by David Lloyd
It was a little bit of a taboo stroke in those days anyway, and it was known for players to get left out of the next game if they played it in a competitive match. Goodness knows what they would have done to you if you had dared a reverse or a switch hit. I can only imagine that it would have involved a summons at dawn.
Similarly, if somebody swept you as a spinner in the mid-1960s and you asked the captain for a deep backward square leg, the reply more often than not would be ‘put your sweater on, lad.’ The very idea that anyone should be sweeping you was dismissed out of hand, and they certainly weren’t going to encourage it by giving you protection out in the deep.
If you were a batsman who played the sweep, you were a heathen. Heaven help you if you got hit on the pad, because it was almost certain that the umpire would give you out. It was even known for umpires to raise the finger, shake the head at the same time and mutter ‘shocking shot’. It was only a step up from shoplifting in the greater scheme of things.
There were other life lessons to be learned too. Moving into that professional era we also recruited a lad called Keith Goodwin, a hard-as-nails bloke who had served in the British Army and was never shy of letting us know in his most matter-of-fact tone: ‘I’ve killed a man.’ In the pub of an evening, with a couple of pints down him, he would start singing a dirge called ‘Fulwood Barracks’ that could go on as long as twenty minutes.
It wasn’t quite twenty minutes in length normally, it was just that if anyone stood up, or even moved from the seats where we were sat, they would be fixed with his glassy stare in rebuke and told in no uncertain terms: ‘One singer, one song.’ Then, he would begin again, from the start. If anybody spoke, it was exactly the same result. This military command resulted in a scrap on one occasion between Keith and Ken Snellgrove, a scouser who rarely took a backward step in his life. Rebelling against the usual order, Nelly got up to play the one-arm bandit and was immediately given the ‘One singer, one song’ line. The pair of them had to be separated with us young ’uns sat transfixed, almost petrified in case Keith turned his ire on us.
Life in the second XI moulded you as a cricketer. Everything about it was instrumental in your development through the ranks, and not everyone could hack it. For example, Lancashire possessed a batsman of what appeared to be immeasurable ability in the same age-group team that I featured in. Alan Thomas churned out runs like they were going out of fashion for Bolton in the Bolton League and had a reputation as the best young player in the country.
There were no debates about whether he was good enough when it came to his recruitment, it was obvious he would be signed. But he just couldn’t hack it in the dressing room and ended up leaving after a year to pursue another career. If you were deconstructing the reasons for his departure to a 2015 audience, some might even call it bullying. I would suggest that it would not be the right word, because the harsh environment he rejected was character-building from my point of view.
For some, the cajoling, the piss-taking and general japes around a dressing room are part of fashioning a team and the individual players within it. You just had to survive it, and if you weren’t able to, there was no other option but to walk. Playing the bully card, as someone famously has in England in recent years, was not an option.
This was just part of life in that Lancashire dressing room, although I do recall towards the end of my career colleagues of the same age insisting that the youngsters would not be put through the same kind of treatment that we were put through. People would tell you that Graeme Fowler and Paul Allott controlled the dressing room, but I didn’t necessarily see them as bullies at all. They were just helping the next generation of players grow up. The Lancashire way has been passed on over the decades, and it meant that if you did get a really difficult character any problems were ironed out to ensure that the team functioned as it should. Whenever we heard of awkward characters around the country, it was often said: ‘Put him in our dressing room and he’ll be a difficult character no longer.’ Step out of line at Old Trafford and you would have half a dozen other blokes telling you in a heartbeat: ‘Don’t do that.’
Later, when I became coach, someone like Neil Fairbrother would do the policing. There would be no need for me to get involved, because the senior players used to keep everybody else in check. Internationally, Mark Taylor was doing the same thing with Australia. When I was coach of England, he pulled Stuart MacGill and told him what behaviour was expected of him after he sang a derogatory song in our presence in the aftermath of Australia’s 3-1 Ashes win over my England team in 1998-99.
All it took was a succinct ‘we don’t act in this way, mate’ to MacGill, who was what you might call a character of difference. Now these characters of difference are fine within a team, and should actively be encouraged in some ways, as long as they don’t think they should be treated as characters of difference when it comes to team rules. Strong dressing rooms have strong characters reinforcing the collective ethos and not allowing individuals within to challenge that. Strong dressing rooms should always be able to handle the difficult guy without it becoming a problem that is known about outside the four walls that surround you.
Now, consider the Kevin Pietersen situation. While I have not sat in that particular England dressing room, I have been in it plenty of times, and if somebody is stepping out of line, the team is responsible for pulling him straight back in. Nobody really knows the full depth of what went on apart from those directly involved, but it all seems a little bit childish that it got to the stage it did with bogus Twitter accounts, claims that ‘it’s difficult being me in the dressing room’, ostracisation, public character assassinations, the ripping up of a central contract following a sacking, and further clarification of his position in May 2015.
