A Clear Blue Sky

by Jonny Bairstow

  He was wrong; I was back in three.

  Having not wanted to play before, I now wanted to play very much. First that recreational period away from the game and then the enforced absence from it galvanised me. I was refreshed, which made me relax too. In March I’d dreaded the season to come. In May I couldn’t wait for mine to start.

  I also decided to change my batting technique. I quietly went into the Yorkshire nets, which are below the East Stand at Headingley. Ian Dews stood beside the bowling machine and fed balls into it for me. My original idea was simply to play straight. Get my balance. Get my head and eyes over the ball. I wanted to stop going after deliveries – and I also wanted to start playing them later rather than in front of me. The change I made was minimal but critical. I stood with a raised backlift, and it felt comfortable. Before anyone else but me, Ian knew it was going to work. I hit one ball so high and hard that it punched a hole in the wall behind him. The ball is still lodged there. I began timing shots so well that Ian thought his job had become dangerous and almost went off to find a suit of armour.

  Looming ahead was our Championship match at Durham, which Sky was broadcasting live. I had to be there. It was too important to miss. The TV exposure was an early chance to impress England’s selectors again. Jason Gillespie disliked picking anyone who was only half-fit. I had to demonstrate to him that my finger had healed. I wheedled myself into a low-key fixture – so low-key that you won’t find it in the record books.

  If life is a great wheel, turning to bring you back sometimes to a place you’ve been before, then this was a prime example of it. The match was staged at Sedbergh, on the same spot where I’d made my first XI debut for St Peter’s School a decade earlier. The weather, cloudy and overcast, was the same too. Rain was closing in, and for an hour it seemed as though it and I were locked in a race. I needed to score as many runs as quickly as possible before the deluge arrived. I managed it, hitting 40-odd, which was sufficient scorebook proof of my fitness, before the game was ruined.

  I don’t like to set targets. You can put too much pressure on yourself that way. You can’t legislate for the ball that rears up unaccountably or stays absurdly low. Or for the umpire who gives you out when you’re not. I got the latter at Durham. I made 97, denied a century only because of a dodgy lbw decision. Replays showed that the ball would only have hit stumps that were three feet high. With my new approach ticking along, I still left Durham thinking that the new England coach Peter Moores – another former wicketkeeper – would have seen enough. I thought he’d pencil me in for the first Test against Sri Lanka at Lord’s, which was only a month away. I didn’t even make the squad. Nor did I get a consoling phone call to explain why or to offer me the odd scrap of encouragement for the rest of the season.

  The frozen wilderness isn’t a pleasant place to be – especially when your fall into it is so steep. I found myself in an alien and disorientating landscape. In less than six months I’d gone from somewhere – the status of being England’s number-two wicketkeeper – to nowhere, cut out of the reckoning. If I’d snatched at five catches in Australia and dropped all of them, I’d have understood the decision. Even if I’d only been 13th man at Lord’s, and then sent back to Yorkshire, I’d have appreciated the thinking behind it. But to be excluded completely, as though I’d become instantly irrelevant, seemed inconceivably harsh to me. Once the initial shock wore off, like an anaesthetic, what I felt was a demoralising pain. I tried to rationalise what had happened, but the sense and meaning of it always slipped away from me. England had nursed me through the ranks. I’d appeared in two Ashes series. I was battle-hardened. Why abandon me now?

  I began to think my uncle Ted may have been right. Maybe I should have chosen rugby ahead of cricket. Perhaps I could have carved out a better career for myself there. I dwelt – albeit fairly briefly – on whether, approaching 25, I could still make a late switch. Could I get myself into physical shape and persuade a club to sign me? But then thoughts about ‘fight or flight’ buzzed into my head again. I’ve always argued my corner, combatively if necessary; I’m exactly like my dad in that respect. When I was in Yorkshire’s academy side, I wanted to know why I wasn’t being promoted to the second XI. When I reached the second XI, I wanted to know why I hadn’t broken into the first team. But I learnt that, once you’ve been told the answer, there is nothing to be gained by banging on about it in public. Or by going in a sulk. I decided to say nowt, buckle down and prove England wrong.

