I was knackered. I’d sleep for two hours in mid-afternoon, have an early dinner and then go back to bed. With hindsight, I was adjusting to the demands of professional sport. The transition from emerging player, scorer of seventeen centuries, two double-hundreds and 4,396 runs at an average of 87.90, to first team wannabe was stark.
A county second team is a team in name only, a melting pot of players with different career trajectories and variable levels of motivation. It can be a shared adventure – there was an obvious affinity with Will Jefferson, James Foster and Ravi Bopara, because we were on similar pathways – but it is essentially a selfish experience. Everything is seen through the prism of your own progression.
I was fortunate in sharing a dressing room with Barry Hyam, a senior pro with a rare generosity of spirit. A second-team stalwart, who played sixty-one first-class games in nine years from 1993, he was a huge source of encouragement and advice. It is no surprise he has developed into a thoughtful and innovative coach, who now runs the Essex second team and Academy.
He was released as a player at the end of the 2003 season, by which time I’d been given three first-team games on relatively flat pitches. I made 84 in a win over Surrey, contributed two more half-centuries to average 47.80, but learned most from the example of two players from diverse backgrounds and abilities.
I watched Waqar Younis become a different player when he sensed victory, shifting up several gears to bowl fast reverse swing, take five wickets and mop up the win. I studied Andy Flower from the other end at the Oval, when he made 201, and listened to him distil common sense and experience. He was thirty-five, in the final game of a relegation season, and his application was absolute.
I was growing up, on and off the pitch. I moved away from home and learned on the job. During one defeat by Hampshire, I’d got out to a massive hack against James Bruce, the right-arm fast-medium bowler who would retire prematurely in 2007 to take up a job in the City of London.
My error was compounded by the fact that it was the final ball of Bruce’s spell. I should have stayed around to see him off. I was headstrong, an aspiring, adolescent pro, who thought he knew best. I was right in the first-team mix, desperate to make my way. This was my living, and I was beginning to realize that avoidable mistakes had consequences.
The boy had become a man, with rough edges and many more miles to travel.
3. The Survival Gene
Rats scurried along bare concrete walls. Cockroaches congregated in corridors, where we did press-ups and sit-ups to compensate for the lack of a gym. They told us the hotel in Dhaka was structurally sound, though it was half-built and anything above the fifth floor was open to the elements. The beds were damp, and the electrical system made playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour on the Xbox a lottery.
Welcome to international cricket, and my first experience of captaining an England team, in the Under-19 World Cup in Bangladesh in 2004. Despite the privations, it was an invaluable four-week crash course in team building and personal resilience. Those sessions, working down from twenty press-ups to two, and back up again, did no one any harm.
When we moved to Chittagong, our hotel was the one in which the senior side refused to stay later that year. We thought it was a palace. We should have done better than lose to the West Indies in the semi-final but cracked under the pressure and were bowled out for 155. It demonstrated how much I had to learn, about both group dynamics and individual obligations. We were so far from being the finished product.
Though I had captained Bedford School, there seemed more chance of making a day trip to Narnia than captaining my country. Samit Patel was our original skipper, but he failed a fitness test and Andy Pick, who coached the squad in conjunction with John Abrahams after taking over from Paul Farbrace, made a brave call in asking me to take over. He wanted to deliver a life lesson to Samit, that talent is only part of the equation.
Samit has huge natural ability, and I had enough faith in him as a spinner to bowl him at the death in our five-run group win over Pakistan, the eventual winners of the tournament. He came through, taking the final wicket of Zulqarnain Haider when the game was on the line. He had to deal with similar doubts about his work ethic throughout his senior international career and insists he has never missed a game for county or country through injury, but that’s not actually the argument, is it?
Being in peak physical condition might have been negotiable in a previous era, but in the modern game it is a fundamental symbol of commitment. No one likes fitness sessions. There’s nothing exciting about going to the gym, doing the horrible, unglorified bits. There’s nothing nice about hurting yourself during those long-distance runs that never seem to end.
The Aussies call it ‘ticker’. Have you got the heart to withstand tough periods, when your character is under scrutiny? Can you get through by sheer force of will? You can’t replicate a critical game situation in practice, but that old cliché about the tough getting going when the going gets tough has more than a hint of truth. Guys who are genuinely successful tend to be the ones who put themselves through the sessions no one sees.
I prefer to train early in the morning. My routine at home is to get up at half past five, do some gym work and then run around the lanes between six and seven. It’s a quiet time of the day, an absorbing and strangely intimate process. I am proving myself to myself, if you like. I could so easily lie in, do the work mid-morning, but there is something about being out there on my own, not really wanting to be there. Knowing you are ready to do the hard stuff adds to your self-confidence.
I’m not comparing myself to a Martin Johnson, who led England’s World Cup-winning rugby team by the power of his example, but I suppose they picked me as an inexperienced captain of the Under-19s for the same reasons they asked me to lead the full team. People probably respected the way I went about things. There were no great secrets to my approach.
I worked hard, put myself on the line by opening the batting. I topped the fitness tests. I wanted others to have the same drive, and people seemed to listen to what I said. Tactically, I was too conservative in Bangladesh. I probably wasn’t sufficiently assertive with the team, but that is not altogether surprising, given my youth.
