A Clear Blue Sky

by Jonny Bairstow

  It wasn’t.

  It actually began in a restaurant beside the Indian Ocean.

  CHAPTER 10

  A DAMP DAY IN FRONT OF THE WESTERN TERRACE

  I know everyone draws first the easy straight line that connects me to my dad. I don’t blame them, but in doing so one fact, which is the most important of all, usually goes unnoticed or gets ignored. I look so much like my dad – same chin, same cheekbones, same forehead – and I play a little like him too. But I am my mother’s son. I am who I am because of her. My dad passed on his cricketing talent. My mum has enabled me to use it. Her life’s work has been Becky and me. She’s given our lives balance and structure. She’s taught us to treat everyone decently and equally. Our sense of spirit and our guts come from her. So does our work ethic.

  Without my dad, she had to be fatherly as well as motherly. As we broke into our teens, she could never rely on that ‘wait till your father gets home’ approach. She had to pull us into line herself, responsible for all the dos and don’ts and also any tellings-off. In having to be tough, she worried that she wasn’t being tender enough at the same time and that what we’d remember of our childhood were only the rebukes she’d given us rather than the love. Never. We remember only the love.

  I knew my mum was giving – and would always give – everything she could and more to Becky and me. The money she had went on us. The time she had was ours. I knew, though she never spoke about it, how isolated she must have felt sometimes, bringing up the two of us practically alone. Her investment in us came at an enormous personal cost. Her diary and her social life became entirely dominated by our own. As children do, we must have infuriated and exasperated her, no doubt in the same moment. We only wanted her to be happy, but some days we must have been more of a benign nuisance than a help. There must have been other days, too, when she was fed up or despondent, but she didn’t betray it to us, going on indomitably instead and thinking of us first and herself hardly at all.

  She didn’t even complain about her cancer. I’ve never heard her ask ‘why me?’ – though the question would not only be legitimate but also perfectly understandable for someone who has been through so much so often. My mum thinks I get my determination and resilience from my dad. I think it comes mostly from her. She’s recovered from each setback and every adversity, demonstrating a resilience that constantly astonishes me.

  Like my dad’s death, Becky and I recall my mum’s original diagnosis of cancer and then her treatment in fragments. Most of all, we remember how tired she became and how long it took for her to get well again. Also like my dad’s death, she explained her cancer to us – or as much as she dared – without ever getting emotional, aware as ever of our feelings.

  Everyone who survives cancer knows the victory against it may only be temporary. You know eventually that you might have to fight all over again. Almost 15 years after my mum’s first bout of cancer, a second bout occurred. This time she needed an operation.

  It was the winter of 2012, only four days before Christmas. I was on England’s tour of India. My mum didn’t want me to know what was happening to her in case it affected my form. She decided that I shouldn’t be told until after the surgeon had done his work. Only Becky changed her mind. ‘You’ve got to tell him,’ she said. ‘He’ll want to come home and be with you.’ Becky continued to press that point. The way she felt was the way I would feel, she argued. ‘I’d be heartbroken if I learnt about the operation only after it was over.’

  I was in Pune, a city that is one of the symbols of the new, vibrant India. The temperature was over 30 degrees. Your mobile phone is locked away when a game starts, so England’s security officer Reg Dickason had to bring me a message. It was no more than a solemn ‘your mum wants to speak to you’, a handful of words that I knew were drenched in meaning. It couldn’t be anything but bad news. I was on the outfield, preparing for the match. I ran off to reclaim my phone, saying nothing to anyone at first. I called my mum without being able to reach her, the phone useless in my hand. ‘I need to know what’s wrong,’ I said to Reg.

  So he told me.

  The trek home began as a long day’s journey into a sleepless night. Mumbai is only 90 miles away from Pune, but the drive there took five hours. The wait for a flight to Manchester took five hours more. The flight itself took 12 hours. I touched down at 10 a.m. I was on the road almost an hour later. Since it was the weekend before Christmas, the holiday rush had already begun, the traffic so thick as one motorway merged into another that it took almost two hours to travel from the airport to the hospital in York. The car got stuck in a jam and I told the driver in panic: ‘Please, just get me there somehow … any how … any way.’ I arrived just 20 minutes before my mum was wheeled into theatre for an 11-hour operation. There was just enough time to kiss her and hold her hand. The ward had been spruced up with tinsel and posted-up cards in an attempt to make it look festive. I didn’t notice them.

