Steve Waugh on England vs New Zealand and a captain's role in cricket's biggest game

Steve Waugh doesn’t really need to be here. He started the day in Manchester for the first World Cup semi-final, will end it in Birmingham for the second, and at no point in the journey between the two could Croydon be described as a natural stopping-off point. But here he is, nonetheless: taking precious hours out of his schedule to address a group of teenage Afghans, who are largely oblivious to the fact that they are in the presence of one of the greatest cricketers in history.

“How many Tests did I play?” Waugh asks them. One says 20. Another reckons around 50. “One hundred and sixty-eight,” Waugh reveals tersely, before turning to one of the volunteers alongside him. “Maybe we’ll set up a video session for them later,” he suggests.

He’s joking, of course, but with Waugh it’s often hard to tell. In retirement, as when he played for Australia, Waugh can be drier than sauvignon. He always preferred to let his actions do the talking for him, in any case, which is why his extensive charity work often flies under the radar. He’s here in his role with the Laureus Academy, overseeing a long-standing project run by the Change Foundation, where young Afghan refugees are offered logistical support, life advice and - once a week - cricket sessions with a qualified coach. This is the kind of work Waugh finds most rewarding of all, and if he has to sit down with a journalist for half an hour afterwards, well, that’s a price worth paying.

Still, he warms up appreciably when he’s reminded that for all the pizzazz of the modern white-ball game, back in the mid-1980s he was actually one of the first one-day innovators, pioneering the back-of-the-hand slower ball that is now a part of every death bowler’s armoury. “You’ve done your research, mate,” he says with only the merest hint of sarcasm. “I invented that ball, which not a lot of people know about.”

As England and New Zealand limber up for Sunday’s showdown at Lord’s, they could do worse than to heed the advice of a man who has been there three times and finished on the winning side twice. Waugh won with Australia in 1987, lost against Sri Lanka in 1996 and captained the winning side at Lord’s in 1999. And so he’s perhaps best-placed of all to tell what Kane Williamson and Eoin Morgan are still yet to discover: what goes through the mind of a captain on the morning of a World Cup final?

“Look, you want to try and keep it as normal as possible,” he says. “Obviously, it’s not, because as a captain, a World Cup final could be the defining moment of your life. But you want to prepare the same that you prepared for the previous match, not get too over-excited about the opportunity. The key for a captain is to stay calm and relaxed.”

By the time Australia reached the 1999 final against Pakistan, Waugh knew that the hard part was over. They had come through two bruising games against South Africa that, Waugh says, had left them “mentally exhausted”. But they had also shaken off the sort of internal turmoil that would have torpedoed many other sides. It’s often forgotten now, but for most of that summer Waugh and his best bowler Shane Warne were engaged in a sort of open warfare that would test his leadership skills to the hilt.

The rift opened (and has arguably never truly healed) earlier that year, when Warne was dropped during the tour of the West Indies. It continued to fester during a fitful World Cup campaign, and at one point Waugh remembers being informed by the team psychologist Sandy Gordon that Warne was manoeuvring behind the scenes for his job. Waugh’s response was not to seek retribution, but quite the opposite. He told his players to boost Warne’s confidence as much as possible.

“That’s leadership,” he says now. “You’ve got to work out what’s best for the team. In my mind, he [Warne] was obviously unhappy he’d been dropped, and there were some other things going on around him. So I thought: how can we make him more comfortable and relaxed? You’ve got to put the team above yourself, put ego aside, get on with the job. That’s when leaders have to step up to the plate.”

It worked. Warne responded with 10 wickets in three games, including four against Pakistan in the final. Yet amid the crowning success of his captaincy, Waugh freely admits that there was a long-term price to be paid. “You’ve got to hide things as a captain,” he says. “You can’t always reveal what you’re thinking. After a while, keeping those emotions in check can be mentally draining. I think a leader only has five to seven years, max. Any longer than that, you probably need a change. Any leadership role takes its toll.”

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Perhaps this is why Waugh harbours such a grudging respect for a leader who, in many ways, has done for England what Waugh did for Australia: reinvented their game by adopting a doctrine of relentless, fearless aggression, all while maintaining an implacable, granite facade. Waugh certainly isn’t going to anoint Eoin Morgan as his spiritual heir. But he certainly likes what he sees.

