A CLEAR mind in a cluttered room. Amid the pads and sweaters and baggage-handlers'-strike chaos of the visitors dressing-room at Hove last Thursday, Nasser Hussain sat trying to put the past behind him. ``All I have done,'' he said, ``is to score a double century. Next week is the real test to see if we can carry it on.''
He did not mean any irony, just as he does not actually intend the arrogance of that heavy-lidded, long-nosed look at the outsider. No worries, English fans will hope it annoys the hell out of the Australians as it occasionally used to with team-mates in younger, fierier days. At 29, Hussain is this morning the man his country most expects to twist the Kangaroo's tail. It is a daunting honour, but one for which the years have readied him.
Among his earliest memories are the buzz of watching his father ``Joe'' bat for Madras in the huge, fevered atmosphere of Chepauk Stadium. Once the family had moved to east London, Nasser soon became a tiny, curly-haired prodigy flighting looping leg-breaks at the likes of Graham Gooch at the converted factory hall over which Bill Morris' deep Scottish tones ruled at the Ilford Cricket School.
At 14, Hussain was captain of England Under 15s with one Michael Atherton as his leg-break-bowling vice-captain. At 21, he was a bright student at Durham, graduating with a 2:1 and a place in the England Test side in the Caribbean. By any standards, it was a glittering start. It is now history how a broken wrist on that tour put him back down the batting queue. How having eventually got recalled against the Australians in 1993 he went on the West Indies tour, failed to get picked for a Test, had an indifferent '94 and was only saved that winter by long hours with the video camera and Keith Fletcher at Chelmsford, followed by club cricket in Cape Town with the additional help of a left-eye contact lens devised by American optometrist Kent West at Stellenbosch University.
Almost nineteen hundred runs in 1995 and then the captaincy of England A on the Pakistan tour was the pay-off; 128 against India on his next Test recall last summer was fulfilment, and last week's double century took things to another plane. Since then, the pundits have acclaimed his improved wider-bat defence, the tabloids have illuminated us with Ten Things You Never Knew About Nasser, and the man himself has had time to reflect on how easily it could have all gone wrong.
In a minute, he will pay fulsome and expected tribute to Gooch after Essex's greatest soldier has clumped, mobile phone in hand, through the dressing-room debris in search of an address book. But first, his mind goes back not three years but 14. To the summer when it was almost over before it had even publicly begun. Hussain was a maths scholar at Forest School near Snaresbrook and doing O-Levels a year early. But it was not sitting exams which was destroying him. It was the other kids in the old cricket-school nets in Beehive Lane. Hussain had grown nearly a foot during the winter and his leg-breaks had lost their trajectory.
``Sunday mornings had always been a ritual,'' he remembers. ``I was the golden boy who used to run in and bowl everyone out. Now they were smacking me all over and the parents were saying how I had lost it. You sit at home and don't fancy it when dad says 'Come to the cricket school'. That's when you need pushing. That's what I got.''
That is also when any examination of Hussain's success has to take in the phenomenom of the Hussain family as a whole. Joe had married teacher Shireen when his electronics firm seconded him to England in 1963. It has been a mixed marriage and a good one. Four children, never any great funding since the Hussains moved from Madras to Ilford in 1973, and yet now two of the boys are well on the way to business success, Mel in Credit Suisse, Abbas in pharmaceuticals, Nasser is our current hero and Benazir is a top ballerina.
We have all met parents who put their little ones through it. Joe and Shireen have got them out the other side. Up at the Ilford Cricket School which he now runs, Joe is putting a 17-year-old local leaguer through it. These days the old place has had a whitewash and boasts a spooky new bowling machine up the back of which Joe clambers like a photographer on a ladder. Like the best of teachers he is hard and warm at the same time. The balls rocket at you in quick succession. ``Good shot'' echoes round the hall in best Kipling English when firm contact is finally made.
The first of many young, white-flannelled Asian boys is being dropped off by his mother. On the walls are pictures of Test teams and Under-12s. A glass case houses some faded medallions and a photograph of Gooch introducing N Hussain to the Queen. ``Cricket,'' opines Joe grandly through a haze of tobacco smoke, ``is great fun if you play it just for pleasure.'' The thrill for these would-be-Hussains is the challenge of playing for something bigger, too.
Back at Hove, Hussain is not yet ready to contemplate immortality beyond inferring that he and wife Karen might be thinking of a family in a couple of years time. ``If it hadn't been for my old man, I would not have had the chance of Test cricket,'' he says. ``But it was hard. That's why I am so close to 'Benu'. She's down in Perth now but we speak on the 'phone. They even interrupted a classical music programme to say Shane Warne had finally got me out. Being a ballerina is four times as hard as being a Test cricketer. But we have our moments.''
On Thursday, these had begun early enough. Long gone are the ``off with the dinner jacket, on with the pads'' times of yesteryear. This is 1997. This is Essex. That already sweat-soaked Kitchener moustache alongside Hussain in the catching session belongs to Gooch. When the game begins they again stand shoulder to shoulder, matching each other in their men-in-boys'-caps intensity in the slips. Soon though, Gooch is sitting beside us, an ice pack pressed against a boxer's bruised cheekbone, smacked when a ball crashed through his normally hungry hands.
``The thing I like about Nass is how much he has worked at his cricket,'' says Gooch. ``He has fire in his belly. Okay, he used to sometimes get into scrapes early on [once famously with Gooch making the errant Hussain apologise to an umpire in St Kitts] but now he harnesses it to keep trying to improve. To make every game matter.''
Despite a noon start, Sussex hardly last till lunchtime as the ball swings under an overcast sky. And it is not long into the Essex innings before Paul Prichard has played on and Hussain is coming wordlessly down the steps saying to himself: ``Come on. This is important.''
For more than half an hour he is a study in long-sleeved intensity, only cutting loose a couple of times immediately after the patched-up Gooch has lost his wicket. Then a good ball from Vasbert Drakes has Dickie Bird's finger signalling lbw and it is the trudge back for the tension-release tantrum in the privacy of the dressing-room. That done, he focuses on the rest of the game and on the little diversion of the Lord's Test on Thursday.
``It is important that this should matter,'' he says glancing out to where Australian Stuart Law is now doing things to the local attack which look likely to imperil the safety of the pension-age clientele who make up the Sussex faithful. ``I remember the nine or 10 'phone calls I got from these guys after my 200. I don't deserve their support unless I come down here and do my best for them. It has been a bit hard to focus this time but he [looking across to where Gooch has once more got an ice pack on his cheek bone] has been a great example. I have seen him do it time after time.''
Gooch and Fletcher have been the best of mentors. They have encouraged Hussain to play his own wristy inside-out method but to padlock that with a more face-of-the-bat defence. They are thrilled to see the torch being carried on and their prodigy is under no illusions.
``What is daunting as a batsman,'' Hussain says, ``is that you have just one chance. You wake up in the morning with a knot in your stomach. It is a batting day and you are going to walk out there and however much visualisation you have done, if Shane Warne or Glenn McGrath run up and bowl you an absolute pearler you are out, you are being slagged off on the replays and three days of your Test is over. I tell you, bowling is hard on the body. But batting is bloody hard on the mind.''
The blue eyes are now wide open beneath those heavy lids. ``I know I am a long way from the finished article.'' He pauses with what one hopes just might be Australian-upsetting relish, and adds: ``But I am going to try.''