However beautifully pastoral the surroundings, I knew that the game played in them required you to be as hard as handmade nails. My dad taught me that. He also spoke so proudly of Yorkshire that I always wanted to play for them and no one else, despite what I learnt, as I got older, about the divide that had opened up between them and also how much it pained him.
My future, rather than my dad’s past, was more pressing for my mum, so she never allowed recent history to interfere with it. I didn’t consider going anywhere else but Headingley; and I didn’t consider ever leaving it when I got there – even though I had to tolerate some snide whispers that I’d been taken on and then lavishly indulged only because of who my dad had been.
My arrival at Yorkshire’s academy proved fortuitous timing for two reasons.
The first of them was Ian Dews. He’s held a lot of ‘directorships’ at Yorkshire: director of cricket development, director of cricket operations and director of the academy, which is the post he held when I first knew him. Ian championed me from the start. Watching me in the indoor nets, he said he immediately recognised in me ‘something’ of my dad, whom he hadn’t personally known but had regularly seen play.
It was an enjoyable slog for me then because the demands of football at Leeds and rugby and cricket at St Peter’s were never-ending. I also got into hockey, which meant I was training, playing and travelling in perpetual motion. My mum and Becky were always on the touchline or sitting beside a boundary. Kipling wrote about filling every unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ distance run. We squeezed far more out of every minute than that. My mum had a VW Touran, which guzzled petrol only because she must have done enough miles in it on my behalf to circumnavigate the globe a few dozen times. The car could have got itself from York to Leeds’ training ground at Thorp Arch, so familiar did the route become. She’d also follow the Leeds team coach wherever it went on a match day, always driving because no one else on the club’s books lived near enough to us for their parents to offer her a lift. The three of us dined on fast food, mostly burgers, only because there was no time for anything else. We ate on the move or we starved.
I owe a debt to my sister too. Becky and I are so much alike that we could be twins, and in childhood some strangers even assumed we were. Our personalities are similar too – though she says, probably correctly, that I’m too quick to react when something rankles with me. We had every imaginable sibling squabble: from what to watch on TV to who should sit where in the living room, and from who’d wasted the bathroom hot water to who ought to have done what household chore but hadn’t.
I once accidentally hit her across the forehead with a log. It was like a scene from one of those Laurel and Hardy movies. I was carrying the log over one shoulder and turned abruptly, clocking her with it as she stole up behind me. Out came a heavy wrapping of crepe bandage. She put up with always having the smallest bedroom. She tolerated – just about – the dates I arranged secretly with her friends while, as the over-protective big brother, I baulked at her dating mine. And she never complained about my time impinging on hers. On a Saturday her friends would go shopping in York while she was watching me somewhere. Sometimes she’d have to cocoon herself in sweaters and coats to ward off the cold. At Thorp Arch she’d sit in a flat-roofed portable building doing her homework.
When I played cricket, she’d set up the picnic basket and the blanket, or she’d score, once using coloured pencils and upsetting the traditionalists who thought it sacrilegious. She always hoped there was another girl of her age there, someone she could talk to as she logged every ball. It happened rarely. One summer her holiday was the Bunbury Cricket Festival, the week-long tournament held in Newquay in Cornwall, which has become a showcase for future Test players. Becky credits me with teaching her how to catch a ball because she had no choice in the matter. In the back garden I’d shove her in goal, throw a rugby pass at her or persuade her to bowl underarm so I could practise my cover drive. She put up with all this – and more.
A few in the Yorkshire academy weren’t overly enthusiastic about bringing someone in who often went away to concentrate on other sports. You were supposed to devote yourself to cricket entirely. Ian persuaded them otherwise. ‘He’s promising,’ he said. ‘Let’s fit him in where and when we can.’
Ian knew that the other sports were beneficial to my cricket. Hockey improved my hand speed, built up my arms and strengthened my wrists, making them more flexible too. Rugby improved my decision-making and my reactions. Ian’s opinion was: ‘If you’re a fly-half, standing behind the pack, you see the shape the game is taking and have to react to it quickly. You’re in charge. That’s going to help you at the crease too.’
