England captain who dragged the Test side out of the wilderness
CricketWhen Nasser Hussain took the England captaincy in 1999, the team had just been booed off at The Oval and ranked bottom of the Test world. Four years later he handed over a side that beat Pakistan in Pakistan, Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka, and the West Indies in the Caribbean. The turnaround did not happen by accident.
Born in Madras in 1968 and raised in Ilford, Hussain came through the Essex academy as a sharp, chippy middle order batsman with an obvious cricket brain. He made his Test debut in 1990, went through the classic English wilderness years of being dropped and recalled, and came of age with a double hundred against Australia at Edgbaston in 1997.
As captain from 1999 to 2003 he was the spiky, demanding foil to coach Duncan Fletcher. He cajoled a generation of players into believing they could win away from home, insisted on central contracts, and turned England from a soft touch into a genuinely competitive side. The image of him pointing at the number three on his shirt after a hundred at Lord's is the one the fans remember.
He stood down in 2003, scored a fairy tale century in his final Test innings against New Zealand at Lord's, and walked straight into the Sky Sports commentary box. More than two decades on, he is the most watched cricket pundit in the country, and the trusted voice at the centre of every big England moment.
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