In Sydney, Mike Brearley once asked my dad to go to long stop, where he got pelted with crushed beer cans and assorted rubbish and heard his parentage questioned in between every delivery. Well-hardened to the grumbling of restless, difficult-to-please crowds at Bradford and Sheffield, he found the Australians merely cantankerous in comparison. At Lord’s, it’s a little more genteel. I fielded in front of the Grandstand, where I could hear the pop and fizz of champagne being opened and regularly saw a cork whizzing over or past me, launched from the lower or middle tiers as though someone was using me for target practice.
We recall so much of our lives in moments, seen again like a page of snapshots, rather than a long, continuous image. So, going out to bat for the first time, I remember like this.
A breezy May day, the wind rippling in from behind the Nursery End. The clouds low. The scoreboard on 266 for four. A short, respectful nod to the departing Andrew Strauss – a century behind him, a standing ovation already underway – as we pass one another on the pavilion steps.
We’d bowled the West Indies out for 243 and had replied to the total with some conviction. We’d almost got 50 before the first wicket fell and were within a spit of 200 before the second went down. I’d been sitting on the balcony, making sure that my eyes were familiar with the dull light; though, it has to be stressed, sitting from afar and standing at the crease are markedly different. And, when you’re batting at the Nursery End and looking at the rust-coloured architecture of the pavilion, it can be difficult to pick up the ball. It can vanish into one of those dark spaces shadowing the sightscreens. Or it can get lost in someone’s brightly striped MCC blazer.
I was facing Kemar Roach. At 5 foot 8 he isn’t the tallest quick bowler. He can nonetheless get the ball to hurry at you when it pitches short of a length. He has a fast arm, which comes down like the crack and whirl of a whip. He wore a sparkling earring in each lobe and a gold necklace that was as thick as a loop of naval rope. It swayed as he ran in towards me. The ball, only three and a half overs old, was wax-shiny, the seam stitched high and the maker’s embossed stamp glowing even to the naked eye. Roach banged it in intimidatingly short. He figured, I’m sure, that I’d be nervous, a bit flustered and unsure of myself. The ball reared. I went a half-step back and almost, but not quite, shaped to deal with it by going on to my toes. Then, realising it was still climbing, I dropped my wrists and tried to wrench my chest out of the line. The delivery hit me directly on the sternum.
Welcome to Test cricket, I thought.
It was the sort of crunching blow that can knock the breath out of your body. I refused to flinch. I also refused to rub the spot where I’d been struck, thinking it would be construed as a sign of feebleness. Instead, I stood bolt upright, my expression as inscrutable as I could make it. I pretended that nothing hurt, nothing untoward had happened and nothing could cow me or disturb my composure. The ball dropped harmlessly with a soft thud towards the slips, where Darren Sammy, the West Indies captain, narrowed his gaze, cast it towards me and said in his richly deep Saint Lucian accent, deliberately loud enough for me to hear: ‘Oh boys, we got a brave one here. A real brave one. You hit him and he don’t go down.’
I comforted myself with the thought that it could have been worse. Even a batsman as classically fine as Jimmy Cook – more than 21,000 first-class runs – got a first-ball duck in his Test debut for South Africa. I was still there, another two deliveries of Roach’s over to come. However much the wound stung, the outline of the seam possibly tattooed on to my chest, I wouldn’t be in the record books as someone who got a first-baller at Lord’s, which is the kind of fact that would have followed me for ever. After that, I steadied myself and managed to make some shots, including a handsome drive. I got in – but then I got out. Roach claimed his revenge, trapping me lbw for 16, the ball jagging down the slope that my dad disliked so much.
We won that Test by five wickets, and the second at Trent Bridge even more overwhelmingly, steamrollering them by nine wickets. The third, at Edgbaston, ended as a draw, a fierce barrage of rain settling over Birmingham and refusing to move. The first two days were washed out, making what was left largely redundant, a result impossible. My first Test series was over, and I’d batted only three more times (one of those was a nought not out). I’d patched together 38 runs, inspiring no poetry.