I am an advocate of sorting problems out internally, and that means sometimes if people have differences of opinion they should just let it rip. Let guys go hammer and tongs at each other in private until everything is out in the open, all differences have been put across, it’s been accepted that you are never going to agree on everything and hands have been shaken in the knowledge that it’s all been done in the best interests of the team. In my experience, some guys have torn strips off each other but everyone turns up the next day happy enough and the team moves on.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened in this situation and the Pietersen saga festered for years. From the outside looking in, there have been some obvious mistakes made. I would have expected a stronger leadership from the senior players in the dressing room. And better direction from those above them.
As Stuart Broad quite rightly said, there was never a need to ban Kevin Pietersen from that England team. How can you indefinitely suspend a player on the basis that he’s a bit different? There’s never a need to sack a player at international level, because in a meritocracy if he’s not performing, not doing what you want him to do, you just don’t pick him and leave it at that. It really is that simple.
If, as a management, he’s not performing or behaving as you would expect, you just leave him out of the team for a couple of months. When quizzed by the media on why he has been excluded during the selection process, just tell the truth. It really is that straightforward; there should be no need for talk of a player being disengaged. If and when he does conform we will consider him again, is all that needs to be said. It was effectively what the new ECB chairman Colin Graves spelt out at the start of the 2015 County Championship season to encourage Pietersen to re-engage with our first-class game. Every player within that competition is trying to show their worth, and the currencies they are dealing in are runs and wickets.
If that missive had been sent out twelve months earlier, Kevin would not have had a leg to stand on. But he was clearly unbelievably hurt that the ECB should decide to sack him. Being dropped from a team should be enough for a player to re-focus the mind, and the brilliant ones like him want to be playing at the very highest level they can for as long as they can, because t
hey are driven by the challenge of being the best, so it was never going to be long before he pulled his neck in. If you have been dropped, you can bleat as much as you want but unless you can give reasons to merit your selection you just ain’t getting picked.
As I’ve already cited, Yorkshire’s dressing room contained few pals, and they won the Championship annually in my era. The whole damn lot of them were squabbling, the whole flamin’ time. But they were a fantastic team. They might not have liked the bloke that was changing next to them, or would never have thought about going out for a beer with the bloke on the other side of them; there would have been few that you would have ever considered to ask around for dinner with your missus, but in the workplace they had your total respect, and that one word respect is crucial in any team environment. You don’t have to enjoy someone’s company but in good teams you enjoy their success. If Fred Trueman got five wickets, everyone was happy. The same if Geoff Boycott got a hundred. You might have heard some of them mutter ‘absolute prick’ under their breath, but they acknowledged they were great cricketers. Once they crossed that white line everything changed.
One of the surprising aspects of the Pietersen affair was that it incorporated more than one breakdown in relations. He had already been given his warning and left out for a period of time for those alleged derogatory texts about Andrew Strauss sent to members of the South Africa team around the time of the 2012 Headingley Test, before being brought back into the bosom of the unit for the tour of India the following winter. For a while at least, it seemed like they had sorted things out, that he had learned the do’s and don’ts, but that was because they were winning and, crucially, KP was playing a key role in the winning. He was simply sensational against India, contributing to a first England Test series victory on the subcontinent since the mid-1980s.
Unfortunately, things then broke down once again during the Ashes series of 2013-14. The fact that Strauss took over the mess as England’s new cricket director and immediately stressed there were issues of trust – only hours after Pietersen had struck his career-best triple hundred against Leicestershire in May 2015 – was extremely sad. Any sport should be able to revert to its basic principles of selection on performance.
Sometimes you can have so many tiers of management that your organisation becomes cluttered. While Paul Downton – the managing director of the England team between 2014 and 2015 – was a lovely fellow, I was never convinced about his role. Why was he walking around the ground before a game? What purpose was he serving? In a winning culture things like that go unnoticed, but when a team is not winning they stick out like a sore thumb. Backslapping players and high fiving as they practice gives the illusion of togetherness when you are successful, just as it looks out of place when you’re losing. Too often Downton looked a forlorn figure lapping the ground, out of place and away from the tasks he should have been concentrating on.
Throughout my playing career, there were frank discussions in just about every single season I played at Lancashire. Flare-ups are part and parcel of being in a professional dressing room. But I cannot think of an example during my time as a county player – I’m not talking about when I was coach, because that is different as you are slightly detached and view people differently – of what I would call a bad egg. Sure, people had differences in all sorts of things, and you respected that. They might not always have shared the same views but they were committed to the same cause.
On the county circuit, rooming with someone offered you a ready-made confidante, and swapping room-mates regularly avoided any associations being viewed as cliquey. As it happens, I was always an advocate of blokes sharing rooms on away excursions, and the primary reason that the practice was stopped when I became England coach was because we simply had too much kit. You couldn’t get all the clobber for two players plus all their personal items in one room. It was just not possible. You would have your white kit for Test matches, your coloured kit for one-day stuff, two sets of pads and your training kit as well, which meant there was simply no room to move.
