Duncan Fletcher would make a great poker player. As England coach he personified inscrutability and had the rare ability to treat Kipling's impostors the same. His autobiography was called Behind The Shades; those familiar sunglasses slammed shut any potential window into his soul. On the morning of his first Test as England coach, against South Africa at Johannesburg on 25 November 1999, a big interview with Fletcher appeared in the Express. Tucked away in the fourth last paragraph was an ostensibly insignificant quote. "In the dressing room I won't get too excited if we do well, I won't be cross if things don't go well," he said. "I believe it is important to keep an even keel to get the best out of players."

By the time people in England were reading that interview over their muesli and not-from-concentrate orange juice, Fletcher's philosophy had been given the most exacting test. On the first morning of the Test, the first morning of England's bright new era, they were reduced to two for four, the second worst start to an innings in Test history and the worst ever start to a series. Fletcher, as promised, was impassive, a monument of inexplicable calm and equilibrium.

England had started the tour as the worst side in the world, according to the Wisden World Championship (there was no ICC Test Championship in those days, although the retrospective rankings have them eighth, still above Zimbabwe). Their build-up was encouraging, however, with back-to-back first-class wins for the first time in years. Nobody expected them to beat a strong South African side who had won 10 Tests in a row at home, but there was cautious optimism that England would at least compete.

A level playing field might have made competing easier. On the morning of the match, conditions were barely fit for club cricket: terrible light and a pitch that Mike Selvey described as "disgracefully damp for the start of the Test". Nobody expected play to start on time, but it did. "The pitch was so wet and the light so bad that it was embarrassing," said Fletcher in his autobiography. "There is no way we should have started." Gary Kirsten and Allan Donald were among the South Africans who agreed the start should have been delayed. Fletcher said that winning the toss was "tantamount to winning the match".

With weary inevitability, England lost the toss. Rumour has it that Hansie Cronje even showed his teeth as he invited England to bat. Then Donald and Shaun Pollock went to work. Within 15 minutes England were two for four; one of those was a leg-bye. As if the scoreline wasn't bad enough, the four players to be dismissed were their only experienced batsmen, all England captains past or present: Mike Atherton. Nasser Hussain, Mark Butcher and Alec Stewart. They had 244 Test caps and 16,052 runs between them. between them. The next four batsmen shared two caps and 17 runs. Michael Vaughan, Chris Adams and Gavin Hamilton were all making their debuts, while Andrew Flintoff was back in the side after a 15-month absence. The whole thing felt like a perverse take on the defeatism that accompanied English cricket in the 1990s. You think being the worst team in the world is bad? Well cop a load of this.

The Spin was at university when it happened, and stirred reluctantly at the ungodly hour of 9am to check how the cricket was going. When we turned on Talk Radio (they had outbid the BBC for the rights) and heard the name 'Adams' – who had been earmarked to bat No6 – we assumed we must have got our timings wrong, and that the game had started a few hours earlier. Over the next five minutes, this bed-bound detective pieced together the details of the crime. Two for four?! England had been two for four in a Test the previous winter as well, but at least then they were in Australia. This time they were two runs for four wickets.

"The dressing room was completely silent and in a state of intense shock," wrote Atherton in his autobiography. "Even those of us experienced in England's calamities had never seen anything quite like this." Fletcher had infamously inherited a side with a lower order ("Never call them the tail," says Fletcher, though he'd surely have made an exception for this lot) of Andy Caddick, Alan Mullally, Phil Tufnell and Ed Giddins. Now he had a top order who were dealing in binary. In the Times, Christopher Martin-Jenkins said the start was "like arriving at the party to which you have been looking forward for months, only to be seized, bound, gagged and robbed".

The build-up to the series had been dominated by talk of Donald v Atherton. In England's previous Test at Johannesburg, four years earlier, Atherton had played the innings of his life, saving the match with one of the all-time great captain's knocks, 185 not out in 643 minutes. He was in splendid form, too. In the tour games he played with serene certainty, even hitting a few sixes. Selvey said he was "playing as well as he has ever done". Donald, by contrast, had endured a long, dark month of the soul. He had bowled poorly in the Test series against Zimbabwe a few weeks earlier and was all over the place in the nets. Plenty thought that, at 33, he was finished. "Judging by my preparation," he wrote in his autobiography, "I'd have been happy with Alan Mullally's wicket, never mind Athers'!"

Cricket's capacity for the perverse never ceases to amaze. Atherton would last three balls in the match and get a pair. Donald would take six for 53 in the first innings and 11 for 127 in the match. He had almost willed himself back into form. "That game taught me a hell of a lesson: when it is not going well you have to find something that works," said Donald in this excellent interview. "There is no turning back, there is no hiding. You must find something that contributes to the team even if you take one wicket."

