A generation of brilliant England cricketers has been sacrificed at the altar of banter. Talk about English cricket in the 1990s and many will snigger about how relentlessly crap it was. The reality, as presented so brilliantly in Emma John’s book Following On and Mark Butcher’s documentary England in the 90s, was a bit more nuanced. England contributed significantly to the second golden age of Test cricket.
There was, however, one winter where gallows humour or outright derision was the only reasonable option. On their tour of India in 1992-93, England cocked so many things up that it was hard to know whether or not they were engaged in an elaborate satire. They were thrashed in all three Tests, becoming the first touring side – in the parlance of 1993 – to be “brownwashed” in India. Then, on the way home, they lost a Test to Sri Lanka for the first time.
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