It was only when Ian MacLaurin, then chairman of the ECB, asked to see a room at the Monomotapa Hotel in Harare that things changed. I got one of the keys so he could look at the rooms and on opening the door he declared: ‘My God! Never again.’ He had come out to Zimbabwe to support the team and was taken aback at the standard of accommodation that we were staying in compared to the management who were housed in completely different hotels. While the Lord’s hierarchy was all staying in plush hotels elsewhere on tour, those at the coal face were being shovelled into whatever was available. Usually on the cheapest rate possible, I might add.
Even in subsequent years, some lads like Andrew Flintoff and Steve Harmison would ask for interconnecting rooms where possible because they liked each other’s company for support while away from home, setting up a haven complete with dartboard for amusement. On reflection, I can see the advantage of single rooms for modern international players, because at night they provide you with your own space, and time to reflect privately about things when you go to bed. Some players prepare differently to others and over the years, there will have been multiple examples of a guy who likes to go to bed at ten o’clock being pitched in with someone who is only going out at that time and not likely to be back before 2 a.m.
Mr Nightclubber comes in a bit worse for wear, chattering away, tripping over the kitbags, knocking everything off the sink. I know because I’ve been there. Myself and Paul Allott were on a nicely paid jolly towards the end of my career, promoting Barbican non-alcoholic lager in the United Arab Emirates. I can report that not a drop passed either of our lips but plenty of other liquid was imbibed by Walt on one particular night when I chose to turn in at a relatively early hour.
I woke with a start when this beer-battered behemoth came banging in at around 7.30 the next morning. He has always been a big lad has Wally and so he didn’t half make a racket. ‘What time are we leaving?’ he asked bleary-eyed. ‘About eight o’clock,’ I told him. ‘Wake me up in ten minutes then,’ he said, at which point he tried to get his trousers off, putting himself into an uncontrollable spin in the process and resulting in him completely missing his bed.
Some like to get away from cricket completely once the day is over, while others will yak away all night and never leave the subject. Geoff Clayton was greyhounds mad, and became a handler at White City Dogs, which used to be a stone’s throw away from Old Trafford, sandwiched between the cricket and football grounds, before being turned into a business park. The façade remained – they couldn’t knock it down because it’s listed – when they moved to Belle Vue, by which time I was quite into greyhound racing myself. Whenever I popped along to watch I would always look out for Geoff, known to us as Chimp because he walked like a little chimpanzee, making him very distinctive when he led his dog round to the traps ahead of a race.
Chimp was totally chilled out at the dog track. He would engage himself in chat with the trainers, liked having a bet and this world became his refuge. As a cricketer however, he was a real shop steward, and if he didn’t like something he wouldn’t do it, as when he refused to chase Warwickshire’s Gillette semi-final total on principle.
He wasn’t the only bolshie bloke in that dressing room, either. Ken Grieves was another one who left on the infamous night of blood-letting. An Australian, Ken later became professional at Accrington. Overseas players like Ken have given enormous value to county cricket over several decades, but sadly few in the twenty-first century give the service our two gems provided during the bulk of my stint with Lancashire.
If you want to assess the legacies of Clive Lloyd and Farokh Engineer at Old Trafford, then consider that they are still regulars at the ground and have remained residents in the area, adopted Mancunians the pair of them. It has been hard not to like these two champion blokes, who also happened to be two champion cricketers. Ask any long-term Lancashire member and they would tell you they are two of our own; forget the fact that t
hey were imported from Guyana and Bombay respectively. They were certainly characters that endeared themselves to the people around Old Trafford. A sign of their popularity was that they both had successful benefit years with Lancashire despite their overseas status.
Not that everything was smooth. In fact, if things had turned out slightly differently we might have lost both early on due to teething problems. For Farokh was as likely to arrive in Timbuktu as his intended destination when setting off for an away game in those early days. He lived on the south side of Manchester and his handling of the journey to Old Trafford from his gaff was as accomplished as his glovework behind the stumps. He didn’t have too many problems once pointed towards the M6 either. But the M62? He was completely stumped if we were setting off for an away fixture against Yorkshire.
Farokh was a real stalwart for us, offering us a wonderful all-round package. In addition to being one of the best wicketkeepers in the world, he was also a fine attacking batsman and we sometimes employed him as my opening partner in the Sunday League, to make use of his ability to hit over the top. ‘See that Chris Old? I am going to lift him,’ he would say, promising some aerial dynamics to our top order. He would say it often enough to ensure we didn’t alter our thinking and slip him back into the middle-order.
‘See that Mike Procter?’
‘Don’t tell us, Farokh . . . You’re going to lift him?’
His explosive hitting was the perfect foil to my anchored approach, and I always enjoyed our walks out together on a Sunday. But in contrast to Clive, he was not as keen to accompany me to the nets. Clive practised, practised, practised, whereas Farokh could think of nothing more galling.