A Clear Blue Sky

by Jonny Bairstow

  Zulu was an inspirational film for my dad. He admired the red-coated British, but also admired the Zulus, who could run 50 miles towards the scene of a battle and still fight, fresh and fit, after getting there. Yorkshire was my dad’s small army, outnumbered and outflanked but somehow surviving and occasionally prospering, if never coming too close to winning a trophy. He was always firing, always reloading, always aware that Yorkshire could be overrun at any moment. The subtleties of captaincy were less significant than the bloody-mindedness of just going on. It was a time of adjustment on the field and a typically unsettled one off it. Even Lord Hawke, dug up and dusted off, couldn’t have done much better than my dad did.

  It was still heretical to say then that Yorkshire ought to recruit from outside the county. My dad said it anyway, embroiled in a scrap over the recruitment of an overseas star. ‘The game’s changed,’ he told the committee. ‘You’ve got to fight fire with fire.’ Yorkshire’s loyalty to its own was a patriotically well-meaning but flawed act of intransigency. It persisted until 1992 when the county caved in, hiring at last a promising young fella you might have heard of: Sachin Tendulkar. On his arrival, he was immediately handed a flat cap and a pint of Tetley’s so he could pose as an authentic Tyke for the newspaper photographers.

  Odd how, 21 years later, I found myself standing at short leg to Tendulkar in a Test in Mumbai. I was crouched low and observing him through the grille of my helmet, amazed at the stillness of his body before the ball was bowled, the nimbleness of his feet as he picked the line and length of it, and also the depth of his bat, so thick that it seemed as though the whole trunk of a willow tree had been used to make it. Someone has only to mention Tendulkar and that image of him appears in front of me again, as though I am still there.

  Yorkshire finished 11th in my dad’s second season and 10th in his third, which was progression by inches. It wasn’t enough for the committee, who wanted yards and so used the most unoriginal of excuses – that his wicketkeeping had ‘suffered’ because of his captaincy – to give the job to someone else. One of his favourite put-downs, delivered with gentle scepticism, was ‘you know three-quarters of seven-eighths of sod all’. He believed it applied to Yorkshire then. He felt snubbed and also saw himself as a scapegoat. He recovered from that blow, returning to the ranks, but not subsequent ones. In 1988 he was dropped for the first time in his career. A year later the cricket committee decided to sack him, their decision reversed only after Brian Close’s intervention. On a sunny day in June 1990 he was sacked, the news relayed in a phone call. That summer he’d ensured maximum batting points in one match and saved Yorkshire in two others. He was third in the club’s Championship averages. ‘I’m utterly devastated. I can’t understand it,’ he said. ‘I will have to start counting my teeth because I’ve been kicked in the mouth so often.’ He lost sleep about it too, admitting he’d once got up at 4 a.m. to check and recheck his run-scoring records and compare them with previous seasons.

  I know my dad was reluctant to accept that Yorkshire were duty-bound to bed in a replacement for him eventually, and so he resented their efforts to do it. But the club were at fault too, refusing to placate him a little; for if you’re constantly thrashed with a stick, rather than offered an olive branch, you’re only going to respond one way. He asked a rhetorical question: ‘How much does loyalty count?’ It was meant to embarrass Yorkshire, a sign of how sour he felt towards them. Uncle Ted remembers how much his farewell disturbed him even 12 months later. He was still adamant about the unfairness of it. He was still certain that he ought to be playing. He was still talking about the principles of loyalty.

  As far as the Championship was concerned, there was no sense of thwarted entitlement about it. He was simply aware that the team lacked the capacity to win the title while he was with them.

  It was different for me.

  We not only knew that we could win the Championship, but we also became quietly assured about it without ever feeling over-cocky. Before a ball was even bowled, there was a calm recognition that 2014 was ‘our summer’ – providing we put the work in.

