by David Lloyd
It would be wrong to suggest that I didn’t have some enjoyable times during this period; for example relinquishing the captaincy at Old Trafford provided an instantly liberating effect on my individual game. Some time later, the national selectors would call once more, and in the twilight of my career I was nearly the restorative Mike Brearley figure. I may have been dwelling in the international wilderness, playing just once more in the 1970s, but when England were looking for a leader at the turn of the next decade, I had some conversations which offered hope that it might be me. Had I made a better fist of things, that legendary 1981 Ashes might have had a different protagonist trying to get the best out of Ian Botham.
Some of the pizzazz was lost from the international stage during the late 1970s due to the emergence of World Series Cricket, which meant that many players were unable to play in Tests for a while, but that didn’t dilute the ambitions of Englishmen when it came to playing for their country. My efforts were rewarded with a single call-up, for an appearance against Pakistan, between travelling home from the 1974-75 Ashes and the start of the 1980 summer. So despite scoring two Benson & Hedges Cup hundreds – against Derbyshire and Scotland – and an unbeaten 90 in a John Player Special League win over Gloucestershire as an opening batsman in the fortnight building up to the international curtain being raised, a recall at the age of thirty-three was a surprise.
Yet that was not the full story because they wanted me to be the experienced head down the order, the hinge at No. 7, and if I acquitted myself okay, I would be under consideration to lead England in the near future. At the time there was an issue over who should be captain, and a strong feeling that there was too much responsibility on an all-rounder like the 24-year-old Botham.
So while they made him captain for that summer, they also primed some older candidates, like myself, Keith Fletcher and Mike Brearley, that an opportunity might present itself in the not-so-distant future.
For the previous five years, I had come to terms with being a former international batsman – that solitary limited-overs match against Pakistan in 1978 being very much a call out of the blue – but any cricketer with pride never entirely gives up hope of forcing their way back in.
However, my last life as an England player spanned just two days – the length of a weather-interrupted opening match of the Prudential Trophy at Headingley. West Indies had made 198 in their 55 overs on a day of interruptions for rain and bad light. We had closed on 35 for three after gritting it out for 23 overs against their lauded pace attack. Resuming the match next morning with the required run rate at five runs per over for victory, the end of a brief Botham flurry signalled my entrance to face Malcolm Marshall.
It was to prove a painful reintroduction as an England batsman. Marshall pushed off out of the pile of sawdust, charged down the slope and let go one of his customary searing deliveries that comfortably defeated my defensive prod off the back foot and imprinted a Duke tattoo on my right forearm. Despite the pain and embarrassment I actually carried on, although not for long, my ignominy completed when I was bowled by Gordon Greenidge – yours truly his first and only international wicket.
The swollen arm was a memento of my final time in international action, preventing me playing in the next match at Lord’s. However, worse was to follow as it wasn’t the impact that caused most discomfort in the aftermath. Once the swelling had gone down in my right arm I resumed playing for Lancashire, but greater and greater discomfort developed in my left one and would not go away. Initially, the medics thought I had tennis elbow and so administered a cortisone injection that didn’t make a blind bit of difference.
X-rays later revealed an astonishing conclusion: on the ball’s impact with my right arm my left jarred down awkwardly, causing a piece of bone to dislodge inside. There had been some reverberation through my neck and all the way down into my left elbow; surgery was required and to this day I still have a rather extensive scar as a reminder. If there was a funny side to any of it, it came when Mr Glass, my Manchester surgeon, offered me a sherry before, with the aid of four blokes to hold me still, he administered a cortisone jab.
It was the end to a sobering experience and one that probably should not have taken place. Although I had orchestrated a successful one-day county team, I should not have been picked again. Indeed, I should not have retained realistic hope of a recall once I’d been overlooked for the 1975 Ashes, which was shortened to four matches due to the presence in the calendar of the inaugural World Cup. A sign that I wasn’t too far back in the pack was given when I was chosen in the MCC representative team to take on the Australians.