I was integrated into senior dressing rooms from the age of fifteen, when I was taken under the wing of Ian Elliot and Robbie Barber, who opened the batting for Maldon. The average age of the team was late twenties; I sat there, listening almost in awe to their piss-taking and their unlikely shagging stories. The cricket was extremely competitive and they were brilliant, sharp-witted sledgers.
I’d barely gone through puberty and was small, so I was an obvious target, especially for the overseas pros we would come up against in the East Anglian Premier League. They were generally good cricketers, mostly South African or Australian, but their insults weren’t terribly inventive. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ they’d ask. ‘I’m going to kill you.’
I wasn’t intimidated by the verbals and could handle the short stuff when it inevitably arrived. By the time I was eighteen I was able to dominate the opposition at club level. Typically, I wanted to end one game, at Mildenhall in Suffolk, early so that I could go out that evening with Alice, whom I had just met.
We were chasing 170, and I drove a South African bowler to distraction by tearing into him from the outset. Clearly peeved that a kid was showing him no respect, his default mechanism was to bowl shorter and shorter, and try to bounce me out. I scored 80-odd in no time, and the course of true love was smoothed.
It was a great learning experience. There was a brief trend for county academies to play in men’s leagues. I didn’t agree with the basic premise, that there would be continuity in the challenge. A promising player can become too insulated in youth cricket. There’s a sense of dependence when support staff provide the throwdowns, and coaches are taking notes.
By playing for your club, rather than representing your county academy, you’re dealing with the real world, playing teams of dif
ferent ages from different backgrounds. You are playing alongside a forty-year-old with three kids who has no inclination to mollycoddle you. You organize throwdowns with your mates. You embrace the mentality of a clubman, share such rituals as the Thursday-night barbeque around the pavilion.
Playing for an academy doesn’t mean you’ve made it. The county badge on your helmet gives you no privileges. It doesn’t hurt to raise your head above the parapet. In some public schoolboys there’s a distance, a slight sense of entitlement, that needs to get knocked out of them. I had the privilege of a private education because of scholarships that recognized my talent, but there was no silver spoon in our family’s cutlery drawer.
Some of the lads in the Essex Colts teams were more worldly, and maybe spent a little more time in front of the mirror than I was used to. I was fortunate to grow up in a first-team dressing room in which the standards were set by the likes of Ronnie Irani and Darren Gough. They were hard, but fair, in setting definable limits.
You knew what you could, and could not, get away with. Anyone who took a liberty quickly regretted it. Ronnie was a nuts-and-bolts captain, a cricketer who made the most of himself, as an England all-rounder before chronic knee problems forced him to filter his determination through a revised role as a specialist batsman.
He would look out for younger players, like Ravi Bopara and me, if the opposition tried to bully us, and was at ease with strong characters, though he didn’t exactly see eye to eye with Nasser Hussain, who gave me a three-week masterclass at the end of his career. I opened with him in his final match for Essex, scoring 51 as he marked his farewell with a trademark second-innings century.
‘You’re going to take my job,’ he told me. Kind, slightly startling words, but his example had as great an impact. Here was a former England captain who had played in ninety-six Tests, giving his all when others would have coasted into retirement. I watched, entranced, as he worried away at his batting grip and twiddled nervously. He was seeking answers, searching for secrets until the end. It was the first manifestation of the survival gene that characterizes successful sportsmen. He cared all right.
The sense of wonder, when I first stepped into that Essex dressing room with Ravi, at the age of fifteen during the school holidays, has never really left me. I’d be given a few token throwdowns at the end of nets, go through the fielding drills with the seniors, and then be allowed to sit in on the team meeting. I was being introduced gently to the trade.
Any airs or graces were fair game. I slaughtered James Foster for walking past me without a word when I went to see him play for the first team at Colchester, but knew he was in his own little world, and we were forming lifelong bonds. The democracy of cricket unites people who, outside the game, might have little in common.
I consider Ben Stokes one of my better mates. He’s from a completely different background to me, and from the other end of the country, but we text and speak often. He’s a great guy, despite the well-documented controversies, and will, I’m sure, respond positively to the fame generated by his contribution to the World Cup win. Conversations about cricket are the glue in our relationship; his commitment to the England team is total.
Friends outside the game who have gone the traditional route, through public school, university and the City, have probably missed out on that type of connection. I see them as much as I can, but it is inevitable that contrasting lifestyles make that difficult. As I began to make my way in the game my horizons were narrower, because I was concentrating on the stepping stones of professional sport.
As an emerging pro I wanted the perks of the trade, the personalized car-parking space and the sponsored car with my name signwritten on the driver’s door. Needless to say, I got neither. They took parking privileges away as a result of one of those fathomless health-and-safety orders. The personalized sponsored car, which first seized my imagination when I saw Peter Such drive past me, went out of fashion.
Not a bad thing, all told, because, in hindsight, they looked ridiculous. I settled for a locker, given to county players, but it took time to wean myself off my dodgy car habit. The stick I received for one aberration of taste and decency, a bright orange Ford Focus, was unrelenting and entirely deserved.