Now, when I look back on it, I think I probably wasn’t ready for England at that stage. But I also know that if I hadn’t played then – if Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower hadn’t backed me – I wouldn’t have been as successful subsequently. If not then, when? If not against the West Indies, then whom?
I learnt painfully – as that ball from Roach flew towards me – that the difference between the County Championship and a Test match is half a second; sometimes even less than that. Not even a full tick-tock of the clock. Doesn’t seem much, does it? Everything, though, is speeded up in a Test – especially the ball when it’s coming at you – in comparison with the Championship. For Yorkshire, I was used to getting two balls an over to score off. For England, I might not get one. Your temperament as much as your talent is on trial. A coach can talk to you about all this for hours, but you have to experience five minutes first-hand to understand it properly. I learnt that at Lord’s, which meant I benefited from it later on.
I was the 87th player to make his Test debut for England there, which is a nice statistic but not as significant as another. I was the 13th son to follow his dad into the England team, a sequence that began in the mid-1930s when David Townsend, an opener and the last man to be capped without playing for a first-class county, emulated what his father Charlie – an all-rounder who bowled slow right-arm and batted left-handed for Gloucestershire – did in 1899. Among those who achieved the feat after them are some names you’ll find in a hall of fame, such as the Tates, Fred and Maurice; the Joe Hardstaffs, senior and junior; the Manns, Frank and George; the Huttons, Len and Richard; and, much more recently, the Broads, Chris and Stuart. There was only one difference between me and everyone else who had gone before. I was the only son whose dad wasn’t there to see him play.
My dad said he always remembered a John Player League game at Hull against Hampshire. Geoffrey Boycott was out lbw to a shooter, a horror of a delivery skimming so low that the ball trimmed the grass of a shorn pitch. As a novice, my dad couldn’t understand why, as soon as the umpire’s finger passed sentence, everyone around him began dashing out of the dressing room. It was as though someone had just shouted ‘Fire!’ ‘They fled through the door,’ he said. Boycs, fuming at such rotten luck, arrived in a rage of industrial language, which began after a bit of bat tossing. My dad sat as impassively as possible through the worst of it. This seemed to impress Boycs, who gained a respect for him. The two of them stayed pals even through the turbulent years at Yorkshire.
Boycs and his wife Rachael have been so helpful to my mum. They let her use their home in South Africa and we went as a family later too, spending a Christmas there. Boycs has seen me grow up, once even coming to watch me play football, but has never interfered. I’ve known nonetheless that he and Rachael are always willing to support the three of us, however and wherever possible.
So it was appropriate that Boycs should present me with my England cap, shaking hands and telling me in that unmistakable voice, which most at one time or another have tried to imitate: ‘Your dad would have been so proud of you today.’
I knew it was true, but I so wanted my dad to have been there, so I could have heard him say it instead.
My Test debut at Lord’s was the second thing I wish he’d seen.
CHAPTER 7
THE SMALLEST ROOM AT LORD’S
I had never been to an Ashes Test before I played in one; everything I knew about the colour and the atmosphere of the series had been gleaned from television.
Like everyone else, caught in the wild fever of it, the 2005 series gripped me wholly from start to tumultuous finish, making the others I’d seen before it seem
palely inconsequential. In those seven crazy weeks it became impossible to look away. You were too afraid of missing something. You searched out a TV or radio and you turned every day to the newspaper back pages. It was suddenly fashionable to be into cricket. Even people who previously had been only loosely interested in the game became utterly absorbed in it, as though the series was another soap opera. Wherever you went someone was talking, like an expert, about tactics or the personalities of Andrew Flintoff or Kevin Pietersen, Shane Warne or Ricky Ponting.
