basis of poor one-day performances. Given what was to follow, he might have suffered a worse fate had he also carried the can for a directionless Test series against New Zealand.
With the gloves, as well as the captaincy, now removed, Stewart looked vulnerable as a 36-year-old opening batsman in a struggling team. But, as he did so many times before – and several times subsequently – Stewart produced the goods under pressure with the bat. But by the end of the series, the team’s dire position had led to his return as wicketkeeper once again.
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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) However, Atherton had briefly served as vice-captain to Gooch in the summer of 1991, as noted in Opening Up: ‘Just as the first ball of the West Indies innings was about to be bowled… Gooch halted proceedings, called me over, and told me I was the new vice-captain… It wasn’t really mentioned again, and but for one instance at The Oval, Graham never asked my advice.’ Atherton, after struggling with his back, and the West Indies’ fast bowlers, then endured a spell out of the side.
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