For Daniel Brigham, England’s freewheeling run through the win-soaked summer of 2004 consigned the shoegazing days to history and ushered in a new kind of cricket that wasn’t afraid to enjoy itself.
The summer of 2004 was a beautifully incongruous jolt. For English cricket fans brought up in the 1990s, the months of May to September always went the same way: hope, disappearing hope, no hope, despair, gallows humour, dead rubber win, misplaced hope for the winter tour.
England won only 26 Tests that decade. The most they won consecutively was three, way back in 1991. Successive accomplishments weren’t beyond them, though: they once managed seven defeats in a row.
The summer of 2004 was different. Very different. All seven Tests against New Zealand and West Indies were won. It was like discovering, after years of murdering Mustang Sally on the karaoke, you can suddenly belt out Nessun Dorma note perfectly. Old heroes shone for one final time, and new heroes arrived like a summer downpour: English cricket was refreshed and invigorated.
Like all of the best sides, there were forgotten heroes in England’s ranks. I watched Rob Key’s double hundred against West Indies at Lord’s in an empty Penzance pub (you know the cricket’s going well when you’re not using a holiday to avoid it but actively seeking it out). Then there was Ashley Giles. If England’s team was full of players who looked like they’d quite happily go for a drink or six with the fans, Giles was the sort who’d make sure everyone got home safely. Constantly derided throughout his international career, he was England’s leading wicket-taker in the West Indies series.
August 21, 2004: the day England completed their seventh successive Test win, equalling their record set in 1888 and 1929 (on the back of Strauss’s 220 runs, they would break the record with a win at Port Elizabeth in their next Test). The day of victory at the Oval was fitting: the UK was celebrating a gold rush at the Athens Olympics. Cricket, for so long the embarrassing friend in English sport, was finally invited to the party again.
Do people remember the summer of 2004 as fondly as it deserves? It seems to have been consumed by the enormous orbit of the 2005 Ashes. Perhaps England’s agonising loss to West Indies in the Lord’s final of the Champions Trophy in September soured some memories. But it really happened: England won all seven Tests, and they did it with an attacking, hair-raising and joyful pizzazz – yes, pizzazz! – that we could only dream of during those shoegazing days of the 1990s. English cricket was golden again.
