Graham Gooch, who celebrates his birthday on July 23, did not have a smooth path to the England captaincy, but once he got the job he revolutionised the team’s approach. After his record-breaking summer of 1990, Wisden published this assessment in 1991.
Ian Botham has, in his time, managed to make a fair amount of trouble for himself. But not even Botham managed to get himself banned from Test cricket for three years, or made himself the hate-focus of an international political campaign, or caused an entire tour to be cancelled. Graham Gooch has done all those things. How extraordinary then, how absolutely extraordinary, to consider that this is the man we must begin to think of as the most important cricketer of his generation, and the most effective captain of England since Mike Brearley.
Yes, Gooch said famously, we’ve got the makings of a goodish side. The point is that this was not an understatement: it was an exact assessment of the facts. Gooch’s achievement has been to maximise the resources of that goodish side. It has been a triumph of nothing less than leadership, and this from a man who resigned as captain of Essex because captaincy was affecting his form.
The chairman of the England selectors, Ted Dexter, when in his journalistic avatar, famously described Gooch as having the charisma of a wet fish. This has been thrown back at Dexter times without number, but it is, in fact, a fair remark – from a media person. All the same, Gooch cannot have achieved his success without great gifts of communication. It just so happens that these gifts are not apparent to those outside the charmed circle of his team. Nor does his team find Gooch’s gifts readily communicable to the outside world. The nearest anyone ever gets to an explanation is to say that he leads “by example”. But this means little. Plenty of leaders have worked themselves silly while inspiring only contempt. Gooch simply has, at a point that must be alarmingly close to the end of his cricketing life, come into his own. He has reconstructed and re-inspired the England cricket team: and it seems that he has done a similar job on himself. Yet he remains as hostile to outsiders as ever, and the team is probably even less approachable now than it was in Botham’s time. There is still an Inner Ring: the difference is that Gooch appears to have made everyone in the team a member of it.
Right from the first moment that he took charge in Delhi, Gooch made it clear that he wanted only to be judged on results. In those terms, he has established himself as a truly great cricketer. His achievement in remaking the England team might yet be even more significant, and in this much larger area he again bears the stamp of incipient greatness.
