By Seaxe Man
February 2 2013

HERE'S PART 1 (of 3) OF SEAXE MAN's REPORT OF GATT'S CAREER AS ENGLAND CAPTAIN.  WE HAVE AN OVERALL SUMMARY AND LEARN OF GATT"S NON AUSPICIOUS START.   MORE TO FOLLOW PRE SEASON,

Background/Scenario

Mike Gatting was born in Kingsbury, Middlesex on June 6th 1957.

Mike captained England on 21 occasions. In series against India (part) Australia, Pakistan, West Indies (part) and New Zealand.

His record was W2, D16 and lost 5.

Initially this does not seem impressive until more detail unfolds.

His full Test Match stats were: Tests 79, Innings 138, n.o 14, runs 4409, hs 207, av 35.56, 100’s 10, 50’s 21, ct 59.

His Middlesex stats were: matches 412, innings 631, n.o 93, hs 258, runs 28411, 100’s 77, 50’s 137, ct 393, av 52.81.

This places him second only to Patsy Hendren, who totalled 40302 runs with 119 100’s and a touch lower average of 49.82.

Fortunately Gatt’s two wins came against Australia, in Australia, in the Ashes Series of 1986/87 which were sufficient to retain the small urn.

The  79 Tests Gatt played in, was one more than Denis Compton and he held Middlesex’s highest number of Test caps awarded, until passed by Andrew Strauss who finally totalled 100 in the recent South Africa series.

His reign spanned from July 1986 until June 1988. His time was dogged by bad weather (1986/1987), hence the high number of drawn matches. In several of these,
England had the opposition under the cosh but the weather intervened to our disadvantage.

He was relieved of the captaincy in June 1988 (more later) at the conclusion of the drawn 1st Test against the top side of the era West Indies.

This at a time when England’s star was waxing against these formidable opponents, after a 3-0 Texaco Cup whitewash, the first game of which, at Edgbaston, I was fortunate to see.

Beginning of Gatt's England Captaincy

The 1986 India series was of a three match duration.

The first of which at Trent Bridge was captained by David Gower.  The result a 5 wicket win for India.

Gower stood down for the 2nd Test at Leeds and Mike Gatting took over. This was also lost by 279 runs and the 3rd at Edgbaston was drawn. So India’s series.

The following 3 Test series against New Zealand was won by NZ 1-0. So not a great start, though to be fair, both India and NZ had fair sides back then.

This led onto the 1986/87 winter tour of Australia for the Ashes series. Despite the disappointing results against India and New Zealand, Gatt kept the captaincy.

I seem to recall that this was the series when John Emburey famously said ‘ we can’t bowl, we can’t bat and we can’t field’. Famous last words as they say.