The Gloves are Off by Matt Prior

Author:Matt Prior [Prior, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

At the end of the Headingley match, Andrew Strauss’s leadership had really shone through for me. Firstly, when he was given a grilling in the post-match presentation by Sky Sports’ Mike Atherton, I thought he handled the questions with real calmness and clarity. That certainly rubbed off on me, and I’m sure it did on the rest of the team. It reassured me that we weren’t about to make a load of changes to the team or that all hell would break loose ahead of The Oval. We’d had a bad game but it didn’t make us a bad team. You talk about what makes a good leader and here in this situation I thought Straussy showed as much. It was the first time I thought: ‘This bloke is really special when it comes to that side of leadership.’

As the last rites of the match had been enacted it had been terrible. It felt like everyone was thinking: ‘That’s it now. We’ve had it.’ It was almost as if we were 3-0 down. That’s how bad it felt. I felt so low. We were then told that we had to go back to the team hotel for a meeting. I think most of us just wanted to go home. But in truth and on reflection, it was the best thing that we could have done. In that meeting we collected all the negative stuff, all the crap, and dug a great big hole and shoved it all in. We left it knowing two things for certain: one, that we were going to cop a heap of criticism in the press and, two, we were going to be strong and stick together.

We admitted that we had got ahead of ourselves. That had been our biggest problem at Headingley. It hadn’t been all the distractions on the morning of the match. It had been the fact that we were 1-0 up, with two Tests to play. We had been thinking about winning the Ashes. Win at Headingley and it would have been all over. We would have won the series. That’s what we were thinking, and that is always dangerous.

I know the media get frustrated when we say things such as ‘We’ll take each ball as it comes’ and ‘The first session is the biggest’, because they are such horrible clichés, but the truth is that is how you have to approach every game. Outcomes take care of themselves. We as professional sportspeople have to focus on the processes and the smallest details. We didn’t do that at Headingley, and it was a huge lesson to us. Instead of going our separate ways, parting for a week and reading and hearing stuff about ‘What direction should they go?’ or ‘Who should they pick?’, we all knew.

We knew that Andrew Flintoff would return from injury. And we knew that, unfortunately, Ravi Bopara was also going to be left out. His form had gone, and he had made only one and nought at Leeds.

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