A Clear Blue Sky

by Jonny Bairstow

  There were two sequels. Lehmann wrote out an invoice and left it in the dressing room, the charge for using what he claimed were his ‘favourite boots’. It went unpaid. In both the next Test and the third, White claimed Lehmann’s wicket and his sister refused to talk to him afterwards, thinking he ought to have bowled half volleys that her husband could have hit for boundaries.

  I mention this because it shows how steely and calm White could be. He was never going to have palpitations about our second XI run chase in the Rutland countryside. Nine coaches out of ten would have given Joe and me the instruction to anchor ourselves to the crease, presenting the bat’s full face in stodgy defence for hours. Not White. He looked at the two of us and said: ‘Lads, go out and entertain me.’ We did, putting on 358. White was so entertained that he told Yorkshire to pick me without delay.

  I stepped into a reshuffled order when Michael Vaughan was injured for the Somerset game, which began on 11 June. The date was poignant, just over a week after my dad’s first appearance for Yorkshire exactly 39 years earlier.

  It hadn’t been, and it wouldn’t become, a vintage summer for Yorkshire. Far from it. Stuck in what can be seen now as a transitional phase – Darren Gough had retired the previous season – we were already struggling in the table and barely clung on to our First Division place during the next three months, setting an unfortunate county record for the number of matches without a win. We survived, our great escape comprising chiselled-out draws.

  We were regularly in the news, though seldom for favourable reasons. Vaughan, left out of the England team, made only five appearances, managed just 147 runs and retired in mid-season, deciding the sparkle had gone from his game. Matthew Hoggard, despite being our leading wicket-taker, moved to Leicestershire after the tug of war of a contractual dispute. Anthony McGrath, out of form, gave up the captaincy, handing it to Andrew Gale, who, at 26, became the youngest ‘official’ holder of the post since Brian Sellers almost 80 years earlier.

  There’s a story about a novice walking into the Yorkshire dressing room during the 1920s, the age of Holmes and Sutcliffe and Rhodes. He shuffled around outside it, peering through the half-open door because he was so apprehensive about where to get changed among the aristocracy. There was a hierarchy, a strict pecking order, within those walls. It was Sutcliffe, clearing a spot, who beckoned him in. ‘Come over here, young ’un,’ he said. I never had such a problem. I walked in, looked for the space no one else was occupying and plonked my kit down on it as though planting a flag; I guessed that’s where I was supposed to go. I felt at home. Not many players outside Yorkshire much relish coming to Headingley. The ground is an acquired taste and the crowd aren’t slow to let an outsider know whether he’s rated or not. The atmosphere can seem abrasive if you’re not tuned into it. But I felt at home there too.

  Somerset had a decent team, certainty superior to ours then. There was Marcus Trescothick and Justin Langer, Craig Kieswetter and Alfonso Thomas, Dale Stiff and Charl Willoughby. I fielded mostly on the outfield rather than close in. Gerard Brophy was first-choice keeper, a man with seven county seasons already behind him. In The Cricketer’s Who’s Who that year, I was described as a right-hand bat and a right-arm bowler before my wicketkeeping even got a mention. This wasn’t surprising. I’d barely kept for the second XI. I’d been third-choice keeper at best at Yorkshire, behind Simon Guy, who was recovering from a cerebral abscess that had required an operation.

  The match took a twist for me, turning it into one of those unlikely ripping yarns. Brophy broke his thumb. My wicketkeeping gloves and pads came out of the bag. I’d been behind the stumps only 12 times since the season began – and 90 per cent of those appearances had been for the academy. In the second innings I suddenly found myself keeping to Hoggard, someone who’d taken 248 Test wickets and was capable of swinging a delivery in front of first slip. The ball smacked into my gloves. In the 46th over Trescothick, who’d go on to score almost 2,000 runs that season, went for a drive, the ball cutting across him. He got a hard, rising outside edge. It came at me like something fired out of a cannon. I caught it – very gratefully – against my breastbone and held on for dear life, the slips able to celebrate before I could.

