SPECTATOR SPORT
Captains courageous
Simon Barnes
IT was with an odd sense of regret that I learned that Graham Gooch will be retir- ing. He started his last first-class cricket match this week. As coincidence would have it, I watched Mike Gatting whack a cheery 85 for Middlesex off the Australians that same weekend. Both men are former England captains, both carried on playing — and playing well — deep into their for- ties, both are now England selectors. Gat- ting will be delighted to have outlasted Gooch, but how much longer will he carry on?
Both were late developers. Gooch famously began his Test match career with a pair, a blow from which only the exceptional recover. Gatting struggled for years to translate his routine county batterings into achievement at the highest level. He finally made his first Test match century when the England team was on its uppers. This was in India, after Indira Gandhi had been assassi- nated and, a few days later, an English diplomat murdered. The team was depressed, distressed and fearful. Gatting set personal angst aside and rose to claim his own.
Both men are thoroughly good eggs. If they were a couple of sticks of rock, they would say cricket all the way through them. But this has not prevented them both from having turbulent careers or being banned from Test cricket, or being strangely reduced by the mantle of Eng- land captaincy. Gooch was the first to be banned, for going on the first of the 'rebel tours' to South Africa, those half-forgotten propa- ganda exercises for apartheid. Because of his general good-eggery — a genial, outgo- ing chap with a flair for impersonating other cricketers — he was made captain. The side was soon known as `Gooch's Rebels'. Gooch was forced to defend the moral purpose of the tour to a hostile media. Ill-equipped for the role, he fell back on boot-faced sporting professional- ism: just a game of cricket, and I'm a crick- eter. He retreated into the laager of his own darker nature, and in public never emerged.
As captain he became obsessed by fit- ness, practice, work-rate, intolerant of those whose natures led them to different approaches to a game that has always embraced all sorts and conditions of men. His failure to come to terms with David Gower, and Gower's ejection from the team, was his most obvious single failing.
Gatting also became careworn and trou- bled as England captain. The weight of responsibility caused that terrible explosion of temper in Faisalabad, and the row with the umpire, Shakoor Rana, which caused a diplomatic incident. Cricket stood by him, only to sack him a few months later for the crime of making tabloid headlines — 'Eng- land captain in heterosexual shock!' — by dallying with a barmaid.
This injustice prompted Gatting to take the krugerrands in his turn, and he was cap- tain of the last rebel tour, one that coincid- ed with Nelson Mandela's release from Robben Island. He too was made to look a fool by events and his dim response to them. He too was enriched and scarred by his African adventuring.
Both are wonderful and courageous cricketers. But the fact of the matter is that the England captaincy has the knack of reducing the best of men to self-parody. Few people walk away from this job with- out being in some way diminished.
The single exception to this rule is the present incumbent, Mike Atherton. He has handled every crisis, every defeat, in a man- ner that is honest, articulate, loyal, never self-serving, never excusing. A perfectionist would like him to win a few more Test matches, but you meet some very demand- ing people. What is his secret? How can he remain immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous cricket? Impossible to say: but had Gooch, had Gatting possessed the same immunity, their lives and cricket his- tory would have been very different.
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