David Gower (Text Only)

David Gower (Text Only) David Gower David Gower was the most brilliant and gifted of English Test batsmen in recent times. Yet, despite his unimpeachable Test record, his career was not without controversy.In his frank and outspoken autobiography, Gower responds forthrightly to those critics who questioned his ‘laid back’ approach, and makes some incisive comments about the management of the England side. He recounts the triumphs and reverses of his captaincy of England and of Leicestershire, and compares his man-management with that of Illingworth, Brearley, Willis, Gatting and Gooch.On a lighter note, Gower writes about his nights on the tiles with Botham and Lamb, his Cresta Run, and his ‘fly over’ during a state game in Australia. Copyright Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF First published in Great Britain 1992 Copyright © David Gower Promotions Ltd 1992 David Gower and Martin Johnson assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work Tabular statistics supplied by Bill Frindall Photographs supplied by Patrick Eagar, David Gower, Graham Morris, Adrian Murrell/Allsport and Syndication International All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780006379645 Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008235468 Version: 2017-01-13 Contents Cover (#u78b0f9e6-87af-518c-83bf-e24e515f37ff) Title Page (#u2d9fcfa0-ccf3-56e5-a7c6-9f33a98b979e) Copyright (#ulink_03004e20-1cb6-57e8-8027-dabbfe0d0962) Preface (#ulink_1bf5ca26-d888-566e-828e-ecaa836d616c) ONE: Fun, style and excellence (#ulink_477b5a44-9443-54ed-a300-93aa46f75535) TWO: Laid back – and think of England (#ulink_91f40bb7-6d17-5b63-990c-d0decbab7c7a) THREE: A millionaire? That’s rich (#ulink_b9c50daf-495a-50dc-b714-a190d911b2c2) FOUR: On the piste and on safari (#ulink_1373881b-8f13-52d4-99ca-53bf7039c7f2) FIVE: Out of Africa (#ulink_8dd90116-c88c-5867-aa5c-e0b933c975eb) SIX: ‘Bloody hell, Gower. Have you just come in?’ (#ulink_607f5e69-2b9d-5d81-ba1e-071e8e5aca46) SEVEN: The officers’ mess (#litres_trial_promo) EIGHT: A total mess (#litres_trial_promo) NINE: A rum tour (#litres_trial_promo) TEN: A new board game: spot the England captain (#litres_trial_promo) ELEVEN: Steward Micky, Malcolm Devon and sacked again (#litres_trial_promo) TWELVE: On thin ice, and pressed into service (#litres_trial_promo) THIRTEEN: Baron von Gower’s low-flying circus (#litres_trial_promo) FOURTEEN: Grounded (#litres_trial_promo) FIFTEEN: You must be ****ing joking (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Gower – the career 1975–1992 (#litres_trial_promo) Tabular statistics (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Preface (#ulink_63d2bb4b-74ff-51ed-a6a0-f3d25f0b0adc) THIS book was conceived in the autumn of 1991, following a somewhat disappointing season of below par achievement, and with the problems of the 1990-91 tour of Australia still very much in mind. It was a time when the fortunes of my personal career were at a low ebb, and I was not at the peak of my form either in terms of performance or mental outlook. There were several questions in my mind, which no doubt were also being asked elsewhere, largely along the lines of how I was going to approach the rest of my career, and whether or not I was going to be able to regain the sort of form that would allow me the chance to pass Geoff Boycott’s all-time England run scoring record, a target that had been there for the taking in Australia. My subsequent omission from the Test side and ensuing poor form, with my perfectly logical further exclusion from that winter’s touring party, meant I had already begun to accept that number two in the list might be as far as I would ever get. This in itself was no problem as I could quite easily convince myself that what I had already achieved was not an overall disaster – and besides there are always other challenges in life. However, a positive attitude was what I needed to begin the 1992 season in good shape, especially in view of the other potential problem lurking in the back of my mind. I knew that if this season did not bring success, I would be thinking very seriously about retiring from the game. My spirits were definitely at a low ebb! Happily, I returned to Hampshire in April in the right frame of mind, and started the season in good enough form to realize those targets. My most important task was to try and convince people that my intention to play cricket for England for some years to come was entirely genuine. There were those, even in positions of power, who suspected that the Boycott record was my only motivation, a suspicion that I resented and strongly wished to dispel. Whenever a potential milestone has loomed on the horizon, I have always regarded it as incidental to the main course of events and taken the stance that if the job is done properly in the first place and often enough, then milestones will come and go automatically. On the other hand, there is no point in denying that this particular milestone did mean a lot to me. When I did finally pass the magic figure it was a very proud moment. No matter what the future holds, I will be able to treasure that memory, even in the knowledge that someone eventually is likely to come and surpass the new total. Ironically, as I write this preface for the paperback edition, many of those ‘What does the future hold?’ questions have resurfaced, despite what I would describe as a successful season in 1992. Every time that I have to sit down and compile something for this book, it seems that I have to do so at the same time as having to contemplate life from outside the inner circles of England cricket. The basic truth that all of us in time come to appreciate fully is that there are no guarantees, hence the merits of being able to ease the inevitable disappointments by maintaining a sense of perspective and balance. Although I am to spend the winter of 1992-93 watching cricket for a living instead of playing it, I can do so comfortably, knowing firstly that I have much on which to look back proudly; secondly, that there is potentially much still to anticipate in terms of a cricketing future; and thirdly, to be spending half of the winter behind the microphone in Australia and India is not exactly a complete disaster. Thus with cheerful countenance I proffer what follows as a mixture of fond memories and tales of woe, all of which are an integral part of any sportsman’s life, safe in the expectation that, as time goes on, inevitably the highlights will outlive the disappointments. David Gower Brisbane, November 1992 CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_301a7c9f-8cef-5242-b130-cbb94957d50d) Fun, style and excellence I HAVE, during the course of a career stretching back to 1975, won a good many medals and trophies in all parts of the cricketing world, mostly for performances on the field. However, pride of place on my mantelpiece at home is reserved for an award from a national newspaper that does not, on the face of it, mean anything much at all. And yet it means as much, if not more than any cup final medal, or the International Cricketer of the Year trophy I won in Australia in 1982-83. It is a plaque, inscribed with the words: ‘For Fun, Style, and Excellence.’ If I had the choice of words to be chiselled on my tombstone (actually, I suppose I do … where’s the will?) it would be those. In many ways I am happy to forget the mere statistics of a career in cricket, and to remember the fun of it as well as feeling that I have given spectators a little pleasure too. It is a philosophy I carried with me throughout my cricketing career, and despite the fact that it torpedoed me in the end, it is not one I would have changed even with the benefit of hindsight. Fun, style and excellence is a nice way of summing up what I tried to do. I started playing the game because it was fun. I acquired a certain style while I was doing it (unfortunately, ‘laid-back’ was the way it was described most often), and if I have touched excellence at various points along the way (and as I played 114 Test matches I must have got quite close once or twice) then you could not ask for a great deal more. When young players have asked me for a philosophy of the game, or something to bear in mind when they are embarking on their cricketing careers, I have invariably said: ‘Enjoy it. You started playing the game for enjoyment, and whatever helps you retain that outlook, go ahead and do it.’ If you are not enjoying it for any reason, you cannot bring out the best in yourself. There are times, of course, when you have to push yourself beyond fun, so that you can achieve the results that will give you the satisfaction to make it fun. There may, on the other hand, be a few lessons to be absorbed from this book that may prevent our star of the future from having his head lopped off like I did. Graham Gooch, whose fingerprints – among others – can be found on the lever that operated the guillotine, has accused me, ironically, on more than one occasion, of not having fun – or at least not enjoying the lifestyle on the field as much as I did off it. To a certain extent he was right, and if I am accused of not always sporting a mile-wide grin during a dull game in a howling gale, while cursing to myself for not putting on two pairs of long johns instead of one, then I apologize to him for this major character weakness. This book, I hope, is not a whitewash. I admit to not taking either cricket or life seriously enough at times, but while this has occasionally found me out, I would like to think that my warts are mostly friendly ones. I do get bored easily and hard graft has never come naturally, but nothing annoys me more than hearing that I fell short of some people’s expectations because I appeared to find the game too easy. I have never found cricket easy. My external appearance has not always been deceptive, and when I once turned up for play one morning wearing one black shoe and one brown one, this was a fairly accurate indication of what I am like first thing in the morning. On the other hand, wearing a smile on your face, or making the occasional facetious comment, is not evidence that you are an idle dilettante either. There is no one way of playing the game that is right or wrong, and cricket is a sport that lays your character bare like almost no other. I was latterly perceived, wrongly in my opinion, to have had a lack of commitment to the England cause, that somehow I rocked the boat with an indifferent attitude. I scored nearly 500 runs in my last series in Australia with this lack of commitment. I did however commit the unpardonable sin of looking more cheerful after a flight in a Tiger Moth than during some of the management’s interminable training routines, on a tour when runs around the block counted for rather more than runs in the middle. There was an atmosphere in Australia in which fun and cricket had no place together which was alien to my interpretation of how to bring out the best of international cricketers, leaving me often at odds with the likes of team manager, Micky Stewart. Character differences are part and parcel of all team sports, and a diversity of opinion can of course be used constructively. Unfortunately, my relationship with Micky Stewart was not enhanced on this tour, which worried me less than the fact that I was finding it so difficult to communicate with Graham Gooch, who I had known and liked over a much longer period. It seemed to annoy both of them that I could succeed without conforming to the methods they laid down. The attitude that came across was that I did not deserve to succeed. The argument that often came out was that I was not setting the right example to younger players, that I was somehow inhibiting or retarding their development. I didn’t accept this, nor did I find anything remotely like this impression among the other players. I was no different at thirty-three than I had been at twenty-one. The idea, so it appeared to me, was to fit in with whatever the system was at the time, but yet to do what you needed to do yourself to be happy and confident about playing when required. The fact that our relationship suffered the terminal fracture in Australia was not without its irony or significance. Micky in particular had taken note of Australia’s change in selection policy after we beat them on Mike Gatting’s 1986-87 tour. Bobby Simpson and Allan Border decided that a certain type of character was required to play for Australia, hence the more flamboyant and slightly rebellious people like Greg Ritchie, Tim Zoehrer, Craig McDermott and Greg Matthews all got thrown out. Looking at their subsequent results, you have to say that their decision worked, but at least two of those players got back into the side eventually, proving that no system need necessarily be rigid to the point of inflexibility. If it had happened to me ten years earlier, it would have been easier to shrug off, but not only had I been given a label, I was also approaching that period in my career – if not my sell-by date – when a slightly rebellious older hand could more easily be cut adrift. When I was left out of the West Indies series in the summer of 1991,I had not been in form for Hampshire, but I did feel they could at least have given me the chance to prove that I still had it in me, or otherwise as the case may be, for one or two of the early Tests. I’m told that Stewart’s report on the tour to Australia suggested that the only reason I wanted to play on was to get the thirty-four runs I needed to beat Boycott’s record. This not only shows a complete lack of understanding as to my own character, but also sums up the peculiar way in which Stewart’s mind operates. True, I would dearly love to have broken Boycott’s record while still in Australia and I continue to rue missed opportunities to do so, but I would say that my primary aim is to still be playing Test cricket for the satisfaction of succeeding again at that level, not just for the sake of thirty-odd runs but for a lot more beyond. Gooch intimated to me early in the summer that it would be easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for me to get back into the England side, which did not correlate with his simple message at the end of the Australia tour to go out and get runs. Whereas I was looking for a bit of a lift, a smidgeon of encouragement from the top, this left me dispirited and with an overriding sense of futility. I knew it had more to do with scoring runs, whatever Graham had said after Australia. Stewart did not seem to want me back at any price. Unfortunately, the way he went about things irritated me and I was not always very good at concealing my feelings. Come to think of it, I do not believe I was, or am, the only player to think this way. His was a difficult job in many respects and one certainly cannot accuse him of not working hard at it. But despite his efforts and good intentions, I still found him unconvincing and uninspiring. As for Graham, I had – and still have – great admiration for the way he transformed his own game from the late eighties, putting in a huge amount of effort in order to prolong his own career, but it ultimately came close to an obsession for him. He then looked at me in a different light because of it, wondering no doubt why I was not more like him, and it caused us to grow apart. He set off with a method in Australia, and it didn’t work on that occasion. This is not unusual, and it has certainly happened to me. Indeed, every system will have its flaws in this unpredictable arena called international cricket. Yet when I tried to get him to involve more people, to give them a greater sense of their own importance, and above all not to talk at people rather than with them, it merely seemed to bring my motives under suspicion. It was a bad sign. Senior players should carry some weight. Junior players are mostly going to conform come what may, although there are exceptions that prove every rule, and Philip Tufnell was one of them. However, the inference that Tufnell would pick up bad habits from me was hard to swallow. Tuffers might take a certain interest in the attitudes and opinions of players like myself, but Tuffers is the way he is because he is Tuffers. Like the case of Phillip DeFreitas in 1986-87, he had to work out how to mix in international company, and, like many before and since, did not perhaps reach the right note first up. Nor did I hit the right note when I took the aeroplane trip, so it is not a failing exclusively attributable to younger players. Having said that, I think it was getting out last ball before lunch in Adelaide – in the way that I did – that later became more significant in the management’s assessment of my future. Graham has said that he didn’t feel he ever really got to know me, not deep down anyway, and I can take some of the blame for that in that I have usually presented a flip and light-hearted view of events instead of getting terribly serious. It is, of course, a form of defence that people like myself present to the world to cover up any insecurity or worries that they may have in the same way that many comedians have deeper, darker sides to their natures. Where it told against me was that I gave a false – or not entirely true – picture of how dedicated I was to the game. For instance, I did not much care for Stewart’s training routines, but when I thought I needed hard work I usually went out and did it. Before the Sydney Test I went out and had a private net with Cardigan Connor, who was playing in Australia that winter, along with a couple of local bowlers, and when Stewart later brought this up as evidence of preparation equalling results (I got a century in the Sydney Test), I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I benefitted a lot more from not having him hovering over me while I was practising. The way things went for me on that tour always gave me the impression that Perth had every chance of being my last Test match. I had been dropped before by England, three or four times in fact, but the coming English summer seemed more than just uncertain. What I found dispiriting and depressing about it all was that with my place under threat, I had dug deep to get 150 against India in the final innings of the previous summer when my place on the tour had been uncertain, and battled hard for my runs in Australia. Now I was cast as a wayward spirit, who sometimes got runs by accident, and it hurt. As a subscriber, however, to the no smoke without fire theory, I do plead guilty to a certain amount of underachievement, and the one thing I would like to have been is just a bit hungrier in the pursuit of runs. I’d hate to guess at a figure, but in about 95 per cent of all my innings I can look back and think: ‘You could have done a bit more there.’ The Boycott record frustrated me in that I could and should have got past it. The compensation, from what I’ve read and heard any way, is that more people enjoyed watching me bat than Boycott. Who knows why we are the way we are? Why do some cricketers have more single-mindedness than others? Why can’t some people give up smoking? I don’t know why I got caught in the gully off wide deliveries more than Boycott did – probably because it was more in my nature and probably because the two previous wide ones had been pinged through extra cover and I enjoyed the feeling enough to try it again. Looking back, there has been a lot of enjoyment, but a lot of frustration as well. Most disappointing of all was the way that it finished. Having watched Hadlee and Richards bow out at the time of their own choosing, you think to yourself, ‘Well I wasn’t too far behind these guys, it would have been a lovely way to go out.’ Instead, the rug was whipped away from under me, and I was left on my arse. It seems to me that you should ultimately be judged by results. If the Stewart-Gooch regime decided that regimentation was the way to get results, and it worked, then fine. I’m not sure, though, that they ultimately applied the same test to me. The irony is that it sounds as if they modified their rules slightly by the following winter’s tour of New Zealand and for the World Cup. The idea that breaks in a training and practice session could also be beneficial has crept back in, giving the players a little extra respite from the rigorous demands that international cricket makes upon the minds and bodies of its participants. Work and practice must be done – and I fully acknowledge their benefits – but as cricket, in essence, is time consuming, I will always maintain that time off, judged and used wisely, is almost as valuable as another practice session. CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_3e20c13c-08a5-5a36-a31f-3d69415ba79d) Laid back – and think of England IF fun, style and excellence are three words that I think of most fondly, then the two that have irritated me most (with the possible exception of ‘caught Dujon’) are ‘laid back’. I don’t know why they should annoy me so much, but the mere fact that they do should be evidence in itself that I am not as laid back, whatever that actually means, as people might think. I do, in fact, have a pretty short fuse. I have been known to explode in both dressing room and on the field, and you ought to see me on the motorway, although I do have the happy capacity to hose those flames fairly swiftly. I suppose, though, that I do have this ability to suggest that I am more interested in the Telegraph crossword than the state of play, and that my mid-pitch conversations with batting partners occasionally have less to do with the fact that Ambrose has just replaced Marshall than whether the evening’s repast should involve fish and chardonnay or steak and claret. Mostly, those impressions are spot on – but cricket has always been the sort of game to switch on to and off in my opinion. Spectators nip into the members’ bar between overs, so why can’t players take a mental break at times? In any case, when Ambrose is pawing the ground and there is an outside chance of ending the day with your jaw wired up, chatting about eating a nice steak can have the effect of concentrating the mind wonderfully well. Much of the image is created by your own peers, and how they perceive you. I remember picking up the soubriquet of ‘Fender’ on the 1986-87 tour. The TV drama, although drama is used here in the loosest sense, Bodyline was showing on Australian TV when we were out there, and to give you a clue as to its absolute devotion to historical accuracy, there was one memorable scene of Les Ames completing a stumping off Larwood. As for poor old Percy Fender, he was portrayed as a party-loving, champagne-swilling, ukelele-playing, monocled buffoon – a strokemaker, both on and off the field. As I was well in with the Bollinger man in Sydney, a wonderful man named Rob Hirst, and as the lads curiously felt that I fitted the bill in other respects as well, ‘Fender’ is the nickname I acquired. The image was further enhanced at a Sunday League match at Cheltenham during my first period as Leicestershire captain, when both Leicestershire and Gloucestershire were so utterly convinced that there could be no possibility of play – it had started raining hard at tea-time on Saturday and was still stair-rodding down at 2 p.m. on Sunday – that the players readily accepted the offer of lunch and hospitality in a sponsors’ tent. We had already left four or five players back in the bar at the hotel, where a Sunday lunchtime jazz band was in full cry, and they eventually staggered into the tent to join the party. While we were getting stuck into the Pimms and sundry other concoctions, the elements outside had transformed themselves into sunshine and wind, and the College Ground’s legendary draining properties were coming into play. In short, while the ground got drier, the players got wetter. It was round about half past four when one of the officials, Mervyn Kitchen, popped his head around the tent flap, and I confidently expected him to deliver a message like: ‘Don’t bother turning up tomorrow either.’ However, what he actually said was: ‘We think we can start a ten-over slog at ten past five, at which point I said: ‘Nice one, Merv. What are you having?’ His reply was: ‘Captain, I’m afraid we’re serious,’ at which point I spilled most of the contents of my glass and led a concerted weave from tent to pavilion. David Graveney, canny captain that he is, and armed with a certain local knowledge, had remained reasonably sober, but the captain of Leicestershire – and most of his troops – were in no condition to make contact with a medicine ball. I attempted a knock-up on the outfield without much success, declared myself unfit to toss, or in any event to be able to recognize a head from a tail, and entrusted the operation to Nigel Briers. We decided to bat first, largely on the grounds that nine of us at least could get down to some serious coffee drinking, but we were forced to make a late team change when Ian Butcher popped his head around the home dressing room door. His timing was bad, in that Paul Romaines had been busy practising his golf swing with a three-pound cricket bat and Ian’s nose had taken the full brunt. Paul, whose exertions and embarrassment had sent the Pimms rushing to his head, also retired from the contest. I went in No 4, gave Graveney the charge first ball, and although I never saw it I somehow hit it over long on. I then played several air shots, before deciding to unveil the reverse sweep, and actually made contact with one of them. By some miracle we managed to get 70 or 80, which turned out to be ample. They were something like 20 for no wicket after 6 overs, and every time one of their openers took a swish, a large divot flew out of the ground. It was slightly ironic, I thought, when I brought Gordon Parsons on to bowl – one of the few who had not touched a drop – because his first ball ended up on top of the press tent. I would like to think that our successful defence owed something to my inspirational leadership, but in point of fact they only got as many as they did because I kept diving the wrong way at cover. Mind you, Bill Athey picked up the fielding award for circling underneath an interminable skier to eventually hear it plop to earth about ten yards away. Anyway we won, and in honour of our triumph, I duly led the troops straight back into the tent. There were many questions asked in the Gloucestershire committee room, but the near-total absence of spectators, and the generosity of the press in putting it down as on off-day all round, somehow allowed both sides to get away with it. There was another, less shameful, incident involving a tent at Grace Road. The visitors were Essex, whose ground at Chelmsford is festooned with hospitality boxes. Their end-of-day drink when they came to Leicester consisted of one crate of bottled lager (warm) bunged underneath the dressing room table. They once protested by taking all the tops off and leaving them there, and on one occasion John Lever had wound me up so much about the lack of conviviality at close of play that I rummaged around in the attic for a miniature one-man tent that I used to play with as a child. I erected it just over the boundary rope at fine leg in a pathetic attempt to imitate the throng of sponsors’ tents Essex would have expected to find at home, took half a dozen bottles of the aforementioned lager down into the tent, and at the end of the day we had a fairly silly ten-minute party in this particular sponsor’s tent. I suppose it all added to the general image, although ‘laid back’ was largely an invention of the press. The words press and invention have not been entirely separable throughout much of my career, even though I have had some highly complimentary things said about me as well, and the TCCB’s concern about the altered concept of modern cricket reporting led them to appoint a media relations manager in 1988. They were also considering at one stage organizing some sort of press awareness course for England players – pitfalls for the unwary, so to speak. In point of fact, there are also pitfalls for the wary these days. Your first exposure to the press is normally a pleasant one, in which the callow youth picks up his weekly copy of the Loughborough Echo and finds his score faithfully reported somewhere near the back page. As time goes on you save the clippings: as time goes further on, you screw them up and hurl them towards the wastepaper basket. When I first started playing, the dunce’s cap superimposed on a player’s head – so beloved of the tabloids when we were getting hammered by Australia in 1989 – was not even an idea. I can recall in my early England days being asked to pose topless and sit on top of a circus horse, although I can’t imagine Hobbs or Hammond ever having accepted this sort of request. I have tried not to get too carried away by some of the things that have been written about me, or indeed too upset, but there are times when you just cannot believe what a complete stranger has just written about you. One of my regular tormentors has been a reporter for The Sun, who has poured out some amazing vitriol about me. We sat in the same press box in Jamaica when I was hired by The Times for the 1989-90 West Indies tour, and I thought about introducing myself, but really could not think of what to say to the guy. In most respects, though, it hurts more if you are lambasted by comments in the ‘serious’ papers, such as when I was advised after the first Test against Australia at Headingley in 1989 to book in for a lobotomy at the same time as my shoulder operation. I shan’t mention his name, but suffice to say that, in terms of this book, he is a ghost writer of his former self. Pure human instinct dictates that if you are criticized by the media, you don’t really like it. Cricketers do not care much for criticism from former players, and players are incredibly defensive nowadays. Most of the bad language in a Test match dressing room comes from players reading the morning papers, or listening to some former player giving you stick on TV. Having said that, I still believe that players and the press have to work together, and for my own part, I would like to maintain my own interest in the game through the pen or the microphone. Reading rubbish about yourself in a newspaper is not the most difficult part for a player, unpleasant though it might be; it is the thought that someone might pick it up and believe it. Interpretation is another problem, in that you can sometimes say something perfectly innocuous and see it blown up, taken out of context, or both. If you go through a press conference with an unsmiling face you run the risk of being called angry, and if you crack the odd joke you become flippant. Sometimes you can see the question that comes attached to a limpet mine, and sometimes you can’t, but you certainly have to be on your toes. There are other times when you find yourself abroad, and being ripped to shreds by people who have not even left the country. It happened on the 1985-86 tour to the West Indies, where there were also many unfamiliar reporters – tennis correspondents, you name it – specifically sent to dredge up the dirt, that it was a sheer relief to talk to a cricket reporter. I remember seeing a copy of the Daily Mirror in Barbados that devoted an entire centre spread to rip into our off-the-field activities, including one piece from a woman fashion correspondent who was there on holiday and had spotted someone daring to have a bottle of wine with his evening meal. None of them had a clue about cricket, and even the bloke who covered the tour for the Mirror was a stand-in seconded from some other sport. Years ago, a cricketer’s private life used to be respected by newspapers, but that ethos has long since passed away. With regard to the genuine cricket press, England players these days regard it almost as an obligation to fume and rant, but it frequently becomes counterproductive. It is too easy to moan about what is being said or written. In some ways it is cathartic – it allows you to let off steam – but it is not necessarily useful in terms of producing the right mood and spirit that you need to play the game. If you can talk yourself into ignoring the media most of the time, take the view that they are getting on with their job and we are getting on with ours, then that is the ideal approach. We have to coexist, however uneasily. It is very hard at times, but each time a player gets involved, he is wasting his energy on a conflict that is always fruitless. Although there have been one or two disasters along the way, and my Test career ended in a way that left a slightly sour taste in the mouth, it is nice to be able to reflect that the good times far outweighed the bad. I cannot, in all honesty, claim a memory of elephantine proportions, but certain moments stay with you quite vividly. My first Test century against New Zealand at the Oval in 1978, my first century overseas against Australia at Perth later that year, my double century against India, and involvement – either as captain or player – in a good many Test series triumphs. I had the experience of playing with or against any number of famous players, and if I had a mentor in the professional game, it would have to be Ray Illingworth. As someone who had done little more than give it a swish at King’s School, Canterbury, it was a good education to learn the serious aspect of the game from a man with one of the harder noses in professional cricket. There was a good atmosphere at Grace Road under lily’s captaincy, and it was also a benefit for me to launch my career in one of the better county sides around at that time. He had his foibles, and the amount of mickey-taking he took from the other players without it in any way undermining his authority reflected a happy dressing room. In some ways, the club never recovered from his return to Yorkshire in 1978, and the way things turned out, I wonder whether Illy regretted leaving. However, he was never one for power sharing, and as Mike Turner was very much in charge at Grace Road, the chance to become player-manager at Yorkshire rather than remain answerable to Mike at Leicester was the more attractive option. It’s ironic to think back now that Mike actually gave me ?5 a week more than I was asking for when I signed my first contract in 1975, because in all my time at Leicester, the prime topic of conversation was how little we were paid in contrast to other counties. Mike, who more or less ran the club, was impossible to crack on wages – on almost anything come to that – and he was the sort of man who commanded either love or hate in his business dealings. He was known as the Ayatollah, because he had to have a finger in every pie that came out of the oven at Grace Road. Whether it was picking the side, or some piffling request from a gateman, Mike had a say in it, and he took such a work load on himself that he only really slowed down (and then only minimally) when he had a heart attack. As an administrator he was second to none, knew his cricket, and as far as I was concerned he was very supportive. If you were on the wrong side of Mike he was a hard opponent, but if you were on the right side he was a good friend and ally. Much of the good work he did for the players, myself included, was done quietly behind the scenes and with no great drama. The player I was closest to at Leicester, both in cricketing outlook and as a kindred spirit, was Brian Davison. Davo was a larger than life character, and no-one could possibly have guessed from his early wild man days at Grace Road that he would end up as a member of parliament in Hobart, Tasmania, which is where he and his family emigrated after a long career at Leicestershire. I assume his