  That ancient Chinese proverb – how a ‘journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’ – usefully sums up the way back I chose. My single step was the decision to go on, persevere and win back a Test place, however long it took. There was just one stage on which I could do that: the County Championship. And I didn’t only want to perform so well in it that England couldn’t possibly ignore me. I wanted us to win the title too.

  More than ever we live in a Twenty20, white-ball world. Spectators like it. Television definitely likes it. And players also like it because of the financial bounty, unimaginable even a decade ago. Our careers can be ephemeral, flourishing one moment but over the next through injury, burn-out or loss of form. That’s worth remembering when one of us gets accused of greed after heading off to the Indian Premier League or the Big Bash. I belong to the T20 generation. I saw the competition begin, and I’ve watched it develop, gradually seeping into every nook and cranny of cricket before entirely reshaping the domestic and international calendars. No one before T20 was in the nets sharpening their hand speed or on the edge of the square practising distance-hitting, the ball arcing into the stands like a drive off a golf tee. As for the reverse sweep and the paddle scoop … you wouldn’t have dared. You’d have been marked down as stark mad or a cricketing heathen.

  T20 was a part of my growing up – and it’s been part of my career too – but I’ve never lost my respect for the County Championship as a consequence. That’s because no county is more synonymous with it than Yorkshire, where the trophy and the pennant are almost considered to be family heirlooms. But that’s also because of my dad, who considered the Championship to be ‘everything’ and the ‘main reason’ why he played. To him it was the ultimate prize as well as the ultimate test of the county pro. His view seems anachronistic nowadays, when the grounds are full for T20 matches and three-quarters empty for Championship games, but every year you only have to look at the celebrations after the title is won to know how much it still matters and also what it means. You sweat through days and weeks and months for it. It’s a battle of endurance, a trial physically and mentally to sustain form, confidence, hope and belief. Those who win the Championship, collecting a silver medal in a box, are proud of it. Those who don’t envy them.

  My dad, having seen Yorkshire repeatedly crowned ch

  (© Adrian Murrell/Allsport UK/Getty Images)

  ampions in the 1960s, dearly wanted a Championship of his own. He never got his wish. He won the John Player League in 1983, a year in which Yorkshire finished at the foot of the Championship for the first time in their history (imagine what my dad thought about that). Four years later he won the Benson & Hedges Cup at Lord’s. Yorkshire beat Northamptonshire. The scores were level as the last ball was bowled, the win sealed because Yorkshire had lost fewer wickets. He celebrated as though it was Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and the Queen’s Jubilee rolled into one. The joy this win brought him was evident in every line of his face. In a close-up photograph taken of him on the Lord’s balcony, you see the spread of crow’s feet from his eyes and those curved crevices from his cheekbones to his mouth. They are deeply pronounced because his smile is so wide, so full. I never tire of seeing this picture because my dad is the personification of happiness in it.

  He came close to the Championship only once. In 1975, not expecting much from the summer, Yorkshire surprised themselves and everyone else, losing only one match but finishing second – 16 points behind Leicestershire, who were captained by Ray Illingworth. The se
asons around that one were often about mid-table finishes or even a drop below it: 10th, 13th, 14th. There was even a 16th place at a time when there were only 17 counties.

  The writer Alan Gibson, a man of the South Riding, once said of Yorkshire’s disputatious history: ‘It’s the bugbear of Yorkshiremen that they always have to behave like Yorkshiremen or in their fixed belief of what a Yorkshireman should be: tough, ruthless, brave, mean.’ The club my dad fought for throughout the 1970s and 1980s was a demonstration of that statement made flesh.

  At its tamest my dad called Yorkshire a ‘soap opera’. At its bitterest he alluded to it as a ‘tragedy’, which summons something of Shakespeare. There was certainly a Shakespearean scale to things at Yorkshire – and many characters were Shakespearean-like – but it would take the amount of paper that Tolstoy ate up publishing a single novel to even outline the full stirring of the plot.

  I’ll keep this brief.

