Cricket
Mike Atherton: The man who would not budge
The early cricketing life of the well-educated Future England Captain.
Written by Mayukh Ghosh
6 min readPublished on
Mike Atherton
Mike Atherton© Saajan S. Mahamuni
When comparing himself and his captain Mike Atherton, Graeme Hick once said, “Mike said that he’d read Wilbur Smith when he was eight. That’s why he went to Cambridge and I didn’t.”
People born in the 1990s and later won’t remember much of Atherton – the cricketer. To them, he is one of those rare commentators who speaks well and makes sense. For the more interested fan, he is the one who writes well too. Check out some of his work here & here.
People well acquainted with cricket in the 1990s know the gritty opening batsman named Mike Atherton. They are well aware of his duels with the likes of Ambrose and McGrath. He was the technician who always made a valiant attempt to get the better of these bowlers.
The foundation years:
Woodhouses Cricket Club is a small village club located at the border which separates Manchester and Oldham. Woodhouse played in the Lancashire and Cheshire league, and in the 1980s the league boasted some very good names. Tony Opatha, Sidath Wettimuny, Farokh Engineer etc. graced the league. Young Mike Atherton had good company.
T.E. Srinivasan, one of the finest – and at the same time unluckiest – batsmen from Madras, used to play for Woodhouse. Srinivasan helped Mike immensely. Later, Mike acknowledged the fact that it was due to Srinivasan that he developed the habit of hitting the ball with a straight bat.
Mike had a supportive father who guided him in the right manner. In 1978, on a day in June, he called Mike to the lounge. A curly-haired left-hander named David Gower was making his debut for England. “See how still he keeps his head,” said his father. A lesson his son never forgot.
The taste of ‘first team’:
Mike was 14 when one Monday evening his father came home from a selection meeting. He congratulated Mike for being picked for the first team at Woodhouse. “Who am I playing instead of?” asked Mike. “Me,” he said.
Mike was a young boy pitted against stronger and older bowlers. He had to devise ways of making runs against them, and as a result learned how to use the pace of the ball while playing horizontal-bat strokes.
At Thornham, he played against the famously fiery Roy Gilchrist. Gilchrist was in his late 40s but was still sharp enough to hit young Mike in the face with his infamous bouncers. These were tough times for the young boy, but it shaped him up nicely for a bright career facing tough bowling in cricket.
Schooling:
His education started at Briscoe Lane County Primary School at New Heath. Mike was part of the cricket team there and they won the Manchester Primary Schools’ Cup for four consecutive years, in both football and cricket.
Mike appeared for an entrance exam at the prestigious Manchester Grammar School and was selected. He took his time to gel with his batch-mates, but then slowly flourished as an indispensable part of the cricket team, which lost only one match in five years. His consistency at this level made various representative sides interested in him. He found himself a regular in the Lancashire and England representative schools’ teams.
Cambridge calling:
Mike had the opportunity to become a professional cricketer just after passing out from school, but instead appeared for the entrance examination at Cambridge University. It was too good an opportunity to resist, and he was happy to not become a professional cricketer at that point.
He was fortunate to have Lord John Butterfield as his master at Downing College. Butterfield was a kind man who was also the president of the university’s cricket, tennis and rowing clubs. When Mike was apprehensive about accepting when he was offered a place in the England Young Cricketers team for a tour to Sri Lanka, Lord Butterfield urged him to go and lead the team in the faraway land, provided Mike made up time in the vacation and didn’t fall behind in his studies. Mike obliged and kept his word. He was once again selected to lead the same team next year, this time for a series of matches in Australia.
His First-class debut was against an Essex side captained by his future opening partner Graham Gooch. Cambridge sent Essex in to bat; a waist high full toss from Atherton was good enough to have Chris Gladwin caught at deep square leg. Despite his efforts, Atherton’s bowling did not improve substantially over the rest of his career. His first (and penultimate) Test wicket, Dilip Vengsarkar, would also come off a full toss.
When Cambridge’s turn to bat came, Page, Foster and Lever reduced them to nothing. Meanwhile, Mike, batting at number 3, made his first runs his First-class cricket – a thick inside edge through square leg. They were 20/7 before Mike resurrected the innings, to an extent, with the tail enders supporting him. He remained not out on 73 as his team crumbled for 135.
It was a good start; good enough to make Keith Fletcher say, “Let’s get this irritating little p***k out,” when Mike went in to bat in the second innings.
Mike managed to fulfil both the dreams he had before joining Cambridge: to become a First-class cricketer and to get a degree in history.
In those three years he scored 1493 First-class runs for the university at an average of 41.5.
Cricket at the highest level:
Some experts were not very happy with Mike’s over-exposure to cricket at Cambridge. They said that the team was over-reliant on his batting and as a result he was always under pressure to score heavily from such a tender age. This, according to them, was a hindrance to his game developing fully. They also said that captaining a side with virtually no chance of winning for two years made him a defensive captain.
He did well while captaining the Combined University team (which included another future England captain: Nasser Hussain) in 1989, though. They became the first non-county team ever to make the quarter finals of the Benson & Hedges Cup, where they lost to Somerset by just 3 runs.
Mike himself always believed that his stint as a cricketer for Cambridge helped him immensely. It made him understand the nuances of the game and developed his temperament.
He was by then a regular in the Lancashire first team, and him being a Cambridge pass out didn’t go well with some of his team mates.
He was touted an ‘FEC’ early in his career for Lancashire. Initially, it was wrongly assumed that this stood for ‘Future England Captain’. It turned out that it stood for ‘F***ing Educated C***’.
This ‘FEC’ went on to play more than 100 Test matches for England, and led his country with distinction. He always had a solid foundation to bank upon. The days he spent on the turfs of Manchester Grammar School and Cambridge University were immensely beneficial to him in the long run.
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