We were playing Notts, the game beginning bizarrely. Somehow, through a quirk of wireless technology that is beyond me, the tannoy system picked up and broadcast the eulogies that were being made during a funeral service held nearby. We were in trouble when I went in – it was like my debut all over again – but I hung about for four hours, hitting ten fours and also a six. A century was in the offing until I ran out of partners, finishing 16 runs short. I wished I could have scored one for my dad.
He was capped for Yorkshire in 1973 at Chesterfield. It was a steaming hot day, but he insisted on wearing it and his new sweater throughout, the perspiration waterfalling off him. His new cap was stiff and a quarter of a size too small, making him look like Just William. At the end of play, he didn’t stuff either the sweater or the cap among the rest of his kit, but placed them in a polythene bag as though both items were sacred. He said he kept looking at them and wondering ‘whether they were really mine’.
Yorkshire knew how important Scarborough was for me. So I was awarded my county cap there in 2011. That first cap is one of the most precious things I own. The club didn’t tell me beforehand that I’d be receiving it, but instead tipped off my mum, making sure she saw the presentation in front of the pavilion.
There are two moments I’ve always wished my dad had been alive to see. That was the first of them.
CHAPTER 6
THE POP AND FIZZ OF CHAMPAGNE
My mobile rang, bringing up one of those ‘caller unknown’ alerts. I answered anyway, thinking I’d immediately push the off button when the voice at the other end launched into some nuisance spiel about insurance, double glazing or a timeshare in the sun.
It was Andy Flower.
I’d met him just a couple of times, our conversations never drifting much further than a few polite pleasantries and the odd encouraging comment about the progress I’d been making. I was only on the periphery of his orbit, so we hadn’t, as yet, sat down for a meaningful one-to-one, which explains why his number wasn’t in my phone – and vice-versa. He’d had to ask the ECB for it. By then Flower had been in charge of England for two years, winning both the Ashes in 2009 and the World Twenty20 competition 12 months later. Only a few weeks before calling me, Flower had taken England to number one in the world’s Test rankings. And, shortly afterwards, he’d be named as coach of the year at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards because of that achievement.
Everyone I knew spoke well of him. He was a member of the wicketkeepers’ union with 160 dismissals in 63 Tests for Zimbabwe, nearly 5,000 runs and two spells as their captain. The way he’d played for them was also the way he coached for us. From the start, he’d shown himself to be a strong, intensely focused and methodical character, who knew where he wanted to go and how he wanted to get there. He was an intelligent man who treated those under him intelligently too; he didn’t talk down to anyone. Flower was also a principled character, the evidence for it shown in one unflinching and dignified act: the black armbands he and his Zimbabwean teammate Henry Olonga wore during the 2003 World Cup, a protest against the ‘death of democracy’ and the ‘abuse of human rights’ under Robert Mugabe’s brutally oppressive regime. This was no token gesture, but a genuine sacrifice with risks. Opponents of Mugabe had previously been badly beaten up as a consequence of speaking their contempt for him out loud. The armbands told those who didn’t know Flower something important about him. If you’re willing to stand up so publicly to a dictator, then the pressures of winning a cricket match aren’t likely to make you wilt.
Eventually, as one summer turned into another, I’d come to learn a lot about Flower and admire him. Like a university professor, he’d always bring his notebook into team meetings. Everything was written down, covered point-by-point and in meticulous order. There was a serious structure about his tactical approach, which had been scrupulously thought through. Flower would only confuse me when he used words that I thought he’d combed through a thesaurus to find. I’d stop him at the end of some sentences and ask for a dictionary definition.
But when he rang, there was no need for clarification. ‘How are you?’ he asked.
The question couldn’t have been more innocuous, his way of introducing himself and allowing me an easy reply. I should have been savvier, realising straight away that Flower wouldn’t have gone to the bother of tracking me down unless he had something significant to say. He couldn’t be calling to just ask about the Yorkshire weather, after all.
‘I’m very tired,’ I told him, truthfully and without thinking.
