and waiting no more than three yards away on my left-hand side, with the roar of celebration beginning to gurgle up from the pit of Benjamin’s stomach, I had more than enough time to work out the following equations: 1+3+6+0+4+0+0+7+2 = 23, and 23 divided by nine = not enough (2.55 recurring, in fact).
And then Tony Middleton dropped the ball. I could have kissed him. Eight runs later I had, as Wisden recorded, ‘escaped single figures for the first time’ in my ninth first-class innings, and I went on to make 81, an innings I must have played in a trance because I remember absolutely nothing whatsoever about it. After two days of rain, our declaration and a double forfeiture of innings meant they were chasing 333 to win on the last day and we prevailed thanks mainly to the 90mph bowling of Andre Van Troost, our Flying Dutchman who remains the fastest bowler ever to come out of the Netherlands, and, swearing his head off in a unique twisted mixture of English and Dutch, the most unintentionally hilarious when angry as well.
I was away. Opening with Lathwell for almost all of the remainder of the season, I followed up my maiden first-class 50 with another, in my very next innings against Yorkshire at Headingley and then, at Bath a week later, my first hundred, against Surrey. Lathwell kicked off with a double in our first innings, Somerset’s first-ever on this ground, then I scored 121 in our second as we declared on 329 for six, setting them 470 to win and had them 48 for three at the close on the Saturday.
I was ecstatic and spent the rest of the evening down the road at Keynsham with Eddie Gregg, Lee Cole and the rest of the lads, playing silly drinking games, like spoof and piling up beer mats on the edge of a table, flicking them up with your hand from underneath and seeing how many you could catch. Once a club cricketer, always a club cricketer. Utterly bladdered by the end of all this, I crashed out that night wondering if life could ever get any better. And the runs kept flowing like Taunton scrumpy.
The day after we had finished off Surrey by 317 runs, I made 116 against Oxfordshire in my NatWest debut, then four 50s in the next six championship innings, and, at the end of July, another century, against Sussex at Hove. At that stage, from and including the innings when Tony Middleton gave me a second chance against Hampshire back in May, my run of scores in the championship read 81, 54, 26, 121, 55, 0, 53, 59, 8, 87, 0 and 115. Forget 23 in my first nine innings, I had made 659 in the next ten, including six fifties and two hundreds.
Now, up to this point I’d never exactly been thought of as the next Che Guevara; even at school I was more of a hopeless case than a rebel with, or without, a cause, but what happened next took me about as close to challenging authority as I had ever been before. In the middle of this unbelievable about-turn and run of form against some of the best bowlers in the country I had to stop playing for Somerset and start playing for the England Under-19s.
At the beginning of August, instead of playing two championship matches against Durham at Taunton and Middlesex at Lord’s, I had to play in two Under-19 one-day internationals against India and the first of three Tests, again under Michael Vaughan and, unbelievably irritatingly, at Taunton. There was just no comparison in the standard of cricket, and while it was, of course, always an honour to represent my country at this level, I felt it was also a complete waste of my time. My heart wasn’t in it. I wasn’t being arrogant or getting too big for my bangers, it was just that I knew I would learn so much more playing for my county than England Under-19s at this stage; I was on a roll and I had my eyes well and truly fixed on making 1,000 runs for the season and a possible England A tour place at the end of it. And I told them so.
When Micky Stewart, who had just stood down as senior England coach to be succeeded by Keith Fletcher but was still heavily involved in the set-up, came down to Taunton to discuss the issue and asked if any of those present in the room among the Under-19s squad would rather be playing for their clubs, of the nine in our squad who had played first-class cricket, I was the only one in the room who said yes and why. ‘I just think I’ll learn more playing senior cricket than against players my own age,’ I said.
It didn’t work. After making 15 and 92 on my return to county cricket against Essex, it was off to the second Under-19 Test where I hit 140 in our second innings, and with another 64 runs under my belt against Northants, on 8 and 9 September, in the third and final Under-19 Test at Edgbaston, I took out my frustration at having to miss a third championship match, against Kent at Canterbury, on the Indian attack. After a rain delayed start we slumped to 27 for five at the end of the first day, of which I had made 11 not out. The next day we finished up 381 all out, with me making 206 from 233 deliveries.
Starting the final championship match of the season, against Derbyshire at Taunton I needed 127 runs to reach the magic 1,000.
Rain washed out play until after lunch on the third day so, realistically, I had to make them all in one go. I scored 51 in our first innings, edging to 924, only 76 away, and spent the rest of the rain-ruined match cursing the fact that playing for England Under-19s had cost me a probable six innings in which I would only have had to average 15.81 to become, at 18 and a half, the youngest Somerset player ever to make 1,000 runs in a season.
Not that I’m bitter but, to cap it all, England then picked Vaughany ahead of me for the A tour to India and Bangladesh, while they gave me the runners-up prize, captaining the Under-19s in West Indies that winter. On second thoughts …
I consoled myself by passing my driving test, at the second attempt, not before nearly wiping myself out in a scene reminiscent of the final moments of the original Italian Job, starring Michael Caine, when their getaway coach is teetering on the edge of a 1,000 foot drop on an Alpine road. Practising my reversing and three-point turns in a private road running left-to-right halfway up a hill and parallel to the ground, I attempted to reverse uphill into a driveway, got my left and right hands confused, reversed down the hill, and back wheels first, over a four foot sheer drop and smashed the rear of the car into a concrete post. There I was sitting in the driver’s seat of my Ford Sierra staring straight ahead at the sky above me. I jumped out, took one look at the car and realized that if the post hadn’t stopped the car dead it would almost certainly have rolled backwards all the way down the hill and quite probably into the stream at the bottom. The RAC had to come and rescue the car. The undercarriage was totally wrecked. I was lucky I wasn’t.
I duly skippered the Under-19s in the Caribbean, with David Lloyd as coach and Freddie as all-rounder. Alex Morris of Yorkshire and later Hampshire provided the musical talent – his dad Chris had had a couple of UK hits in the 1960s under the name Lance Fortune, the best-known being ‘When Will You Be Mine’ which became our unofficial tour anthem, though nobody ever sang it or knew any of the words, not even ‘Almo’. The name Lance Fortune had been dreamed up by his manager, Larry Parnes, who liked it so much that when Fortune’s fame dried up, Parnes simply recycled it, giving it to another act he managed, a bloke called Clive Powell, who later became the sixties pop icon Georgie Fame. Despite my disappointment at being overlooked for the A tour, and after the usual early tour shakes, I had an incredible time as one of 15 young blokes playing cricket in the Caribbean, all expenses paid. I made a century in the first Test in mid-January, 106 not out, out of 199 for four declared to set West Indies a target, and batted quite well throughout. At the end of it I organized a bumper end of tour dinner in Port of Spain, Trinidad at which I ate only bangers, of course, washed down with litres of fizzy soft drinks. It really is a wonder I have any of my own teeth left.
When I came back to Somerset I negotiated a pay rise to £12,000 per year from 1995 and that was about as good as it got for quite some time. What happened next? I flat-lined.
Everyone’s heard about second season syndrome; what happens when the county bowling fraternity have absorbed the lessons of bowling to a new batsman, identify a weakness to attack and pile on the pressure in his second season. My second season syndrome seemed to last longer than usual – about four seasons in total.
I had my good moments. I made a third championship ton in 1995, against
