England on the up
Simon Barnes
THE England cricket team won the Test series in Sri Lanka for a very good reason: they keep winning Test series. This is their fourth on the trot. But before this, England were in the habit of losing Test matches. They kept on losing them because they kept on losing them.
England had created a culture of defeatism, one that reached its nadir under Nasser Hussain — who happens to be the present and victorious captain, and co-creator of a new culture of, I suppose we had better call it, victoryism. They play not in the hope but in the expectation of winning.
Victory and defeat tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies in sport. Winners expect to win, losers expect to lose. The England cricket team played in a World Cup on home soil in 1999 and were knocked out at once; a shockingly, if not a surprisingly, poor performance. They then lost a Test series to New Zealand, which put them at the foot of the Wisden international rankings. Hussain came on to the balcony at the close of the series and was booed.
Now let us observe how events conspired to change the culture of the England cricket team, and slowly to introduce the spirit of victoryism. England were beaten fair and square the following winter in South Africa, as we all expected. But then came the crossroads Test, in which the then South African captain Hansie Cronje and Hussain did an unprecedented deal on a rain-washed match after the series had been lost. Each side conceded an innings, and England scrambled a win in the resulting one-innings match.
This gratuitous kick-start to the drive for victoryism was followed by four Test series. By pure chance, the opponents came in a perfectly graded order. First was Zimbabwe, who suffered a horrific mental collapse, overwhelmed by the majesty, not of the England cricket team, but of their principal cricket ground. Lord's undid them.
Then came a series, again at home, against the West Indies. There had never in the last 25 years been a better time to play them. The West Indies were no longer mighty: a side fading fast, England had just stepped on to the up-escalator, and passed the West Indies as they were heading down.
Last autumn England went to Pakistan, and Pakistan made the huge error of waiting for England to collapse. This would have been a perfectly legitimate strategy in any winter of the last decade, but with the two victories behind England, it no longer worked. England had learnt a new resilience. Pakistan stuck to their wait-andhope strategy to the end, and England won the final Test, and with it the series, by sticking their heads in front at the last second — on the nod, as racing people say.
On, then, to the last series, in which England genuinely expected to win battles and, with them, wars. Sri Lanka at home are as tough a side as exists in world cricket — however, their top man, Muttiah Muralitharan, was just a little less than his usual self. England played him awfully well, and genuinely deserved their victory,
It was the order in which the opponents came that worked so well, granting, as they came and were vanquished, a gradual escalation in confidence. As Clint says in Unforgiven: 'I was lucky with the order. But I always did get lucky when it comes to killing folks.'
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