  The hospital released my mum so she could spend Christmas at home with us. I helped cook dinner – though none too skilfully on my part – with Becky. We fetched and carried and fussed over her, the fact that she was there and recovering more important than presents or food or decorations.

  (© Author’s collection)

  Exactly three years later the three of us were in very different surroundings, which made it especially poignant. The Oyster Box hotel in Durban sits on the Umhlanga seaside. The beach is decorated by an 80-foot lighthouse, the crown of it redder than my hair, that sits on the Indian Ocean, which stretches like a blue carpet to the horizon. The Oyster Box is a five-star palace, and Becky and I took Mum to the restaurant there, an early 60th-birthday present for her. The perfect day is one in which nothing can be added afterwards to make it even better in the memory. We had that perfect day. Becky, I know, counts it as ‘one of the happiest’ we’ve ever spent together. We wanted to be nowhere else in the world then – and in no one else’s company except our own. The sun was full. The sky and the sea were empty, each attempting to outdo the other for bright colour. The afternoon was still and meandered on beautifully and we took our time to enjoy it, enticing Mum to eat mussels and scallops, which usually she wouldn’t, and also taste drinks she hadn’t sampled before. Mostly we talked … and we talked … and then we talked some more. Our mum was healthy and fit; only that mattered to us.

  (© Author’s collection)

  The series against South Africa began at Kingsmead on Boxing Day. I walked into it with my head and my game together, the thought of our perfect day relaxing me. I made one half-century and came close to another. We won the Test by a landslide of runs. The Oyster Box had put me in the mood for Durban. And then Durban put me in the mood for Cape Town. We went on to beat South Africa 2–1, losing only the dead rubber, and I reached a turning point with England, a place where my century had carried me. But to push on and take advantage of it, I knew one thing had to improve.

  If it didn’t, I’d be dropped.

  At the stage at which I seriously started to think about becoming a wicketkeeper, Adam Gilchrist was in his pomp. Everybody wanted to be like him.

  It can be difficult to judge the scale of something when you’re actually living through it, but Gilchrist was recognised as a game-changer while he was still playing rather than only retrospectively. He was one of those once-in-a-generation cricketers, the batsman-wicketkeeper par excellence. What impressed me, then as well as now, was how he did that: how he broke down the component parts of the two roles, working out an approach that suited him, and then how his work ethic shot him to the top. I liked the fact that he set out to dominate the bowling aggressively, irrespective of who had the ball and how the field was set. He argued – correctly – that the game was about ‘hitting in the ball’. He could smash it anywhere, but was especially strong off the back foot, his pulls as vicious as a boxer’s haymaker to the jaw. I also liked the fact that everything – as well as keeping wicket – was done without fuss.

  Nothing
excellent is ever wrought suddenly. Gilchrist is proof of that, but he’s also proof of what careful thought, allied to application and the shedding of several hundred gallons of sweat, can achieve. After all, here was someone originally viewed as a batter who ‘kept a bit’. Here was someone forced to swap New South Wales for Western Australia because he wasn’t rated as the best in his own state. And here was someone who eloquently expressed how he felt when chosen only as a batsman. Gilchrist frequently fielded close in or as a short-something or other for New South Wales, but regarded not wearing the gloves and pads as being ‘almost naked’. Without them, he added, he was ‘only half a cricketer’. Gilchrist thought not being the wicketkeeper applied more pressure on his batting, which made him jittery. If he failed, he feared being ‘out altogether’ and soon forgotten.

  What he underwent at Western Australia was nothing short of a metamorphosis, and it led to the reinvention of the wicketkeeper-batsman for the modern era. He remodelled the strategy of that role the way the aeroplane and aerial bombardment once remodelled the strategy of war. In 2001 Duncan Fletcher, then the England coach, put together a tactics book for the Ashes, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of the Australians. Against Gilchrist’s name, he wrote a question mark. His strengths were too numerable and his weaknesses too debatable. The question mark was the equivalent of a baffled Fletcher scratching his head about him.

