The Botham Report. Ian Botham
was to comprise Dexter as chairman, Micky Stewart, the England coach, and the captain, whoever that may be.
And in a further move unbeknown to the chairmen at the time, Subba Row also decreed that the committee was to be joined and influenced by another figure, namely the chairman of the TCCB cricket committee, Ossie Wheatley, who was to have the veto over the committee’s appointment of England captain.
Subba Row believed the Board needed this safeguard on the England selection panel because of what had happened the previous winter. Such an unholy mess had persuaded him that a man with a broader view of the whole picture should be included in the selection process.
But by effectively taking one of the primary functions of the England committee, namely the final say over the selection of the captain, out of their hands, Subba Row merely undermined their authority over the process. The potential for confusion was enormous.
And so it came to pass when Dexter was called upon to make his first decision as the new chairman of selectors – the choice of England captain. Three names were mentioned: David Gower, Mike Gatting and Graham Gooch. Dexter interviewed Gower and Gatting but not Gooch and it became clear quite quickly that the Essex man was never in the frame. Presumably he didn’t fit into Dexter’s idea of the required new style of leadership. Not surprising really as in his previous role as newspaper pundit Dexter had written in the Sunday Mirror that Gooch’s captaincy at The Oval Test against West Indies in 1988 had the effect on him of a ‘slap in the face with a wet fish.’
Gooch had offered the perfectly reasonable assertion that ‘a team is only as good as the players. Nobody can turn a bad team into a good one.’
Dexter thought better. This was his responese: ‘No wonder the England team is in such a sorry state if that is the general atmosphere in the dressing room … A captain must make his men feel that everything is possible. The Gooch approach means that the West Indies were inevitably going to win at The Oval and that he was resigned to that result before the game began. Translate his theories on to the battlefield and there would never be a victory against the odds. David would never have killed Goliath because it wasn’t worth a try.’
Steady on, Ted.
The full story of how Gower was chosen ahead of Gatting, and for that matter Gooch as well, did not come out until it was made public by the England committee at the end of the disastrous Ashes campaign of 1989, presumably in order to deflect some criticism away from the selectors over what had happened that summer.
According to the story it was Gatting rather than Gower who had been the first choice of Dexter and Stewart. Indeed, prior to the appointment the rumour-mill had gone into overdrive predicting that the Middlesex man had the job in the bag. Enter Ossie Wheatley.
Wheatley was a former captain and chairman of Glamorgan and a contemporary of Dexter’s at Cambridge. But ninety-nine per cent of county cricketers would not have known him had they fallen over him. Wheatley, it was said, had decided that the time was not yet right for Gatting to be reinstated because of the events that had happened during his previous term of office. Wheatley was ostensibly mainly concerned with Gatting’s public row with the Pakistani umpire Shakoor Rana in the Faisalabad Test on the 1987–88 tour and other examples of poor behaviour.
It was never said publicly, however, but most of us were convinced that it wasn’t only the behaviour of Gatting and his team during that winter that led to Wheatley employing his veto. Quite clearly, according to the story, the business involving Gatting and the barmaid at Rothley Court in the early part of the summer of 1988 had had a large bearing on Wheatley’s decision.
Wheatley informed Dexter and Stewart that Gatting should not be considered and the new England committee turned instead to David Gower.
Not a great way for Dexter’s ‘Brave New World’ to begin. And as the summer progressed many commentators were crying out for a return to the cowardly old one.
The explanation that Dexter had originally wanted Gatting ahead of Gower has always puzzled me. I never thought of Gatting as Dexter’s type of captain. Clearly Micky Stewart would have wanted Gatt, as he was the captain on Stewart’s and England’s successful expedition to Australia in 1986–87. He was also captain when England reached the final of the 1987 World Cup. Stewart and Gatting were very similar in their approach to the game and got on well. On the other hand, Gower, all elegance, grace and style was much more Dexter’s cup of tea. Perhaps Graeme Wright, then the editor of the Wisden Almanack, writing his notes in the 1989 edition, came closer to the truth than anyone thought at the time. He wrote, ‘As much a surprise as the veto was the discovery that Dexter should have wanted Gatting as captain in the first place.
‘In the three weeks before the new committee met to choose the captain, Gower was generally thought to be Dexter’s favourite for the job; he was the one the new chairman singled out for mention. However, no decision was made at that meeting, which was said to have contained “detailed discussion”. Five days elapsed before Gower was accorded a press conference at which Dexter announced that he was “the committee’s choice” to captain England for the series.
‘There was just a hint that he might not have been everyone’s choice.
‘The trouble, when things are kept secret, is that people start to look around for explanations other than the authorised version. I have always been one for conspiracy theories. For example if Dexter wanted Gower, and knew that his number two, Stewart, wanted Gatting, the veto could not have been more in Dexter’s favour. It gave him the captain he wanted and prevented an initial disagreement with Stewart. The existence of the veto was known from the outset to the four men on the committee, and Dexter looked the sort who was at home walking the corridors of power. Of course it is equally possible that, sometime in March, Stewart persuaded Dexter that Gatting was the man for the job.’
As Wright suggests, it is equally possible that Dexter enlisted the help of Wheatley, his old Cambridge colleague, to do his dirty work for him.
Whatever the truth, all this was to remain secret, particularly to Gower, until the end of the summer, although the curly-haired one did get an inkling that all might not be well at the press conference to announce his appointment. Micky Stewart sat there quietly, with thunder in his face, barely uttering a word. Then when Dexter was asked whether the decision to appoint him had been unanimous, he answered somewhat mysteriously, ‘After a long discussion, David was the committee’s choice.’
At first the Gower-Dexter dream ticket did engender a certain amount of optimism and hope. And at that stage Allan Border’s Australians offered little cause for alarm for the forthcoming 1989 summer Ashes series. Although the tourists made hay against the Duchess of Norfolk’s XI in the traditional curtain raiser to the international season at Arundel, then against MCC at Lord’s, they lost against Sussex in a one-day match and then lost their opening first-class match of the tour to Worcestershire by three wickets. They then got into their stride against Middlesex and Yorkshire, winning both matches easily, but with a Texaco trophy shared 1–1 and one game tied, the stage was set for a close and competitive Test series.
It turned out to be anything but.
England were not helped that summer by an extraordinary catalogue of injuries to key players, myself included, and the distractions caused by the recruitment of the South African rebel tourists. But the selectors did not help their cause by making the extraordinary decision to ditch Chris Broad after only two Test matches. Broad, who had scored four hundreds against Australia in the last five Tests including three during the 1986–87 Ashes series at the end of which he was named the Man of the Series and International Cricketer of the Year, was certain to be Graham Gooch’s opening partner for the first Test at Headingley but, although he performed adequately there he was out on his ear by the time England contested the third match at Edgbaston. As he later signed up for the South African rebel tour, the second Test at Lord’s was the last time he played for England.
By then, however, with Australia 2–0 up after two Tests, it was obvious that Border’s team was a vastly different proposition to the one we had faced in 1986–87. Player for player there didn’t seem to be all that much difference between the two squads.