back on my career at all. When it’s raining and Sky put
on an old bit of footage, it feels like somebody else – an
out-of-body experience. I cannot now visualise facing
Allan Donald in front of 40,000 screaming people at The
Wanderers. The technical incompetence! Feet all over
the place, head ditto, I got runs despite a bad technique.
It was a different era, of course, you didn’t have the
forensic analysis, with fewer cameras and so on. Alastair
Cook has similar strengths to me, albeit he’s better. He
absolutely knows his game. You wouldn’t necessarily
copy his technique, but you would absolutely copy his
mental toughness, concentration and resilience. He has a
continuing rhythm to his game. He walks fi ve or six yards
to square-leg, then back again. You cannot necessarily
say great technique is better to have than resilience.”
Of course concentration and stonewalling were never
needed more than during that famous, epic 185 not out at
The Wanderers in 1995/96, “I just knew I wasn’t going to
get out. It had a dream-like quality. It’s a game of chance- the ball might come off a crack, the umpire might stuff
you, but I just felt I wasn’t going to get out on that fi nal
day. It was a lovely feeling. The greats like Brian Lara
probably had that feeling more often than not.”
Bravery and defi ance were the adjectives needed to
describe that other famous encounter with the South
Africans, against Allan Donald at Trent Bridge 1998. “It
didn’t just fl ick my glove, it almost broke my hand. We
went into the opposition dressing room and I sat next
to him. We swapped momentos. I gave him my glove,
which I autographed, over the red mark, and he signed
the magnum of champagne I won as man of the match.
He’s a terrifi c bloke. Donald was one of the handful of
bowlers of that era who was slightly quicker than the
rest – with Shoaib Akhtar and Brett Lee. I wasn’t scared,
but there’s that nagging feeling of getting hit. At the start
of my career at Lancashire, Peter Lever was mad about
pace. He had about 12 lads plucked from the leagues,
and I was one of the guinea-pig batsmen who faced
these guys off about 17 yards. It got me into the habit of
playing fast bowling. It sped up my reactions. That is the
biggest difference between the amateur and professional
games. There were also those bowlers who took wickets
and kept a lid on the scoring-rates. People like Glenn
McGrath, Shaun Pollock and probably the best of the
lot, Curtly Ambrose – destructive. It was always so hard
against McGrath and Shane Warne together. Even if you
weren’t getting out, you were never going anywhere. They
bowled for an hour at a time and closed the game down,
and inevitably wickets would come.”
Refl ecting on two-Test series, especially the recent one
against Pakistan that frustratingly ended 1-1, he said it
was a shame that a batsman can fl ee from the clutches of
a top bowler. He was famously dismissed by McGrath 19
times in Tests. “If the bowler has the wood on you, there is
no escape. It is hard to develop a narrative over two Tests,
but something juicy might happen over fi ve.”
Of course he was also fascinating on the subject of
captaincy. Until recently he had led England the most
number of times in Tests, before Cook went past his
mark of 54.
“I didn’t know much about leadership and life at 25. In
some ways I look back and think I did as good a job as I
could, and other times I cringe and think, ‘what were you
doing?’ It would have been nicer to do it at 29, but
I had a back operation at 21 and the surgeon
said I wouldn’t play much beyond 30, so
when Ted Dexter offered it to me there’s no
way I could have said, ‘do you mind if I wait
four years?’ You cannot be something you are
not, you cannot bluff people. Nasser was a
very blunt, no-nonsense captain, very good,
but I had to be true to myself. I had played
under David Hughes, Neil Fairbrother and
Graham Gooch.
“If I had my time again I would have
gone out of my way to speak to people
in different walks of life – different
sports, business and so on. We
were playing every day, either for
England or our counties... there
wasn’t any time. I did meet Sir
Alex Ferguson in an unoffi cial,
relaxed way. I was surprised just
before a game that he didn’t give
a team-talk, but he told me he’d
done all that, he’d drilled them
all week and then let them get on
with it. He had faith in them.”‘You have to be
slightly immature
to be a good pro
sportsman – to
think it’s the most
important thing in
the world – which is
clearly a nonsense’
ABOVE
Atherton saves
England at
The Wanderersthecricketer.com | MIKE ATHERTON | CRICKETER LIVE