“The good thing about Morgan,” he says, “is that he’s embraced the pressure of the favourites tag. Some captains in the past might not have wanted that. But they’re more than happy to say they’re favourites. A lot like Aaron Finch, he took the job on when the team were down, and in conjunction with Trevor Bayliss, he’s moulded it into his attitude and style. They’re not scared of anyone. They play without fear and back themselves from ball one.”

There are warm words, too, for England’s opponents, who Waugh suspects will go into Sunday’s final with a more circumspect approach than four years ago under Brendon McCullum. “New Zealand seem like a really together team,” he says. “They play for each other, they work hard and they all contribute to the cause. They’re not to be underestimated. Last time, New Zealand went in with a really aggressive attitude. Maybe this time they’ll play with a different gameplan.”

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And although we are speaking on the eve of Australia’s defeat to England in the semi-final at Edgbaston, Waugh also sees signs of promise in his home nation. He is particularly insightful in his analysis of Australian cricket’s rehabilitation following the ball-tampering scandal of Cape Town, which ripped apart a team that in some important way was seen as an analogue for Australia itself.

“That’s probably the way it’s been in the past,” Waugh says. “The Australian people want that. That’s probably why they responded so badly to what happened in Cape Town. They saw it as a reflection of themselves. That’s why there was such a big uproar. The team does probably reflect the way people want to see themselves.”

Does Waugh approve of the culture shift that resulted? “Culture’s an overused word,” he scoffs. “It’s the values you stand for, and whether you stick by them. [New coach] Justin Langer’s big on that. We played the Aussie way, which is hard - sometimes aggressive - and the team has probably had to pull back from that a little bit. But they have to find the happy medium. We’re not good at sitting back. We want to be proactive and positive and make the game go forward. So there’s a balance that the team’s got to find, which I think they’ve done pretty well.

“It was a traumatic time for everyone. Administrators left, coaches left, players had 12 months out of the game. Justin Langer has come in and stabilised things. I guess the positive out of the whole thing was how players were given opportunities who wouldn’t otherwise have played. You can see now there’s real competition for places in the side. They look a strong unit.”

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All of which would seem to bode well for the forthcoming Ashes, which Waugh sees as a largely even contest, rejecting any suggestion of a psychological boost from the World Cup. “The winning side will obviously say there’s momentum,” he says. “The losing side will say it doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant to Test cricket. I think both sides think they can win, which is great. There’s going to be five fantastic Test matches. It’s going to be an exciting series to watch.”

For a player who won four Ashes series in England, perhaps it’s not surprising that Waugh also plays down the notion of home advantage. “I see absolutely no reason why it’s harder to win away from home,” he insists. “These guys play cricket all around the world. English conditions are not much different to Australia at all, in my experience. They’re only different if you think they are. It has to be a psychological thing.”

And for the first two Tests, Waugh will have the chance to impart his wisdom first hand, as he joins Langer’s team in a mentoring role for the start of the series. Waugh is a big believer in nurturing the psychological rather than the technical side, which perhaps explains why formal coaching has never really appealed to him. “The best coaches I had were the ones who gave me confidence,” he says. “Who told me I was going OK without getting too technical. People think I analysed my game a lot. Actually, I was pretty relaxed.”

Which is not to say Waugh doesn’t have strong thoughts on how young cricketers should be handled. Above all, what concerns him about the modern game is how it nourishes talented young cricketers without necessarily growing the person within. “Mental health is a real issue for young cricketers,” he says. “I’ve seen it a lot: they get built up, and all of a sudden it doesn’t work out for them, and there’s no real safety net.”

Waugh has never been one of those ex-cricketers who winds up endlessly fetishising the past. That’s why he’s here, after all: looking after the next generation, giving something back. But as he makes his excuses and returns to his cricket-mad refugees, he makes a telling comparison between his own era and the current one. “These days, you live your whole life preparing for cricket,” he says. “It’s a bit cut-throat. In our day it wasn’t so much that way. You didn’t make the same money, of course. But we probably had more fun.”

Laureus Sport for Good is a global charity that uses the power of sport to end violence, discrimination and disadvantage. In 2018, Laureus supported more than 300,000 children and young people in over 40 countries