The images of those Tests have since been played and replayed so often that constant repetition has affixed them to the mind. We can always summon back the most memorable of them: that Steve Harmison bouncer at Lord’s, which gashed Ponting’s cheek after pounding him on the side of the helmet, the blood that came from the cut proving that the Australians were really human like the rest of us … Flintoff draping his left arm over Brett Lee’s right shoulder in an act of Corinthian compassion at Edgbaston, a scene worthy of some grand oil painting as well as the photograph that captured it … the swarm and heave of the crowd as it queued outside Old Trafford, the compulsion to be there and be a part of the match irresistible … the dive, the rise of dust and then the splayed stumps at Trent Bridge after Gary Pratt’s run-out of Ponting … and finally the pandemonium of the Oval, where there was enough confetti for a thousand and one weddings and enough champagne for a thousand and one more. A series like that, with the bonus of a cliff-hanging last day of suspense, comes around rarely, like some grand comet. You count yourself, as I did, grateful and privileged to have witnessed it.
I’d grown up in the age of Baggy Green dominance. I wasn’t a glint in anyone’s eye when, in 1986–87, the team that supposedly couldn’t bat, bowl or field – even though Ian Botham was in it – brought the Ashes back from Australia under Mike Gatting. In the year I was born, we lost them again. My generation grew up so familiar with England not owning the urn that it seemed as though there would be no end to the sequence of disappointments. The Aussies looked invulnerable; they came and then conquered or we’d go down there and get our butts kicked. As spectators we became fatalistic about it, glumly taking defeat almost for granted and consoling ourselves with thoughts of ‘the next time’. So in 2005 we rooted from our hearts to our boots for what we eventually got, but we never believed it would happen until it actually did. We had our stiff upper-lip ready again – just in case victory slid inexplicably away from us at the very moment we went to grasp it.
That sweetest of summers also answered the question of sport’s place in life’s great scheme. You’ll always find hardened naysayers who think getting carried away about winning on a field is frivolous when the world has more important issues to concern it. But what 2005 did was underscore sport’s capacity to have a dazzling effect on morale. This was more than simply ‘a sporting win’. This was a catharsis too. We felt better about ourselves because of it.
I was a fortnight away from my 16th birthday when that series ended. My hero worship throughout it belonged to Ian Bell – though I don’t think I’ve ever made that abundantly clear to him. He was the baby of the England team. He was only 23 and had played in just three Tests before being pitched into it. He didn’t get a substantial amount of runs against the Australians. Apart from making fifties in both innings at Old Trafford, the limelight didn’t track him the way it did Flintoff or Pietersen. But sometimes just the fluidity of a single shot – a cover drive or something wristy or powerfully straight – was so well-timed, so beautifully exquisite in its execution that it amazed me. He didn’t go in for flashy, show-off strokes, but everything was still stylish. He was neat and gracefully compact, his movement gorgeous to watch. I didn’t want to miss a ball when he came in, thinking I could learn something. I would have paid at the gate to study him alone. Even his walk to the wicket had an authority about it.
He had a Slazenger bat. I had a Slazenger bat too, and in the nets at St Peter’s School I tried to copy him – the lovely arc of his pick-up, the lovelier follow-through. He’d sometimes hold the final position of the shot, as though posing for a sculptor who was about to start chipping away at some vast block of stone. I know there are spectators old enough to talk with first-hand knowledge about the greats, such as Wally Hammond and Tom Graveney, both of whom had a signature flourish to their shot-making, especially through the covers. But I can’t believe either of them – or anyone else – had more aesthetic appeal than Bell. Not for me anyhow.
I watched him with awe and I wanted to be like him. I also wanted to play against Australia, but it was not the sort of private thought you made too public because it sounded fanciful – even more crazy than telling everyone you planned to fly to the moon simply by flapping your arms. But less than eight years later, on an overcast early afternoon, I came down the shallow drop of stone steps that lead out of the wooden pavilion at Trent Bridge. It was my first Ashes Test. We were batting on a pitch that was the colour of parched wheat. We were in a bit of trouble: 124 for four. My mouth had dried up a little. There was a small swarm of butterflies doing aerobatics in my stomach. I was wearing my game-face, as sternly serious as I could make it. I didn’t pass my new partner on the way to the crease. He was leaning on his bat at the Radcliffe Road end. He nodded a greeting to me, and I nodded one back at him.