  We possessed what Yorkshire during my dad’s day did not. We had a serious outbreak of talent. We had a set of bowlers who were capable of taking 20 wickets in a match. We had a set of batsmen who were capable of scoring a thousand-plus runs or at least coming close to it. We also had a squad with depth to it. We recruited well from overseas – first Kane Williamson, then Aaron Finch – but we also had lots of good pros who were on the edge of our team and could have muscled into quite a few others (19 different names appeared in our scorebook).

  This isn’t an infallible rule, but I look at successful Championship sides and mostly see in them a collection of players who fit into one of three categories. Those who performed with distinction for England in the recent past, but either know another call is unlikely to come or have retired internationally anyway. I’m thinking of Ryan Sidebottom. Those who have already played in a few Test matches, been dropped and want more than anything to reclaim a place. Someone like me, for instance. And those who are hungry for a first Test cap and go out to get one, such as Adam Lyth, Gary Ballance and Adil Rashid.

  Even then, during the long haul of the summer, you can only cross your fingers about the two factors no one has control over. The weather, especially in the blowy north, has to be kind. And usually – for this was before the introduction of the uncontested toss – the coin has to spin and fall the right way for you. It didn’t for us. We guessed right only five times, which statistically proves that Lady Luck didn’t love us as tenderly as she might have done. The fact that we still blasted other counties apart tells you the fighting shape we were in. Partly it was because of our ravenous desire for success; Yorkshire had won only that one title in 46 years. More significantly we knew the sweat we’d have to shed to achieve it, making us psychologically stronger than ever before.

  In 2013 the club celebrated its 150th anniversary. There was a lot of hoopla around our sesquicentennial: dinners, books, commemorative souvenirs, a smart striped blazer tailored in the club’s colours to exactly match one that Lord Hawke once wore. We were among the bookmakers’ Championship favourites, adding to the pressure and expectation that gathered around our attempt to crown the celebratory year. In many seasons winning seven matches would have been enough for us to do it. Not then. We came second to Durham, losing to them in one of those epic contests in Scarborough during the festival. Defeat wiped away the decent lead we then held and also gave them the impetus to cash in on a game in hand. We didn’t complain, acknowledging Durham as the marginally superior team. But being so close brought us a wider appreciation than before of what would be needed to push us over the line next time.

  The modern cricketer has access to a heap of data. Every season is scrupulously logged. It’s like an annual census of your career. Not only statistically, in the form of coloured charts, tables and diagrams, but also in video. You can get a recording of every innings you play, rewatching them on a laptop until your eyes pop and your mind frazzles. But we stripped everything down to the basics. Nothing about our strategy was ever too fussy or over-elaborate. Andrew Gale, our captain, spoke the phrase ‘process, process, process’ so often that he probably said it aloud in his sleep. It only meant repeating the next day what we’d done successfully during the previous one, each of us fulfilling our own responsibilities.

  We took the title emphatically and aggressively, unquestionably the best and the most attractive side. Five games were won by an innings. We romped through another by almost 300 runs, a second by more than 200 and a third by nine wickets. At Northampton our openers Adam Lyth and Alex Lees piled up an opening partnership of 375 and made almost 2,500 runs between them throughout the summer, bossing the Championship the way Justin Langer and Matthew Hayden had once bossed Tests for Australia. The bowling wasn’t only bullied; it was flayed and tanned too. Here’s the maths that matter: nine batsmen – and I was one of them – averaged over 40 and si
x bowlers averaged below 30. We dominated even those games we drew. We lost only once – at Lord’s in late April. Middlesex chased down a fantasy score of nearly 500, a defeat that would have subsequently ripped the backbone and the bleeding heart out of weaker teams. You have nightmares but forget them when you next turn out the light for bed. This is one that happened to us in broad daylight and while we were awake, but we treated the experience as you should any bad dream, forgetting it and moving on. We proved unstoppable because of that. We stampeded through August and into September, our results carrying us to Trent Bridge for the penultimate game against Notts, who were then in second place. If we could beat them, the Championship was ours.

  It was one of those games in which the sun shone strongly, making it seem as though high summer was still to come. The law of averages kicked in too. We won the toss, a rarity. We totted up over 500 runs, making them in no hurry. We pinned Notts to the floor and held them there.