  Looking back on his debut, my dad said that the gulf between the Championship and anything else he’d ever played in was ‘mighty’ because ‘the ball does so much more’. It was a ‘far different world’ from the Bradford League, he added. He could get away with a dip in his concentration there, but would make himself ‘look daft’ if he did the same for Yorkshire. The first catch he took for them was critical, he maintained, because it ‘settled me down’ and settled everyone else down around him too. It made the others believe ‘the lad’, as he called himself, was rightfully in the side and had become one of them immediately. I know what he meant. I also know how he felt. I took three more catches, getting rid of Langer too.

  In our first innings I made a respectable 28 before getting carried away. I tried to hit a ball over the East Stand and into the car park. It fell about 250 yards short. In our second I came in when we were 49 for three, the possibility of an ignominious innings defeat hanging over us. I batted for more than three stubborn hours, hitting seven fours in an unbeaten 82. My dad lost his first match by nine wickets. I lost mine by four, but, precisely like him, I’d made a statement, the rest of the summer now opening up promisingly in front of me.

  I’d started to learn the business of being a county pro.

  Percy Holmes liked to roll up first at the reception desk of the hotel wherever Yorkshire were staying and tell the clerk to: ‘Book us in as Percy Holmes and his circus.’ The joke, though eventually dog-eared by overuse, still had a serious edge to it. A cricket team, always on the move, is certainly a bit like a travelling circus, with all the paraphernalia and disparate personalities. You’re always performing, a new audience replacing the last one soon enough. You always have to rub along with everyone.

  I was as lucky as my dad had been. He made friends straight away. Doug Padgett, the opener and fellow Bradfordian, drove him around before he could afford a car of his own. And Tony Nicholson, who was fine enough to play for England but always got overlooked by the selectors, virtually adopted him. To someone still in their teens, not long out of school, anyone over 25 seems reasonably old. That means anyone over 30 seems ancient. Nicholson was 32, a former policeman in Rhodesia, and a five-time County Champion. Geoffrey Boycott described him as ‘bloody good’ at taking wickets. At first, my dad actually called him ‘Dad’ and thought Nicholson ‘revelled in his paternal role’. He wasn’t beyond giving him a telling-off and a clip around the ear. Nicholson soon became ‘Nick’, and their friendship grew out of the iron belief each had in the other’s ability.

  I got close to Jacques Rudolph. He was 28 years old. He’d already played in more than 30 Tests, scoring a double hundred in the first of them. It wasn’t only his guarantee of 1,000 runs a season – that summer he totalled over 1,300 of them – but also the manner in which he made them that impressed and drew me towards him. He was a professional from the toes of his boots to the peak of his Yorkshire cap. The way he practised studiously. The way he shared his knowledge so unselfishly, sifting through it thoughtfully and then offering only what was most useful to me. The way he quietly pushed me on too – a nudge here, a suggestion there, a little prod to keep me straight. I didn’t have ‘a dad’ in the dressing room, but Jacques was avuncular and I came to rely on him, knowing he’d always be prepared to talk about what I was especially interested in – batting, bowlers and the stuff it took to get into a Test team and remain there. I came to admire and respect him. He was patient with me, and never self-aggrandising.

  Of course, I made mistakes. I was a whippersnapper, still maturing. Sometimes I tried to help too much. I’d rush around opening doors, making tea, sorting kit, as though justifying myself. I also got into the odd crazy scrape.

  In one of them we’d gone back to Headingley to collect our cars
after a game against Worcestershire at New Road in which Azeem Rafiq, who is 18 months younger than me, made his maiden hundred. Azeem had bought himself a new VW, just off the showroom forecourt. I was still semi-incredulous, I think, that I was a part of the team, and I was already daydreaming about the next match. I motored out of the car park, waving and telling everyone that I’d see them soon. I was blind to Azeem, who was stationary and directly in front of me. I bashed straight into his VW.

  This wasn’t the worst of it either. I lived so close to Headingley – less than half a mile as the pigeon flies – that I could almost hear the crowd clapping when a wicket fell. Yorkshire once sent out strict instructions that every player had to report in suit and tie for a club photograph. The photographer’s shutter would click at 9.15 a.m. precisely.

