Atherton walks away with his bat held high

The former captain of England who retired yesterday may not have been the greatest leader but was one of the most loyal and most popular

Michael Atherton always thought the wheel would turn. He said it in places like Port of Spain and Sydney, Harare and Auckland and by a fishing stream in his Lancashire roots, but of course it never did and now that he is gone officially from the field there is a hole in the fabric of our sporting life as big as The Oval gasholder.

It is not so easy to say quite what was once filled by this vacuum. Character, oodles of it, of course. A deep love of battle, no doubt. But also something much more complex and elusive. A quirky way of thinking, perhaps, an obduracy, an ambition to defy any odds which you could taste in any corner of a ground and which made his defeats, of which there was a never a great shortage, go to both his heart and your own. He didn't walk with the tide or the times. He didn't issue sound-bites.

Atherton may have been a loner, and as such not ideally suited to the demands of captaining a modern sports team, but there was something in him which touched anyone who has ever been in an unpromising fight and he never lost the affection of his team-mates who on Monday night gathered for a farewell dinner. Once, around the nadir of his reign as England captain, he slapped a rubbish bin with his bat on his way back to the pavilion. A man sparing of words had spoken a thousand.

Atherton, almost from the start, was tetchy, stubborn, dismissive. Not only did he refuse to suffer fools, from time to time he flayed them, not least the Pakistan journalist who claimed that his love life had perished the moment he was dismissed as a buffoon by this haughty sahib of English cricket. After surviving the crisis which threatened to overwhelm him at the dawn of his captaincy, the ball-tampering incident at Lord's, Atherton scored a brilliant 99 at Headingley before telling a press conference ready to re-sanctify him that maybe his innings had quietened "the gutter press."

The following morning, after glancing at the papers, he wore a rueful smile but his eyes still reminded you of steel.

If for him the captaincy of England was a ball and chain, it could also be a glory. If you worked at it long and hard enough, if you ignored the pain in your back and the one elsewhere which came when you picked up your morning newspaper and noted that the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck was among those calling for your head. But of course the wheel never turned, not a full revolution, and it was maybe Atherton's awareness this summer that it would not happen for him, at least not against the most oppressive of his opponents, Australia, that finally pushed him into retirement.

Some may say that the dust of failure accompanied Atherton's last strides from the arena of Test cricket, that he failed as a captain and that even his fabled fighting character, and the fourth highest total of runs amassed by an English batsman, 7,728, yielded a batting average of just 38 runs, two short of the generally agreed threshold of front-rank Test performers. But sometimes it is impossible, even offensive, to measure a man's footprints with a list of numbers which tell you nothing of either his meaning or his circumstances.

Sometimes those circumstances weighed him down almost to the point of despair. Certainly his game and a fine technique suffered, never more so than in the early winter of 1997 in New Zealand after a nightmarish tour of Zimbabwe, when England had been pilloried not only for sub-standard performance but what was perceived as a terrible arrogance. Over lunch in Auckland Atherton speculated on what odds the London bookmakers would put against his scoring a century in the coming Test. He said that he felt good for one, he had been going back to basics, giving himself some time in the nets to straighten out a stance that had been undermined by the barrage from men like Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh, Glenn McGrath and Allan Donald.

For a few days he had put aside the cares of captaincy and worked with the bat. The odds were 14 for 1. He batted beautifully at Eden Park for 86 before falling to a freak catch. It seemed, for an anguished moment, that whatever he did he would be thwarted. But then he batted superbly for a century in Christchurch, one of 19 in his Test career.

The essence of Atherton was in his battles against Donald in Johannesburg and Trent Bridge, when the great South African grimaced and yelled and Atherton stood his guard so resolutely he might have been forming a square at Waterloo.

His moment of final decision as England captain came in the dusk in Antigua in 1998, when his highest hopes of winning in the Caribbean, after a stirring victory in Trinidad, had been swept away by a renascent Ambrose and Walsh. He had offered his resignation at the end of the previous summer, only to be talked out of it by Lord's and, perhaps more persuasively, his father. Before the Antigua Test, which England needed to win to tie the series, he walked on the beach and thought more carefully than ever before about his future.