  Jack Brooks rattled off 68 wickets in the season, mostly from short, rat-a-tat spells. We used him in spurts rather like the Australians had deployed Mitchell Johnson during the Ashes series. Trent Bridge, however, was Ryan Sidebottom’s stage. My dad’s on-field relationship with Tony Nicholson in the 1970s became symbiotic – almost telepathic, even. It wasn’t only that my dad could tell, simply from the way Nicholson spread his fingers on the seam, whether he planned to swing the ball away, bring it back or make it shoot upwards off a length. He could also detect from Nicholson’s body language – how tall he stood, the angle of his shoulders, the stride of his walk – how he was feeling at a particular hour, which meant he read, as easily as words on a page, how his friend would bowl. It’s the same for me with Sid. I can see when he’s about to take the opposition out. He’ll throw back that thick tangle of hair. He’ll stick his chest and his chin out a little further. He’ll look at a batsman as though mentally boring a hole straight through him.

  The chance he was being offered seemed too perfectly coincidental to be true. Here he found himself, back at the club that had curiously let him go, with the ball in his hand and the glint of the Championship ahead of him. Dear me; Notts were about to pay. In the first innings he took three for 35. In the second, as Notts followed on, I’ve never seen him bowl better. He blazed away at them. He made the ball do everything except come back into his hand after leaving it like a yo-yo. It was a classical demonstration of seam and swing and accuracy, a piece of cricketing art. The MCC could have produced an instructional DVD purely from one spell. In 18.2 overs he claimed six for 30.

  At 11.36 a.m. on the final morning, beneath a clear sky, one of my mates was bowling to another: it was Sid versus James Taylor. Titch slog-slashed a slightly short and wide ball to backward point. Game over. Championship won.

  My dad once said that if he ever won a trophy for Yorkshire he’d cry his eyes out. He did it twice. I don’t mind admitting that I wept at Trent Bridge too, as the consequence of our achievement sank in. So did Sid. We’d come so far together and scrambled over so many hurdles to get there. A lot of what we felt went unspoken only because each of us knew what was going through the other’s mind, our past experiences and our expression making words unnecessary. We were thinking about my dad … and about his dad … about how much we owed our respective families, who were there … about him proving Notts wrong at last … about my fight to get over Australia and get back into the England team … about Yorkshire being at the top again … about how proud we felt.

  It was one of those days that will stay with me always, however old I grow. I won’t forget the sound of ‘On Ilkley Moor Baht ’At’, a burst of community singing that rose from nowhere. Or the endless bottles of Veuve Clicquot sprayed across the outfield, which surely grew lusher over the winter because so much of the champagne got soaked into the grass. Or how, not far from the square, Sid and I played football with his children, Darley and Indiana, the shadows getting longer as the afternoon wore slowly on. Or the fact that none of us really wanted to go home, doing so only reluctantly, like moving a party elsewhere, when the ground was empty and the light was dropping. There is no time like the first time. I looked around me, savouring what I saw and storing images as memories, adding to those that I’d snapped with my mobile phone.

  A few months later Yorkshire fastened a team picture on to the wall near our dressing rooms. It remains there now. In the photograph, taken at Headingley after the season’s last match, we’re behind the obligatory sponsors’ board. Each of us has an arm raised in triumph. The Lord’s Taverners chalice is raised too. Whenever I pass it, the picture reminds me of our achievement and also of the whole spread of that super summer. But the most poignant thing isn’t the image on its own, but the place where Yorkshire chose to put it. It sits directly below another photograph – the one of my dad on the Lord’s balcony after the Benson & Hedges Cup final.

  (© Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)

  So there we are, dad and son alongside one another again, celebrating triumphs that are 27 years apart.

  That title-winning season turned my career right-side up again. It made possible all that followed immediately afterwards.

