Christopher Douglas aka Ed Reardon and Dave Podmore
Saturday, July 1st 2000. England v West Indies at Lord's.
I watched the whole of this wonderful, intense, umbrella handle-chewing day's cricket from behind the fine-leg boundary board at the bottom of the Warner stand. Between 10.30 a.m. and 7.30 p.m. I missed just half an over when I couldn't bear the tension and went for an ice cream - there are occasions in life, admittedly rare, when a drink doesn't really help much and that Saturday at Lord's was one of them, so a 99 it was.
The game was nicely poised at the start of the day. Andrew Caddick had blitzed the West Indies batsmen the previous evening - a consequence, as it later emerged, of a ferocious teatime bollocking from Captain Alec Stewart standing in for broken-fingered Hussain. An enraged Caddick bounced and blasted them in the same way their bowlers had been dispatching England for decades, and the West Indies were dismissed for just 54, their lowest Test score ever. That left England needing 188 to win; not an easy fourth innings target with the wicket deteriorating, but gettable given cool heads. Unfortunately England weren't noted at the time for staying calm under pressure. And they were facing two of the most unforgiving bowlers in history: Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh.
So the openers, Atherton and Ramprakash, both nought not out overnight, trotted down the steps from the Long Room that Saturday morning to face an attack with over 800 test wickets worth of confidence. Ramps went in the sixth over to Walsh and out came Michael Vaughan in only his fifth Test. I lost count of the times Atherton and his heir apparent were beaten by movement off the pitch. They flirted, they left, they ducked, they fended and they swayed. But they stayed. For an hour the game was at an utterly engrossing standstill. 28,000 of us watched a palpitating stalemate. No wickets and no runs - the very inactivity that cricket-haters complain about. But the manner of it, the courage, the skill, the ferocity, the bloody-mindedness was magnificent.
I came dangerously close to missing this enthralling epic. We'd been burgled the week before and among the otherwise no doubt disappointing loot was my MCC membership card. When I told my mother that the thief would be able to watch England play at Lord's on Saturday she said 'Serve him bloody right'. And that was pretty much my own pessimistic view at the start of play. We hadn't won a series against the West Indies since 1969. I'd watched, listened to and followed England's subjugation for 30 years. If you lived through that period of West Indian domination it seemed as though they not only ruled Test and one-day cricket but county, beach and office-corridor cricket, too. In fact they looked cool enough to dominate anything. If they'd turned up on 'Just a Minute' Clement Freud and Kenneth Williams would probably have unplugged their mics and gone home. Such was the English sense of inferiority from the mid-seventies to the early-nineties.
To those of us watching Vaughan and Atherton that day - those of us, that is, who had seen two generations of England players' off-stumps exploding out of the ground like fireworks on bonfire night, who'd seen the tabloid black and white photos of black and blue Englishmen from Brian Close to Phil Edmonds, and who'd witnessed the torments of Andy Lloyd, Paul Terry, Brian Rose and Chris Cowdrey, casualties who were never quite the same again - it didn't seem remotely possible that the cricketing world order was about to change.
So, not daring to hope, we chewed our brolly handles and licked our ice creams while Athers and his young partner dug in. 27 balls it took Atherton to score a run, Vaughan took 29. Painstakingly they nudged the scoreboard along, the brand new replay screen adding to the drama on its debut at the Nursery End. Each run was cheered emotionally like a Gazza goal. 92 they made before Walsh got them both. Then he got Hick and then Stewart and Craig White. The familiar, brave, doomed procession was underway. At 140 for 6 it shouldn't have felt like the end but it did.
My impression was that Ambrose was actually the harder of the two to play. England could barely lay a bat on him yet it was Walsh who picked up the wickets. It was often that way with those two - sometimes one would get the rewards, sometimes the other. They said they didn't much mind as it all evened up in the long run. Ambrose was only months away from retirement and had mellowed, smiling ruefully rather than grimacing if an edge went to the boundary. Walsh was a year older yet still had a hunger that was to take him past Amby to 519 test wickets. Five years earlier I had bunked off work to catch what I thought would surely be a last glimpse of them in harness at Lord's, yet here they were back again in 2000, and winning it for the West Indies.
But then down the pavilion steps strutted Dominic Cork, like Vaughan, one of the new order who weren't content to bow to the inevitable and have a laugh with their tormentors on the golf course the next day. Cork attacked the tiring legends (Walsh bowled 23.5 overs, Ambrose 22) and, with Darren Gough blocking like a frenzied doorman, he thumped England to a two-wicket victory. When the winning run was forced through the covers by Cork the Warner stand erupted. I'd seen it under construction in 1963 on my very first visit to the ground and it felt like it would come tumbling down again.
Amid the tumultuous pitch invasion did anyone spare a thought for a taut, white face on the England balcony - that of the number 11 Matthew Hoggard playing in his first test? The glory years that led to the 2005 Ashes and to England reaching the number 1 spot in world cricket lay in the not too distant future. For now though, this marvellous win was more than enough.
Christopher Douglas
Memory added on June 9, 2015
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