In the dressing room on that first morning, Cronje told everyone that Donald would bowl Atherton in the first over the day. When Donald obliged with the last ball of that first over, he pointed straight at his captain. Donald had been bowling inswingers because his wrist action was all over the place, and he produced a monster that came back a mile to take Atherton's off stump for a walk. "It is hard to believe," wrote Chris Lander in the Mirror, "that Atherton has been on the end of a more venomous wicket-taking delivery." (Courtney Walsh might have something to say about that, but anyway.) Donald said it was the second greatest delivery he had ever bowled, just behind a jaffa to dismiss Sachin Tendulkar three years earlier.

"Every time I see that picture of me bowling Atherton in the first innings it signifies the amount of effort I had put in mentally," said Donald. "It just shows this thing between your ears is so strong. If you believe in it and you trust what you have, you can do wonders."

Hussain fell for a duck to a vile lifter from Pollock. Then, in Donald's second over, Butcher feathered a good delivery to his near namesake Mark Boucher and Stewart was given out lbw to another huge inswinger. "It might provide for exciting cricket," said Kirsten at the end of the day's play, "but it is not the way the game should be played. It does not provide for a fair contest between bat and ball." Batting, said Wisden, was "a lottery." England were – it's worth repeating – two for four after 17 balls, with two debutants at the crease who had not faced a ball. At the time it seemed like they'd would do well to reach 50. But among the debris, England found a piece of gold.

Vaughan was not supposed to be in the squad. He was the only demand Fletcher made, and the tour party was extended to 17 to accommodate him. He had only averaged 27.12 in first-class cricket that summer, but Fletcher was not interested in statistics. Few, if any, have had such an eye for raw talent. After the first net session in South Africa, Fletcher told Hussain that Vaughan had to play in the first Test. "Hussain gave me a perplexed look. 'Are you sure?' he said," remembered Fletcher in his autobiography. "I most certainly was."

The calm, classy manner in which Vaughan made a two-hour 33 suggested England had found someone who had the temperament and talent for Test cricket. He would become one of England's best attacking batsmen of the modern era, but at that stage he was a different player entirely, widely compared to Atherton for his sang froid and defensive excellence. CMJ went further after that debut innings, comparing him to Chris Tavare. "He has the same angular frame, the same walk to short square leg between balls, the same ability never to seem hurried and, mercifully, a greater willingness to recognise a scoring opportunity."

Vaughan added 32 for the fifth wicket with Chris Adams (16) to take England to the, ahem, respectability of 34 for five. Perversely, the predicament helped Vaughan to relax. "If I am honest, [the scoreline] relieved some of the pressure on me," he said in his autobiography. "With our four big guns gone, I knew that I could not do any worse. Much as I would like to portray my debut as having been heroic under fire, the truth is that it is easier to come in at two for two on your debut than at 200 for two on a flat wicket full of runs. Chris Adams came out at two for four and asked, 'What's it doing?'' to which I replied, 'Don't ask me I haven't faced an effing ball yet.'"

Vaughan said he felt "remarkably calm" as he went about his work. He then added 56 in an hour with Flintoff, who punched 38; their partnership was the first sign of the fearless, almost carefree approach that would win the 2005 Ashes. England limped to 122, almost a triumph in the circumstances, with Donald and Pollock sharing all 10 wickets and 19 in the match. That first-innings score was in part thanks to an absurd cameo from Mullally, who top edged Donald for six during a rare foray into double figures. When he did so, the England balcony naturally burst into laughter – "black humour which released the tension of a morbid day," said Fletcher. The Mirror's back page the next day had a picture of the balcony smiling, with the headline: "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU LOT LAUGHING AT?"

For the most part the press reaction was reasonable. "England have put in some dreadful performances in recent years but this, despite all the evidence on the scoreboard, is not one of them," wrote Tim de Lisle, the editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly. "They have had a raw deal in Johannesburg from the toss, the pitch, the weather and the umpires."

Fletcher made that first day in Johannesburg a Duncan Day – the name given to those when England were outplayed to such an extent that Fletcher would face the press himself rather than send one of the players. "It would have been difficult for any batting side out there this morning," he said. "I will tell the guys to look forward, not back, and try to forget the situation. I wouldn't say I was too excited by the start. It's not a good score but it could be worse."

He stuck to his guns after the match too, going ahead with a planned break to Sun City despite some criticism. Atherton said "there was not a hint of panic" in the way Fletcher reacted to the defeat. England went on to lose by an innings and 21 runs, an inevitable result after that traumatic start, but in the performances of Fletcher, Vaughan and Flintoff, there were significant positives. Something else happened on that first day, too. Back in England, the counties agreed that the ECB could give up to 16 central contracts the following year. You'd have been a brave man to say as much when England were two for four, but maybe 25 November 1999 was a good day for English cricket.

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