I was still panting from a fitness test. Our season had also already been long and exhausting, an embarrassing failure for us. We’d crashed, dismally, winning only three Championship matches and finishing second to bottom. We were relegated as Lancashire took the title, a fact that only added to our misery. The occurrence of a Red Rose triumph and a White Rose disaster was too irresistible an opportunity for one entrepreneur, who produced a T-shirt with only the final table spread across it. Lancashire’s name and our own were printed in capitals, the letters much bigger than anyone else’s, which made the need for a witty slogan superfluous if you came from west of the Pennines. It was not only chastening, but also unexpected. The summer before we’d come close to the Championship ourselves, letting our chance go only on the last day when, against Kent at Headingley, nine of our wickets fell in 44 horrible minutes. One of them was mine. I was the last victim of a James Tredwell hat-trick. I was out for 9, which left me 82 short of my first 1,000-run season.
I’d now passed that landmark, finishing top of our averages, which was a consolation for me that didn’t altogether cushion the blow of going down. After passing 50 in 18 games, I’d also gone on to score my maiden century – I even turned it into a double hundred – against Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge. I still hadn’t twigged why Flower was calling. The suddenness of it seemed implausible, so my instinctive thought about being weary came out before I realised the stupidity of saying it. Fortunately Flower chose to ignore me, getting to his point quickly.
I was in Leeds. He wanted me in Cardiff. He also wanted me there as fast as I could gather my kit, get into a car and drive the 228 miles separating us. England were facing India in the last one-day international of the series; Ben Stokes was injured, and Flower wanted me to be his replacement. My fatigue lifted. I would have walked to Wales. You’ve never seen a man move so fast. I was still living at my mum’s, which meant a dash there, collecting clothes and bags, before the dash to Cardiff could begin. I set off around 6 p.m. and arrived at 11.30 p.m., everyone else tucked up in bed with the lights off.
That’s how, during mid-September 2011, my England career began.
My dad made 21 one-day international appearances for England. One of the most memorable, he said, was the first he played in coloured clothing and under lights, both of which were still a relatively Kerry Packer-style novelty for cricket in 1979. The innovations were a vulgar gimmick for the traditionalists, but an enticement for those either entirely new to the game or who liked the idea of clocking off from work and heading to the ground. My dad initially found the lights slightly surreal, as if a football match was about to break out. The posts holding them were 300 feet high. Picking up the ball was more difficult: the bulbs of yesteryear weren’t as bright as today’s and weren’t designed for cricket either. Throws in to the stumps from an outfield packed with shadows could be tricky to see. One of them – from Peter Willey – bashed him on the head. Like any Yorkshireman, brought up to be cautious about spending his brass, my dad went to find out how much it cost to use the lights. He whistled after being told the price: £175 per hour. The average workman back home then earned less than £2.75 an hour.
My introduction to ODIs was a day–nighter too. I was saying hello to them as Rahul Dravid was saying goodbye, the game his 344th and last appearance. We won the toss, put India in and were chasing a daunting 304 until the rain came, the target subsequently determined by Duckworth–Lewis. After som
e niggling, stop-start stuff, the target became 241 in 34 overs. When I came in, the floodlights burning across the ground, we were off the pace, needing 75 from 50 balls. Some thought the game was up, reckoning we’d fall far short.
Sometimes, it just clicks for you. There’s no other explanation, rational or otherwise, behind what you do. I faced 21 balls in 29 minutes. I hit three sixes. The first of them – a slog-sweep – sank into the crowd at mid-wicket, a calling card to announce my arrival. The other two went out of the ground and got a soaking in the River Taff. I made an unbeaten 41 and we won with ten balls and six wickets to spare. I’ll never forget Dravid’s handshake, warm and sincere. Or my man-of-the-match award, so unlikely only half an hour earlier. Or the sight of my mum, overjoyed in her pavilion seat as I walked back in at the end. That the whole thing came and went in a blur, spanning less than 24 hectic hours, benefited me, I’m sure. The rush home to pack, the rush down the motorway and the rush to leave tickets at the gate crowded out the nerves and eased the pressure. No one expected much. I could throw what I liked at my innings with impunity, and so I did.
