“In 2010-11, the entries start quite basic, because I’m excited. I’m 21 years old. I’m in Australia for the first time. I’m talking about going out for dinner with people,” Steven Finn is running through the diary he kept during his first Ashes series, the last English victory Down Under 15 years ago.
“And then as the series goes on, I started having those feelings of inadequacy and failure when I was left out of the team. It was a way for me to try and disperse those feelings and I felt it was relatively effective.
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“But then, when we flip forward to my 2013-14 entries, when I got sent home [and labelled “not selectable” by coach Ashley Giles], I was really unkind to myself. I’m always punishing myself and telling myself that I’m not good enough and I’m useless and I’m hopeless. But when I was on that tour, I didn’t have the perspective I do now. Cricket was my obsession, my life.”
Finn is one of only 17 Englishmen to win a Test series in Australia since 1986-87, and few are better equipped to understand how to cope with an away Ashes series given the extremes of his Antipodean experience. The Ashes made him, broke him and then allowed him to put himself back together again, as detailed in The Ashes Files: My Pride and Pain in Cricket’s Most Intense Series, his autobiography released on Thursday. Now 36, he retired in 2023 as the 25th-highest Test wicket-taker among English fast or fast-medium bowlers, playing 36 Tests and 126 senior internationals among all three formats.
Perspective is perhaps the overarching theme of the autobiography, the repeated regrets of his blinkered youth, which contributed to pushing his body and mind so hard he played his final Test in 2016, aged 27. He has gradually begun to make peace with what he long considered a wasted talent. He bowled to Andrew Strauss in the nets the day his grandfather died, and played against Northamptonshire instead of attending the funeral. When his mum visited Australia for Christmas 2013, she suffered a serious allergic reaction while alone in her room and “she didn’t feel like she could disturb me”. “What sort of person had I become?” he writes.
“Becoming obsessed by something is counterproductive,” he says. “Because you feel like you’re giving your all to everything, but actually, in order to learn and to get better at things, you need to be able to take a step back and see things through a wider lens.
“The bad feelings I was having around cricket extended into my everyday life, my relationships with people. My advice would be to have interests outside of cricket and be able to immerse yourself in something else that occupies your mind, rather than being sat at the dinner table and thinking about your bowling action. That’s why I get frustrated when people have a go at these guys for playing golf when they’re on tour.”
Finn unsurprisingly recommends keeping a diary as “you get loads of time to sit with your thoughts”, and also believes all players should be working with a therapist, something he has done since the later years of his career. He tells a story of crying the first time he met the England Lions psychologist Mike Rotheram, in Brisbane during the 2013-14 series, but it was only when he found the right, independent counsellor that he really felt the benefits.
“It’s not as though you just immediately get on with people,” he says. “You have to find someone that you personally can communicate with, that is on a similar wavelength. Three players might enjoy working with that person and 12 might not. I certainly think that encouraging people to find independent help that really works for them is a good place to start.”
Bazball is in its pace-fetishism era, and Finn is honest that he would love to play under this management. He accepts that the control and repression of the Andy Flower years were necessary to harness the talent and egos of the time, but they clearly did not suit him, and watching the media reaction to Jonathan Trott leaving the tour in the 2013-14 Ashes impacted him for years. “It made me bottle things up and not want to show that vulnerability.
“The difference is that this set-up encourages people to really, truly, be themselves as opposed to having to fit within really stringent guidelines about what you’re required to do for the team. I would say it’s much more positive.”
Mark Wood is the only bowler in the current squad who has previously played a Test in Australia, and Finn’s advice is simple: “Over the last couple of years, the pitches have been far more supportive to skilful seam bowlers than they have been to out-and-out quicks. Don’t have any preconceived ideas of what the conditions are going to be like, and try and play the situation that’s directly in front of you, rather than looking too far ahead.”
Of the current bowling corps, there is a fair argument that Josh Tongue is the Steven Finn of his generation, a comparison Finn understands. “I certainly see the similarities,” he says. “He’s got this amazing ability to take wickets, and that’s an asset to this team. I don’t think we’ve seen an environment in English cricket that would support a bowler like that as much as this one is, and I think that that’s a really good thing.”
His final advice? “The only thing that you can affect is the moment that’s directly in front of you. Embrace the country and embrace the people. Don’t shy away and hide in your hotel, as we did in 2013-14. Because if you do manage to stand up, puff your chest out and push back against Australia – they really respect that.”
Photograph by Antonio Olmos/The Observer