  I woke up at 9.13 a.m. Either the alarm hadn’t gone off or I had slept through it. In the nanosecond my brain took to register the horror of it, I’m guessing that I must have looked like a cartoon character – eyes widening and then abruptly shooting out of their sockets on long stalks. Everything takes twice as long when you panic. I know this now. Every nerve in your body is jumping, so your coordination goes askew. You fumble for things. You can’t do anything in a structured way. I began to tear around the bedroom in madcap fashion, picking up and putting down again what I didn’t need and either dropping or being unable to find what I did. Imagine that scene from Four Weddings and a Funeral in which Hugh Grant realises he’s going to be late for the first of those weddings. That was me …

  I kept looking at the clock, hoping irrationally that time might have stopped or would actually start to tick backwards out of pity for me. It didn’t, surprisingly. I dragged my clothes out of the wardrobe. I dragged a comb through my hair. I put my shoes on without my socks. I only half-tied my tie. I threw myself out of the front door and into the car. I got to the ground, parking skew-whiff in the first space I saw. I then ran more than 100 yards to the pitch, hurdled over the perimeter fence in a single leap and speed-walked towards the team as casually as possible, as though I could sneak up to them without anyone noticing I’d ever been absent. Not a chance of it. Everyone was waiting for me. If you tell one lie, you’re forced to tell another to cover it up and then a third, which is usually wildly more extravagant than the first two.

  ‘Car was low on oil,’ I said, seizing on the first fanciful excuse that came to mind. ‘I had to go to the garage.’ It was unoriginal and so obviously nonsense on stilts. When the photograph was taken, I was still half-dazed in sleep, my eyes almost glued shut.

  The chief prankster at Yorkshire was Anthony McGrath. You could sometimes pick a pair of socks out of your bag and discover that someone had cut the toes out of them. We suspected, but never conclusively proved, that he was the culprit – the Yorkshire Snipper. Pretending to believe my alibi, he teased the car keys away from me, offering to check the oil level on the pretext that there could be some deep-rooted problem with the engine. He knew the truth, and he also knew I’d spend the rest of the day worried sick, waiting for him to expose me as a fraud.

  I did.

  My dad’s first season contained mistakes too. At Bradford, he found himself against the Surrey leg-spinner Intikhab Alam. He had never faced a ‘real’ leggie before, the species rare even then. You have to remember that, pitched into his debut, my dad’s response against Mike Proctor was the attempt to thump one of his devilishly quick, skiddy bouncers into the middle of Malham Cove. Intikhab and his flicked wrist must have seemed to him like being given the key to the sweetie shop. He fancied his chances, he said, advancing down the wicket twice and lifting him majestically over the boundary. So far, so successful. He tried to do it a third time. Intikhab, a clever old bird, held the ball back and gave it an inch or two more air. My dad thrashed at it and was caught at long on. He’d made 26 and was ‘quite pleased’ with himself until he got back into the dressing room and found an apoplectic Brian Close storming towards him. In two swift movements, Close picked my dad up, pinned him against a wall and waved his finger in front of his face. ‘He filled my ears with asterisks,’ my dad said. ‘The gist was that I had been a very stupid little boy.’

  Then, during the closing weeks of the summer, my dad was so fatigued that he missed two straightforward chances, which worried him until he found Close more forgiving. He offered reassurance that it wouldn’t harm his future. It was all part of his growing up, and he needed only to ‘keep trying’, added Close, confident that he’d build more skill into his hands.

  My dad was weary because these were the early days of the John Player League, which almost doubled the amount of travelling. In one five-week period he went to Bristol, Swansea, Colchester, London, Northampton, Nottingham, Worcester, Scarborough, Bristol again, Taunton and Manchester. It explains why his young bones were creaking a little by the end of September. To look at his packed fixture list is to appreciate how much cricket has changed. He was either playing or on the road. He was also going to grounds that no longer host first-class matches – Bradford, Hull, Harrogate and Middlesbrough among them – or no longer exist at all, such as Sheffield and Hastings, which was paved over for a shopping centre. He liked the out-grounds, once taking my Uncle Ted to Park Avenue and mourning the fact that it had ceased to be a hub of county cricket. He was so emotional as to be almost tearful. My Uncle Ted became aware of ‘how much he felt the loss’ of it, which had ‘clearly affected him very much’.