I had returned from Australia with continued discomfort in my neck but with a determination to rail against the feeling that my number of Test caps would not reach double figures. Although I put on a century stand with Graham Gooch, the new kid on the block and as yet uncapped, it was he, not I, who was picked for the first Test at Edgbaston, where he made an infamous pair. So good was his England record in future years that it was hard to believe he had started with nothing.
Lancashire went well enough under my stewardship that year and threatened a first Championship triumph for a quarter of a century, before dropping off at the business end. That meant we had only the Gillette Cup to show for our season’s efforts. I say only because such was our proficiency in one-day cricket that we could be forgiven for becoming blasé about success in that competition. In contrast to the team’s results, however, my own form was sketchy and my batting lacked fluency.
There was just one hundred to show for it, against the champions Leicestershire in Blackpool, when I scraped to three figures in the 100th and last over of the innings. Competition rules that year restricted first innings to this 100-over limit and it took a horrible slog and equally horrible dropped catch from Raymond Illingworth for me to secure the two runs to take me off 98.
Afterwards, Illingworth wasn’t the first Yorkshireman to suggest one of mine was the worst innings he had ever seen. Richard Hutton was not very complimentary about one of my innings in a Roses match, although at least Raymond’s dismissal of my efforts followed a first-class hundred. One of my career regrets was not to make one against the old enemy.
There was some talk about my stepping down towards the end of the 1975 season but I didn’t necessarily link my productivity, or lack of it, with the bat to the leadership of the team, and the speculation in the Daily Mail that I was to quit was dispelled when just a fortnight after getting my hands on that elusive first trophy as captain, I was reappointed for the following year.
The following two winters I did get tour places, but unfortunately these comprised only the Derrick Robins XI’s venture to South Africa, which spanned five weeks, and a place on the plane as an ex-Ashes participant for the Centenary Test against Australia. Qualification was four Tests and I had squeezed in, just. The South Africa tour held a real thrill for me, because I had been chosen as captain and Ken Barrington, my hero as a youngster, was the manager. They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes but Ken was an exception to this rule, as he proved to be one of the finest blokes I’ve ever met. A great player, averaging 57 in Test cricket, he possessed even greater humility.
A subconscious admission that my career was winding down was also made in this period, as I tentatively began accepting a clutch of after-dinner speaking engagements. Despite feeling comfortable behind a microphone and with a television camera pointed at me at Sky Sports, to this day I cannot say that I’ve ever enjoyed getting up and speaking to a drunken audience that demands that you make them laugh. Getting those laughs was generally not a problem, as I found out over many years, although my inherent shyness stopped me relishing these occasions.
Back on the field, I spent the majority of the 1976 season down the order to accommodate Andrew Kennedy at its top, but returned to opening with a measure of success by making 82 against the touring West Indians in mid-June. The hostility of the West Indies appealed to my love of situations when the odds were a
gainst me: in adversity I played some of my best innings.
After the highs of the previous years, however, this offered something of a low: next to bottom in the Championship, we also tasted a rare defeat at Lord’s when Northamptonshire took the Gillette Cup off us. I’m sure some of the cleaning staff thought we had been robbed that following winter, as they had become so used to seeing the cup in the trophy cabinet.
Even in defeat, however, there was fun to be unearthed in the Lancashire dressing room thanks to the wonderful Farokh Engineer. No matter that it was a Lord’s final, he was once again at his persuasive best, with the opposition’s opening bowler the subject of his well-loved ‘lifting’ negotiation.
John Dye – known to us as Dr Dye, the Queen of Seam, a bloke who had a Bobby Charlton sweep of hair flopping on the breeze – would saunter in on an angle from another postcode with the wrist of his bowling arm cocking up and down along the way. Farokh insisted: ‘I can lift this man, Bumble.’
