Eye of the tiger

Nasser Hussain was not happy. He looked at the umpire who had just given him out leg-before wicket with dismay and paused for a moment, reluctant to leave the crease, before tucking his bat under his arm and stalking off towards the pavilion, his body language speaking eloquently of his disbelief. We were warned not to approach him for half an hour. He was still in a foul temper when we finally made contact and he was initially unwilling to pose for photographs. But he relented and eventually apologised for being “in a mood”. “My whole day today has been geared towards getting runs for Essex. You get a bad decision and your day has gone. It pisses you off but you have to get on with it.”

In a way it is a compliment to Hussain, the England cricket captain, that a week before the first Test he is so worked up about getting out in a second division county championship match between Essex and Nottinghamshire in front of a couple of hundred diehards at sleepy Chelmsford. Hussain’s urge to score runs and to succeed, the steely competitiveness that characterises his game, is apparent whatever the arena; it is why he was chosen as captain and why cricket followers believe he has what it takes to lift cricket out of the doldrums.

The game in England is facing unprecedented challenges. The Test team had a dismal record in the 90s, and Hussain took over last year when Alec Stewart was sacked after England’s humiliating exit in the first round of the world cup. The overall quality of the game has also come under attack from critics who say there are too many full-time players performing at a mediocre level that is a world away from the rigours of international cricket. Peaceful days in the sun at Worcester or Guildford, it is argued, have no place in our fiercely competitive global age.

English cricketing failure in the 90s, sitting starkly beside the rapid rise of Premiership soccer, left the sport looking feeble: it has struggled for media attention, is having trouble attracting sponsors, and currently lacks players with the punch of Ian Botham or the panache of David Gower. England had limited success for much of the 80s too, and were routinely annihilated by the all-conquering West Indians, but with Botham, Gower, Lamb and Gooch, it was possible to lose with elan, to feel pride in defeat. The 90s were just drab and pitiful.

The threat now is that soccer will change its calendar and, in line with a Fifa initiative, be played from February until November. If football changes its season, our traditional summer sport would be in danger of being dismissed. All of which demands that the 32-year-old Hussain, as well as being England’s captain and key batsman, should also be the miracle worker who remakes cricket for the modern age.

Part of that miracle has to be cultural, and Hussain – who has an Indian father and an English mother and was born in Madras – is uniquely placed to work it. Cricket in England has been emasculated by class and deference; strangled by the old school tie. Captains were supposed to be pukka gents like Peter May or no-nonsense northern types like Raymond Illingworth (Botham and Mike Gatting were earthy – and short-lived – exceptions). The game itself has been locked in some Majorite dream-world of village greens, public schools and hearty parsons: no wonder soccer, adapting its class base and connecting the media and sport, pop and Posh, has been making all the running.

When Hussain became England captain last June, his former team-mate at Essex, Derek Pringle, now cricket correspondent of the Independent, wrote of the change – both practical and symbolic – that his appointment would make. “Hussain is a shrewd, passionate cricketer whose desire to succeed is just what English cricket needs, as it looks to step into the new millennium. Rumours emanating from HQ were that the occasional bout of temper made him something of a liability in the genteel world of Victorian mores by which the game in this country still judges itself. Yet like it or not, he is very much a product of modern Britain, and as such should not be precluded from shaping its future.”

“He is a good choice as captain and a very important figure,” says Rob Steen, editor of The New Ball, which showcases new cricket writing. “He should have been blooded earlier, but the selectors were scared of him. He had said in one interview that we had to get nastier and the establishment hated that. He represents a break with the past, and making him captain was as significant as making Len Hutton the first professional captain in the 50s. He’s not from the usual background; he’s from a talented Anglo-Indian family who love the game.”

Mihir Bose, author of The Sporting Alien, says Hussain is very different from other Indians and Anglo-Indians who have played in English cricket. “There is a long tradition of Indians playing in English cricket, but they tended to be from the gentlemanly or princely class and above the battle,” says Bose. “In the early part of his career, Nasser made a point of being different – he was bolshie, a streetfighter. He is very much a product of the late 20th century and his captaincy marks a change in cricket. I don’t know whether it is conscious or not, but there appears to be a desire to be more populist. He is certainly more populist – like a character from Men Behaving Badly – and aware of modern susceptibilities and of his dual identity.”

Cricket has always been central to Hussain’s life. He was born in Madras in 1968 to an Indian father, the cricket-playing Jawad (anglicised to Joe), and an English mother, Shireen. They had met when Joe, who had an electronics business in India, was visiting the UK. His two older brothers, Mel and Abbas, were fine cricketers, and Nasser’s early years were spent on the boundary’s edge at the Chepauk stadium in Madras watching his father play and having members of visiting Test teams bowl underarm to him.