  I was behind the stumps for 12 successive first-class matches, which counts as my longest-ever run for Yorkshire. I settled into a groove, the simple familiarity with routine and repetition improving me as a wicketkeeper. I felt more confident purely because I’d taken more deliveries. I regained my form and my zeal for the game. I became a different player.

  Nine members of the Yorkshire team at Trent Bridge had come through the academy, so retaining the Championship in 2015 was hardly unexpected. We won more matches (11) than any side since the split into two divisions. We racked up more points (286) than anyone had done over that same period. And our margin of victory (68 points) was the most convincing too. From the start of that season until the late middle of it in particular, the runs came in a lovely long flood for me. I’d finish with a Championship average of 92.33. In May there was a hundred against Hampshire. In June there was another century against Middlesex and then a career-best double hundred – 219 not out at Durham. Barely a week afterwards, as July began, I went to Warwickshire, scoring 108, and then to Worcestershire, adding another 139.

  The Ashes series had been going on without me. We’d beaten Australia at Cardiff. They’d beaten us – rather badly – at Lord’s. I’d been on the England Lions tour of South Africa the previous winter. As though history were repeating itself, purely for my benefit, I’d also been called up for the last ODI of the series against New Zealand at Chester-le-Street in June when Jos Buttler split the webbing in his hand. Like my first ODI at Cardiff four years previously, the game was rain-affected. This wasn’t the only spooky similarity. The matches were almost mirror images of one another. We again found ourselves chasing a total that Duckworth–Lewis set. I went in – again – when things seemed fruitless for us; we were 40 for four. And I won man of the match too: 83 off 60 balls led us to a win with an over to spare. Eighteen months had still rushed by since I’d last appeared in a Test before sheer weight of runs – almost a thousand at 80-something – got me back for the third Test at Edgbaston. Some things had changed. England were under new management. Trevor Bayliss had replaced Peter Moores, sacked after only 13 months. Some things hadn’t changed at all.

  Mitchell Johnson was waiting for me.

  On pitches that didn’t offer as much bounce, muzzling him a bit, Johnson hadn’t been as successful here as he’d been on the hard soil of home. This isn’t to say he was docile. I’d made five when I faced my first ball from him on the second morning of the match. Johnson, who beforehand had barely got a delivery much above stomach height, thrust one in short of a length. The ball rose, screaming blue murder. I edged it in front of my face and Peter Nevill, Australia’s wicketkeeper, took it in front of his. Even Geoffrey Boycott, seldom short of something pithy to say, initially offered only three words. These were ‘what a delivery’, and the astonished tone of his voice sugges
ted that a platoon of exclamation marks were trailing behind the short sentence. The term ‘rip-snorter’ came later. So did the follow-up description ‘an absolutely lethal ball’.

  Anyone looking at the scorecard could conclude that Johnson had a spell over me; that he simply had to turn his arm over to get me out. Not so. The delivery was a jaffa, a beast for any right-handed batsman. Even watching the replay three-dozen times wouldn’t have given me much of a clue about how I could have played it and been certain of survival. Two balls later a similar, but not quite as spiteful, delivery from Johnson got rid of Ben Stokes.

  The main thing was that we won the Test and then took the next at Trent Bridge, where I got 74. We regained there what we’d lost in Australia, which was the grandest form of redemption after our previous trouncing. I finished the season with more than 1,100 runs, a second Ashes-winning medal and a second County Championship. And only three and a half months later, I was at the crease in Cape Town on 99 not out, waiting for Stiaan van Zyl to finally drop a delivery a little short and wide of off stump …

  Stokesy and I had a partnership with bells and whistles attached to it that day. We trampled across the record books, revising them as we went. His double hundred was the second fastest in Test history. The 399 we put on together was a world record for the sixth wicket – and the first 300 of them constituted the fastest triple-hundred stand in Tests. You’d become figure-blind if I listed the other landmarks that got overtaken. In the end I made 150 not out, the last half-century coming off 30 balls – all the tension purged at last. You’d think Newlands was the launch pad for the unprecedented 12 months that followed, bringing more hundreds and more record breaking.