He had said several times that when the weight of office threatened his basic pleasure in playing the game he would quit, and this was perhaps the time. "When this Test is over a lot of questions are going to be asked by others, and by me," he said, "and I will not skip over them. This is my 52nd Test and of course things haven't gone as well as I'd hoped. When I came into the job there was a model out there for me. It was the Australian captain Allan Border. He took over in very difficult circumstances but slowly the wheel turned for him.

"Well, it hasn't really turned for me and I have to accept that. I like to think we are a better team now, more committed, and I think it's true we've had some pretty rough luck out here. But all that has to be pushed aside in five days time, when I know I have to make a decision. You don't make long-term decisions when you're in the trenches fighting for your life."

Tributes to Atherton varied in their generosity yesterday. Among the kinder, unsurprisingly enough, was Ian Botham, who spoke of Atherton's competitive character and courage under the burden of constant back pain. Steve Waugh talked of his commitment, his talent, his willingness to fight, which, when you put it all together, "gave you everything you would want in a Test cricketer." Bob Willis said there was a certain naïvety to Atherton's captaincy, but allowed that his bowling resources had always been slender.

In a wry moment of reflection, Atherton once said that he had finally worked out the trick of being a great captain. It was to have a great side. For him it was never an option. So it meant he had to fight down all the years. Just because the wheel refused to turn, it didn't mean that he had to bend.

The highs and lows of M A Atherton

1987: Debuts for Cambridge University and Lancashire. Tops 1,000 runs in the season.

1989: Makes England debut against Australia at Trent Bridge.

1990: Makes first Test century, 151, against New Zealand at Nottingham.

1990-91: Tours Australia.

1992-93: Tours India and Sri Lanka.

1993: Appointed England captain for fifth Test against Australia.

1994: Captains England on losing 3-1 tour of West Indies. Captains England to 1-0 home Test series win against New Zealand and a 1-1 draw with South Africa. Accused of ball tampering at Lord's against South Africa. Denies allegations but fined £1,000.

1994-95: Captains England in Australia, losing series 3-1.

1995: Captains England to a 2-2 home series draw against West Indies. Captains England in South Africa. Makes highest Test score of 185no in Johannesburg.

1996: Captains England to a 1-0 home series win over India, but loses series 2-0 against Pakistan. Captain in drawn series in Zimbabwe.

1997: Scores 94no and 118 at Christchurch to secure 2-0 series win over New Zealand but loses form for the Ashes series with Australia which England lose 3-2. Leads England in West Indies.

1998: Struggles throughout Test series in West Indies, which England lose 3-1. Resigns after final Test. Hits century in first Test back as England draw with South Africa at Edgbaston. Misses final Test of summer against Sri Lanka at The Oval because of back trouble.

1999: Back trouble forces him to miss World Cup.

2000: Scores 136 in first innings of drawn Test against Zimbabwe. Makes 100th Test appearance alongside Alec Stewart against West Indies at Old Trafford.

2001: Appointed stand-in captain for second Test against Australia at Lord's, with Nasser Hussain injured. Cannot prevent England from slumping to an eight-wicket defeat. In his final Test for England is out for nine in the second innings as England are beaten by an innings and 25 runs. Ends his England career as the leading run-scorer in Test cricket since January 1990.

Highest-scoring Test batsmen Jan 1990 - Aug 2001

Inn Runs Avg HS 50s 100s

M A Atherton (Eng) 206 7,633 38.36 185 46 16

A J Stewart (Eng) 205 7,406 39.39 190 38 14

M E Waugh (Aus) 191 7,392 42.48 153 43 19

S R Waugh (Aus) 165 7,240 53.63 200 29 23

S R Tendulkar (Ind) 129 6,704 58.30 217 26 25

B C Lara (WI) 141 6,533 47.69 375 33 15

M A Taylor (Aus) 166 6,306 40.95 334 35 15

M J Slater (Aus) 131 5,312 42.84 219 21 14

Inzamam-ul-Haq (Pak) 123 5,194 46.79 200 30 14

P A de Silva (SL) 122 4,978 44.05 267 18 16