Graham Gooch interview: 'David Gower was the best batsman I played with'

Graham Gooch is hardly a Baseball fan, but he thinks it needs some work. Photo: Telegraph/Geoff Gilbert

Graham Gooch poses for our photographer in London's chic Fitzrovia area, just six steps from Lord's. If he looks great for being 70 years old, it's probably because he just came from a meeting at Advanced Hair Studios, the bonsé braiding experts he's been promoting since the mid-1990s.

Perhaps It's unprofessional to say this, but the evergreen Gooch was my hero growing up. Studying county results in the school library, I celebrated every time he led Essex to victory over our great rivals Middlesex and Nottinghamshire. Then, about ten years later, I was delighted again when Wisden named him the highest-scoring batsman of all time.

And yet, despite those 67,000 views, writers of the day spilled less ink on his majestic strokeplay than on his disconsolate body language, which once led Ted Dexter to declare that Gooch had «the charisma of a wet fish.» As a man with a well-concealed dry wit, he played up the score as a decent job in cricket. On the eve of the final test, the photographer asked him to smile, to which he replied: “I can’t — the image will be ruined.”

So, what does Mr Pragmatist think of England's newfangled Buzzball tactic? When we get to lunch, the answer is mixed. “Good to watch,” muses Gooch as he enjoys a helping of Cornish sole and sourdough bread. (In typical fitness-conscious style, he doesn't keep any bread at home, but now makes up for it with the same appetite he once showed for «Daddy's Hundreds.»)

“I’m all for trying to get out of the situation from the beginning, setting the agenda, taking the lead,” he continues. “My mentor at Essex was Keith Fletcher, who was successful in three-day cricket because he never let the game go wrong. And I was amazed that on the first ball of the Ashes, Australia had a sweeper on both sides. They reacted to England's supposed plan before it even began.»

Is there a «but»? This is a must have. As England coach in the early 2010s, Gooch once attacked Kevin Pietersen for a series of self-destructive Baseball-style dismissals. So it feels reassuring when he returns to his mode of waiting for hoary common sense.

“Sometimes you have to be smart,” he says. “There was a short ball fiasco in the second Ashes Test. The score was 180 for one, and then we kind of went out there with a bag of balls and a glove and said, “Get laid out, I’ll make you some catches.” smart to announce our best player at 130+?

“For me, Joe Root doesn't play Baseball. And rightly so: you need balance: some Alastair Cook/Geoffrey Boycott style players and some Ian Botham/David Gower style players. Because you need to set different tasks for the opposition. Today, most England players are on top of the ball because they were brought up on Twenty20 cricket.»

Gooch is in full swing on the way to 333 against India at Lord's in 1990. Photo: Shutterstock/Colorsport “Gower was the best I played with”

Cricket fans of the 1990s might be shocked to read such an approving mention of Gower. Didn't the two Gs fall due to Gower's lazy flying in Adelaide during the 1990-91 Ashes? And weren't questions asked in Parliament two years later after Gooch left his arch-enemy at home to embark on an ill-fated tour of India?

The answers are yes and yes, but Gooch has previously admitted he made a mistake in his opposition to Gower. Today the two men are good friends, even though Gooch again emphasized their contrasting temperaments during lunch.

“We were recently on a theater tour together,” he explains, “and we were chatting one afternoon about our approaches to acting. I was a player who had been developing for over 20 years. I changed my technique, worked on my fitness and started thinking about myself differently when I became captain. It just calmed the chimpanzee on my shoulder, so instead of thinking, “Am I going to make it today?”, I was thinking, “I’m going to be fine today.” David was the complete opposite. “I understand where you’re coming from,” he told me. “But I'm afraid I was the same player at the start of my career as I was at the end.”

Gooch stresses that he no longer believes one approach is better than another, and that “David has always been a brilliant batsman — the best I've played with for England.» But in the long run it was Gooch's investigative mind rather than Gower's instinctive genius that proved more influential.

In particular, Gooch's once signature stance—the bat raised like a periscope—has become standard practice for today's baseball players, completely eclipsing the boycott-style orthodoxy of pointing the toe to the ground until the ball is released. In an unexpected twist, this innovation emerged from early video analysis. After the 1978–79 Ashes, Gooch returned home to discover that his wife's Aunt Grace had been recording TV highlights for two and a half months.

