England’s winning cricket formula

After decades in the doldrums, England has found a winning formula that’s sure to be copied.

England's David Steele got lost as he went out to bat

In the build-up to the 1976 England-West Indies cricket series, England captain Tony Greig declared he intended to “make them grovel.”

It would have been a provocative statement under any circumstances; given that Greig was a white South African, it bordered on inflammatory. (Greig and his accent later found a home at Australia’s Channel 9 where he introduced the curious practice of vandalising the surface of the wicket with a car key during his pitch report.)

Karma was both instant – a 3-0 series defeat – and protracted: that flogging was the first of many dished out by the West Indies over the next decade and a half. And when the Caribbean dynasty crumbled, Australia gleefully stepped into the breach, giving the Poms another 15 years of cricketing hell.

The England selectors generally responded to these humiliations either by sacking the captain or plucking an unknown or a tried and discarded veteran out of county cricket. Interestingly, when they consolidated this approach by plucking someone who was both unknown and a veteran, it actually worked.

Derbyshire’s David Steele made his test debut against Australia’s fearsome fast bowlers Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson two months before his 35th birthday. Being unaccustomed to the home dressing room at Lords, he got lost on his way out to bat and blundered around in the bowels of the pavilion for several minutes while the crowd and fielding team grew increasingly restless.

When the bespectacled and prematurely grey Steele finally made it out to the middle, Aussie wicketkeeper Rod Marsh greeted him with, “Where the f— have you been, grandad?”

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After Steele had averaged 42 in eight consecutive tests against Australia and the West Indies, the selectors reverted to eccentric type by not picking him for a tour of India on the theory that he couldn’t play spin. He never played for England again.

After a particularly humiliating loss, the headlines would proclaim that England had “hit rock-bottom”, even though they’d done that the year before and the year before that. Some pundits declared England had slipped permanently out of the top tier of cricketing nations. We were told one-sidedness had consigned the 100-year-old Anglo-Australian rivalry to the dustbin of history, and henceforth the real clash of the titans would be India vs Australia.

This habit of jumping to the conclusion that the future will simply be a continuation of the recent past could be termed premature extrapolation.

There’s a lot of it about. America’s indebtedness and political gridlock prompted various commentators to announce the end of the American Empire. This has become something of a refrain since the US scuttled out of Vietnam almost four decades ago.

The eurozone crisis and outbreak of recreational rioting in the UK caused Time magazine to devote its cover to “The Decline and Fall of Europe”. You didn’t have to read beyond the first sentence – “Britain is burning” – to know that whatever the merits of the story, it wouldn’t include a sense of perspective.

Premature extrapolation assumes people are going to carry on doing exactly the same thing with the same results, but generally they don’t: heads roll, reviews are done, successful models are copied in the hope that different methods will deliver different outcomes.

If the changes are far-reaching – for instance, making the game at the bottom more competitive so players who make it to the top are better equipped for inter­national competition – the benefits won’t be apparent for years.

English cricket revamped its governance, its domestic competitions, its talent identification and development systems. It got the right people into the right positions. It relearnt the value of long-term thinking and consistency of selection. Now England are the No 1 test team in the world, having just deposed India in an embarrassingly one-sided series.

Reinforcing the point that sport is ­cyclical, Australia is now playing “follow the leader”. A seven-month review of ­Australia’s dizzying fall from first in the world to fifth concluded they should just copy what the Poms have done.