The family moved to Ilford when Nasser was six and all three sons continued to play cricket. Nasser, who was very small as a boy, was an excellent leg-spin bowler, but Mel was reckoned to be the more promising player (“10 times better than Nasser at the same age,” according to their father). Ironically, Mel went on to play a few seasons for Hampshire, while Nasser scaled the heights of international cricket.

When he was 14, Nasser suddenly grew and, as he got taller, lost the ability to bowl leg- spinners. “He must have been crying in his bed,” says his father. “But he was determined to play professional cricket, was hungry to play for Essex, and turned himself into a batsman. Mel didn’t have the patience, but Nasser was determined to succeed. At 17, I knew Nasser would make it to the professional game, but I didn’t know he would play Test cricket at 21.”

Living next door to the Hussains in Ilford must have been a noisy experience: one neighbour recalls the endless thump of cricket balls against the wall. Joe Hussain would also take his three boys down to the nets at the Ilford cricket school (which he later bought and now runs), where they would hire a net and practise for hours on end. Ilford is a buoyant catchment area for young cricketers – former Essex and England captain Graham Gooch comes from near here – and an evening at the school demonstrates that there is life in the game yet.

Hussain’s characteristics – steeliness, directness, testiness, an unwillingness to give a sucker an even break – might be thought of as typical Australian virtues, and they did not endear him to the cricketing establishment in his early days. He was seen as a rebel, accused of aloofness and arrogance, and his career has been punctuated by disciplinary infringements which led to one- or two-match suspensions.

His father says the competitiveness is hereditary. “I play cricket the hard way; I play to win. If I see a boy with the fighting spirit, I don’t dampen it, I just have a quiet word. You’ve got to have it: look at the Aussies, look at the way Steve Waugh [the Australian captain] talks to batsmen at the end of an over. You can’t play cricket with one hand tied behind your back. Nasser went over the top once or twice, but nothing much. He always wanted to do well and to win. If those qualities hadn’t been there, Nasser wouldn’t be what he is today.”

Early in his career at Essex, Hussain was involved in two incidents that dogged him for years afterwards. Once, when he was yorked [bowled by a ball that hits the base of the stumps without bouncing] in a match against Surrey, he went back to the dressing room and rounded on the Essex bowlers for their inability to produce such effective deliveries. Gooch, then Essex captain, did not take kindly to an upstart denting team morale and suspended him for one game. Worse, in another match for Essex, he gave the team’s senior bowler, Neil Foster, some unwanted advice and was publicly reprimanded. Back in the dressing room, he kicked over a case containing cricket equipment, which fell on the foot of another Essex bowler, Mark Ilott, injuring his toe. He refused to apologise, and he and Ilott almost came to blows.

Hussain was banned for two games after that altercation and was on the way to getting a reputation for truculence that at one stage seemed likely to deny him the England captaincy. He was passed over when Michael Atherton resigned in 1998 (Hussain was vice-captain but Alec Stewart was given the job), and there were dark rumours that Lord MacLaurin, chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, was vehemently opposed to Hussain becoming captain. But the débacle of the world cup appears to have convinced the cricketing authorities that England needed some of his bloody-mindedness.

When he was made captain, his long-time England team-mate Michael Atherton said that Hussain would have to temper his steeliness. “It is in the dressing room that he may have to work the hardest,” said Atherton, who captained England in a record 52 Tests. “He is regarded by some as self-centred, good for a batsman but not for a captain, and has the endearing ability to rub people up the wrong way with no apparent effort. So much so that last winter two of England’s bowlers were heard to mutter that if he ever became captain he would have to find two more bowlers.”

“I’ve always had a short fuse,” Hussain admits. “That’s just the way I am. But the reputation came from one or two things that made the press. I was only left out for one or two games by Essex, and disciplined for a heated argument in the dressing room, but after that you are portrayed as a bad boy. It’s very difficult to get away from that, and in your mind you almost start to live up to it. That’s why I understand players like that, and like to have them in my side, because you can see them doing what you’ve done in the past.”

“What underpins everything is his burning desire to succeed,” says Gooch, who has known Hussain since he was eight. “He has a passion that has sometimes led him to boil over. He still has that fire in the belly, but he has learned to control his emotions. He always had his own ideas about how things should be done, and we had our moments when I was captain, but that all helped to make him a more rounded character.”

“He does explode on occasions,” says Keith Fletcher, the former England captain and coach, and now eminence grise at Essex. “But he handled the long tour of South Africa well, and has grown with the responsibility of being England captain. He knows he can’t explode now because the press would be down on him. He’s not stupid.”