  Geoffrey Boycott took over the captaincy in 1971. He was replaced in 1978 when Illingworth returned to manage the team. My dad believed Illingworth had been brought back to get Boycs out of the dressing room altogether. ‘He would have succeeded,’ he explained, ‘in any other county but Yorkshire.’ When Boycs was ousted, the malice in the explanation for it wasn’t even thinly disguised. ‘It is not for what you have done, but because of what you are,’ he was told. Flash forward to 1983. Yorkshire’s cricket sub-committee sack Boycs and its general committee award him a testimonial. The contradiction makes no sense, but shows that Yorkshire’s politics had become a fractious and tangled weave.

  The general committee was 23-strong, elected on a regional basis in 17 different constituencies, stretching alphabetically from Barnsley to York. Each of them, my dad said, had their own, sometimes fiercely independent and idiosyncratic ideas about how Yorkshire ought to be run. Hours of every annual general meeting could be swallowed up by points of order or arcane nitpicking, the business of the team buried beneath it. It annoyed the hell out of my dad. During the climax to a game at Scarborough, one member decided to demonstrate about the issue of ‘membership seating’. He parked himself near the sightscreen and periodically disrupted play by moving as the ball was about to be bowled. Yorkshire were closing in on a win, every over vital, but took only nine wickets before the day ended. My dad continually shouted at the protester, urging him to give up. He became convinced afterwards that the man’s cussedness, depriving Yorkshire of vital overs, had cost them the match. This stupid incident, long forgotten I imagine, is symbolic of the state of unrest and rebellion that Yorkshire became trapped in.

  Civil wars are always the nastiest and the most bloody. Yorkshire proved that.

  Some swore by Boycs. Others swore about him. What engulfed Yorkshire in the debate was perpetual controversy: writs, private and public meetings, accusations, recriminations and remorse. Every tongue brought in a tale, and every tale condemned someone as a villain. It became a mud-slinging contest – and each side matched the other clod for clod. Politics, personality and pride became more entwined than ever with the cricket. My dad said he ‘cringed’ to see the club in such a state. It was feeding time for the press, who gorged understandably on every delectable detail. The headlines were gruesome:

  YORKSHIRE – THE FAMILY AT WAR

  YORKSHIRE: WILL THE FIGHTING EVER STOP?

  YORKSHIRE’S BAD BLOOD RUNS EVERYWHERE

  After being sacked, Boycs rang my dad, so overcome with sadness that he had to break off the conversation. ‘I thought he might have been crying,’ my dad said. Every player was asked whether Boycs ought to remain in the team. My dad unhesitatingly voted ‘Yes’. Only two of his teammates did likewise. One of them was Arnie Sidebottom. My dad was part of the defence counsel for Boycs. He thought it ‘made more sense to have him in the side’. He also thought: ‘When he says Yorkshire cricket is his life, he is telling the truth.’

  (© Bob Thomas/Getty Images)

  Boycs stayed at Yorkshire. At a special general meeting, which was like a high-noon showdown, his supporters won the vote to reinstate him. Boycs soon became a member of the general committee, and Brian Close was restored as chairman of the cricket sub-committee. You might find this hard to credit, since I’m describing events that occurred six years before I was born, but some of the feuds those rows cleaved open, as well as some of the wounds caused as a consequence of them, have still to heal. This isn’t as plain daft as it sounds when you think of how heated the exchanges between the opposing camps became. Or how a sense of proportion got lost amid the shouting. My dad suffered, implausibly called the ‘head of the Yorkshire Mafia’ and also the ‘little bastard’ responsible for ‘causing all the trouble’. His accuser was a former Yorkshire committee member. In fact, my dad was a mediator, who loathed the infighting and remarked dryly of it: ‘The trouble with revolutions is that anyone can be caught up in them.’

