The Young Lion as Captain: Mike Atherton

Mike Atherton (2002) – Opening Up: My Autobiography, London: Hodder and Stoughton

I suppose if you weren’t as obsessed with the England team in the 90s as I was, the prominence of Mike Atherton’s book in someone’s house might seem worthy of comment. Even back when he was England captain, Atherton was a slightly strange object of admiration for a teenager: a gawky, slightly prefect-style figure, in charge of a largely unsuccessful team, who gave little away in the media.

The transition to respected writer and broadcaster upon his retirement was pretty swift, and perhaps a generation of fans have stapled this more cheery and relaxed Atherton to the taciturn young captain of our youth, in the process convincing ourselves that he was always like that, really.

And he probably was, to team-mates, friends and family: to the public and media, though, 90s ‘Ath’ was known, as he acknowledges here, by the nickname ‘Captain Grumpy’.

The shedding of that persona arguably began with Opening Up. As most cricket fans will acknowledge, hopes that a recently retired player will release a book that reveals them to be much more interesting than you thought and answer most of the burning questions you had about their career are frequently left unrealised.

However, for an England cricket fan waiting to find out what the captain really thought about all the mad stuff that went on during the mid-90s, Opening Up does pretty much everything that you’d want.

It helps that Atherton is an engaging writer and knows what the reader wants: not too much about the early years (Cambridge cricket was eccentric, he doesn’t agree that it made him a defensive captain), lots of detail about the captaincy including his difficult relationship with Ray Illingworth, with sufficient focus on major highs (185* against South Africa in 1995, the duel with Allan Donald in 1998) and lows (‘dirt in the pocket’, the 1996 World Cup).

The 1989 loss at home to Australia is again a focal point: Atherton made his debut in the series, noting that he was not ready for Test cricket and benefited from scattergun selection as well as a media obsession with the potential of young players. A demoralised squad, led by a distracted David Gower and hit by injuries, withdrawals and defections to the ‘rebel’ tour of apartheid South Africa, set the blueprint for everything that playing Test cricket for England should not be.

Four years later, more established in the team, and after a few ups and downs in the interim, he was named as captain, taking over from a dejected Graham Gooch at the tail end of an equally unsuccessful home Ashes series. Atherton lost his first game as skipper before conjuring an unlikely, but comprehensive, win in the final Test at The Oval.

That match was my first experience of an England Test victory, out of ten matches played since the winter tour to India. A revitalised team, playing exciting cricket, under a dynamic young skipper: the stage seemed set for a new side to develop, starting – just as Gooch’s team had four years previously – with a winter trip to the West Indies.

Waiting for Mike Atherton’s England side to be good was a quest that dominated my teenage years more than any other. It always lay tantalisingly out of reach, never so hopelessly dashed by the latest defeat that all seemed lost, with the occasional unlikely win or heroic performance rationed out in such a fashion that faith and optimism could still be maintained.

The man himself somehow never seemed entirely culpable, perhaps because he led from the front with the bat, or because a lot of the madness of English cricket at the time existed around him – was happening to him – and there was a sense that he was doing all he could to keep the team going.

The youthful squad (‘Young Lions’, if you will) selected for his first tour didn’t quite show the level of promise to guarantee its constituent players a longer run, and perhaps even fell short of the standards produced by Gooch’s team on the previous trip. As it turned out, selection for that tour was the most influence Atherton was able to have over the makeup of his side during his captaincy.

Ray Illingworth was then installed as Chairman of Selectors and presided over a period of frenetic player turnover, accompanied by a consistent and high-profile media presence, both of which made Atherton uneasy. The skipper’s power base was further eroded over the ‘dirt in the pocket’(1) affair later in the year – about which Atherton writes well here – although the ongoing impact of the incident on their relationship is not really explored.

While he may have had differences of opinion with Illingworth, Atherton appears keen to play down any notions of a power struggle or battle for supremacy, only noting frustration at selection, sadness that the two did not work better together, and a lack of coaching support once Illingworth sacked Keith Fletcher and stepped into the role himself.

It proved to be too much for Illingworth after the gruelling winter tour of 1995/6 to South Africa, followed by a desperate showing in the World Cup. New coach David Lloyd brought new energy and optimism, but found his former Lancashire colleague running on empty.

Atherton himself gives an example of a day at the end of that summer of 1996, with England heading towards a series defeat against Pakistan at The Oval, which illustrates how the job was getting on top of him: Chris Lewis arrived late; several players in the team had to be informed during the Test that they were to be left out of the ODI series to follow; England’s bowling got whacked around the field as Pakistan amassed a huge total before declaring; then Atherton had to go out and face Waqar and Wasim with the new ball.

Although he survived until the close, this was a scenario that seemed to repeat itself throughout his captaincy: with England on the back foot after a long day in the field, the skipper then had to drag himself back to the wicket in order to face the evening music as the best batsman in the team and the wicket that the opposition most cherished. Little wonder that many of these days ended with him prodding an outswinger to slip.

By the following winter in Zimbabwe, he was badly out of sorts with the bat, and the team were attracting bad press. Yet a turnaround in form for both in New Zealand, followed by an uncharacteristically emphatic thrashing of the Aussies at the start of the 1997 summer, seemingly set the scene for a fairytale ending.

This was the Hollywood script for The Atherton Years: the young player out of his depth and alarmed by cynicism in 1989 unexpectedly becomes captain in 1993 and, after struggling through various ups and downs, finally defeats the Aussies and recaptures the Ashes.

Alas, it was not to be: England had their moments in 1997, but their opponents had better players who were more easily able to perform at their best under pressure during the crucial moments. The team had moved forward, but with some backward steps and wasted years along the way, and though the selectors were by now more patient, they were still liable to panic in the face of bad results.

Opening Up manages to capture the same mixture of optimism, pessimism, triumph and frustration that summed up its author’s team in the 90s. Key moments are identified and given a great deal of attention: the ‘dirt in the pocket’ incident is illuminated by diary entries from the time, while the two famous innings against South Africa are broken down in a refreshingly non-tedious way.

Opening Up sees Atherton give an honest and self-critical assessment of his time in charge. While undoubtedly progressive by contemporary standards, in some respects he seems to have possessed an old-school mindset, reasoning that players deserved some consistency of selection and a level of support but, beyond that, they had to work Test match cricket out for themselves.

There was also, of course, his lack of interest in engaging with the media, which he viewed as a chore rather than a necessary part of the role – although, to be fair, between 1994 and 1996 Illingworth was doing enough talking in the media for both of them. Indeed, even after shedding tears in the changing room while announcing his resignation to the team, he steels himself again for the press: ‘I was damned if I was going to let them take a peek at my soul’.

In the many years since, Atherton has admitted that he gives his past captaincy career very little thought at all, expressing mild bemusement at the continuing presence it seems to have in the minds of fans who followed it so keenly at the time.

After writing candidly about it here, he sums the period up with suitably neat understatement, a written shrug of the shoulders: ‘I was appointed at twenty-five with little or no team in place, in a system not conducive to success. I gave it my all for nearly five years and there I will leave it.’

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Notes:

(1) I’m aware that I keep referring to ‘dirt in the pocket’ slightly euphemistically: I’m loath to refer to ball-tampering, although the suggestion that this is what TV pictures showed Atherton doing during the 1994 Lord’s Test against South Africa was, of course, at the heart of the controversy. It seems to have been largely forgotten about now, but its prominence here reflects the white-hot media attention it generated at the time, despite the umpires confirming the condition of the ball had not been altered, and South Africa winning the match in question by a huge margin.

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© Ben Richards 2026