The dressing room began to school me with its brutal humour. Even to this day I’m known as Woggle, because of my slightly wonky left eye. It can lead to some horrendous still photographs when I’m concentrating on my batting, since I appear cross-eyed. I get hammered left, right and centre, from senior players and kids alike. You must be big enough to take it, if you want to give it out.
Cricket tends to attract a broader base of personalities than, say, rowing, where a successful eight tends to come from a similar demographic and is more interconnected. A cricket team can overcome individual errors but if one oarsman catches a crab during a race it’s all over. As an established Test batsman, I could survive a short run of very low scores and still win a series through the efforts of others.
That helps to create a distinctive tolerance within the dressing room. It is an enlightening environment, because you unconsciously, or even consciously, reveal aspects of your character within it. What makes it so special is that teammates see everything of you, and share your struggle, without the outside world knowing anything of it.
England teammates had a 360-degree view of my career. They saw me as a bloke at rock bottom and fearing for his future in 2010, as a fighter scoring 766 in an Ashes series in Australia the following winter, and as the authority figure going through the fires of captaincy and controversy in 2014. It is an individual trial, but a collective experience.
Together, you experience the highs of winning and the dreadful lows of losing a tight game. You are strapped into the same emotional roller coaster and can relate to one another. I’m drawn to the exclusivity of the process. No one else is allowed into the inner sanctum, where you must be true to yourself and those around you.
With trust comes understanding. Steven Davies and I go back to that Under-19 World Cup, yet I was unaware of his deepest secret until a telephone call from Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower before the 2010–11 Ashes tour. Steve, selected as understudy to Matt Prior, wanted us to know of his homosexuality and, as a group, we pledged to keep it in-house until he wished to make an announcement.
I found his air of liberation, when he came out in February 2011, deeply affecting. The barriers were down on that tour, when he felt free to share the isolation he had felt previously. He had been in the T20 group for two years and would retreat to his hotel room rather than go out with the lads. The frustration of being too inhibited to be himself was profound.
He spoke of being sick with nerves in our pre-tour get-together at Lord’s, where, like the rest of the group, I made a point of offering my support. He was Steve, the cricketer. Nothing more, nothing less. Professional sport is a pressure chamber at the best of times and for him to carve an international career when enduring such internal turmoil is a convincing summary of character.
Acceptance was instant, universal and enduring, once he made his announcement. That’s as it should be. Straussy and Andy deserved a great deal of credit for their approach, which combined empathy with practicality. On a professional level, they saw it as an issue to be dealt with and filed away for future reference, when required. On a personal level, they related to the humanity of Steve’s dilemma.
We all need a helping hand, in various ways. Mine, in a cricketing sense, came consistently from Graham Gooch. His 333 against India in July 1990, a ten-and-a-half-hour marathon that would be voted as the greatest innings seen at Lord’s, was my first conscious sporting memory. I was five at the time, bewildered when TV coverage of the Test was interrupted by horseracing.
I queued for his autograph as a child and grew up quickly because of his patronage. He was hugely influential, supporting me financially in grade cricket in Perth during a gap year, where the wickets were slow and low, and I didn’t even appear to merit the traditional
verbal abuse from Aussie bowlers.
Sometimes, in sport, the circle of life accelerates. Goochy saw something in me, drove me hard, but looked after my wider welfare. Like my mum, he urged me to go to university instead of prematurely committing myself to full-time cricket. His rationale was based on bitter knowledge; he had seen too many young players released in their early twenties with nothing to fall back upon.
He didn’t want me to make a common mistake. I resisted, in part due to the beliefs and disciplines he had instilled in me from the outset. I worked hard with him, ritually and regularly. I would chop wood at his house with Swampy, my housemate and fellow hopeful Mark Pettini, before training sessions designed to test us physically and mentally.
He would send us on long early morning runs and pedal beside us, offering admonishment and encouragement. He would bombard us with bouncers for half an hour in the nets before tiredness thankfully took a toll. Sessions on the outfield at Essex were demanding: ten shuttle runs, face four balls, and then do another six shuttles. He would make us run backwards at speed and stand over us as we sweated through a series of burpees and press-ups.
He was a distinctive cross between an army PTI and a solicitous housemaster. Once the work was complete, he wanted us to clear our minds, relax and release. I was eager for knowledge, and he warned against self-reproach when I disappointed myself. It was a significant message, delivered simply and illustrated by personal experience.
He confided that his method of finding mental equilibrium on losing his wicket was to sit with his pads still on. He would have a cup of tea and answer his mail. This was before the internet and smart phones, the days when pen and paper weren’t museum pieces. That triggered my imagination; how could he be so phlegmatic? What was behind his acceptance of fate?
Yet it carried over into his tutelage. He wouldn’t scream at me if I got out to a poor shot; a look of piercing sadness was usually enough. He knew I knew what I’d done: why raise the temperature if you, as a coach, have faith that your pupil will respond? His most persuasive method of motivation was the quiet but telling one-liner.
The Autobiography Page 4