He struck a deal with St Peter’s. I’d always be made available for the school’s crunch fixtures – Ampleforth was one of these, a match of Roses-like importance – but otherwise I played mostly for the academy. Ian made one point abundantly clear to me about this arrangement. ‘When you turn out for your school, you have to be the star of the side,’ he said. ‘Don’t go back there and think you can take it easy. I never want to hear that you’ve been lazy or complacent.’
He also curbed my tendency to be too exuberant occasionally. If someone hit two sixes before lunch, I’d want to hit two as well; and then I could get myself out attempting a third. ‘Think of how many more runs you would have scored if you hadn’t done that,’ he’d tell me. Eventually the message sunk in.
When I was 15 years old, Ian pushed me into the under-17s, convinced that I needed the challenge. Neither that move nor his overall support of me proved universally popular. I was already familiar with some resentfully sardonic remarks, which were always made behind my back. There were two charges against me, and both of them were based around the fact that I was ‘a Bairstow’.
My name had got me into Headingley.
My name guaranteed me preferential treatment there.
Sometimes Ian would even be asked: ‘Are you sure he’s as good as you think he is? Do you really believe he’ll make it?’ He was vindicated first when the under-17 side won the County Championship final.
I was part of a rare harvest of talent. It’s the second reason why I count myself as fortunate to have arrived at Headingley when I did. In various teams over different summers I played alongside almost everyone that I’m playing alongside now, among them Adil Rashid, Gary Ballance, Adam Lyth and Joe Root. When I first saw him, Joe was a wisp of a thing. You’d have thought a puff of wind could have blown him away. That impression, as well as an innocent expression and those choirboy cheeks, disarmed bowlers only until the moment Joe faced a delivery, and then carnage ensued. His first appearance in the nets at Headingley was similar to Len Hutton’s baptism at the club’s ‘winter sheds’. George Hirst, a legend, coached Hutton and said afterwards: ‘There’s nowt we can teach this lad.’ At 12 years old, Joe sat unobtrusively watching Anthony McGrath face a session of short-pitched bowling. The ball was chucked at him hard and quick from less than half a pitch-length. When it was over, Joe asked the coach to repeat exactly the same procedure for him. At one point a bouncer clipped the grill of his helmet. He didn’t care. He wasn’t flustered.
I found that Joe and I were similarly obsessed. He practised constantly, smoothing out his shots by sanding away the imperfections in them. He hated not being the focus of a game. He also hated getting out. We almost always had long and profitable partnerships, but I once called him for a quick single – my fault, I think – and he didn’t get home. Afterwards, far from hunky-dory about it, he complained that I’d demanded far too much of him. No one who heard the explanation (especially me) has allowed him to forget it. ‘I don’t have as many fast-fibres in my body as you do,’ he said. Fast-fibres? Everyone within earshot was too busy laughing themselves daft to hear the rest of his protest.
Everyone assumes that I’m a wicketkeeper because of my dad; that I simply got into the family business, glad to uphold the tradition of the trade he began because I so much w
anted to be like him. It isn’t true. I became a wicketkeeper through circumstance rather than grand design. It had nothing to do with my dad at all.
I didn’t start out with any ambitions to imitate him, and I didn’t feel any obligation or pressure to do so either. Early on, not wanting to slavishly follow my dad anyway, I fancied myself more as a bowling all-rounder, first of pace and then of spin. At school, I’d pull off my sweater, hand it to the umpire and reply to his question about what and how I’d be bowling with the phrase: ‘Right arm over – rapid.’ Soon I realised that I’d never be a successful quick bowler – I just didn’t have it in me – so I turned to a bit of crafty turn and flight, giving the ball a generous tweak instead. Or at least that’s how I like to remember it … I once took a six-for, the peak of my brief life as a bowler.
I was in my mid-teens before I really began to play regularly as a wicketkeeper and then to think of myself as a budding one.