  To be captain of Yorkshire was once described as being ‘the second-best job on earth’ – only half a notch below being captain of England. My dad had always wanted the job. As early as 1981 he confronted Illingworth about it at Scarborough. Illingworth had just made an uncapped player stand-in captain ahead of him. Exactly what was said depends on whose version you prefer. It was one of those yes-you-did and no-you-didn’t sort of arguments, but the battle-lines between them were not under debate. My dad thought he should have been captain; Illingworth disagreed. What’s also not in doubt is that my dad turned up the volume. Sailors in the Viking area of the North Sea are believed to have heard clearly what he said. Finally becoming captain in the summer of 1984, he was expected to bring together factions that were at loggerheads. No peacekeeper in the United Nations could have reconciled their differences. He was congratulated on his appointment by one member, who then warned him: ‘Watch your back.’

  My dad made two things clear. There should be ‘no backbiting, no grudges’, no traces of the ill will of Yorkshire’s wintery discontent taken on to the field. He also didn’t want to be a captain ‘who led a team of losers’. These were optimistic ambitions, and he must have known it. He was constantly obliged to dodge a lot of criss-cross friendly fire, and every match was ‘played in an atmosphere of crisis’, he said.

  On the morning of his first Championship match – against Somerset at Taunton – Boycs offered to give him a lift. He took a wrong turn and got lost. ‘If Boycs didn’t carry a map in his car, he wouldn’t be able to find his way home,’ my dad said. The two of them were late, but Yorkshire won in a run chase and went on an unbeaten streak lasting until the end of June. Injuries and a limited attack meant a 14th-place finish. The team also lost horrifically to Shropshire in the first round of the NatWest Trophy. His verdict was: ‘We’ve been beaten by a team of amateurs, which doesn’t say much for our professionals.’

  My dad was unlucky. He always said he was less than a foot away from putting Yorkshire into the Benson & Hedges Cup final. In the semi, against Warwickshire at Headingley, he hit a shot, whistle-clean and out of the middle, but saw it taken on the boundary only because Bob Willis – 6 foot 6 tall in his bare feet – claimed the catch. Anyone else, lacking Willis’s height and telescopic reach, would have watched the ball arc over them for a match-winning six. Being named man of the match was no consolation for my dad. ‘Who remembers beaten semi-finalists?’ he asked, mournfully. The defeat left a little cloud over him, and nothing could shift it for a while.

  Captaincy was difficult for him at first. My dad found it hard to ‘tell an old mate’ that he wasn’t in the team. He knew, too, that some saw him as a sergeant major, screaming orders, rather than an officer, pushing a fielder into position with a wave of his hand. Illingworth would later criticise him for that: ‘People on the edge hear him shouting and yelling and they think he’s a good skipper. But good captains don’t do that.’ When he took over, Yorkshire had attempted – but failed – to persuade him to hand the wicketkeeping gloves to someone else. Wicketkeeping was too important to give up, he said, but the dif
ficulty of combining it and the captaincy was ‘conveying the message’. As my dad said: ‘You can’t just wander up to a bowler and you can’t always be running from where you are to them. Everything would take too long.’ Anyway, he liked to lead Yorkshire the way he had always played for them, the noise he made integral to that.

  My dad’s time as captain was memorably described as ‘a series of uphill cavalry charges’. The sentence is meant to illustrate not only Yorkshire’s difficulty in grasping the initiative against teams that were more experienced and more heavily armed than them, but also the heart and guts and fight in my dad. I can think of a better analogy. His favourite film – which we watched so often as a family that we almost wore out first a video and then a DVD of it – was Zulu, which depicts the Battle of Rorke’s Drift in 1879. Michael Caine had the breakthrough role of his career as Gonville Bromhead. My dad was more John Chard, the character played by Stanley Baker. Zulu is about how 150 soldiers held off three to four thousand warriors. Chard is told he hasn’t got ‘much of an army’ at his disposal, but accepts it and makes a lot of very little. He continues to issue the same order – ‘Front rank fire! Rear rank reload!’ – to keep their spirit and momentum going, never slackening himself. Chard has most of the best lines in Zulu, and I can imagine my dad saying some of them. Told his troops are tired, he responds with: ‘I don’t give a damn – we fight on.’ When Chard, just wounded, learns that Bromhead isn’t overjoyed about having leadership responsibility shoved on to him, he says: ‘You’re a professional.’