“Grace bought one of the first VCRs,” he explains. “It was a huge machine with cassette tapes the size of books. In those days, you never really saw yourself on TV. But I saw how I was playing and I thought: “I can’t play like this, I keep falling.” I knew I needed to make changes for the 1979 season to straighten out my eyes. The only way to get comfortable is not to stand in the usual way, but to pick up the bat from the ground.” In the short England-Australia series in 1979–80, he averaged 45, a significant improvement on 32 the previous winter.

Gooch became famous for his meticulous preparation for matches, which he carried into his coaching career. Photo: Telegraph/Jeff Gilbert “Mitchell Johnson is stuck in our heads”

Over the course of his career, Gooch came up with not only this important innovation, but also several oft-repeated phrases, including “Who writes your scripts?” (to Ian Botham, who had just batted his first ball since his drug ban) and «If it was a cheese roll, it would never have gone past him» (after Shane Warne's ball of the century to Mike Gatting).

But the principle he lived by was: “If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” That's why he used to call in his personal batting coach — Essex teammate Alan Lilley — for private networking sessions between team training sessions. After retiring in 1997, he applied the same no-nonsense approach, coaching Essex between 2001 and 2005, followed by a four-year stint as England manager at the height of their dominance under Andrew Strauss.

“We had a good team,” recalls Gooch, who still attends Tests regularly and also attends every Essex home match as an ambassador. “Broad and Anderson, Ian Bell, Matt Prior. We didn't have any bad cricketers. When we won the match in Brisbane [in 2010-11], that's the only photo I ever took on tour. I still have it on my phone: 517 for one. I've never seen anything like it. We expected the Australians to win, and they expected victory too. Two days to knock us out of the game? And this brought us victory in the series. Usually, if you fall in Brisbane, there is no going back.

England's second innings result when they declared in Brisbane in the first Ashes Test of the 2010/11 series. Photo: Getty Images/Hamish Blair

“The funny thing is that when we came back three years later, we had virtually the same staff. But he simply wasn't there. Something was different. They followed Swann for a bit. Trott was not in the same condition: you could see this because he used to always score, but now he only had a few shots. And Mitchell Johnson got into the heads of some of our players.» (For good reason: Gooch admits that Johnson bowled as fast as Patrick Patterson, the 1980s West Indian who was the only opponent who made him fear for his safety on the cricket field.)

“I thought Steven Finn could be like Dennis Lilley'

Gooch's tenure ended after the Ashes whitewashed in 2013-14. England's cycle of dominance could not survive Swann's controversial resignation, Trott's burnout and the persecution of Pietersen, who became a scapegoat for allegedly looking out the window during team meetings.

Yet one of his most poignant memories is of the bowlers. “In 2010, when Steven Finn played his first test, I said to Andy Flower: 'You've got a potential attack leader,'” he recalls. “But then on the 2013-14 tour there was a comment about Finn being 'impossible to pick' — it was terrible but accurate because his playing was really off the mark. I remember him sitting on the ground at Allan Border Oval in Brisbane and crying his eyes out. It made me sad.

I thought he might improve himself, like Dennis Lilley, who had a big setback when I first met him, or Richard Hadley, but that never happened. Nice guy, though. The three best players I have coached are Alastair Cook, Chris Woakes and Steven Finn. I'm not saying that the others were bad…»

Gooch's focus on self-improvement runs through every topic we consider, and explains why — despite his admiration — he could never understand Gower's reluctance to look under the hood of his own engine. Returning once again to Baseball, he suggests that this still-new policy needs some work.

“I think Baseball is fantastic. I have nothing against this. But I think… after the event it's easy, but you can get carried away. The other question I'm wondering is whether this will affect other teams. This approach requires the captain and coach to be one. You have to believe in it because you will suffer some failures when things go wrong.

“Also, in India, we will see if they can use attacking tactics against the spinning ball. You can certainly use it if the ball is turning towards you, but it is more difficult when it is turning away from you. It's exciting because when you go watch England these days you never know what's going to happen next. Except for one thing: it won’t be normal.”