England captain, Ashes winner, and a quiet architect of a cricketing revival
CricketFew England captains have led from quite as deep a place as Andrew Strauss.
He made his Test debut against New Zealand in 2004 and scored 112 in his first innings at Lord's. Only the fourth batsman to make a century there on debut, he came close to becoming the first Englishman to score hundreds in both innings of a debut match, adding 83 in the second. By the time he retired eight years later he had played a hundred Tests for England, fifty of them as captain, and had done something no England captain had managed since 1987: won an Ashes series in Australia. The 2010/11 tour remains one of the cleanest pieces of away cricket England have produced in the modern era, and Strauss led the batting chart across the whole series with 474 runs.
As a batsman he was compact, unflashy, and brutally reliable at the top of the order. Twenty-one Test hundreds, more than seven thousand Test runs, and a habit of scoring them when the pressure was heaviest. Teammates talk about his calm in the dressing room more than they talk about any single innings. The captaincy came to him later than it might have, and he seemed to grow into it.
Since retiring in 2012 he served as the ECB's Director of Cricket from 2015 to 2018, chaired the high performance review, and took on the kind of institutional roles that usually go to people less interesting. Knighted in September 2019. Lost his wife Ruth to a rare form of lung cancer in December 2018 and has been a vocal supporter of the Ruth Strauss Foundation since.
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