Through the unfortunate timing of his birth, my dad didn’t make his Test debut until he’d played ten seasons and 183 first-class matches for Yorkshire. He found himself in the same era as two outstanding rivals and a handful of good ones. He rated the best of them, Alan Knott, as one of the ‘greatest-ever wicketkeepers’. He regarded Bob Taylor, so long Knott’s understudy, as a consummate performer.
Taylor played for Derbyshire. After a Sunday League game at Chesterfield, one drunken local accosted my dad as he came into the pavilion, telling him: ‘You’ll never be as ******* good as Bob Taylor. You’re a ******* ******,’ before kicking him twice in the back of the leg. The irony is that my dad would never have claimed to match the purity of Taylor’s glove-work – it was as though his hands were magnetised, drawing the ball straight into the well of his palms – but he did consider himself to be the superior all-rounder. Taylor’s batting was so weak that he made only one first-class hundred, finishing with an average below 17. Taylor, ten years older, had 22 Test appearances behind him before my dad made his first, aged 28. In late August 1979, England finally brought him into the team for the last match against India at the Oval. His first victim, claimed almost immediately, was also his most prized – the scalp of Sunil Gavaskar, caught behind.
(© Adrian Murrell/Allsport UK/Getty Images)
Next to the length of his apprenticeship mine was meagre. I’d played just two and a half seasons at Yorkshire and I was only 22. But in modern sport perspective can soon slip its anchor. You’re either hot or you’re not, the middle ground where common sense lives usually obliterated by either hallelujahs of praise or the sort of condemnation that stings because it is so disproportionate. So it was that instantly, almost out of nowhere and based solely on one innings on a damp night, I was being tipped as a player to watch and follow, a Test cricketer of the near future, a son possessing the potential to be better than his dad. Because of Cardiff I spent the winter with the ODI squad in India and then went on the Lions’ tour of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
I was being gently prepared for a Test series.
At Headingley I knew the only way was up for us, primarily because the repercussions of going down still further, which would mean scrapping in mid-table or at the bottom of Division Two, were too awful to contemplate. We couldn’t let that happen. Yorkshire took one of those punts that was a eureka moment disguised as a gamble. Jason Gillespie was hired to work alongside Martyn Moxon.
When Martyn first came to Yorkshire, my dad remembered someone who wore glasses with lenses as thick as double-glazing. ‘With their usual sense of diplomacy,’ he said, ‘the team quickly decided that he looked like a frog.’ The name caught on; he’s been Frog or Froggy ever since. Jason was predictably called Dizzy after the jazz trumpeter, a musician whose cheeks swelled so much on the high notes that it looked as though someone was blowing air into them with a foot-pump. Dizzy and the Frog fitted like a dovetail joint for us. Dizzy wasn’t an experienced coach, but 71 Tests and more than 250 wickets for Australia meant he brought a sense of authority with him. Only five years before he’d been our overseas recruit, and the hook nose, the incongruous mullet and the size of his affable heart endeared him so much to the membership.
But I still remember how different the landscape could have looked at Yorkshire.
In 2006 the club moved for Chris Adams, asking him to restructure the whole set-up and become a kind of batsman-manager-captain-director of cricket and general man-at-the-top. It was a lot of hats to wear simultaneously.
Adams was on a high wave of success. He’d just taken Sussex to their second Championship. He’d won them the C&G Trophy final at Lord’s too. He even had a Yorkshire link; his father was a Yorkie. Adams gathered us together, including those, like me, who were hopeful of eventually moving through the ranks. The meeting was held in Headingley’s indoor school. I expected a cup of tea and a friendly handshake. I thought we’d then get an encouraging speech, a few rah-rah phrases that would make me and everyone else go away feeling buoyantly confident. We got a hard-line lecture instead.
From the start, Adams laid down the law. Everything was going to be different from now on, he said. What he intended was root, bud and branch reform, not a gentle nip and tuck. And what he proposed sounded to me like a dictatorship. There’d clearly be no softly, softly ‘getting to know you period’, and woe betide anyone who had different ideas from Adams’s own. He even used a PowerPoint presentation to punch out his plans in front of us. I sensed the temperature in the room dropping towards zero the further he got into it. We all went away thinking that a kind of tornado was about to gust through Headingley, ripping up everything and scattering it goodness knows where. Change was on the way, and we had to batten down the hatches for it.