Having been given his opportunity to prove it, he got bowled through his legs for nought, having an almighty hack. He was spitting feathers when he got back through the Long Room and into the dressing room.
‘What’s up, Farokh?’
‘The arsehole Dye bowled when I wasn’t ready.’
‘You what? This bloke runs in forty yards!’
One of the other amusing idiosyncrasies of our wonderful overseas recruit was his adoption of the fast bowlers’ chunterings, or his own pidgin versions at least. For example, Peter Lee and Peter Lever might greet an inside edge for four with a shout of: ‘Well, f**k my old boots.’ In contrast, Farokh, in his distinctive Indian lilt, would mutter: ‘F**k, old, boot,’ every time a ball flew over the slips or dropped just short. We used to kill ourselves laughing.
If you talked about the great wicketkeepers of the time, the conversation would have started with the names of Alan Knott, Bob Taylor and Farokh Engineer, and not gone much further. Here was a natural player who hated practising but had these wonderful hands and a great eye. One of his cameos with the bat resulted in him scoring 96 versus West Indies – before lunch. Farokh was a real showman behind the stumps, an extravagant, exuberant player.
He used to get me in on the act too. Being left-handed, I would be at leg slip to the spinners Jack Simmons or David Hughes, and Farokh would tell me to flick the ball back quickly whenever I could. It became second nature to dive away to my left and return it in one motion, and Farokh would shimmy the bails and lob it to slip all in one movement. It used to draw a real reaction from the crowd. However, when he was missing one week playing for India, it meant Keith Goodwin took his place behind the stumps. Of course, I produced my usual party piece and Goody happened to be looking the wrong way when the ball struck him flush on the ear lobe. Cue a chain of expletives from our former army man, one of the most frightening I’ve ever met. Thanks, Farokh.
After the drought of 1976, the summer of 1977 was so wet that it ruined the season and dampened my love of the game. Best estimates suggested we lost twenty days of Championship action due to the elements, and there was no real enjoyment when we did make it onto the field. The way I felt was clearly shared by the team. We just weren’t enjoying our cricket as a collective anymore, and it was obviously time for me to quit as leader. I handed in my resignation as captain that October.
Ironically, following erroneous newspaper reports that I was to pack in altogether twelve months later, this is something I did actually consider at the end of 1979, only to be talked out of it by the club, who persuaded me to sign a new two-year contract. I’m not certain they would have had the appetite to do so had Barry Wood not moved on at the end of his benefit year.
Thoughts of quitting opened my mind to other careers. I had dabbled in loads, yet – although it was true that the Old Trafford I once loved had lost its appeal and work became a chore –- none of the alternatives had sufficient appeal to entice me away. Cricket is what I knew best; what I had once loved and would come to love again. But for a time, life as a professional player took on a different veneer. What I had once viewed as adventures around the circuit, meeting up with familiar adversaries, became a monotonous trek to take on the same old faces. The county beat was losing its appeal.
There were several reasons that I developed a more negative view. Jack Bond was now back at the club as manager, but in my thirties I was not as much help to him as I had been a decade earlier, and on more than one occasion I was dropped as injuries bit and my form dipped. There’s no doubt that once you become an established player you feel immune to being overlooked in selection, and it therefore makes it all the more painful when it happens, as it does to 95 per cent of players.
As so many discover, the ageing process does not help. My biggest problem was my eyesight and my refusal to acknowledge that I was struggling to see the ball as the decade drew to its end. Indeed, it took me a long time to wear glasses as a cricketer, because I felt doing so would jeopardise my chances of winning new deals at the club. Once it was made public that I was struggling, I thought that would be the end for me. I kept putting myself in the place of a committee man considering my future: ‘This bloke can’t see, get rid.’