canvassing methods are slightly different to those he employed in the Rhodesian army, when the members of the opposition were dangled from helicopters to help them in conversation. He was a destroyer of a cricket ball, and a phenomenally strong man – nor would you aim to get on the wrong side of him. When his nostrils flared, it was time to make yourself scarce. He liked a drink, smoked like a chimney, but there was a highly cultured side to him as well, and he became, among other things, quite an expert in antiques. He was appointed captain of the club in 1980, a short engagement that ended with too many adverse umpires’ reports, but I loved batting with him for the confidence he exuded at the crease. I loved driving with him rather less, as he tended to solve traffic problems with 90 m.p.h. excursions on the wrong side of the road. On his day, he would murder any bowler, and although he now lives in Tasmania, we still keep in touch. I also learned a lot from Roger Tolchard, not least in refusing to play him at golf for money. His will to win at everything manifested itself in a self-appointed handicap of about 18 when he was closer to scratch. Tolly, who was my landlord in those early days at Leicester, was a fabulous one-day batsman, who was perhaps never quite the same player after having his cheekbone caved at Newcastle on the 1978-79 tour to Australia. He was not the most popular player on the circuit, as he consistently got up people’s noses, and as a teetotaller never gave himself the chance to undo the damage in the bar afterwards. However, he was a marvellous influence in our own dressing room, and was always at you about your cricket. I took over from him as captain in 1983 when the club fired him, a decision that he certainly did not expect at the time, and which closed the door on his career with an emphatic thud. My closest mate in the England team has been Allan Lamb who made his debut about four years after mine. He is the only man I know who has been collared by a policeman on the beat for using a mobile hand-held telephone: he was in a traffic jam on the King’s Road in London and doing about 1 m.p.h. Lamby is a remarkably straight-up-and-down guy, with as large a capacity for having a good time as anyone I’ve met, is an extraordinary good host – dangerously so – and has this huge energy and vitality that rubs off on any dressing room he is in. He has, down the years, been the wheeler-dealer of the England team, having as good an eye for business as he has for a cricket ball. On his day, he is as ruthless a destroyer of good bowling as anyone. Like most South Africans he is fond of the outdoors, and has now become something of the English country squire, always out hunting, fishing and shooting, and it was Lamby who was with me when I first went down the Cresta Run, another little part-time diversion that we will come back to later. Lamby and Ian Botham are similar characters in many respects, and there is a common denominator in my relationship with them in that I can’t keep up with either after dark. He has never shirked a challenge, and the fact that this applies off the field as well as on it has dropped him into the fertilizer once or twice. ‘Both’ is quite a vulnerable character, who tends to overreact if people set out to rub him up the wrong way in a bar, as many have, but he can also be as good as gold. He’s much brighter than people give him credit for, and because he has done so many things, there is a lot of depth to him. Again, contrary to public opinion, he does not down the nearest bottle of Beaujolais nouveau in one gulp (although I dare say he could) but is actually quite a discerning wine buff. He’s exceptionally loyal to his friends, and can be equally hard on people he has no time for. It is perfectly possible, also, for people to change categories with him, and one example was Leicestershire’s Les Taylor. Botham had no time for him at all until the 1985-86 West Indies tour, but when he found out what a character Les was, they became bosom buddies. It was said that I had problems captaining him, but rarely ever did, and I always enjoyed playing with him. I enjoyed playing with Graham Gooch until that last tour to Australia in 1990-91, but we have been good mates down the years, and I have nothing but admiration for what he has achieved for himself. He is, as most people are aware, an intensely private man, extremely shy with people he doesn’t know, and has become more and more dedicated over the years. He was a good bit wilder in his younger days, which might surprise some people, but as time has gone on he has become immersed in the game, and in making money out of it. He is still a social animal, with a dry sense of humour, but can be horribly intransigent at times. He always resented the punishment that was dished out to him for going to South Africa in 1981, and it is either an irony or a triumph for his character, depending on your point of view, that a cricketer who was banned for three years by his country has now become a national figurehead. Whether, when we drifted apart in Australia, he thought I had become a subversive influence I don’t know, but it cooled our relationship and this has left me a little sad. Whenever I have come in for criticism during my career, I have invariably been compared, unfavourably, with Geoff Boycott. Why could I not have been as single minded as he was? The answer is I don’t really know, but as I said before, I might possibly have entertained a few more people than he did. He always liked being the centre of attention (when he’s on TV he always speaks louder than anyone else) and would like to be loved more than perhaps he is. He has always been an enigma. He can be very rational, he has an immense knowledge of the game, he’s a very fine analyst of techniques and of situations within a game, and he is, potentially, one of the world’s great commentators. He certainly has the knowledge and understanding, but unfortunately you have to temper that with a very one-eyed view of the rest of the world, which largely centres around himself. I’ve never managed to finish one of his books (although in fairness this applies to most books I pick up) but the gist always seems to be: ‘I’d have done this, I’d have done that,’ and all the rest of it. Everything is based on G. Boycott. There are the archetypal Boycott stories, such as the time he reckoned he had cracked John Gleeson’s googly but refused to tell anyone else in the dressing room how he had done it. The only time I ever heard him admit to feeling vulnerable was in India, at a cocktail party in the grounds of the Maharajah of Baroda’s palace, when he sought me out for a heart-to-heart and said that he didn’t think people understood him properly. Well, following a conversation in his hotel room during a previous trip to India, I certainly knew someone who did not understand him. Me. We had arrived in Bombay for the Jubilee Test after the 1979-80 tour of Australia, a match I remember for three distinct reasons. Firstly, Both did his ‘Wilson of the Wizard’ bit and more or less won the game single-handed, then there were two strange incidents on the field. John Lever turned a ball off his legs for two, dislodging a bail as he did so. When he got back to the striker’s end he realized that no-one had noticed, surreptitiously put the bail back on, and got away with it. The other, even odder event, concerned Boycs, who had got a thin tickle down the legside to the wicketkeeper and was given out. However, at no stage did he look up at the umpire, and simply carried on marking out his guard and doing a spot of gardening. Eventually, the umpire put his finger down, the Indians appealed again and this time Boycs was given not out. It was extraordinary. I did not get any runs in that game, and had also had a poor tour to Australia. (I did get 98 not out in Sydney, having enjoyed a lot of luck in getting to 40, then ran out of partners when Willis lost his wicket. It was a barren period for me.) During the Bombay Test, I had some autograph sheets that needed signing, and I popped in to Boycs’ room at the hotel to get a few signatures. He looked up at me and said: ‘I can tell thee what tha doing wrong, tha knows.’ Pause. ‘But I’m not going to.’ I thought to myself: ‘Thanks very much’ and walked out. On the tour of India in 1981-82 Boycott had the world record for Test runs in his sights, and he passed it with a century at Delhi. Our next game was in Calcutta, and although he got a couple of rough decisions, it was as if the whole mental effort of getting past the target had drained him of motivation. After the second dismissal he went straight to bed, stayed in his room through the rest day and reports came back through his lady friend that he was very ill. The doctors were called in, and we didn’t see him again until round about lunchtime on the final day. With the game heading for a draw, we were still in the field, and as we went out again after lunch, Boycs turned to the boys left in the dressing room and said: ‘Anyone fancy a game of golf? I need some fresh air.’ It was widely believed that if he really required fresh air (always assuming you can find any in Calcutta) then perhaps he should have been inhaling it out on the field. Anyway, he took himself off to the Tollygunge Club for nine holes, and the overwhelming feeling that Boycs’ personal ambitions were coming a long way before the team’s general well-being, and the suspicion that his continued presence would be divisive on a tour already proving difficult in terms of morale, earned him an early ticket home. He left us a farewell note, pinned with a corkscrew to the side of a very pleasant redwood cabinet in the team room of the Oberoi Grand Hotel. Some of his unscheduled time off, of course, was spent organizing the Breweries tour to South Africa. He’s certainly different. He takes his ginseng tea with him everywhere, and he even had it written into his contract with Sky TV in England that he had to have a ‘proper’ cup or mug – no plastic. There are times when you can get on with him, and he has a lot to offer – although he got up Lamby’s nose during coaching before the last tour to the West Indies when he did everything except sing My Way to us. Technically and mentally he was a very strong player, although his first philosophy was always not to get out. We dropped him from the one-day side in Australia once, and when we brought him back he suddenly discovered a few shots. He had a lot of guts, and the number of runs he scored points to him being a more than useful player. Boycs always made me concentrate harder when I was batting with him, although this was largely to avoid getting run out. He did me once in Jamaica, and during a Test at Edgbaston I erred on the side of safety when he glided one down behind square, declining his call for a single. Not long after, he returned the compliment after I’d knocked one into a space, and at the end of the over he said: ‘If you’re not going to run mine, I’m not going to run yours.’ He has the ability to be extremely charming, and an equal ability to be a complete sod. He has said many times that a combination of my ability and his brain would make quite a player, and I would admit that had I had more of his application and dedication to the game I might have scored a lot more Test runs than he did. I might not, however, have had quite so many chums. I would count Mike Gatting among them, and we go back a long way. I have always admired his fighting qualities, and I thought it was typical of him to have scored so many runs in the summer of 1991 when he came back from South Africa. People who thought he would not have sufficient motivation without the incentive of a Test place, did not know the man. He murders bad bowling, and his eyes come out like organ stops when a spinner comes on. His eating habits are legendary, and the biggest shock I had all last summer was reading a report of a Middlesex game in the morning paper in which the captains, Gatt being one, had agreed to waive the tea interval. He has acquired a little dangerous knowledge about wine and crosswords, and although he invariably finishes the Daily Telegraph puzzle, he is not averse to putting a word in that fits the space rather than the clue. I like Gatt, although we are not that similar, and we don’t often seek out each other’s company after hours. I have never spoken to him on the subject, but it is rumoured that Micky Stewart told Gatt that he was about to be reappointed England captain ahead of me in 1989 when Ossie Wheatley applied his veto. What with getting sacked in 1988, his mother-in-law dying soon after, getting fined by the TCCB for an unauthorized chapter on the Shakoor Rana business in his book, and then getting knocked back by Wheatley, it was perhaps not surprising that he took the South Africans’ money later that summer. Mike remains a very committed cricketer and loves his role as Middlesex captain, following in the footsteps, if not the style, of Mike Brearley and the likes, and continues to bat with complete assurance and disdain for most opposition bowling. He has a down-to-earth approach to both the game and the people who play it which endears him to most of those who play under him, who in turn are prepared to excuse his foibles in exchange for his support and leadership. CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_f86768bf-badb-5433-a706-2fd1c69856ff) A millionaire? That’s rich I WAS never tempted to play cricket, unauthorized cricket that is, in South Africa. It was nothing to do with any great moral stance, but I was strongly recommended against it by my advisers when the Breweries tour was being organized for the winter of 1981-82, and no approach was made in 1989 when I was England captain. The only time I have played there was in the mid-seventies, as a member of the Crocodiles touring team selected from seven southern England schools and captained by Chris Cowdrey. We were there for three and a half weeks over the Christmas holidays, visiting Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban, Bloemfontein and Johannesburg, and it was a fabulous trip. The cricket was good and the hospitality even better. The rebel tour that Boycott organized in 1982, and which Gooch eventually captained, had sprouted its initial roots the previous winter during the England tour to the West Indies. There were a series of clandestine meetings, with shadowy figures emerging from hotel rooms, and various players were asked if they would be interested in a trip to South Africa should one be arranged. Most people kept their options open, waiting to see what sort of money was being offered, and it was all very hush-hush. It did not really gather momentum, however, until the tour to India the following winter. South African intermediaries would fly in, meetings were arranged in hotel rooms, and money was placed on the table. The standard plea, of course, was: ‘If you don’t want to come, fine, but please don’t blow the whistle on us.’ My agent, Jon Holmes, had told me that I would be risking too much from the commercial angle by going, and ‘Both’, whose solicitor had flown out to discuss the matter with him, received much the same advice. Simply as a cricketer I would love to have played there, but in practical terms it did not seem a good idea. There was no set punishment – as there was to be when Gatt skippered the 1989 side – but the players knew that repercussions were likely, among them a possible ban on playing for England. You don’t get paid that sort of money and go around behaving like an MI5 agent without suspecting that there might be a penalty clause. The code word, which still makes me giggle when I think back, was ‘chess’. So when someone wanted to talk to you about South Africa, he would sidle up to you and say: ‘Do you know how Karpov and Spassky are getting on?’ or ‘It’s a cool (k)night, but do you fancy a trip up to the Maharajah’s castle?’ However, once I had made the decision not to go, I never attended another meeting. Keith Fletcher, the captain, was another who turned it down, but Boycott, Gooch and John Emburey were strongly in favour. Graham’s tack was that ‘England never offer any guarantees’, and poor old Fletch quickly found out how true that was when he was sacked the following summer. Graham felt that money in the bank was worth more than any potential earning power he might or might not have by turning it down, and it is not always appreciated that he was a lot less confident of his own ability than he is now. He had been dropped before and his career had not blossomed to the extent that perhaps it ought to have done. When they came back from South Africa, and were fighting for their right to play for England, there was a certain naivety about their actions. When you are being offered figures that do not tally with normal cricketing rates, then you have got to assume that there is a price to pay. So although a three-year ban might have seemed harsh, it was nothing more severe than I had expected, and I cannot believe that those who went could have thought otherwise. I make no bones about my own reasons for not going. I was advised that it was likely to be commercially unfavourable for me. As for the 1989 tour, I was literally the last person in the dressing room to know, although South Africa had been a recurring theme almost every year. I had been out there on holiday many times between the two tours, and on one occasion in 1988 had been a guest of the South African Board at a couple of matches. The way I was pumped for information during those games left me in little doubt that another tour was on the cards. Even so, when the news broke during the Australian series in 1989, I had no real inkling before reading about it – like most people – in the morning papers. I can honestly say that had the organizers of the tour offered me a place, my answer would have been ‘No’. Because my main ambitions all centred on playing cricket for England and for as long as possible, with or without the captaincy to worry about, resisting the kruggerand did, I think, turn out to be a sound commercial decision. And there is no doubt that I have earned a tidy living from professional cricket. It is not a well-paid sport, however, and while I will not have to spend my retirement years playing the harmonica at the bottom of tube station escalators, nor am I wealthy. I have a lovely house in leafy Hampshire, but when guests come to stay, I am not able to send the Rolls to meet them or offer them the choice of accommodation in east or west wing. Comfortable would be the right word, I think. I would be more comfortable but for a financial settlement after splitting with my former fiancee, and a property deal that singed the fingers, but by and large I have done reasonably well out of the game. I am not in the same league as another of my agent’s stablemates, Gary Lineker, and I certainly can’t afford to do nothing after cricket. Life after cricket, in fact, might require a change of lifestyle, and indeed a change of attitude. Like growing up. Fortunately, I have been talented enough to earn wages at the higher end of the cricketing scale, but more importantly from the bank manager’s point of view, I have also had the good luck to be personally marketable. It is not quite true to say that I have sponsored cars to kitchens to lounge suits to underpants, but the spin-offs have augmented a fairly ordinary salary into one that has allowed me to pursue my various pleasures with a certain amount of style. A county cricketer’s wages, on the other hand, are not brilliant. It varies from club to club, and with sponsors playing a bigger and bigger role, certain players can command a useful basic wage. Sponsors helped Hampshire put together a very good deal for Kevin Curran when he was leaving Gloucestershire, comfortably above my own, but Northants in fact were able to top this by similar means. Yorkshire TV’s cash was also instrumental for Yorkshire to secure the services of Sachin Tendulkar, but the lesser players still have to scratch around for work every winter to make ends meet. A senior capped player’s basic last summer was between ?12,000-?15,000, which is not a fortune. When I was captain of Leicestershire I was on ? 15,000 and although it was not the money that made me leave, I got a ?10,000 rise by joining Hampshire. Had I taken Kent’s offer instead, I would have doubled what I was on at Leicester. Clubs will often point out that a player is only required to do six months work, and he has the potential to augment this over the other six, but it very much depends on what qualifications or abilities he has. Some go on the dole, some drive milk floats. Some are driven out of the game because employers eventually decide they cannot afford to give them summers off, as happened to the Leicestershire fast bowler Peter Booth. There were players at Grace Road last winter coaching in the indoor school for about three pounds an hour. Missing last winter’s tour to New Zealand and the World Cup might have cost me something in the region of ?30,000, about half of which I would have recouped doing other things, such as contributing to the media and one or two other promotional ventures. My agent, Jon Holmes, has been my greatest ally, and I would be worth a lot less without his advice down the years. I have never signed a contract with him, or ever felt the need to. I had a good benefit year at Leicester, and when my earning power was at its maximum we shrewdly tied up a lot of my money in investments, some of which I have since had to sell in order to buy my current house. I do have the odd indulgence, such as a special edition Jaguar XJR-S of which I am very fond, buying paintings, and I have a lot of claret and port laid down in various warehouses so that if I ever do go broke I can either sell it or drink myself to death. I don’t spend my money on anything in particular, apart from music, and I gave up the flying lessons when I got Peter Lush’s bill for twenty minutes in the air in Australia. If I leave cricket with no regrets at all, it is probably in the knowledge that I will never have to play another one-day game. Around the world it now attracts more spectators than Test cricket, but from a personal point of view, it was in the ‘watching paint dry’ category of enervation and excitement. I enjoyed it when I first started, probably because it allowed me to play bad shots with some sort of excuse. After a while, though, the repetition of the thing began to wear me down, and the fact that everything was geared – for the fielding side anyway – to the negative side of things. By and large, if a spectator turns up for the last fifteen overs he won’t have missed anything. It is purely about the result, otherwise you wouldn’t be standing there at extra cover wondering why the crowd was going bananas over a leg-bye. I enjoyed the day-nighters in Australia more, for the different atmosphere and theatre they generated, but they don’t stir my adrenalin quite like Test cricket. Latterly, of course, with fielding such an important part of the one-day game, I enjoyed it even less because my shoulder injury would not let me contribute properly. To be unable to do something you actually used to do reasonably well – in my case, throw the ball with slightly more grace than a shot-putter – was frankly depressing. Sunday League games were the worst, and I got to the stage where I almost got resentful about playing in them. The formula is numbing and unless the team is close to the top of the table, the game becomes the chore it shouldn’t be. If there is a bonus to Sunday League cricket it is perhaps because you see fewer batsmen wearing helmets, owing to the restriction on bowlers’ run-ups. Ironically, the only time I have ever been badly ‘pinned’ was on a Sunday afternoon in 1977, during a rain-affected ten-over slog, when I top-edged a pull into my face. I first wore a helmet on my first tour to Australia in 1978-79. The idea had been around for a long time, and it was probably only tradition that prevented helmets from coming into general use many years before they did. The more macho characters resisted at first, some of them holding out for years, but very few players have never worn one at all. Viv Richards and Richie Richardson, in fact, are the only two who come to mind. It may have taken some of the romance out of batting, particularly for the spectators, but when you have just collected one on the cranium from the likes of Richard Hadlee, you tend not to dwell too much on the loss of some precious heritage: preservation of your head seems somehow more important. I’ve tried batting without one against quick bowlers, and I remember leaving it behind in the dressing room after tea during a Test against New Zealand at the Oval. I was feeling pretty confident – en route to a hundred – when Hadlee (hackles raised by my impertinence no doubt) let me have one, and it zipped off the side of my head for four leg-byes. He gave me a look that suggested I’d be better off going back to the dressing room to fetch it, but on the ‘lightning not striking twice’ principle, I carried on. Happily without further damage. It’s not a hardship, nowadays. It does get hot wearing one, but they are now quite lightweight and a long way removed from the old motor cycle crash hat. I’m sure that no-one who thinks properly about it would suggest that players should run the risk of serious injury when there is equipment on hand capable of preventing it. I have no truck at all with anyone who suggests banning helmets for either batsmen or fielders. There is the old argument that they make you less aware of danger, a bit like cycling through the rush-hour traffic plugged into a Walkman, but when you are twenty-two yards away from an object that could easily kill you, it really doesn’t cut much ice. I thought about not wearing one in Antigua in 1981, because I was in such good form, and was rather glad that I resisted the urge when Colin Croft crusted me with one that I had lost in the crowd. A lot of great batsmen have got by without one, but the history of the game is also studded with people who would have been a lot better off with one on. Nari Contractor, for example, required several blood transfusions and ended up with a fractured skull and a plate in his head after being hit by Charlie Griffith in the West Indies. I’m pretty sure Larwood and Tyson were something above slow-medium, but there have been some rapid bowlers around since I started playing, not all of whom appear to regard the bouncer as an occasional weapon. ‘Who was the fastest you ever faced?’ is a standard question, and although one or two m.p.h. here or there hardly matters when you are talking in the nineties, I think Sylvester Clarke might receive my vote on the strength of several deliveries at the Oval one day. He ripped the top of my glove off, and he would also bowl you the occasional delivery you simply never saw. He also had a genuine streak of meanness that made it additionally unpleasant to face him. Everyone gets worn down by fast bowling in the end, and I was certainly less keen to face it at thirty than I was at twenty. Barry Dudleston, who was a fine player for Leicestershire, told me that when he first came into the game that if anyone bounced him he said, ‘Thanks very much.’ However, when he was starting to get on a bit, he wasn’t so much thinking of four runs as staying out of hospital. The game is nastier now, no doubt about it – verbally as well as physically. When you’ve got the two combined, someone bowling very fast at you and also being rather unpleasant, it can be highly disconcerting. If the world sledging championships were held tomorrow, you would have to install the Australians as 1/2 favourites, and they invented the term of course. On the other hand, some of those who have complained about them have thrown their stones from exceptionally large greenhouses. The West Indies, Pakistan and India are not too far behind them I’d say. It’s a hard old game today, not always edifying, and you can even find some high-class sledging in county cricket. It might be more acceptable if it was more witty, but most of it is very basic stuff. Another perceived problem with the modern game is over-rates, although the authorities are convinced it is one of the major evils and the only cure is to impose harsher and harsher fines. It’s one of the few jobs in the world whereby the longer you work at it the less you get paid. Personally, I think the powers-that-be have become a bit paranoid about this question, although when play was still going on at twenty to eight against the West Indies at Lord’s in 1988 I might have had a different view on the matter. I would guess that the game has become a touch more professional now (maybe more cynical as well) in that the Don would never score 300 in a day 50 years on. The fielding captain would have put his men back, and ordered his bowlers to snap a bootlace twice an over. It’s sad for the spectators if this run feast dries up, but the modern professional will see it as a legitimate tactic. I did it in Lahore in 1984, when we set Pakistan a target on the last day, and Mohsin Khan and Shoaib Mohammad smashed the thing all round the ground. I had to slow it down, and we eventually frustrated them into giving away wickets. Fines may be the answer, and the spectators may deserve more for their money, but I’m pretty sure that if I had walked into that press conference in Lahore and said, ‘Sorry, lads, I could have saved the match, but it would have cost us five hundred quid apiece,’ then anyone picking this quote out of the morning papers would not, understandably, have been very impressed. The respect in which I count myself most fortunate was to be born a batsman. There is a lot more glamour in scoring a century than taking wickets, and from a marketing point of view, it is also more lucrative than being a bowler. Endorsing bowling boots is not the sort of sideline calculated to make you rich, and players such as myself, Gooch and Robin Smith have made more money out of spin-offs than the likes of Dilley, Foster and Willis. The one source of income open to all, provided he puts in the required amount of service, is the benefit, and I picked up ?105,000 tax free from my own in 1987. People will say that the benefit system was not really devised for the likes of people like me, more for the honest-to-goodness county pro who has not really had the chance to earn bigger money, and I would have a certain amount of sympathy with that. However, the common denominator is the reward for long service, to which all players – Test or county – are entitled, and if potential benefactors do not want to give to a player because they consider he is already earning enough money, then that is his or her privilege. Benefits are much more commercialized than they used to be, and in coming ever closer to the technical limits that are imposed upon them, may well attract the interest of the taxman at some stage in the future. In my year we did something like twenty theatre shows the length and breadth of the country, which were too close to being a commercial venture not to declare it to the Revenue as such. No player wants to queer the pitch for others who are following. There have been any number of more successful benefits than my own, including some of the county stalwarts who deserve them most. Paul Pridgeon, for example, managed to raise ?150,000 at Worcester, which came about through a combination of his own popularity and having very efficient people running the benefit for him. Others have not done so well, and when Graham Roope was awarded one with Surrey, it went so badly wrong that he almost ended up losing money. One or two Test players, myself included, have raised eyebrows by staging events outside the county they have been playing for, but when you perform on a higher stage your supporters are not all confined to one county. There is a publican near Worcester – inappropriately named David Drinkwater – who has been a supporter of cricket and cricketers for a very long time, and has been a great friend to players from all parts of the country. I had three lunches there during my year, and Worcestershire queried it with him. Quite rightly, however, he told them that it was entirely his business who he chose to help in this way, whether it be Worcestershire players or not. The only other point to make is that if you compare the modern benefit in real terms to benefits of twenty or thirty years ago, you will find that there has not been a vast increase in the rewards. If you costed W.G.’s benefit out on today’s retail price index he would have to be the wealthiest man who has ever played cricket. And he was an amateur. Overseas players have been a bone of contention over the years, but I think they are good for our game. One argument against them has been that we have helped many become better players through county cricket, and then suffered because of it when they turn round and beat us in Test matches. Border would have taken home a lot of useful information from playing with Essex, likewise Hadlee, Marshall, Waqar Younis, Wasim Akram – the list is endless. However, I still think that it works both ways. Unless our own cricketers play with the likes of these people, they will become too insular. Where our system falls down is in having so many cricketers playing for so many different clubs. In Australia, for example, with only half-a-dozen state sides, the real talent is more concentrated, and this is why they have perhaps more player movement than we do in this country. If someone can’t get into the New South Wales team, but is wanted by Queensland, he will just up and move from Sydney to Brisbane. The fact that we have more players to pick from does not necessarily give us a stronger international team, and rather than taking on new counties like Durham, we should ideally be creating a smaller pool of top players. A smaller number of stronger sides, playing less but more intense cricket, would serve us far better at Test level. Four-day cricket is also, I feel, the right way forward. It can, of course, be a tedious game at times, but it does have the enormous advantage of giving the stronger sides a better opportunity to win. There is certainly more scope for batsmen to occupy the crease (Hick, for example, might never have had the time to make 400 in a three-day match) and it also makes bowlers work harder for their wickets. More importantly, it is so closely related to Test cricket. Whatever system is employed, they have certainly got two things right after years of brainlessness. The extra day’s preparation for Test matches is so obviously a benefit that it boggles the mind to think that it has taken so long to be introduced, as indeed is the fact that Friday is no longer an automatic travelling day. Asking players to perform on a Saturday morning after spending ten hours on the road staring at the back of a caravan, was something that only recently occurred to the TCCB as unreasonable. All this legislation defining what professional cricketers do is passed by the chairmen of county cricket clubs, some of whom appear to have no better grasp of the mechanics of the game than I have of Serbo-Croat. The number of times that I attended county captains’ meetings and saw recommendations passed on that were either totally ignored or chopped to pieces, would make another book. You would make a proposal in September, disappear overseas for the winter, and come back to another captains’ meeting in April to find that the thoughts of what are supposed to be the seventeen or eighteen people closer to the game than anyone, had been deposited in the nearest wastepaper basket. The fact that the Professional Cricketers’ Association