  My dad and I aren’t the only Bairstows to have played for Yorkshire as a wicketkeeper. Arthur Bairstow was another Bradfordian, which isn’t surprising since the surname has its Anglo-Saxon origins in West Yorkshire. He was even born in the same block of the city as my dad, but, as far as I’m aware, he’s no relation unless he lurks on the outer fringes of our family tree. You probably won’t have heard of him unless you’ve delved into the minutiae of the county’s history. That’s because his brief moment in the sun came between the fag end of the Victorian era and the start of the Edwardian one. He didn’t do that badly. In 26 matches he took 41 catches and 18 stumpings. His batting, however, was lamentable. He made only 79 runs. His highest score was 12. His average was 5.64. It’s hard to believe that wicketkeepers haven’t always been expected to contribute runs, but were considered as specialists. Gilchrist put an end to that way of thinking for ever. Now, if you can’t bat you don’t play.

  Wicketkeepers will perish without them, but big scores alone are no protection if catches go down and stumpings go begging. Gilchrist knew that too. My dad used to say that ‘a catch is either held or it goes in the blink of an eye’. Some had gone in the blink of an eye for me in South Africa. In the first Test I’d missed a chance off Hashim Amla (cost six runs). In the fourth Test I’d missed him again (cost 104 runs). And a difficult stumping to get rid of AB de Villiers escaped me in Durban (cost 34 runs). The nine catches I took in Johannesburg didn’t attract as much attention as those mistakes.

  Every slip will nag at you; that’s the consequence of being human. The hardest thing – and it’s entirely psychological – is not allowing an error to spread into the rest of your game and multiply, infecting the whole of it like a virus. You have to shut it away, start again and stay composed, not only at the time but also afterwards when you can see the post-match criticism coming towards you as visible as tracers. I used to read newspapers. I used to follow social media, drawn by curiosity to know what others were saying and thinking about me. I discovered that that way madness lies.

  Something soon dawned on me, possibly too slowly but only because I was much younger then, less worldly wise and the pitfalls weren’t as well-defined. I learnt that when you get into the public eye, assumptions are made about you; especially about the sort person you are and the kind of personality you have – as though watching someone on TV stacks up enough evidence to form an indisputable judgement about them. I also learnt that 99 per cent of those assumptions are wrong. Some of them bizarrely so. I’ve been called a disgrace to my family, a disgrace to my country, a disgrace to myself. Upsetting at first, it now bounces off me like rain off a roof.

  I stopped listening to professional critics as well. Bob Willis once likened me to a seal on a rock, floundering and flapping for the ball. Probably Willis doesn’t get enough credit for 1981 and the 500–1 Miracle of Headingley. Ian Botham’s nuclear blast with the bat meant the Test will always carry his stamp of ownership, his runs overshadowing Willis’s wickets. With his mop of hair and jerky run made on stick-like limbs, Willis polished Australia off with eight for 43 in the second innings, a stint of bowling that at any other time and in any other circumstances would have brought him the laurels and the lap of the honour. Even if he’d never achieved this, his fast-bowling career would still count as superb. My dad certainly thought so. But I don’t know how often – if at all – Willis has ever kept wicket. So I listen instead to other wicketkeepers, such as Mark Boucher, who I sought out in South Africa. Or MS Dhoni, who I saw during a tour of India. Or Matt Prior, helpful whenever I played alongside him.

  You can ask and ask, collating as much advice as you can carry, but in the end you still have to find your own way, your own style and your own method. Just as Gilchrist did. What you need is a coach who understands that. Someone who shares their expertise without imposing it on you inflexibly. Someone who understands that coaching should be bespoke and not off the peg. Someone who allows you to develop naturally, so you find out things for yourself. Someone who won’t soft-soap you. And especially someone you can trust.

  Step forward Bruce French, minus his boa constrictor.