Fear of being binned made me very wary of admitting any such problem existed, so this period was laced with frustration. The one thing I could see was that I wasn’t picking the ball up early enough when batting, and when I eventually got my eyes tested it revealed that I was actually seeing an oval ball rather than a spherical one. Even then, being self-conscious, sometimes I would wear the specs I had been given and sometimes I wouldn’t. I had recently started to wear a helmet, of course, and because of its clunkiness, glasses and helmets didn’t really go together. It all felt a little bit alien.
However, the prescription coincided with a general upturn in my fortunes. So much so, that 1982 represented something of an Indian summer for me – a mountain of runs and a first-class average in excess of 40, the first time I had managed such a feat since 1974, the year of my international debut. If only I had gone to the optician’s sooner to address a natural deterioration, I might have scored a few more runs in the interim.
Towards the end of my career, there was some fun thanks to the emergence of Graeme Fowler, another Accrington lad. He and I proved inseparable, and he introduced me to all sorts of riotous music. I had never heard of Bruce Springsteen before. Then there was Southside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes. Travelling in the car together, music blaring, we would be singing like good’uns. He even got me listening to Meat Loaf, and I wasn’t the only one in cricket that was ignorant of this man’s work.
Lieutenant Colonel John Stephenson, the secretary of the MCC, was a fine old stick who cycled into work daily with the bottom of his trousers in bike clips. One day, he revealed that Lord’s had received an approach from an American popstar to appear at the ground. ‘We met the man in question, and his representatives,’ he said. ‘And I didn’t know whether it was appropriate to call him Mr Meat or Mr Loaf.’ Quite.
Despite the age gap, because of our backgrounds Fowler and I were thick as thieves, and when he broke into the first team I took it upon myself to look after him. He made a fine start, scoring a hundred batting at No. 7 on his home County Championship debut in 1980, a victory over Nottinghamshire at Old Trafford. He was one of the most boisterous blokes you could meet, and he was bouncing around everywhere after that start. Unfortunately though, he couldn’t maintain it and after that initial effort he simply wasn’t getting any more, causing me to ask: ‘How long are you going to live off that, then?’ He burst into tears.
Of course, he went on to become a fine batsman for Lancashire and England, and I was soon to become an ex-batsman for Lancashire and England. By my mid-thirties, it wasn’t only the recurring neck injury that was doing my head in. There didn’t seem to be any respite, solution or suitable treatment for that. It was a case of me having a bit of infra-red and a rub, but never did it go away. I also battled through rehabilitation for two sli
pped discs in my back, courtesy of Paul Allott who put me in touch with an osteopath from Wilmslow. He would tie me in knots, give me a bit of a kick, and make me scream. Then, it was a case of, ‘Arise, take up thy bed and walk.’
Transformed from a fit, young bloke to one plagued by these aches and pains, which prevented me doing what I wanted to do, meant I eventually had enough. I missed half of the 1983 season recuperating from debilitating pain down my right side stemming from my neck and woke one morning with my mind made up – my eyes and body were telling me the end was nigh as a professional cricketer. I was packing up.
In my absence, Lancashire had unearthed some exciting young talents – including a much more dashing left-hander, Neil Fairbrother. The club did not appear to need my services any longer, so it was a pleasant surprise that after I informed them of my decision they continued to select me. Even more pleasing was that I went out in style.
My final Lancashire appearance, at Wantage Road, saw me open the batting with Fowler. We both hit hundreds in a drawn match with Northamptonshire. After twenty seasons’ service, there was no better way to go.
The question of ‘what next?’ now surfaced more strongly, and it wasn’t as if I was short of options. I had experience in a raft of off-season jobs while on the Lancashire playing staff. One was with Associated Tyre Specialists, in Burnley. I wasn’t so great at changing tyres, but I did pick up the mechanic’s gift of the gab. ‘New valve and balance, Sir?’ was the standard question, because that’s where your money was. Every time you did one, it was something like 150 per cent profit. Incredibly, customers nearly always said yes. It involved putting a bit of lead on the wheel and spinning it. To all intents and purposes, these tyre valves had a lifetime guarantee, but you would always ask the question.