has never had anything like the influence at Lord’s as the county committees, has got to be slightly mad. County committees are generally comprised of people who have the game at heart, but who are attracted to a club for any number of reasons, and to have them responsible for running the game is sheer folly. The captains, by contrast, are treated like schoolboys by the people at Lord’s. They pompously issue ‘we know best’ edicts from those offices next to the museum, when half of them should be in the museum themselves. It is very hard to monitor the game if you are not in the dressing room, and even though players can be selfish, short sighted and need monitoring by a higher authority, there is no excuse for their voice being as feeble as it is. You get people like Ossie Wheatley vetoing the appointment of an England captain. Why did he have that sort of power? Who on earth is he? There could have been very few county cricketers at that time who either knew who he was or what he had done in the game, and what is the purpose of appointing an England committee only for its decisions to be over-ruled by a face-less official deep behind the scenes? Lord’s have only recently cottoned on to the idea of consulting umpires about players. They are closer to the action than anyone, and almost without exception, have played the game at a high level themselves. Our umpires are consistently better than they are anywhere else in the world, because of the experience that cannot be bought or acquired from an examination paper. They are familiar with players and their attitudes, and the fact that they have played the game automatically invests them with a cloak of authority. In places where this is not the case, such as Australia, the players find it almost obligatory to abuse their umpires from the moment they get onto the field to the moment they leave it – and that is probably one reason why so few ex-players don’t take it up. Someone like Tom Brooks, who was a pretty good umpire, more or less gave it up in 1979 when he gave Graeme Wood out caught behind off John Lever. It was a poor decision, but the flak he copped was unbelievable. How Tony Crafter, who is a lovely man and a fine umpire, has kept going all these years I don’t know. I am more in favour of an international panel of umpires than so called ‘neutral’ officials. It doesn’t do Australia or England any good if they are saddled with a substandard Pakistani umpire, or indeed India or Pakistan any good if they get a poor one from us. The pressure on umpires these days is horrendous, with all the trials by TV and newspapers, and mistakes are highlighted and exaggerated more than ever. As for the idea of electronic aids, a kind of replay booth of the sort they have in American Football, I tend to think it would be a benefit. I love the theory and tradition of the umpire being the sole judge, and his word being law, but if there are technical aids that can help, then there has got to be a move towards using them. There are so many things for them to do nowadays, that to be infallible is more impossible than it ever was. The days when all they had to do was check the coat pocket for six marbles are long gone. As always with the game of cricket, traditional thinking such as ‘the umpire’s word is law’, remains at the heart of all discussions on the subject. At the moment, the technology that exists can only help with run-outs or stumpings. We will have to wait until there are foolproof methods for clarifying catches behind and lbw decisions, so that those dismissed erroneously in these ways no longer feel aggrieved by colleagues who have been reprieved by cameras ideally sited to deal with a contentious run-out. CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_bfc65288-13e6-56fe-932b-09328752e889) On the piste and on safari FROM early childhood through to adulthood (some might say semi-adulthood) cricket has been the dominant feature of my life, and most of the things I’ve done have stemmed directly from the game. However, I have always tried to ensure that cricket does not take over my life completely, and there have been times when I have had to get right away from it to preserve a degree of sanity. Getting right away from it by taking to the air in the middle of a match was perhaps an extreme example, and in terms of career advancement, not a very wise one. I bumped into my old cricket master from King’s School, Canterbury, during a county game last summer, a lovely chap by the name of Colin Fairservice who would be well into his eighties by now. He brought up the Tiger Moth business and said, ‘The trouble with you, David, is that you’ve never grown up.’ I don’t think this is entirely true, but I guess this is how most people perceive me, and I would have to own up for supplying a certain amount of evidence to this school of thought. I have developed many outside interests, enjoying them both for what they are and as a partial antidote to cricket. You cannot get much further away from a cricketing environment than snow, and winter sports have figured prominently in my more energetic leisure pursuits. I first went skiing at the age of ten, when my parents took me to Switzerland, but it was another twenty years before I had my first serious go at it. I had become very close friends with a keen social skier and bobsledder by the name of Simon Strong, having met him through Allan Lamb, and one year the three of us and our respective ladies took ourselves off to the resort of Verbier. It was a somewhat painful introduction to the sport, largely because our hosts had booked lunch at a place situated at the bottom of one of the more demanding slopes at the resort. It was certainly not for novices, and having made most of the trip on arse and elbow, the wine was consumed less as an aid to digestion than as an anaesthetic. I later took a ride in a bobsleigh at the Italian resort of Cervinia, behind the then British No 1, Nick Phipps. It was exciting – a little like being on a trapeze without the safety net – and just before the West Indies tour of 1985-86, Strong decided that it was about time Lamb and myself had a go at the Cresta Run. Essentially, you lie on a one-man toboggan – two runners with a frame and sliding seat – and we were simply plonked at the start and shoved off. I have been back many times since, acquiring membership of the St Moritz Tobogganing Club, and I have certainly caught the bug for it. There is a corner on the Run called Shuttlecock, which is designed (for both experts and beginners) as a safety valve: if you are going too fast, it ejects you like a cork out of a bottle, bringing you back to earth – hopefully unharmed – in thick snow and hay. It qualifies you for the Shuttlecock tie, not an exclusive club by any means, and if I had one for every time I’ve been catapulted off the toboggan, I would have an awful lot of ties in the rack. Like all of these things, it is a combination of fear and exhilaration that gives you the buzz. The first time we went down, Lamby and myself thought that if we could pull off something like the Cresta Run, then facing the West Indies’ attack would be a piece of cake by comparison. We were not exactly proved right, I must confess. Put it this way, the Cresta went a lot better than the West Indies tour, during which, in all five Tests, the team went the same way as a Shuttlecock tie-holder. I went to the winter Olympics at Calgary in 1988, which was fabulous, and one of my most enjoyable experiences was watching the USA versus Czechoslovakia ice-hockey match. The Saddledome Stadium was packed to the rafters, and I have scarcely enjoyed watching a game of anything more than that. It is a sport that does not come over that well on TV, largely because it is so difficult to pick up the puck, but I would recommend a live match between two good teams to anyone. I have developed a reputation as something of a bon viveur, although it is a general misconception that I always am, as it were, out on the piste. In this country, I am quite a homebird, but it is very easy to be out most nights on a tour. You live out of suitcases by and large, and as there is a certain depressive aspect about room service, I do like to go out and eat. The occasional cork has been heard to pop close to my table, I admit, but the eyes are not bloodshot every morning. I have acquired a taste for champagne, and one of my closer friends, Simon Leschallas, by happy chance works for Bollinger. They always have a tent at Lord’s, and our friendship developed through the frequency of my visits, and the fact that he is a very amusing and amenable host. He introduced me to Rob Hirst, who is Bollinger’s Australian agent, and on Mike Gatting’s tour in 1986-87, Rob not only had a bottle waiting in the room when we arrived in Queensland, but also ensured that supplies were more than adequate (not to mention agreeably priced) over the next four months. On that tour I spent as much time packing Bollinger cases (scribbling ‘medical supplies’ all over the wrapping paper) than my kit bag. Having acquired some fame, there is a mixture of good and bad in terms of invitations that come your way, and whenever one accepts an invitation to some sort of function it is a question of keeping the fingers crossed that all will be well. The good news is that more often than not people are very pleased to see me, and are accordingly very generous and helpful. There are some especially attractive invitations along the way, including film premieres and the like, but it would be wrong to suggest that we all live in a constant social whirl. And often it is the smaller local functions with Rotary Clubs and the like that are the most enjoyable and satisfying. You have to balance out the number of requests with the time available, and one of my bigger chores is getting through the mail. Our postman does not quite qualify for the lead role in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but the paperknife does get a little warm most mornings. On the other hand, during the occasional crises in my career, the tone of the letters has mostly been very supportive, and I do feel I owe it to these people to reply as often as I can. I try and meet requests for autographs and photographs, and there is a never-ending stream of mail asking for items for charity auctions. So many, in fact, that you could end up with an empty house if you’re not very careful. Not everyone gets what they want, of course, but then few do. When the clerical bit gets a mite wearing and I need a bit of a blow out, I tend to head for the tennis court. I also play a bit of golf, and the interesting thing for me is that my temperament for both games tends to be a lot more fragile than it is for cricket. My brain wants me to be an Edberg or a Ballesteros, but the body tends to be irritatingly disobedient. I’ve done a bit of McEnroe-ing with the racket, and I have to say that he’s always been one of my favourites. I can sympathize with the mental pain he appears to go through. Like his, my language on the tennis court (and the golf course) does have scope for improvement. I also play a bit of squash now and then, but my most passionate off-duty pursuit has always been for Africa and wildlife. Having spent my early life in Tanganyika, there has always been a lingering affinity for that part of the world, and the umbilical cord became unbreakable after a private safari to Kenya. We went with a guy called Tor Allan, on a recommendation from Tim Rice’s wife, Jane, and his knowledge of where to find the wildlife – the game, the birds, and all the rest of it – made it a fabulous nine days. To be almost on your own in the middle of these unspoiled places, surrounded by the sights and sounds of the wild, is an unbelievable feeling. But I have to say that what suited my nature just as well was not rubbing two sticks of wood together, and trying to catch supper with a primitive rod and line. Tor’s African boys all donned waistcoats and bowties to serve us four-course dinners, and we kept the Bollinger chilled in an old kerosene fridge. Sitting out there at night in the middle of nowhere was paradise. Southern Africa is just as rich a venue for wildlife, and on Allan Lamb’s recommendation I went one year to a place called Londolozi, a private game reserve on the western Kruger in Eastern Transvaal, run by two brothers, John and Dave Varty. John, who had played a little bit of first-class cricket for Transvaal before falling out with the management (so we had something in common) makes docu-dramas about wildlife all over the world. He specializes in leopards, and one of the first films he made – Silent Hunter – was devoted exclusively to these particular cats. I also have a wonderful book at home entitled The Leopards of Londolozi. The brothers inherited the park, and turned it round from nothing into one of the best in the Transvaal. They try to leave the habitat to nature as much as they possibly can, although a certain amount of management is required for the animals’ own welfare. It is a wonderful spot. The basic form there is to go out in an open topped Landrover with six to eight people, although I have got to know the brothers well enough now for them to entrust me with a warden or a tracker and allow me to take a landrover out myself. It is so much more exhilarating, because you are not tied to the routine of the organized outing. If you want to stay in one particular spot for hours then you can. I have been back four or five times since that first visit, and will continue to do so just as long as I can continue to find the air fare. Complementing my general love of wildlife is a keen interest in the art side of it. Several years ago, I was in Lincoln to watch another mate, Robin Askwith, in pantomime, and was walking back to the hotel when I passed a shop displaying a framed print of cheetahs by the wildlife artist David Shepherd. I liked it so much that I forked out ?250 on the spot, and that was the start of my collection of wildlife prints, paintings and artifacts. I have also got to know the artist himself, who lives in a fabulous renovated farmhouse near Godalming. David is one of the world’s great enthusiasts, not only about wildlife, which has made his reputation as an artist, but also about trains – he even has his own steam railway line in Somerset. He is passionate about the preservation of the world’s heritage, and several years ago he started the David Shepherd Conservation Foundation – my own involvement extending to a seat on the Board of Trustees. There are the obvious species generating concern for conservationists, such as elephants and rhinos, but David also raises money for any number of different projects worldwide. He is a lovely man, very kind hearted, and if I thought I was busy at times, I didn’t really know what busy meant until I met David. I got myself sponsored for so much a run in the summer of 1991 on behalf of the foundation, and as my form was slightly better than one of the cricket reporters made out (who dryly observed that I was on course to save half a tusk), I managed to raise around ? 16,000 for the cause. It could have been better, but the irony was that my highest score of the season – eighty-odd not out against Middlesex – came at Lord’s when David was there to watch the game as a guest of Joe Hardstaff. I saw him before going into bat, and responded accordingly. I later suggested, not surprisingly, that he come and watch me more often. I am also involved in SAVE, a charity that raises money to buy equipment for use in places like Zambia and Zimbabwe. Its headquarters are in New York, but a friend of mine by the name of Nicholas Duncan, who I first met while playing club cricket in Perth in 1977-78, has now started an Australian branch. On England’s last tour to Australia he organized a fund raising dinner, which I spoke at, and I accompanied a party of tourists on a cash gathering mission to Zimbabwe after the tour. The major target for SAVE in Africa, and especially in Zimbabwe, is the black rhino, which is now being poached out of existence. Another integral part of my involvement with wildlife is my interest in photography, but not everyone shoots animals with a Canon. Sadly, the poacher’s rifle is more common. The only rhinos we saw in Zimbabwe on that trip were on a private farm at Imire, an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Harare, where the collection extended to seven orphans. We did not see any in the wild, and their plight is frankly desperate. There was a mixture of English and Australians in our party out there, and, inevitably, we had a game of cricket for the ‘Ashes’. We played on an airstrip near one of the tourist camps using a tennis ball, a piece of wood, and a deckchair for the stumps. Yet again, the Australians made off with the Ashes – and guess who was out to a careless shot? Actually, it was an unplayable ball that swung and seamed both ways. That’s my story anyway. The overall story, I suppose, is that I, like the rhino, also wanted to roam a little more freely than people with metaphorical rifles cared to allow. I only hope that the modern game will continue to cater for the occasional free spirit, and that we do not end up with a clone factory for marathon runners and net addicts. Cricket is too rich a sport not to accommodate different types of character – and it would be a shame if players like myself were to become, like the black rhino, an endangered species. CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_ed1636e2-c173-5818-b63a-e24ab3ae4bb4) Out of Africa I WAS born in Tunbridge Wells in 1957 on April Fool’s Day (which some people might say explains a great deal) although there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that I was actually conceived in Africa. Sadly, neither parent is available for comment on that one. I lost my father in 1973, and Mum died in what was to be a particularly