Medals galore at the Olympics. A world-beating rugby team. A hat-trick of Test victories. England has waited a long time for sporting success and now it seems it won’t stop coming
Richard Williams Perhaps the best thing about a prolonged period of humiliation on the sports field is that it has taught the English not only how to value success but how to enjoy it. In the cheers that resounded through the nation’s workplaces on Monday as the news spread of the England cricket team’s victory in Karachi could be heard a healthy blend of astonishment and relief along with the natural exultation of victory.
In a year marked by a crescendo of triumphs in the boxing ring and on the rugby pitch, in the velodrome and on the rowing course, was the least likely of them all, achieved in the sport once assumed to provide the most accurate metaphor for the national attributes and in which England’s recent record of almost unbroken failure had been taken as a symbol of a more general national decline.
In the past year or so England has been able to boast of a surprising range of laurels. An undisputed world heavyweight boxing champion (albeit by way of Jamaica and Canada). Britain’s highest number of gold medals at an Olympic Games since 1920. The richest football club in the world. The engineers who design the world’s most successful racing cars. A couple of tennis players (one of them a Canadian by birth) who can at least hold their heads up in the highest company. An England rugby team which has just beaten three southern hemisphere sides in a row. And now a cricket team capable of winning three Test series in a row. Where is all this winning going to end? And how on Earth did it start?
England’s feat in Monday’s subcontinental twilight was as extraordinary in statistical terms as it was dramatic in its denouement. Never before had Pakistan lost a Test match in Karachi. Not since 1961 had they lost any home Test match to England. And it is no time at all since Pakistan were considered the kings of world cricket. Yet here, as darkness fell, was Moin Khan, their captain, gallantly acknowledging the justice of England’s victory. “They exploited the conditions better than us,” he said, “and they deserved to win.”
Now, following their wins at home over Zimbabwe and West Indies in the summer, England can boast of a hat-trick of wins in Test series in a row something that has not happened since 1978/79, when they won four in a row in the era of Mike Brearley and Ian Botham.
Less than a week after the death of Colin Cowdrey, that embodiment of the game of cricket in the days when virtually all boys played clandestine games of Owzat! during scripture lessons and kept a set of stumps chalked on the nearest brick wall for use after school, surely here was a sign of the game’s rebirth.
The snicks and mishits and scurried singles with which Nasser Hussain and his team reached their target were a long way from the image of the portly toff easing the ball through the covers visible in the black-and-white footage shown in the tributes to Hussain’s late predecessor as England captain, but they nevertheless bore the authentic stamp of sporting heroism.
Barely 12 hours earlier, an undisputed national hero had accepted the BBC award for the sports personality of the year, which since it is the product of a poll among viewers and listeners might be thought of as the nation’s highest sporting accolade. Steve Redgrave’s fifth gold medal at consecutive Olympic Games from Los Angeles in 1984 to Sydney 2000 was unprecedented for a performer in a sport requiring power or endurance, but his was just one among the 11 performances that brought gold medals to members of the Great Britain team the nation’s biggest haul since 1920.
If there were to be a poll this month to appoint a new head of state, Redgrave would probably make the top five. And as he accepted his latest trophy, he gave his audience a reminder of what it takes to make a champion. In his speech he thanked those who had voted for him and rowed with him. But he reserved his warmest appreciation for his three mentors the comprehensive school teacher who planted the idea of sitting in a boat and tugging an oar, the English rowing coach who supervised his early triumphs, and the former East German who saw him through to the fifth Olympic gold medal.
In football, the one prominent area of sport in which England has yet to drag itself out of the era of decline, there is a new mantra: coach the coaches. Coined by Gerard Houllier, the former technical director of the French football federation and current manager of Liverpool, it summarised the philosophy which enabled France to create a generation of footballers capable of winning the World Cup in 1998 and the European championship two years later, and to become the dominant power in the world’s favourite game.
What it means is that although some sportsmen and women are gifted with the sort of divine talent that requires no guidance, they represent a tiny minority. The majority need to be taught the techniques and the tactics of their disciplines and there is no point even starting the job with sub-standard teachers.
In an age when the state has disposed of school playing fields on a wholesale basis and teachers have become reluctant, for one reason or another, to consider the supervision of competition sport as part of their function, the coaching tradition never strong in England has been allowed to wither. Only in recent years, and in certain specific areas, has it been revived and encouraged.
The arrival of subsidies from the lottery fund has made the effect all the more apparent. Sports which have a clear vision of the future and a willingness to embrace current techniques are given the chance to make spectacular progress as armchair viewers saw in the pictures from Sydney, when Jason Queally and his fellow cyclists mirrored the achievements of Redgrave and the rowers.
These are activities whose governing bodies show a readiness to make the grooming of an elite a priority, sharing the belief that nothing encourages grassroots growth more than success at the very highest level, and that a country should not be above enlisting the aid of foreign coaches if that is the fastest route to realising the potential of its athletes.
The fact that these two sports are generally held to represent the polar extremities of British society is another reason to cherish the similarity of their achievements this year. Those Olympic sports in which British administrators failed to make the same advances, swimming and hockey, were left empty-handed.
Like the oarsmen and the cyclists, and until recently the rugby team, the cricketers have a foreign coach. Duncan Fletcher of Zimbabwe seems to have instilled within the players an understanding that to play the loser’s role is not their unalterable lot in life. So far as one can tell, he has applied no magic solutions to the problems that caused the England cricketer to fall so far behind his rivals.
Quiet common sense appears to have done the trick, although of course it would be unwise to make too much of victories against comparative novices (Zimbabwe), a team in seemingly permanent turmoil (West Indies), and one which has lost its past four Test series at home (Pakistan).
But it should not be forgotten that as recently as June, when England were 1-0 down to West Indies and had conceded the first innings lead at Lord’s in the second match of the series, a few commentators were beginning to suggest that perhaps England would be wise to withdraw altogether from international cricket in order to save the nation further embarrassment.
Fletcher, Hussain and their colleagues clawed their way out of that hole and, with admirable resolution, have proved that they are no longer the softest target in international cricket.
Now England’s footballers will hope to follow their example. Perhaps another foreign coach, Sven Goran Eriksson, can overcome the ingrained chauvinism that has informed some of the comments that greeted his appointment. Eriksson’s arrival next year offers the Football Association a chance to let some fresh air into the fetid atmosphere of an overblown, underachieving squad. And, as with the other sports in which Britain has succeeded this year, the young talent is there, waiting for the correct form of nurture.
Monday’s winning run came fortuitously, an involuntary edge carrying the ball wide of the Pakistan wicketkeeper and into an untenanted area of the outfield. England’s batsmen took the two runs they needed and then broke into uninhibited jigs of joy in the middle of the pitch. And back home, thousands of miles away, the cheering began.