It was Ian Bell.
An over or two later, he got a delivery that wasn’t too full or too wide of off stump. The front foot went forward, as elegantly as a ballet step. He leant into the ball and drilled it through the covers. It was one of those shots that you know, as soon as it hums off the middle, that the fielder isn’t there to stop the ball, but merely to bring it back to the bowler from the boundary the way a dog would fetch a stick.
For me, it could have been 2005 all over again … except that I was now part of the action instead of watching it from the sofa.
My dad made a single appearance for England against Australia. It was the Centenary Test at Lord’s in 1980. His 29th birthday fell on the fourth day. He accepted that the occasion was much better than the game, which ended tamely in a draw after the weather, showing no respect for a nostalgic anniversary, repeatedly got in the way of the play. The rain swallowed up so many hours of the match that the draw soon became the only outcome. He took two catches and claimed a stumping too. My dad was proud of that. He was also proud that three other Yorkshiremen were on the field beside him: Geoffrey Boycott, Bill Athey and Chris Old. He thought it demonstrated Yorkshire’s integral part in so much of what had gone before in the Ashes.
(© Ken Kelly/Popperfoto/Getty Images)
There’d always been an appreciation of history in his approach to the game. Introduced to any former pro, he’d want to know what their era had been like and how it was markedly different from his own. My mum says that he could ‘talk cricket all night’, and he always sought out those who liked to do the same. Meeting and mingling with more than 200 former England and Australia players was for him like being whisked off in a time machine and finding himself blissfully in the past. He was aware that there were men at the black-tie dinners and the drinks parties, the dressing-up parts of a week-long celebration, whom he would never meet again once the match was over, such as Stork Hendry, who’d figured in the 1921 Ashes series here, and Percy Fender, who’d gone down there the winter before. He spoke to whomever he could.
As part of an event that was unrepeatable, my dad called the Centenary Test one of his cricketing ‘highlights’ and also one of the ‘great experiences of my life’, treasuring the souvenirs he picked up from it. He remembered Old lifting the spinner Ray Bright into the well of the Tavern to avoid the follow-on. And he remembered Kim Hughes returning the insult, straight-hitting Old for six on to the top tier of the pavilion.
I’d already played in eight Tests before I got to Nottingham in 2013, but I discovered there what my dad found out 33 years before me. Nothing compares to a Test against Australia. You feel more than a hundred years of the Ashes pressi
ng down on you like a physical weight, but what really sets the series apart is the sense that everyone is watching – especially, because of 2005, those who aren’t motivated to follow a Test against anyone else. Patriotism pulls them towards the Ashes. So it’s like walking on to a stage with every light on and turned up to full beam. You’re in the glare of things like never before.
The thrill of opening day of the opening Ashes Test is different from any other. You sing ‘God Save the Queen’ for the first time. You get – as we did at Trent Bridge – the Red Arrows roaring above you, the sky suddenly streaked with a smoky trail of red, white and blue, which lingers a while before breaking into wispy strands. You look around and see the flag unfurled everywhere, rippling across each of the popular stands in high waves. It was like the Last Night of the Proms. You half expected Elgar to turn up and shake you by the hand.
The scene and the background music prickled the hairs on the back of my neck. Like me, Joe Root was making his Ashes debut. He admitted afterwards that the pomp and circumstance and stagey formalities ‘flustered’ him. So I can only imagine how the Australians must have reacted – however stoic each of them pretended to be.
The debates and opinions that are traded before an Ashes Test seem ceaseless, making it a relief when the only word that matters is ‘heads’ or ‘tails’. Alastair Cook, after calling correctly, was soon steering a ball off his legs. I remember it gathered speed through mid-wicket as it bumped over the old pitches.
A Clear Blue Sky Page 13