awful year for me, 1986. My father was in the Colonial Service, having worked his way up through the ranks to become a District Commissioner and then on to a more senior administrative position in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika – which is now Tanzania – and had been there since the end of the War. We lived there until I was about six (at which time the country’s independence brought us home) and my earliest memories are of living in a bungalow down by the beach just outside Dar es Salaam. Our next house adjoined the golf course and was built on stilts, partly to lessen the prospect of finding some of the less edifying wildlife at the bottom of your bed. I can recall the occasional passing snake, which the garden boy would obligingly hammer to death with a rake. He would have been a decent player – middled it every time. I’ve still got a photo of him, actually, posing with the rake and a dead snake. We lived in true colonial fashion with a small retinue of servants, who lived with their families at the back of the property. With no brothers or sisters, I used to spend a lot of my time with them during the day, running around outside their huts, which were a long way from being palaces I can tell you, and accepting the occasional chunk of bread and a cup of hot sweet tea, which appeared to be part of their diet. It made no difference to me whether I was filled up by that or with whatever my mother came up with back in the main house. Basically, it was a very happy and carefree childhood. My father was an accomplished all-round sportsman. The social life revolved around the Gymkhana Club, where he played cricket, hockey, golf and tennis to a fairly high standard. He also played fives and rugby, and certainly had a greater all-round talent than I ever had. He won a hockey blue at Cambridge, and also had the potential to win one at cricket as well, and perhaps had the talent to become a sportsman if had he not gone to Africa to launch a proper career. Maybe if he’d been alive when I was at university studying law it might have persuaded me not to do precisely the opposite of what he did. It was my father who first put a bat in my hand, although my mother spent as much time lobbing a tennis ball in my direction as he did because he was away at work quite a bit of the time. If it had not been for my mother, I would probably have been a right-hander, because while my father tried to get me to hold the bat the normal way round, it was she who persuaded him to allow natural instincts to prevail. So now you know who to blame for all those lazy nicks to gully. The only other thing I’ve ever done consistently left-handed, in fact, is dealing cards. The last thing I remember doing in Tanganyika, which has a lot to do, I imagine, with my passion for wildlife now, is going on safari with my parents to some of the northern game parks. There was one close call with a fairly truculent elephant, thanks to the driver of our Land Rover panicking and stalling the engine, but it was a lovely way to say goodbye to Africa, as a child anyway. We finished up by taking the boat down to Cape Town, and from there it was onto the Union Castle and back to England. We settled in Kent, and for my father, now commuting to Victoria every day, it was a different climate, in all senses, after twenty-odd years in Africa. We were there for a year or two before he applied for a job as registrar at the Loughborough College of Education – the idea being that he could still use his admin skill while being close to sporting activity. It was also good news for my own sporting education, in that my holidays from prep school coincided with student holidays at Loughborough and I got the run of all the facilities there. We also had a snooker table at our disposal, although you would hardly think so to see to me play now. Before long, though, having done a year or so at primary school in Quorn, my parents packed me off to prep school at Marlborough House in Kent, which was a bit of a wrench at the time. It was fairly intimidating at first, and I did the customary bit of bursting into tears when the parental car disappeared down the drive. I remember thinking when my mother sent me my first cake through the post that I wished it had a file in it, but you soon adapt and I spent five happy years there until the age of thirteen. It was a smallish school, about one hundred boys or so, and without exactly being Wilson of the Wizard, I stood out at most sports. I enjoyed rugby as much as anything and was the all-action-fly-half-cum-goal-kicker, and was a big fan of Wales in those days, when, as I recall, Welsh rugby supporters actually had something to cheer about. As the family name suggests there is some Welsh ancestry – not so much on the Gower around Swansea as further west towards Cardigan – although by the time it got to me the blood was becoming severely diluted. I don’t recall supporting Glamorgan at cricket (there is a limit), although cricket was becoming more and more my best sport. I scored my first century against a school who were one of our main rivals. I was thirteen then, which caused a bit of excitement as centuries were not that common. I had some very good coaching, and the cricket master, Derek Whittome, was a big influence on me at an important stage of my development. I caught up with him again during my benefit year in 1987 at a cricket talk-in evening in Hastings, and he brought along a party of boys from the school. It wasn’t all sport, mind you, and hard to believe though it is I actually paid a bit of attention to my school work in those days. Going back to my early upbringing, I harboured more ambitions towards becoming a game-warden than a cricketer. Dreams, shall we say, of fishing on a game reserve as opposed to outside the off stump. Anyway, I did well enough in the classroom to win a scholarship to King’s School, Canterbury. I was going to sit for one at Repton as well, the idea being to get closer to home, but King’s delivered a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum, and family finances at the time were not quite up to taking the gamble. My father had been to King’s, and not only won most of the supporting trophies going, but also rose to the dizzy heights of head boy. A hard act to follow, and needless to say I didn’t. I started pretty well, getting into the rugby, cricket and hockey teams, knuckling down to my piano and clarinet lessons, and actually studying quite hard. On the cricketing side, the First XI used to play about seven or eight other schools during the course of a summer but also a number of club sides – mostly from Kent, but including the likes of the Stragglers of Asia and the MCC. Now when we played against the clubs, the visiting captain was allowed to invite the boys into The Beverley, which was the pub just around the corner from the cricket field, for the odd half of shandy. Like most people, I suppose, my first taste of beer was pretty foul, but after a few net sessions, so to speak, I began to see the attraction. So much so, that one or two of us decided not to wait for the next club match for our next visit and try a spot of freelancing instead. Inevitably, having cycled with a classmate early one evening and ordered a couple of pints of foaming best bitter, we had hardly started an illicit glass of Kent’s finest hop when in walked a couple of adults we were more accustomed to seeing in gowns and mortars chalking Latin verbs up on the blackboard. I attempted some weak joke, along the lines of ‘What are you having, sir?’ which for some reason failed to reduce the two masters to helpless laughter, and we were duly ordered to leave and await further developments. Fortunately enough, it was a fairly enlightened establishment – no Flashman to roast you over an open fire and not much use of the cane. But although we avoided physical retribution, the next few weeks were not terribly pleasant: confined to barracks, report cards, jankers – that sort of thing. So that was an early blot, head of school prospects out of the window, but the cricket was going well. I had made the First XI at the age of fourteen, which was by no means a school record, but it did mean that I grew up fairly quickly in cricketing terms. The difference between fourteen and eighteen-year-olds is quite a large one, and, like all sports, if you are stretching yourself against better and more experienced opposition then you learn a good bit faster than you would against boys of your own age. On top of this I was playing club cricket in Leicestershire during the summer holidays, which also broadened my social horizons, as a boarding school is somewhat cloistered, and in my last year at Canterbury I had gone on to captain the side. I made a few cock-ups, of course, but it was all part of the learning process, as indeed was the earlier business of getting caught in the pub. Entering a hostelry so closely connected to the school was not a great idea, particularly when Canterbury has one of the highest densities of pubs per square mile in the country. Ergo, if you are a schoolboy in Canterbury you can find a pub that is unfrequented by authority and have a fairly good chance of avoiding detection – as most of us proceeded to prove. Anyhow, it seemed like a good idea to get the hang of beer drinking in preparation for a rugby career, having at that time established a nice, undemanding little number as Fourth XV fly-half. We had a choice between rugby and athletics, which involved tedious things like jumping into sandpits, over hurdles, and cross country runs. The only time I did a cross-country run I cannily missed off a third of the course, and still only came about 80th. My big mistake on the rugger field, however, was to play well enough to get into the Second XV where, with King’s having a strong tradition in the sport, they took the game fairly seriously. The school rugby coach was a Welshman by the name of Ian Gollop, a man dedicated to mathematics and rugby, and who possessed an overwhelming desire to win that was conspicuously absent on the Fourth XV pitch. We even had training sessions, which was not quite what I had in mind when I gleefully kicked athletics into touch. The Second XV backs did an awful lot of running around without the ball – as a foil to our first-team counterparts – and I raised this point with Mr Gollop. ‘Do you really need us for this?’ I inquired, whereupon he told me that if I didn’t like it, I could get on my bike and clear off. So I did. However, this actually turned out to have much the same effect of saying ‘sod ‘em’ to the England selectors fifteen years later, as I then found myself in the First XV. I didn’t quite make it until the end of the season, though. Dropped for ‘lack of effort’. Even in those early days I realized I was a touch closer to the Baron de Coubertin’s philosophy than Ian Gollop’s. Critics have since earmarked it as a failing, a character defect, and maybe they’re right, but I’ve always liked to win. Life’s much easier when you win – it’s just that I sussed out from a fairly early age that you don’t always. I actually had to learn and develop a stronger competitive spirit at school, where I made the discovery that losing in itself is not something to tear your hair out over, but not performing as well as you can certainly is. I remember playing in the school squash competition against a lad I should have beaten. I’d won the first game, and was so far ahead in the second that I almost felt sorry for him and relented. Then, of course, I started to play very badly, and to cut a long story short, got stuffed. That annoyed me so much that I actually felt ashamed of myself. So it’s not so much the winning or losing – it’s more that if I feel as though I’ve played as well as I can, I feel okay. Translated in to cricket, if you’ve done well, scored a century maybe, but the side has lost, there’s definitely a feeling of disappointment but you’re not personally depressed. I used to play a fair amount of tennis with a good friend of mine from Leicester, Tim Ayling, and to be perfectly frank he can beat me anytime he wants to. As I recall, the only time I’ve ever won a set off him was when we had not prepared in the regulation manner, and he was slightly more pissed than I was. But as long as I’ve felt I’ve played hard and competed against him, I’ve enjoyed the game. It might sound a bit futile, but I’d sooner play out of my skin and lose than beat an inferior player. But as for the so-called lack of a competitive streak, I once played tennis with Robin Askwith when he came up to stay with me in Leicester a few years back, and for all Askwith’s charms and abilities, he happens to be deformed. He’s actually got one leg shorter than the other, which he’s hidden quite well in most walks of life, but it doesn’t do much for his agility on a tennis court. He’d also done something to his ankle, so he could barely move at all to his left, which is where I kept hitting the ball. By the end of the game, he was barely able to crawl into the shower, and he said: ‘If anyone says you haven’t got a competitive streak in you, I am living proof to the contrary.’ I don’t think you can get through sixteen years of first-class cricket, with a reasonable amount of success, without some kind of competitive edge. It’s all about maintaining a balance in many ways. For instance I play golf, or a strange version of it, not too often and not too well a lot of the time. But if I can make a contribution, make the odd par here and there, then I’m happy, but if I go round like a total novice, and spend half my time hacking out of bushes or failing to drive past the ladies’ tee, then frankly, I get bloody irritable. Going back to the rugby, and the ‘lack of effort’, I scored plenty of points with the boot, and also popped over for a few tries – but apparently there was something wrong with my work-rate. Even in those days, it seems, skill took second place to sweat. Micky Stewart would have loved Ian Gollop. Generally, I think my philosophy has stood me in good stead. I’ve never been one to mope around looking miserable after losing, which in some ways is a good thing, and in others bad. Putting on appearances to suit other people is not really me, but I now know, for example, that had I looked a touch more suicidal after losing a Test match to India in 1986, I might not have been relieved of the England captaincy. I felt bad about it, but to the man that mattered – Peter May – not bad enough. King’s has a fabulous setting, well worth a walk round if you are ever in Canterbury, and most of the school is within the Cathedral Close. To get to breakfast in the morning there was a walk of about 250 yards past one of the great cathedrals of the world, and a passage through a dark alley reputed to have been haunted by Nell Gwynne. You are surrounded by architecture dating back to the eleventh century, and wherever you go you are surrounded by history. I can perhaps appreciate it better now than I did then, because as you became older as a schoolboy boarder, your main thought is not so much ‘Look how beautiful this all is’ as ‘How do I get out of here?’ You are well aware of one or two social attractions outside, and basically you are walled in. The gates are shut, wander lust strikes (or just lust), you get a bit thirsty and your mind is not so much on Latin or cricket as mountaineering. A young man’s thoughts lightly turn to spring, or to be more accurate, springing out. There was a light on top of one of the walls we used to climb, and you had to move pretty quickly to get over without being spotted. It was a bit like Colditz really, although the penalties for a break-out were perhaps not quite so serious, although the penalty for failing to negotiate one of the spiked railings was fairly severe. I remember one lad losing his footing one night, and instead of the planned evening out he ended up with the school matron applying several layers of sticking plaster to his posterior. Mostly we made it though, and the prime job then was to get around town without detection. Two of my better friends at King’s were one Andrew Newell, the headmaster’s son, and Stephen White-Thompson, the Dean of Canterbury’s son. Andrew was similar to Alec Stewart in as much as he did not let his background prevent him from being one of the boys. The point, however, is that between the two of them it was not very hard to acquire a key that gave one access to the postern gate, and thus an easy exit to the town and beyond. It was relatively easy to take away a key for long enough to get a copy cut, which of course ruled out the need for crampons, pitons, and the possibility of reporting to matron with a punctured posterior. I nearly got rumbled once when one of the masters found this strange key in my possession and gave the relevant gates a try. Fortunately it had been cut badly, and only worked if you waggled it around in the lock, so I got away with that one. I was doing well with the work and sport, but the blots on the copybook were beginning to add up, and discovering girls was next on the agenda. On one particular occasion the school had been granted a day off for some reason or other, though this was due to finish with a roll-call at round about six o’clock in the evening. I had made it as high up as a house monitor, which in terms of high office would hardly give you vertigo – roughly equivalent to lance-corporal I suppose – but I thought at the time that it might be enough not to qualify me for roll-call. Wrong. I’d actually disappeared off to Ashford, which was about a twenty-minute train ride away, to meet a girl I had met at one of the dances that the school occasionally organized, and after a couple of drinks we decided to see a James Bond film at the local cinema. By this time, apparently, we had both been reported AWOL, and as we came out of the movie the search party that had been put out for her came upon us strolling down Ashford High Street. She was dragged off, not quite in chains, and off I went to catch the train back to Canterbury. Unfortunately, the events of the day – in particular the sojourn in the pub – had left me drained, and I woke up at the end of the line in Ramsgate. I did manage to hitch a lift back to Canterbury, where a vast tub of hot water awaited, and it was back to the ranks – an unfamiliar feeling then, if not now. In most respects, school had gone reasonably well. I’d enjoyed my sport, and if I had also enjoyed one or two extra curricular activities too well for an unblemished record, I’d studied hard enough to end up with eight O levels, three A levels, and one S grade in history. I sat the history exam for Oxford, and although I wrote quite competently on half the questions, I found myself rambling on at one stage about King Arthur, a man whose career I had never actually studied. I was, much to my surprise, invited up for an interview. So I spent the next few weeks swotting up on Arthur, before driving up in the family Anglia (the car which we had brought back with us on the boat from Africa) for the interview. Unfortunately, Sod’s Law struck, and most of the interview consisted of questions about what Richelieu and his mates were doing at the Court of Louis XIV, all of which I’d just about forgotten. Needless to say, it did not go well. Another piece of misfortune was that I had applied to St Edmund Hall, which had quite a sporting reputation, but apparently at precisely the time they were starting to think about their academic reputation. Bye, bye Oxford. I already had a place at University College, London, but between my mother and the headmaster at King’s it was deemed to be a good idea to stay on at school and try for two more A levels. This is where I lost enthusiasm. In the summer of 1974 I had played a few games for Leicestershire 2nds and their under-25 team in the previous school holidays, and had rubbed shoulders with the likes of Micky Norman, Maurice Hallam, and Terry Spencer, scored a few runs, and had an offer to join the county the following season. This also had an extra bearing on a distinct lack of application concerning these two extra A’s. So I went to the headmaster, told him I’d had enough, and he more or less agreed that I was wasting my time. My mother was upset, of course, but off I went to Leicestershire and said, ‘Here I am, I’m yours for the summer.’ Mike Turner said, ‘How much do you want?’ I replied, ‘How about ?20 a week?’ He said, ‘I’ll give you ?25,’ and we shook hands on it. This to me was bliss, though the wages and my attitude to the game have both changed somewhat since. I’d enjoyed my previous summer’s cricket, and Leicestershire represented the next beginning in my life. I’d arrived at Marlborough House at the age of eight which was a bit intimidating, starting again at King’s was much the same, and believe it or not, so was turning up at Lutterworth for Leicestershire 2nds versus Middlesex 2nds. Even though a certain amount of natural eye and ability got me through okay, the one thing I remember most from those first senior games was how much I struggled against the turning ball. Good spinners take a long time to develop, and I had hardly any previous experience against this type of quality bowling. Still, here I was back for a full summer, living at home with no overheads and no commitments, and getting paid what for me at the time was a handsome amount of pocket money. I knew I would be taking up my university place in London come October (Mike Turner was the first to advise me not to abandon the academic option), and although to a certain extent I was playing as the carefree amateur, deep down I think I was already two thirds of the way towards full time cricket. The summer of 1975 did nothing to alter that view. Leicestershire won the championship for the first time in their history, in which I featured in about three games, and I also played in half a dozen Sunday League matches. I was never that committed to university, where the only thing we really had in common was the fact that the place was situated in Gower Street. I was supposed to be studying law, but in the six months I was there I learned a good bit more about kebab houses in Charlotte Street. The best way to put it is that we parted company by mutual consent the following summer, and almost before I knew it I was playing in a Benson and Hedges quarter-final at Worcester. I forget who was missing from our side, but I opened the innings and got thirty-odd, which was satisfying enough at the time, even if we did lose a high-scoring match. CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_c01d811a-eae7-52c4-bf7c-9d7e4973c92e) ‘Bloody hell, Gower. Have you just come in?’ THE first game I played for Leicestershire was a Sunday League match. I’d been in The Hague for an under-19 youth tournament, playing for England North against sides from Holland, Belgium and Canada. I got a stack of runs there, and won a bat as batsman of the tournament, so I was in a pretty good frame of mind when the team caught the ferry back across the channel to Harwich. I got a train to Liverpool Street Station, tube to St Pancras, train up to Leicester, and phoned my mother from the station to tell her that I was just about to get the connection to Loughborough and would she be so kind as to come and collect me? She said, ‘Oh no, darling, I think you had better stay in Leicester and get a taxi to Grace Road. They want you to play this afternoon.’ She was right. John Steele was injured and I opened the innings with Barry Dudleston. It was very sudden and I was too tired to be nervous, but I do remember thinking that the Surrey attack was a little more tricky than Belgium under-19’s. Caught Skinner bowled Intikhab 11. ‘Gower played one or two pleasant shots before falling to a careless stroke,’ according to the Leicester Mercury. Doesn’t sound like me, does it? He must have been mixing me up with someone else. My next match was also in the Sunday League at Grace Road, against Sussex, and I appear to have made 21 before getting out to another spinner, John Barclay. The Mercury man must have spotted something, though, as he wrote: ‘Gower, slung in at the deep end at 28 for 2 from nine overs, showed a great temperament and is clearly a man with a big future.’ I got a couple of fifties later on, and I made my championship debut that year against Lancashire at Blackpool. The match was drawn, and I made 32, batting at No 7, before being caught Reidy bowled Shuttleworth. I don’t remember how, but the one thing I do recall from that match was dear old Raymond Illingworth, ‘Illy’, blowing a gasket in bizarre circumstances. During the course of an unmemorable century from David Lloyd, our wicketkeeper, Roger Tolchard, had missed stumping him off Illy because he was standing too far back. Tolly then got injured, Barry Dudleston took the gloves, and soon afterwards he whipped off the bails with Lloyd about a yard out. Unfortunately, the bails fell back into the grooves on top of the stumps, at which point Raymond exploded. He booted his chewing gum up in the air, and frothed: ‘Well, bugger me. One useless (expletive deleted) can’t reach t’bloody stumps, and t’other useless (expletive deleted) hasn’t got strength to knock t’bloody bails off.’ I didn’t play the next game – possibly because of lily’s tantrum at Blackpool, we played two wicketkeepers, or at least David Humphries made his debut as wicketkeeper and Tolly played as a batsman. I then played against Northamptonshire (0 and 21) and my only other championship match that summer came in fairly unusual circumstances against Kent at Tunbridge Wells. I was actually 12th man, but Brian Davison went home to Leicester when news came through that his father-in-law had died. The game had already started, but Mike Denness gave permission for me to step in, and although I didn’t contribute much (1 and 11) it was a vital match in the championship, and we sneaked home by 18 runs. It was an average start to put it mildly, but it was marvellous just to be involved that year. We not only won the championship for the first time, but also the Benson and Hedges Cup. I was a bit wet behind the ears to begin with, and had turned up for pre-season training in a suit. I had no idea of how I should be dressed for my first day at the office, as it were, but it appeared to cause a fair amount of mirth. I was very shy and retiring to begin with, but the atmosphere at the club under Illy was so good that the little boy lost feeling didn’t last very long. All in all, this was to be a good summer and a turning point in my life. The attractions of a career playing cricket meant that from now on the idea of pouring over books in the law library was never likely to be a serious rival. I might never have gone on to become a full time professional cricketer had it not been for the death of my father in 1973. When the various crises came at school, only my mother was around to deal with them, and knowing my father’s determination for me to pursue an academic career, things might have turned out very differently had he still been alive. I was 16 when he died. He had been ill for two years – a combination of Hodgkin’s disease and Motor Neurone disease, which by and large comes under the umbrella of Multiple Sclerosis. He had not been working, and was gradually fading away. The brain remains very sharp, but the body just gives up. Eventually he got too weak to do anything at all, and went into hospital and died. It left a big gap. Because I was away at school so much it probably helped me cope better than I otherwise might have done, and it was harder for my mother than it was for me despite her own independent and strong character. I’m sure he would have tried to be a bit sterner on school matters, but he was very supportive of my sporting pursuits and maybe things would have turned out much the same way. That’s something we’ll never know. Sadly, he only had one chance to see me play representative cricket before he died, and that was at Rugby School playing for Public Schools against the English Schools at under-16 level: the likes of the Cowdreys against the likes of the Gattings. I remember hitting a six which he greeted by tooting the car horn. It was a cold and windy day, typical cricket weather, and what with his illness he had sensibly confined himself to the car with the heater turned on. He loved watching me do well that afternoon, and I’m sure he would have enjoyed most of what has happened since. My father’s encouragement on the cricket front had also extended to rigging up an old net in the back garden, although my mother probably ended up bowling more overs in it. He was an intelligent, well-organized man, which just goes to show that not everything is inherited in the genes, but he also had a keen sense of humour that I like to think was handed down. He also loved his sport. He would quite often take me to soccer matches on a Saturday afternoon, Nottingham Forest one week, Leicester City the next, and occasionally to Leicester Tigers or Loughborough Colleges for a rugby match. Things were okay financially when he died, in that while we were never what you could call genuinely wealthy, one of my father’s talents was that he was quite clever with the financial side of life and made all the right sort of provisions. He dabbled in the stock market, leaving my mother with a reasonable amount of collateral in stocks and shares, which she in turn passed on to me. He was a good bit shrewder than me in this sort of area, and definitely less extravagant. My father’s death obviously left a void, but we were both able to cope fairly well. Nevertheless, as my cricket career began to develop, there was always this feeling of how much he would have enjoyed being around to see it. I felt it most acutely in the summer of 1976, when I scored my maiden first-class century. We were playing Middlesex at Lord’s, and I had a fairly undistinguished first innings, bowled by Selvey for 0. However, in the second I had played pretty well to be not out at lunch on the second day, and came out after the interval to complete what one or two observers imagined to be a thoroughly relaxed and nerveless hundred. On this occasion they would have been confusing relaxed with half asleep (I spent the lunch break fully asleep) because, I have to admit, I had not spent the previous evening preparing in a wholly professional manner. I’d been out on the town somewhere, and while I think I managed to beat the milkman to the hotel door the next morning, it would not have been by much. The apparently laid-back Gower at the crease the next day was in fact trying desperately hard to stay awake, an exercise only achieved by repeated stabs between overs from the business end of Brian Davison’s bat. It was probably the least he could have done for me as Davo had become something of a soul mate of mine – and when it came to burning candles at both ends he was close to being world champion. If, after the likes of Roger Tolchard and Jack Birkenshaw had scuttled off to bed in mid-evening, anyone felt like giving it a bit of a late thrash Davo was definitely the man. What I took rather too long to discover was that he was better at it than me – better than most if it comes to that. Anyway, Davo was smashing it to all parts as we were looking to set up a declaration, while I was groping around in a fog attempting to make contact. I think Illy went on longer than he had wanted to so that I could make the hundred, so there was less glory attached to that innings than I might have liked. Lest anyone, by the way, get the idea that Raymond was a sentimental old fool on these occasions, I would like to point out that earlier in the season he had declared on me in the match against the West Indies at Grace Road when I was 89 not out. The Lord’s innings more than made up for that disappointment, although it was probably the first time I had gone out to bat in what could be described as less than pristine condition. If the century suggested that it was possible to spend all night on the tiles and still deliver the goods next day, there have been one or two cases along the way since that have provided strong evidence to the contrary. Shortly after that I spent six weeks in the West Indies with a Young England side that included the likes of Mike Gatting, Chris Cowdrey, Paul Downton and Paul Allott, and that autumn, immediately after the English season ended, there was a Derrick Robins’ invitation trip to Canada. It only lasted three weeks or so, and when I came home, I went out to work for the first (and as it turned out, last) time. Mike Turner fixed me up with a job with one of Leicestershire’s bigger sponsors, Bostik, and, if you will pardon the fairly awful pun, being glued to a desk all winter did not quite fit my romantic image of the professional cricketer. The next season was another enjoyable (and reasonably successful) one, and life at this stage seemed wonderful. I had climbed onto the rollercoaster and was going along for the ride. On the other hand, my cricket had become significantly more serious. I was earning a bit more than ?25 a week by now, was sharing a flat near the ground with Roger Tolchard, and was being tutored by Illy in the art of becoming professional. ‘These pretty twenties and thirties are all very nice, Gower, but if you could possibly manage the occasional hundred we’d be obliged.’ Raymond was inclined towards the belief that cricket was a fairly serious business, and cricketers who smiled a lot were to be regarded with a certain amount of suspicion. Needless to say, I caused him the odd moment of aggravation, not least on one occasion while he was bowling during a Sunday League match against Derbyshire. We’d been down to Westcliff to play Essex the week before, put down every catch imaginable, and I’d dropped Kenny McEwan – who got a hundred – at least once if not twice. The result was that we’d spent most of the following week doing extra catching practice. Anyway, Ashley Harvey-Walker was batting well when Raymond came on, and I was despatched to patrol the leg-side boundary (these were the days when I had a decent throwing arm). Sure enough, he slogged one straight up in the air, and after swallowing hard at the thought of lily’s reaction should I happen to drop it, managed to cling on. Elation then took over, and as I was tossing the ball up several times and bowing to the crowd, I suddenly heard this apoplectic Pudsey voice bellowing, ‘Get t’bloody thing back, Gower. It’s a bloody no-ball!’ Having already allowed them to run two instead of one, I then hurled the ball in, and it ricocheted away off the stumps for another single. Raymond was now giving a passable imitation of Vesuvius, and Graham Cross has collapsed with laughter at short mid-wicket. I thought about inquiring as to how the captain of England and Leicestershire, not to mention one of the most miserly purveyors of off-spin bowling in cricket history happened to be bowling no-balls, but thought better of it. If I had mentioned it to him, he would more than likely have claimed that the groundsman had painted the line in the wrong place, because if anyone were to hold a world excuses championship, Raymond would have won it with something to spare. Brian Davison used to keep a list of them, and believe me there were some absolute jewels. Illy once got caught at slip shortly after lunch to a ball that he claimed had seamed away on what was basically a flat pitch. He came steaming through the dressing room door claiming that a plantain had sprung up on a length during the interval. ‘T’umpire must have given me t’wrong guard,’ was another classic, and in one match when we were supposed to be defending, he was bowled having a wild slog at Allan Jones, whose trademark was a Jimmy Connors’ style grunt (only louder) when he let go of the ball. It was such a horrid shot that none of us in the dressing room thought he could possibly explain that one away, but sure enough, Raymond was more than up to the task. He came through the door, lobbed his bat in the direction of his chair and sat down. The tension was unbelievable, when he spluttered, ‘Would you credit it? That bloody Jonah and his grunting … I thought t’umpire had called no-ball.’ At which point the dressing room fell apart. Raymond was, nevertheless, a fabulous captain to play under, and while he came in for his fair share of the inevitable dressing-room micky-taking, he had this amazing knack of being able to switch us all on to serious business at a moment’s notice. We’d be having a laugh and a joke, sometimes at his expense, and then the five minute bell would go. Illy would clap his hands, the place would fall silent and he would unveil some masterly tactical plan for the next session. Unfortunately, not every member of his team possessed his attention to detail, and there was one occasion at Taunton when one of Raymond’s brainwaves did not quite go according to the script. Viv Richards was in his pomp at that time, and having faced just one delivery before the lunch break, inevitably walked off 4 not out. He looked, we thought, ominously in the mood. However, Illy had worked out that he was not entirely in control of the hook shot early in an innings, and that the ball occasionally went in the air to what would roughly have been just backward of square. Raymond sat plotting over his lunch, and decided that Paddy Clift should field at fine leg, but move surreptitiously to backward square for Les Taylor’s fourth ball after lunch. This, of course, would be a bouncer. Unfortunately, Les slipped in a no-ball, Paddy’s mathematics got a bit confused, and when Viv did precisely what Illy had thought he might, there was no Paddy Clift. And Viv went on to get his hundred. Illy was also a highly canny bowler. For instance, if Jack Birkenshaw was bowling you knew it was a totally flat wicket, whereas if Illy was on you knew it was either turning square or it was the last over before lunch. The latter case backfired on him quite badly in a match against Sussex, when he duly appeared for his ritual 1-1-0-0 but came off the field, wearing a slightly bewildered expression, with something closer to 1-0-22-0. The batsman in question was Javed Miandad with whom, it later transpired, Raymond had had an altercation a year or so previously, and called him something fairly unpleasant. Raymond had long since forgotten this, but Javed had not, so we spent a rib-clutching five minutes before lunch watching Javed charging down the pitch, and Illy peering – with a completely bemused expression – at one ball after another vanishing over the sightscreen. Getting hit for six did not amuse Illy at the best of times, and whenever teams came to Leicester in those days, they generally required a pair of binoculars to make out the boundary rope – except, that is, for the bigger games, when the sponsors (this is pre-executive box era) would pitch tents on the outfield, hence, shorter boundaries. Raymond used to play hell about this, and in one Sunday League match the sight of two consecutive deliveries dropping into the coleslaw in the Bostik guests’ tent proved too much for him. For the next couple of minutes spectators were treated to the fairly unusual sight of the Leicestershire captain waving his fist at the committee balcony and giving them a fearful haranguing. Even so, I think he managed to drag himself into the tent for a sponsored Pimms or two afterwards. I think it’s fair to say that when misfortune struck, Raymond was not so quick to see the funny side of it, but the old boy was not without a sharp turn of repartee on occasions. Leicestershire did not have a strict dress code for players in those days, but they worked roughly on the basis of smart casuals. No tie and jacket required, but a reasonable appearance was demanded. I slightly tarnished my record one day at Trent Bridge when I woke up in my customary bleary-eyed state in the flat at Leicester and groped around in semi-darkness for a pair of shoes. What I had put on was one black shoe, and one brown. This didn’t go un-noticed by the captain, and there then followed a longish lecture on the standards of dress expected from young professionals. I can’t remember the exact words, but ‘smarten up you scruffy sod’ was the basic message. I fancied there might be some mileage in this lecture, so, having recently acquired a dark blue dinner suit, I took it with me to our next match in Taunton. In the relaxed atmosphere of breakfast before a Sunday League game I strode into the dining room. Suit, bow-tie, polished shoes (both black), the works. Raymond glanced up from his plate, gave me the once over, and said: ‘Bloody hell, Gower. Have you just come in?’ Whether he meant this as a joke, or whether he was being serious, I’m not totally sure. You rarely could tell with Raymond. We got on very well, and he did try to nurture me through, as did most of the senior players, the likes of Davison, Dudleston, Tolchard, Steele and Micky Norman. They were a good crew to be with, and we also happened to be a very good side, and all this worked in my favour in those early days. Those first three or four years under Illy were as good a grounding as a young player could have, and I made the transition from an averagely talented player to a slightly better than average player with a decent idea of what professional cricket is all about. It was certainly different than what I had imagined it would be like, and there were one or two instances of the talented but wet-behind-the-ears-public-schoolboy running into a bit of hostility from the hardened pro trying to make a living on a demanding circuit. I remember opening the innings in a championship game against Surrey at the Oval and timing a few cover drives early on against the new ball, which appeared to draw a fair amount of steam from Robin Jackman’s ears. He has always been a bit volatile, and the sight of this angelic looking youngster creaming him around the Oval with no apparent effort did not do a lot for his sense of humour. He wanted to know, in fairly blunt terms, whether I was interested in playing the game properly. This did enough to unsettle me and I was lbw not long afterwards. It’s the sort of thing a batsman eventually comes to terms with, and occasionally learns to enjoy, but it was all rather new to me at that time and I didn’t quite know how to keep my concentration in the face of it. In a nutshell, I was beginning to learn that county cricket was a job as opposed to a recreation. There were also, contrary to popular opinion, one or two recorded cases of nerves. Before scoring that 89 not out against the West Indies, I remember downing a scotch in the pub next to the ground in the company of the landlady – Roberts and Daniel were sharing the new ball, so it seemed appropriate to try and settle the stomach. Hazel was her name, loved by all, and the place was never quite the same when the brewery moved her on. I did a certain amount of hopping around during that knock. The old duck-hook came out several times – the sort you play when you start going for the hook and end up having to bail out in a hurry when you realize that the ball is homing in on the eyebrows rather more rapidly than anticipated. Chris Balderstone got 125 and 98, which got him into the Test side. As for myself, I was starting to get a few honourable mentions in more influential organs than the Loughborough Echo (proud though I was of earlier cuttings snipped from that paper), although mention of me in connection with the England side did not really begin to build up until the following year, 1977. I overheard Illy voicing his opinion around the dressing room that I would be playing for England within the next couple of years, and coming from him I thought that was as good a recommendation as you could get. In subsequent years, when he appeared to be recommending sons-in-law and prospective sons-in-law for the captaincy of Yorkshire, England, and the Universe, I would have questioned his judgement a touch more than I did then, but at the time it was a pretty impressive reference. By the end of that summer, there had been enough speculation from other quarters to make me wonder, anxious even, about that winter’s tour to Pakistan and New Zealand. Ian Botham was now in the side and it seemed to be a question of whether someone like Mike Gatting or myself might make the squad as a young batsman, taken along to gain some experience. As it turned out, Gatt made it and I didn’t. I was disappointed because I had actually become quite excited about the speculation, but it soon wore off and I was happy to make yet another Derrick Robins’ tour, this time to the Far East. I developed my friendship with Chris Cowdrey out there, behaved pretty poorly, but also got in some decent cricket in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sri Lanka. From there it was a short hop to Perth where I played club cricket for the remainder of the winter, with a fair amount of success, and did well enough in the early summer of 1978 (one of the few years I’ve started off a season in good form) to get myself into the England side for the one-dayers against Pakistan. I scored a century in the second of the two matches, and was then selected for the first Test at Birmingham. So I had already had the settling effect of having played at international level when I made my Test debut, and although hitting your first ball for four would have to rank as a reasonable way to launch a career, the Pakistani attack at that time could hardly be equated with that of the West Indies when G. Hick arrived at the wicket in 1991. Imran wasn’t playing, barred through Kerry Packer, and had he delivered the same ball on the same length as dear old Liaquat Ali, or Liquid as we came to know him, they might have been picking bits of me out of the fence as opposed to the ball. Mind you, I might not have been quite so keen to unveil the pull shot first ball against an Imran or an Andy Roberts. I might have been young, but I had learned a few of the facts of life by now. I did actually wonder to myself at the time whether I should have played the shot, even against Liquid. First ball, first Test, probably not the done thing, and if it had gone straight up in the air it might have caused a bit of a stir – Brian Johnston choking to death on his chocolate cake I shouldn’t wonder. But as I remember, it was just an instinctive shot to a bad ball. Eventually I did hit one straight up in the air, having made fifty-odd, relaxed a little and done something silly when a century was there for the taking. Some might say ‘So what’s new?’ Whenever I have made fifty in my career, I’ve invariably said to myself, ‘Okay, head down, let’s get fifty more.’ The trouble is, I’ve always had to work to say it. It’s a failing, simple as that. I have to fight to stave off the feeling of: ‘Oh yes, I’ve hit a few good shots today, that’ll keep me happy,’ as opposed to having the blinding determination to plough remorselessly on. Sometimes when I get a little bit too relaxed, a bad shot that I get away with might snap me back into it, but contrary to a certain amount of public opinion I am always fighting a battle with the little man up there in my head. I believe that it is all part of the character: some parts may be good, others not so good. Some people have the capacity to put a padlock on the brain and throw away the key – mine likes to go for a wander. More often than not, I don’t like it any more than an exasperated spectator, or selector, but no-one is entirely free of weaknesses, and this happens to be one of mine. The philosophy I’ve tried to live by is to retain a sense of enjoyment in what is a sport as well as my livelihood. If you can be successful by asserting your own character rather than someone else’s, that to me is the ultimate in personal satisfaction. Sure, I’ve fouled up many times, but it would be a tedious old game if we all came out of a factory would it not? At the same time, there is a lot of satisfaction in succeeding almost against your own character – such as grinding it out when you are itching to give it a go – but it’s not something I have managed all that often. I was annoyed with myself for getting out in that first Test innings because I realized that I had missed out on the chance for a really big one. But, character failing or not, I wasn’t going to sit around all day moping about it. What I envy any new Test player is the feeling you get before your first game. It’s an event just to walk into the dressing room for the first time, where there might be one or two players you have never even met before. Just looking at the team sheet gives you a buzz – Brearley, Wood, Radley, Gower … it’s a big thrill just to see it pinned up there. There is a special feeling about a Test match dressing room for the first time, a sense of anticipation and excitement that is beyond anything I’d had before, and corny though it sounds, the blood does start pumping a little harder through the system. And then, once you have played for your country, it gives you a billing to live up to when you return for a county match, and maybe puts a bit more pressure on you as well. As a young up and coming potential England player you are allowed to make the odd mistake, but as an actual England player you’ve got less leeway in terms of how other people see you. A lot more, for instance, was expected of someone like Mark Ramprakash after he had played relatively well in his first Test series against the West Indies. Cricketers, by and large, are a very supportive lot, but some pros look at their colleagues and opponents with fairly critical and sometimes jaundiced eyes. This is especially true if it concerns the solid county cricketer who is never going to play for England casting his eye over the fresh-faced youngster who has just won his first cap. When Sachin Tendulkar, at seventeen, scored a century at Old Trafford to save India from defeat against England in the summer of 1990, one English player said, ‘Let’s see how he goes at the Oval when the ball will be up around his nostrils.’ It’s the traditional English reaction to someone doing well. I averaged 51 against Pakistan and 57 against the New Zealanders later that the summer, but if a lot more was expected of myself at Leicestershire after I had made it into the Test side, the bare statistics of 1978 do not suggest that they were fulfilled to any great degree. Nine games, 15 innings, one not out, 347 runs, top score 61, average 24.78, and in the county game against Pakistan I was bowled by Liaquat for not very many. In a season like that, with six Tests and four one-day internationals, you end up by playing barely any cricket at all for your county, and given the poor scores I made when I did, it was probably fair to say that I batted for England and fielded for Leicestershire. My county average has always been significantly lower than my Test average, and as such it is hardly surprising that the odd grumble from the ranks of the county membership has come my way. The bigger the occasion the better I seem to perform. Yet overall, I was definitely on a high at that stage in my career, and my form for England at least was good enough to win me a place on my first overseas tour that winter. It was a memorable tour both for me – a century at Perth and a decent amount of runs overall – and for the team itself, although a 5-1 victory in the series had a lot to do with an Australian side seriously depleted by the absence of the rebels playing for Packer. The 1978-79 tour to Australia was as one-sided as the final score suggests, but Australia felt the player-drain to Packer more acutely than we did. Both the Chappells, Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh were signed up by World Series Cricket, and while they had some talented younger players to call upon – Kim Hughes and Rodney Hogg, for example – the key difference between the two sides was experience. To some extent, the Australian system allows their players to scale the jumps from grade to state to Test cricket a shade more easily than our own, but a good, inexperienced team will rarely beat a good experienced one and 5-1 was an accurate reflection of our dominance. Having said that, Hogg, in short spells, was as quick and mean a bowler as any I have faced, and he also had the temperament to match. When I was leaving the field with a century to my name in Perth, the fact that I had edged and missed a few against him early on had clearly been festering with him, and he came up and called me an ‘effing imposter’. It didn’t bother me though. As with most Australians it was nothing personal, merely business. Hogg was capable of some curious moods, and after bowling three or four lightening overs on a flattish track at Adelaide he suddenly ran off the field. His captain, Graham Yallop, was as confused as everyone else, and had to run off the field himself to find out what was going on. It turned out that Hogg was claiming he had been attacked by a bout of asthma, but no one really understood why he decided to vanish when he was bowling so well. His method was to bowl flat out for short spells, take a breather, then come back for another burst of the high velocity stuff. Hogg took a lot of wickets in that series, but in all other respects there was no contest. Even the captaincy – Brearley versus Yallop – was one-sided. Brears was baited by the Aussie crowds, who clearly thought he was as stuffy a Pom as Jardine, but as a skipper, he had a very hard core to him. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/david-gower/david-gower-text-only/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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