Hussain thinks that, as captain, he can turn his truculent past to his and the team’s advantage. “What I add as captain is that I have been a bit of a rebel in the past, so can identify with others in that situation. The Caddicks and the Tufnells and the Ramprakashes see me as someone they can confide in and play under.” Each of those players has, at various times, been called difficult or selfish. Indeed, Hussain and Ramprakash were once labelled the “tantrum twins”. But Hussain admires players who are unwilling to conform and believes that he can exploit their sometimes wayward talents.

“In terms of captaincy, I am of the school of getting people together to get the best out of them,” he says. “They can be any colour, any character, do what they want after hours, but from 11 till 6 in a Test match they have to perform. It adds to the side to have different characters. You have to have a full collection of people. There are many different routes to being a top player. I’ve played with Graham Gooch, who was a workaholic and a fitness fanatic, and he was a world-class player. And I’ve also played with David Gower, who didn’t like to net and didn’t like to go for a run, and he was also a great player. I’d love to have them both in the side because there are people in the team who will always go one way or the other, and if you are constantly trying to gear your team towards one of them the other group will say ‘sod this for a lark.’”

Hussain is diplomatic – an important skill for the England captain to learn – about the establishment’s suspicion of him, but he makes it clear that he has no time for the old idea of picking good team players. “We go a bit too much on character in England. The bottom line is whether it’s the right person for the job, and that applies at every level – captains and coaches. We mustn’t just pick people because they’re good blokes who say and do the right things.” Very democratic; very Australian.

Pringle has suggested that Hussain’s Anglo-Indian background accounted for some of his early rebelliousness. “Like Mark Ramprakash, he is the product of a mixed-race marriage,” said Pringle. “As a consequence, growing pains have probably been more acute, with loyalties and identities tried for size, before being discarded.”

“Pring loves a theory,” says Hussain with a laugh. “I consider myself English and I remember how disappointed I was when I was selected for my first game at the Oval but didn’t play. David Gower gave me the bag of goodies but took out the England cap and jumper. I wanted that pullover with the three lions. But I’m still very proud of the Indian side of me. There is a lot of interest from the Asian community in England, and family and friends in India are always ringing my dad to talk about how I’m doing.” “Relatives in India follow his progress so closely on the internet that they know more about him than I do,” says Joe Hussain.

When Norman Tebbit declared his “cricket test” in 1990, asking Britons of Asian extraction which team they would support – England, or teams from the subcontinent – Hussain attacked the former Conservative chairman for his insensitivity and compared him with Enoch Powell. “I admit to getting withdrawal symptoms if I go too long without a curry,” said Hussain. “Yet, on returning from the West Indies [where he had been touring with England] I was looking forward just as much to having roast chicken and all the trimmings. I do know of Asian families who have not integrated into the English way of life. But I know plenty that have. During my childhood it never entered my head to think whether we were Indian or English.”

The source of Hussain’s spirit and singlemindedness lies back in Ilford. Joe Hussain, a fit sixtysomething who still turns out at weekends for Ilford cricket club, instilled in his children a confidence and desire to succeed that has seen them all excel. Mel now works in the City (“he earns twice as much as me, has more days off and doesn’t get slagged off in the press,” says Nasser); Abbas did a pharmaceutical degree at Loughborough and now sells drugs (“legal drugs”, Nasser emphasises) around the world; and younger sister Benazir is a ballet dancer, formerly with the Royal Ballet and currently with the Perth Ballet in Australia.

It is a formidably close-knit, high-achieving family in which sport and education each had their place. Hussain could have gone straight on to the staff at Essex, but his father insisted that he go to university and play for the county only in the vacation. He had attended the very sporty Forest School in Snaresbrook, accumulating 10 O levels and three A levels (ropey grades, he says modestly), as well as a mountain of runs. He was good at maths and went to Durham University, which had a cricket team stronger than those at Oxford or Cambridge, to study geo-chemistry (“maths wouldn’t have left enough time for cricket and socialising”).

“I had three really good years there,” he says. “I played cricket, golf and football, and enjoyed a great social life. It gave me a good, balanced outlook.” He also met his wife, Karen, at Durham; they married in 1993. Karen became a teacher but gave up last year to be able to spend more time on tour with him. Nasser remains close to his family, and father Joe says the truculent public image is far removed from the private man. “On the field, he is aggressive. But if you meet him privately or for a drink, you will find a different Nasser. He’s not what people assume – arrogant and temperamental. “

“He has a good sense of humour and can laugh at himself,” says Gooch. “He mixes well with the players, likes to have a bit of fun, and has learned to relax. At first he didn’t know how to switch off. He was trying to break into the Essex team and then the Test side. He had an early taste of international cricket but then dropped out. When you’re not in the side, the pressure builds.”