With the 20/20 vision that hindsight always brings, I know my teachers at St Peter’s now question whether the school should have been a bit more proactive, steering me towards the role much earlier. I can safely put their minds at rest on that score. If I’d been nagged at, or even gently ‘persuaded’ towards wicketkeeping, rather than coming to it gradually and in my own good time, I’d almost certainly have rebelled. I’m fairly sure that I’d have resented the lazy assumption that my bloodline should determine my future. That may sound melodramatic, but it’s logical to me. Think about it. How would Stuart Broad have felt if, on the sole basis of his father scoring almost 22,000 first-class runs, the coaches at his school had forced him to bat rather than bowl? I know – since we’ve spoken about this – that being stereotyped because of his surname would have narked him beyond belief. In all likelihood, if I’d been given the gloves just because my dad had once worn them, I’d have turned around and given them straight back again. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone behind the stumps at all.
I eventually turned myself into a batting wicketkeeper – which is always the way I’ve thought of things, the scoring of runs coming first – only when I reckoned it would improve my chances of getting picked for a team. It dawned on me slowly that someone had to keep wicket, so why shouldn’t it be me? Ian Dews also urged me to take it seriously. ‘Realistically,’ he said, ‘you’re not going to take wickets.’
I found wicketkeeping came fairly naturally, which perhaps shouldn’t have been all that surprising. I also found I liked the responsibility for the same reasons that my dad did. He kept at a much earlier age than me, undeterred after splitting a finger in his first match. His coach then insisted someone else take the gloves instead, determined to wrap him in cotton wool because of his significance as a batsman. My dad got them back through sheer stubbornness, knowing instantly where his true vocation lay.
Like him, I relished not only always being in the game, but also being at the epicentre of it – looking down the pitch, seeing the batsman and the ball with a close-up intensity. Like him, I found I preferred to see the pattern of the match unfurling right in front of me rather than peripherally from distant outposts, such as long leg or third man, where I could only half guess about whether the last delivery had swung away or zagged back. Like him, I took a lot of pleasure from setting the slip cordon and being asked my opinion about the pace of the wicket, the form and small foibles of a batsman and where a bowler might profitably bowl at him. And, also like him, I relished being the fulcrum of the fielding unit, the ball coming back to me no matter where it went, and the way you have to constantly chivvy along everyone else with a yell, a call or the loud, thudding slap of one glove into another.
The Yorkshire branch of the Noise Abatement Society probably had a fat file on my dad. I’ve been told how his cry of ‘gedit’ when a ball came off the bat or the call to ‘run, run’ rang for miles. You didn’t need the stump microphone to hear what he was saying.
My dad never stopped talking, and he did it at full, thumping volume too. He was like a fairground barker with a megaphone attached to stereophonic speakers. The Notts all-rounder Barry Stead once came to the crease in the second innings of a game with a tuft of cotton wool conspicuously poking out of each ear. Stead told my dad that he was protecting his ear drums after the punishment inflicted on them in the first. My dad began laughing so much that his eyes grew misty with tears and he had to stop to wipe them, his vision so blurred that he couldn’t see the ball.
It was said that the louder my dad shouted, the more he expected something to happen. On occasions, it did. Richard Blakey, succeeding him at Yorkshire, found himself in a quandary. He said my dad had run around ‘like a maniac, barking instructions’, which meant his own ‘less frantic approach’ in comparison brought accusations that he ‘wasn’t really bothered’. This made it ‘hard for me to measure up to his standards’, he added.
Probably through wishful thinking, people saw similarities between my dad and me where none existed. I didn’t have to swot up much on technique, and I didn’t swot up at all on his. I’ve always sworn by the acronym KISS, the principle of the US Navy. It stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. I saw the ball; I caught the ball. There were no great dramas or histrionics about it. I didn’t set out to stand out. I didn’t want to flamboyantly hurl myself at a catch when good anticipation and a couple of long sideways steps would get me to it anyway. That would be making a show for the sake of it – something that simply isn’t me.
