Waugh: last man out of kitchen when the heat is on (19 June 1999)

19 June 1999

Waugh: last man out of kitchen when the heat is on

Martin Johnson

It's the eyes - barely visible through two narrow slits, and as cold and unblinking as anything you'll see on a fishmonger's slab - that let the bowler know exactly what he's up against. If they'd belonged to a baddie at the OK Corral, Wyatt Earp would not so much have reached for his six-gun as the lavatory paper.

When the heat becomes unbearable, as South Africa found out in two epic back to back World Cup encounters, Steve Waugh is the last man out of the kitchen. In selecting a man to bat for your life, you'd eliminate Geoff Boycott on the grounds that watching him would render life not worth living, and plump, every time, for the man who is the biggest single reason - Shane Warne included - for England having lost every Ashes series since 1986.

His features, as cracked and leathery as a dried up billabong, give another clue to the fact that this is a man devoid of frippery, a man with so much steel that a crisis sends ballbearings rather than corpuscles coursing through his veins. If they cast the Waugh twins in a re-make of Zulu, it's not hard to picture which one would play the Michael Caine role, idly swishing flies from his saddle, and which one Stanley Baker, up to his neck in sweat and sandbags.

The contrast between Mark and Steve is all the more remarkable for their having emerged from the same womb, roughly 90 seconds apart. Mark, all style and class, is the gambler, who occasionally gives the impression that his mind wanders off to the card table, or the 3.45 at Randwick. Games of chance, however, have no such appeal for Steve, despite a deadpan expression would make him a hell of a poker player. His brother uses a rapier, but Steve goes to work with a chisel.

Another clue lies in the hairstyles. Mark's locks look as though they've had more than a passing acquaintance with the hairdryer, while Steve's coiffeur might have been the result of five minutes in the shed with an Australian sheep shearer. Content, rather than artistic impression, is what makes Steve the competitor he is, and in a perverse sort of way, Australia will be happier if they're 10 for three when he walks out to bat tomorrow.

In terms of style, Waugh is as poetic as the verse on his fan club's website. "Our Stevie, Who Isn't Yet In Heaven, Thy Kingdom Come, Thou Shalt Get A Ton." Ye Gods. In terms of substance, however, Waugh epitomises the single biggest difference between Australian and English cricket teams of the past decade. He does it not for himself, but for his country.

If the rules allowed a Chinaman to play for England on the basis that he had a great-great grandmother who once visited Stoke Poges, they'd pick him, and the consequence of expediency has been a succession of teams whose individual talent has been in direct contrast to collective bottle. Waugh himself has some sage advice on the latest English Cricket Board manoeuvrings in this direction, namely to appoint, if needs be, a coach from Mars or Pluto if he has a bit of success on his CV.

"Appoint an Englishman," says Waugh. "Australia has got its own team song, and I can't imagine someone from England singing that song with us after we'd won a Test match. When it comes to crunch time, desperation time, if you're not born with that inner passion, you can't make it up."

England's abject run of failure against the oldest enemy goes back so far that it is something of a surprise to realise that the last Australian survivor of a losing Ashes series is not only still alive, but captaining the current team. His cricketing character may well, in fact, have been moulded by his early experience of the international game. "I was a loser for quite a few years," says Waugh, "and I didn't much care for it."

When Australia arrived in England in 1989, they had been humbled on their own soil by Mike Gatting's team two years earlier, and competed with an intensity which made David Gower's side look as though they were playing a cucumber sandwich match on the Duchess of Arundel's back lawn. And Waugh played a gargantuan role in launching what has now become a serial drubbing.

When Angus Fraser bowled him in the third Test at Edgbaston, the scene of that extraordinary semi-final on Thursday, Waugh had been batting for 13 hours and five minutes in the series without losing his wicket. Fraser finally defeated him with the 568th ball he had faced, during which time he had racked up 393 runs.

If Waugh had a perceived weakness, it was, as Corporal Jones would have said, that he didn't like it up him. Michael Atherton caused something of a media stir before the 1994 tour of Australia by suggesting that Waugh might have benefited from wearing incontinence pads under his flannels when the artillery was up around his nostrils, but it didn't bother Waugh. Plain speaking is his own kind of language, and in any case he was already taking steps to eradicate this one area of vulnerability.

He gave up hooking and pulling, not because it frightened him, but because it got him out too often. In his own words he is "a bit more conservative than I used to be. It's not so much a matter of cutting certain shots out, but I pick and choose which deliveries to attack much better than I used to."

He has, unlike Mark, learnt to play to his own expectations rather than that of others. The young, wet-behind-the-ears Steve Waugh was labelled a strokeplayer, and played not to let other people down. Now he plays not to let himself down. He has a simple plan for an essentially simple game. Concentrate, watch the ball, and either play it or leave it.

Waugh's philosophy is also mirrored in the way he produces hardback tour diaries for the Australian book market. He never uses a ghost writer, and every word is his own. As it is when he is at the crease, if a job's worth doing, he does it himself.

It's hard to believe now that Waugh was under pressure as captain at the start of this World Cup, with a number of respected Australian commentators expressing the view that Shane Warne, with his more aggressive and innovative cricketing brain, would have been a better choice as successor to Mark Taylor. You can have an argument both ways. The Richie Benaud style of leadership, or the Ian Chappell. What England wouldn't give for such a choice.

Nothing said more about Waugh than when Paul Reiffel turned a match-winning catch into what might have been a match-losing six at Edgbaston on Thursday. Ten Australians hung their heads in horror, while the captain's expression betrayed not a flicker of what must have been a similar internal emotion.

Off the field, however, Waugh is a long way from being the taciturn, poker-faced individual he is on it, and one of the better examples of his sense of humour accompanied a moment of deep personal disappointment. Shortly before the fourth Test of the 1990-91 Ashes series, Mark, expecting to be named 12th man, was approached on the outfield of the Adelaide Oval by his elder brother: "Congratulations, you're making your debut." Mark said: "Great. But who's been left out?" Steve replied: "Me, you bastard."

Source :: The Electronic Telegraph