I went away demotivated and fearing the worst. Adams had already appeared at a press conference, formally confirming his appointment. He’d been forthright, confident, brisk. We didn’t know that he hadn’t signed his contract. Nor did we know, even as he spoke to us so bullishly, that he was having second thoughts about the job. On the way home, he performed a spectacular U-turn. He decided to stick with Sussex, insisting he’d ‘underestimated just how big an undertaking’ Yorkshire were asking him to make. Adams also mentioned his family’s preference for the south coast, which is something so paramount that you’d think he would have established it definitively before setting off and speaking to us from the pulpit. He sounded relieved to be staying at Sussex. Most of us were more relieved that he wasn’t coming to Yorkshire.
Adams was right in one respect. The club is ‘a big undertaking’, but the axis of Moxon, as director of cricket, and Gillespie, as coach, reinvented it. Out of the doldrums we came. No Yorkshire team had gone unbeaten through a season since 1928. We managed it, promoted as runners-up in 2012. We’d have won the title if so many of our games early and late on hadn’t been weather-affected. It was as though the rain clouds were in conspiracy against us, following the team from match to match.
The core of the team was battle-hardened. There was Anthony McGrath, a Championship winner for us a decade earlier. There was Steve Patterson, who took 48 wickets. And there were Phil Jacques and Adam Lyth, each of whom made nearly 800 runs, and Gary Ballance, who made nearly 700. Twelve months before we’d been able to slide in and steal back Ryan Sidebottom after Nottinghamshire baulked over giving him the security of a long-term contract. He was only 33, which hardly made him pensionable. Our gain. Their loss.
Gillespie made one decision pivotal to me, but Gerard Brophy was so solidly dependable that I had no advance warning of it. He wanted me to be the first-choice wicketkeeper. The confidence it gave me spilled into everything I did. I got a ton against Kent at Headingley. I came within 18 runs of a double hundred against Leicestershire at Scarborough. I claimed a fifty for the Lions at Northamptonshire, which was like a mini England trial.
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��d muscled my way into becoming the logical choice for the first Test against West Indies.
At Lord’s.
Every Test ground has its own atmosphere. At Edgbaston, Old Trafford, Headingley and especially at Trent Bridge, where the floodlights of Nottingham Forest peak over the stand at the Radcliffe Road end, I’ve always sensed a football influence. The crowds are more boisterous, more sing-along. At the Oval, it seems as though the business community has poured en masse out of London’s Square Mile to be there.
Lord’s is different again. I’ve politely pushed my way through the crowds when either returning from a Nursery End net or after leaving the dressing room to go on to the field. I’ve also been inside the Long Room when it is as quiet as a church. I have gone around the gilt-framed paintings that hang on the wall – Grace and Bradman and Jardine and Lord Harris staring back at me – and I’ve run a hand across the top of those high-backed wooden chairs that are positioned in front of the wide windows that overlook the field. I’ve also looked down at the faded spike marks in the wooden floors of the pavilion, made by umpteen-thousand pairs of boots over umpteen decades of cricket, and then I’ve thought about all the names that have come this way before. It’s as though their shadows are still there, ghosting past me. My dad, who didn’t like pretension of any sort, felt suspicious of Lord’s, thinking it could be rather hoity-toity. On his first visit, made as a teenager, he climbed the narrow stairs to the dressing room and went on to the balcony. He stared towards the far end and said to anyone who would listen: ‘This ground’s not up to much.’ The slope, downhill from left to right, appalled him. He thought someone ought to level it.
I’d only played at Lord’s twice before I went there for the West Indies Test: two 40-over matches, the first undistinguished, the second bringing me a century. The ground wasn’t even half-full, but it felt magisterial because of the flags, the weather vane twisting in the wind, the rise of the Grandstand and the members lolling across the pavilion seats. If the Queen gave permission for a game to be staged on the lawns of Buckingham Palace, I imagine it would be like Lord’s. There’s always a brass band, so loud that you can hear it as you’re getting changed or practising. There’s always a marquee pitched somewhere too. What you get is the flavour of a garden party with a cricket match going on inside it.
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