  It was a bitter, depressing March morning, the bruised cloud so low that you felt it could hardly sink much lower without smothering the whole of Headingley like the thickest of pea-soup fogs. It was damp, which made the grass soft and skiddy, and so cold that you’d have thought the hollow of winter was still with us. The Oyster Box in Durban and my century in Cape Town seemed to belong to another year – even another decade – rather than only a month and a half past.

  In the conditions – we even got some sleety snow later on – only the slightly insane would have headed anywhere except indoors. But I knew I needed to sharpen up my wicket-keeping, which meant I also needed Bruce French. The work we had to do required space and fresh air. That’s why we found ourselves in such miserably awful weather in front of the Western Terrace, the dark-blue rows of seats where, during a Test, it is almost obligatory to come in fancy dress.

  There wasn’t a soul about. If anyone glimpsed us, it was from behind glass. Frenchy and I had the run of the place to ourselves – at least once I’d sweet-talked Yorkshire’s groundsman Andy Fogarty into letting us train there. After months of work, the new season almost on top of him, he wasn’t too enamoured by the prospect of the two of us tearing chunks out of his turf. Like a good golfer, we promised to flatten any divots afterwards; he made sure we did, too.

  Brian Statham, new-ball partner and chum of Fred Trueman, once described his preparation for a game like this: ‘A fag, a cough, a cup of coffee.’ He was talking essentially about the 1950s. Even during my dad’s era – certainly at the beginning of it – practice still wasn’t overly sophisticated or particularly strenuous either. The calendar was such a treadmill of matches and travelling that you barely had a day or two between one and the next. You kept fit and in decent nick simply through playing. Now we stretch or catch, pummel the ball into a net or throw down a single stump. But the real graft, the hardest shift, is put in when there’s no one there to watch it.

  It was Frenchy’s recommendation to Andy Flower that led to my one-day international debut at Cardiff. I’d been taking his advice ever since I began moving from one staging post to the next with England. Frenchy likes climbing. It’s no weekend pursuit or casual hobby for him either. He’s been in the Himalayas. He’s scaled the Scottish sea stacks. At Headingley, he was dressed as though he was about to go up Annapurna. I was swathed in clothes too – but still freezing.

  He’s a hard taskmaster. There’s no mucking about; Frenchy isn’t
slow or shy about letting you know when something is wrong. I needed his clear eye and his straight talking.

  I don’t like intensely complicated coaching. I prefer to work things out by myself. A gentle hint is all I need; otherwise it’s like finishing a crossword after someone has given me the answers, some of which may not be right anyway. I don’t go in for coaching manuals either. I always ask: Who wrote them? More often than not it’s someone who isn’t a Test cricketer – or it’s someone who was, but hasn’t played in a Test since Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. Ian Dews knows I’m not into too much ‘technical crap’. He also knows I don’t respond to being told explicitly what to do. He’ll simply say to me: ‘This is what I’m seeing,’ allowing me to work out what I need to do.

  Yorkshire once had the foresight to take on the sports psychologist David Priestley, another Bradford lad. He was subsequently attached first to Saracens rugby club and then to Arsenal football club, endorsing his pedigree. Early on in my career, when my mental approach to batting had become rather confused, I went to him to talk about sorting it out. I don’t think our conversation lasted much longer than ten minutes. We sat opposite one another at a table. He handed over a blank sheet of paper and a pen, asking me to outline what I believed were the basic principles of my game. I’m paring to the bone what I said, but essentially I told him:

  See the ball

  Hit the ball

  Dominate

  Keep it simple

  He didn’t say anything as I spoke or when I wrote them down, shortening my sentences to turn them into bullet points. I slid the piece of paper towards him. He read it and then slid the paper back to me again. ‘This is your blueprint,’ he said. ‘Use it.’ You might regard that as money for several yards of old rope, but he saw instantly what I couldn’t and he then enabled me to see it too, as though a lens had been tweaked, bringing everything into focus. In reflecting my own thoughts back to me he also put them in perspective, untangling the problem. I’d been overthinking things. I had that piece of paper laminated. I took it around with me as a prompter, always there alongside my kit.