My dad followed a similar template. No matter how much commotion he made, I know that he always stuck to the fundamentals. He laid them down like this: ‘You have to keep thinking about the game. Keep concentrating. Keep your eye on what’s going on all over the place.’
Wicketkeepers early in his era were sometimes as slight and light as jockeys, built to be nimble and nippy around the stumps on uncovered pitches. He was different, but for such a solid man there are countless accounts of his agility. He could spring upward, as though bouncing off a trampoline to take a high snick, when both the laws of gravity and geometry suggested he had no right to reach it at all. He could also stoop low, almost corkscrewing himself into the turf, whipping a hand under the ball before it licked the grass. But, generally, he wanted to see it early and get there with the least amount of fuss. ‘One of the most important things is just to be comfortable,’ he said. ‘One of the others is not to overthink.’
His approach was partly shaped as a consequence of a rip-roaring telling off he got during a Yorkshire Second XI game shortly before his first-class debut. Impetuous and desperate to impress, he cut across first slip with a circus-like leap. He felt chuffed with himself, and expected plaudits, until the captain eyed him with a look like thunder and began bashing his ears. It was made clear that if my dad dared try that trick again, he’d be watching Yorkshire’s next match – and the one after it too – instead of playing.
My dad immediately found himself likened to another Yorkshire keeper, Arthur Wood, who played predominantly between the wars. Wood was similar to my dad in physical build and background – he was from Bradford too – and also in humour. He was said sometimes to have worn ‘a cap and bells’, a euphemism for deliberately playing the fool when Yorkshire needed rousing or cheering up. He once shouted down the pitch at Hedley Verity, then taking a terrible caning from a batsman: ‘You’ve got him in two minds, Hedley. He doesn’t know whether to hit you for four or six.’ Wood made his Test debut in an emergency, aged 40, finding himself at the Oval when Len Hutton hit his world record 364. When Wood went into bat, England were on 770 for six, and Australia were gasping. He hit 53 in an hour and a half, got out off a full toss and afterwards hurled his bat across the dressing room in playful disgust. ‘Just like me to lose my head in a crisis,’ he said.
Wood’s zest and enthusiasm certainly sound a little like my dad’s. But my dad couldn’t have modelled himself on Wood any more than I could have modelled myself on my dad. He never saw Wood play, and there was scarcely any trace of him on film to study. I’d estim
ate that 98 per cent of my dad’s performances weren’t recorded either, and almost all of the 2 per cent played in front of the camera either no longer exists or can’t be found. So I’ve barely seen him in action either.
Today we’re used to watching everything from multiple angles and in super-slow motion, so nothing is missed. The camera is even capable of zooming in on a speck of dirt on the seam. When my dad played, the BBC was the primary broadcaster, but its domestic coverage, away from Tests, revolved around the John Player League and the two cup competitions. The only Championship game shown was usually the Roses match – Yorkshire TV often screened that – but those miles of film, like so much of the BBC’s stock, got lost, misplaced, wiped clean or perished. What remains is buried somewhere on the dusty back shelf of an archive. There are a few short clips on YouTube: my dad standing up as well as back, taking a wickedly rising ball in front of his face, diving full length for a streaky inside edge that no one could reach or casually accepting a lobbed throw from the outfield. You frequently see nothing more than his broad back and round shoulders because the idea of putting a camera at both of ends of a ground was some way off then. There isn’t nearly enough film to give you an idea of his approach or the small subtleties of his technique. You get a much better idea of his powerful stature and those surprisingly acrobatic movements from hundreds of black-and-white photographs. I reckon the photographers, knowing that if necessary he’d hurl himself after anything, however hopeless, liked to focus on him because he was so animated and energetic. There are some striking images of my dad tumbling to engineer a run-out, stretching an arm almost loose from its socket to take a catch or sprinting determinedly after a stray ball, his lips pulled tight and his jaw grimly set. It’s as though his whole future depends on cutting off a single. Captured between deliveries, he’s nearly always pointing and his mouth is usually open, the instruction to do this or that or go there having just been delivered.
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