Hussain talks like he bats – very directly, no words wasted – and uses the terms “arty-farty” and “airy-fairy” pejoratively. Asked if he now “channels his aggression” more productively, he dismisses the phrase as flowery and meaningless. He has, you feel, stripped batting – and the sportsman’s life – down to essentials.

He is bright and self-assured. “Nass has a good brain,” says Fletcher, “and if you argue with him you have to be sure of your facts or he’ll pull you to pieces.” He is very good in press conferences and never switches to autopilot. When he uses a cliché, he has the intelligence and good grace to apologise for it. “I’ve realised it’s part of the job,” he says. “The best way to do it is to try to explain to the press exactly what you are going through, why you did certain things and why you are picking certain people, rather than give them half-truths and always worry about saying the wrong thing.”

The England captaincy has been described as the most demanding playing role in British sport (second only to the England football managership in the amount of flak the incumbent is likely to receive). Hussain says that since he became captain last June, his life has been turned upside down. “You become the focal point of English cricket. Virtually everything concerning the game ends up at your doorstep.”

In the past month, that public pressure has been intensified by the allegations of match fixing levelled against South African captain Hansie Cronje and others. “I have no problem with the press frenzy over match fixing,” says Hussain. “I just wish that the whole truth would come out. My initial reaction was complete disbelief. We had heard nothing in South Africa. There were rumblings when we began pre-season training here that the Indian police had got something, but I thought it was a complete red herring. Then someone rang to tell me Cronje had been sacked. I knew the moment he said he had been approached during the triangular tournament involving England that we were going to be involved and that the Centurion Test [which England won after an unprecedented move by Cronje to get a result from a rain-ruined game] would be questioned. I have no problem with that: from now on, everything and everyone has to be looked at.

“The police here have been examining allegations for months. I was driving through Chelmsford in August last year and had a phone call from the CID. I thought it was a wind-up. They wanted to interview me on match fixing and I came in to talk to them. But I knew absolutely nothing. David Graveney [the chairman of selectors] had made it clear that if anyone was approached they were to report it.

“You have to be careful. After the Cronje thing blew up, my brother phoned, put his Indian voice on, and left a message saying this was my Indian bookmaker friend and asking why I hadn’t rung him for a while. You have to have a laugh, but this is not the time or the place because it poses a serious threat to the game.”

During the winter, before the Cronje storm, Hussain had taken an inexperienced England side on a four-month tour of South Africa and Zimbabwe. He won generous plaudits for his batting (he topped the England Test averages), his captaincy (England lost the Test series against South Africa 2-1 but had been expected to do much worse), and the way he kept the touring party motivated. Some of his drive and passion appeared to have rubbed off on his team. “I get a lot of letters saying we don’t mind winning or losing, but make sure the players show that they care,” he says. “We did that this winter.”

Part of his sorrow over the Cronje affair is that his side’s efforts, especially in winning that final Test, are now tarnished by association. “As a fellow player, I feel for Cronje and his fall from grace,” he says, “but the disappointing thing is that the winning or losing of games is now being questioned.” That, Hussain implies, can kill a sport. “I used to be a fan of athletics and liked the 100 metres, but after the Ben Johnson thing I never watched it because I used to think that whoever wins now has just taken the better drugs. I want to make sure that cricket doesn’t go the same way.”

He recognises that the pressure this summer will be different from that in South Africa – not to perform heroically against superior opposition but to win well against Zimbabwe, the weakest Test- playing country, and the West Indies, a once great side which has fallen on hard times. If things go badly from next Thursday, when England face Zimbabwe at Lord’s (the Zimbabweans’ first Test match in this country), he may discover just how tough the captaincy – and how capricious the media – can be.

“I’ve been fortunate because I came in at rock bottom,” he says. “We were out of the world cup, our Test results hadn’t been great, and everyone was thinking that anything from here was a bonus. Everyone was expecting us to lose four- or five-nil in South Africa, and we didn’t so people view it as a success, but I personally don’t because we lost the Test series. There’s been a lot of praise heaped on me, but the two series I’ve been in charge we’ve lost.

“The only thing that will lift English cricket is winning, and people seeing us doing well and enjoying it. We should beat Zimbabwe and, if we play like we can, we should beat West Indies. But Zimbabwe like to prove a point and West Indies are still dangerous .”

The real test, though, comes next summer when England play Australia for the Ashes, the series which will define the success or failure of Hussain’s tenure as captain. “He likes the way the Australians play cricket but he believes we have the talent to take them on,” says Joe Hussain. “His biggest ambition in life is to beat them.” If he succeeds, Hussain will have given English cricket its biggest boost since Ian Botham’s heroics at Headingley in 1981, the future will look incomparably brighter, and the sport’s rebellious son will have become its saviour.

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