  I finished the season with six fifties, a total of 592 runs and an average of 45.53. Not bad for a rookie. I even got a not-out fifty against Lancashire in the Roses match at Old Trafford. But the innings that gave me most pleasure was also my highest: 84 not out. The personal significance behind those runs lay in the location where I scored them.

  The place closest to my dad’s heart, unequivocally his favourite, was Scarborough. Uncle Ted calls it ‘his kingdom’. To my dad it was the epitome of the English coast, postcard perfect. He liked the look and also the feel of the resort: the bars and hotels where his friends could be found; the cafés and the fish-and-chip shops; the ruined castle on its grassy perch overlooking the harbour and both the North and South Bay; the smooth, wide beach, where countless games of cricket took place in between the sunbathers and the donkey rides, and also the way the town spread upward, from the arcades and the amusements along the front into a steep climb of roads and red-orange rooftops.

  In the middle of every season he relished the change of pace he found at Scarborough – the blue band of the sea, the coastal path, the salt breeze, the seagulls wheeling and swooping. At the end of it, during the festival, the ‘cricket on holiday’ atmosphere, which was a kind of celebration, pulled him irresistibly towards it. Usually there was nothing particular at stake for Yorkshire there. The cup competitions were over and the title had already been decided, so the matches offered him a sense of release and freedom from the pressure of the previous five and a half months. He went to seek out a good time – on and off the field. He seldom failed to find it.

  In late August and early September Scarborough was usually decorated with flags and bunting, and there’d be a band too, all of which made it rather like one of our annual jaunts to Bray. He adored the sight of North Marine Road, which was down to earth and full of Yorkshiremen who cared so much about cricket. It represented his ideal of what a ground ought to look like. There was the neatness of the brick and tile pavilion with its white-painted balcony and the spread of the ‘popular’ seating, the wood elephant grey. There was the terraced housing at the Trafalgar End, where someone’s weekly washing could sometimes be found blowing in the wind. There was the fact that the field sat in a snug, saucer-like dip, turning it into a proper arena. He felt entirely comfortably at Scarborough.

  The genial ambience of the place, the intimacy between those watching and those being watched, was unique and treasurable for my dad. For Scarborough had – and still has – something else that most other Championship grounds lack, which is a packed cro
wd. On sunny mornings, there’d be queues three or four deep waiting to come through the narrow turnstiles. As a player, he felt a little empty once the games were over there because it meant another summer ticked off in his life.

  I first went to Scarborough as a child, taking a bat and ball so that at lunch and tea I was able like everyone else to claim my own small patch of it. There were no stern ‘keep off the grass’ signs there. You were encouraged to revel in the club’s hospitality. Only the square was out of bounds, but you’d see a respectful gathering around the rope, the curious and the connoisseurs alike studying the scuff marks and the spider’s web of small cracks on the pitch as the ground staff judiciously swept and remarked it. Around them was a mass of ‘tennis-ball Test matches’ as one generation, made up of fathers and grandfathers, took on the kids. You’d always be at risk of a clunk on the head, the ball from another game 25 yards away infiltrating your own, but no one minded or took offence. My dad never took part, his split with Yorkshire excluding him from Scarborough as much as Headingley; but my grandpa rolled up his sleeves, bowling when I batted.

  Scarborough has always argued that letting the likes of me on to the outfield will forge an affinity not only with the club, but also with the game itself. You’re more likely to go back as a spectator – and a few will go back as a player. After arriving for my first Championship match there, I let my eyes wander around the ground, stopping on those swathes of it so familiar from my boyhood, and I thought nostalgically of past times. It was another reminder of how far I’d travelled – even in a few weeks from the obscurity of the second XI.