1989: The winds of change sweep through cricket -by Ralph Grayden

1989 was a year of revolution. In the course of those electric 365 days the Berlin wall crumbled, Chinese students staged their short-lived protest in Tiananmen Square and Allan Border’s Australians turned the cricketing world upside-down.

When the Australians arrived in England in May 1989, to begin their quest to regain the Ashes, they were condemned as the worst touring party ever sent to contest cricket’s oldest prize. No less an authority than the great leg-spinner turned cricket writer, Bill “Tiger” O’Reilly, dismissed the Aussies’ chances of winning entirely. His Sydney newspaper column screamed the headline, “It’s war but where’s the artillery?”. And for good reason.

In the 11 test matches leading up to the series, the Australians had managed only two victories. The first came in a one-off test against a Sri Lankan team that had not yet found its feet at the highest level of the game. The other was by way of a dead-rubber against the West Indies on a Sydney pitch that turned so much Allan Border’s own part-time spinners delivered him 11 wickets for the match.

Of the 17 tourists that arrived in England, the Aussies could scrape together only four players with prior Ashes experience. Apart from the captain, the batting looked decidedly fragile, with Mark Taylor having only played two test matches and the young number six, Steve Waugh, possessing the meagre record of 27 test matches without a single century to his name. The Australian selectors had also made the curious decision to omit from the squad the form bowler from the previous Australian summer, left-arm paceman, Mike Whitney. Instead the bowling duties were entrusted to an attack comprising of Terry Alderman, Geoff Lawson, Trevor Hohns and Merv Hughes, as well as Tasmanian bolter Greg Campbell. None of these players was even an Australian regular at the commencement of the tour, with only Hughes having played more than two tests over the preceding Southern Hemisphere summer.

Worse still, the inexperienced and out-of-form Australians were taking on an established England side that included players the calibre of the three Gs – Gower, Gatting and Gooch, as well as fast bowler Graham Dilley and a rejuvenated Ian Botham. It should have been carnage. And it was.

When the Aussies returned home they had regained the Ashes by a margin of four-nil: the only team since Bradman’s 1948 Invincibles to win in such one-sided circumstances, and the first team since 1934 to win back the Ashes on English soil. Even more impressively, and as Steve Waugh boasted to reporters after the tour, it would have been six-nil if it weren’t for the ever-present English summer rain. The home side never had a look in.

The Aussies dominated every facet of the series. The batsmen buried England under a mountain of runs, with five of the six top-order batsmen scoring more than 400 runs over the six matches and averaging more than 50. That included Mark Taylor’s 839 at an average of 83.90 per innings and Steve Waugh’s 506 at 126.50, and compared with an English side in which only one batsman, Robin Smith, scraped together more than 400. Lawson and Alderman backed the batsmen up by claiming 68 victims between them – Terry Alderman’s 41 at just 17.36 the second best Ashes haul ever by an Australian. By comparison, the pick of the English bowlers, Neil Foster, managed only 12 wickets at more than 35.

But the reality of the revolution did not lie in the statistics. It was the way in which the Australians played the game.

In Allan Border, the Aussies had a captain who commanded respect not only because of his seniority but also because he had sacrificed so much. Thrust unwillingly into the leadership of the team in the mid-1980s after the retirement of a whole generation of stars, Border then faced mass desertions as many more of his players turned their back on the national side for the lure of the fast money that could be made on a South African rebel tour.

Throughout this turmoil, Border almost single-handedly propped up the Australian batting, averaging more than 50 while his team mates fell like skittles. But Border knew that even he could not do it all himself and the team enlisted the support of former Australian captain Bob Simpson, who became effectively the first full-time football-style coach of any international cricket team.

The two men had set about transforming Australian cricketing culture from one in which individuals relied on natural ability to overcome an equally unprepared opposition into one in which athleticism, discipline and teamwork were emphasised, respect for the captain’s decision was a prerequisite for playing, and wining was the only objective. Anyone who could not fulfil these criteria was no longer welcome in the team regardless of ability. And this discipline was backed up by an increased emphasis on intelligence.

Before the start of each test, Border and his players knew the game of every one of their opponents better than the English knew it themselves (no small feat when you consider the English used 29 players over the course of the series). Individual attacking fields were set for each batsman, and nothing short off perfection was expected by the players in every detail of their game and for every session of the six-test series. In that 1989 series, the Border and Simpson philosophy had finally turned the Aussies into the first truly professional cricket team.

Nothing typified the new, hard Australian game than the captain’s own transformation of personality. Allan Border is by all accounts the most affable of blokes. Before the tour he was particularly close to the England captain, David Gower, the two men having formed a friendship during Border’s stints in the English county game. But, such was the Australian captain’s focus during the series, that Gower found the only word he could get out of his old mate was “heads” as the coin was tossed at the commencement of each match. Border’s determination to win at any cost set the tone for the rest of the team to follow and earned him the enduring nickname “Captain Grumpy”.

Since 1989, the revolution has lived on and Australia has never again lost an Ashes series. Future captains Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh both learned by Border’s example on that tour, and the intensity of the cricket played by the Aussies has never waned.

Mind you, England has some cause for hope. It comes from off the cricket field and in the form of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who writing at the time of the Spanish civil war said, “A revolution only lasts 15 years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation”. The philosopher would probably note that Ricky Ponting is the first Australian captain since Border not to have his thinking shaped by the 1989 experience. After a decidedly wobbly start to this summer’s Ashes tour, maybe this revolution is finally over. By September we will know for sure.

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