My worst and most humiliating experience came when I batted against the canny Indian pace bowler Javagal Srinath in a Benson & Hedges match. He bowled at me for about six overs and I reckon on average I must have played and missed about four times an over. And by now my feeling of win some/lose some had been replaced by the horrible fear that if I didn’t come up with an answer soon I would be finished for good.
Peter and I discussed the issue and he devised a new plan. Instead of saying that’s my game, that’s what got me this far and if it’s risky, so be it, we set about overcoming my instincts and retraining my brain.
Instead of playing the game the bowlers wanted me to play I would say to them: ‘No. If you want to bowl out there, that’s fine by me. Bowl there as long as you want to but I’m not playing your game anymore.’
One aspect of Peter’s training was utterly ruthless, and its roots lay on the beaches of the Caribbean. They say that one of the reasons the great West Indies batsmen of the past were not only fantastic, exuberant strokeplayers but also able to occupy the crease for long periods, was the first law of beach cricket; when you’re out, you’re out. In those days most of these guys learned their cricket playing on sand flattened and hardened by the sea and when it was your turn to bat you made sure you made the most of it because when you were out you wouldn’t get another go until it came round to being your turn again, and with so many kids wanting to play, that might be days.
Peter employed the same principle with the group of us he was coaching now. He would set a maximum time for you to bat in your session, with the bowling machine cranked up to speeds in excess of 90mph, but no minimum. It wasn’t ‘half an hour each, lads – enjoy yourself’ net practice. As soon as you were out against the bowling machine, whether it was first ball or the 1,000th, that was that. Any loose or flabby off-side shot and I would be sitting on my backside waiting for as long as it took for all the other guys in the group to get out as well and for my turn to bat to come round again, and that could take ages. It didn’t half concentrate the mind.
A golfer will tell you it takes about 3,000 reps to change a golf swing. It took me about 3,000 balls from bowlers and bowling machines to get me to the point where I could actually make my own conscious decision about whether to play at the ball or not, rather than just see it and try and hit it.
And then, finally, one bright clear, hot Perth day, in the middle of making 180 for Melville against Gosnell, one ball in particular told me I was going to be all right.
I saw it leave the bowler’s hand, and I recall watching it so closely that the rest of what followed happened in super slow-motion, even though the ball was travelling around mid-80s mph. I saw it pitch about two yards in front of me and slightly to my off-side and realized I had all the time in the world to make a clear choice whether to play it or not. And in the instant I made my decision to leave it, a small happy bomb went off inside my head. I’d got it. By George, I’d got it.
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In 1999, cricket in England was at a pretty low ebb. England’s 1998–99 Ashes trip had ended in a 3–1 defeat. David Lloyd, the coach, had been on a final warning from Lord’s after his comments about the bowling action of Muttiah Muralitharan the summer before and, soon after returning from Australia, ‘Bumble’ announced he would be stepping down at the end of England’s involvement in the forthcoming World Cup. The main contenders for his job were Bob Woolmer, the former England Test batsman currently coaching South Africa, Dav Whatmore, Sri Lanka’s coach and Duncan Fletcher, the Zimbabwean who had gained a big reputation for his work with Western Province in South Africa and later Glamorgan, but not big enough for Simon Pack, the ECB official interviewing him for the job, who greeted him with the words: ‘Hello, Dav.’
It was England’s turn to stage the World Cup that summer, and that gave me the chance to face Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne for the first time, though I’m fairly certain that, for them, the event did not go down as one to tell the grandchildren. Australia, with Glenn, Shane, Mark and Steve Waugh, Michael Bevan and Shane Lee far and away the best team in the world, came to Taunton for a warm-up match, the highlight of which was when I pulled the best pace bowler of his generation for four. ‘Not bad,’ I thought to myself. ‘Not bad at all.’ I looked towards him to see if I might have earned a reaction, a ‘good shot, mate’, a wink, a growl, anything would have done. Nothing. Not a glimmer.
From the host nation’s point of view, the great global celebration of world one-day cricket was a complete cock-up from start to finish. The ICC marketing department decided to hire Dave Stewart from the pop band Eurythmics to write and perform the official tournament song and, when he launched it at Lord’s on the eve of the first match between England and Sri Lanka, on 14 May, the effect on the assembled media was profound.
The song, entitled ‘Life Is A Carnival’, had a passably catchy tune, but the lyrics were something else. At no point was any mention made of anything to do with cricket and the accompanying video, which appeared to be a jumpy-camera home-movie remake of the film One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, was unintentionally hilarious. In it, a group of patients from a mental institution dressed in white tunics ‘escape’ from the medical staff supposed to be looking after them and run off to play a game of cricket. Quite what message Stewart was attempting to convey was beyond everyone. The song and video were met with stunned silence in the press conference, except for a few record company stooges hooting: ‘Whoh, whoh, whoh’ at the back of the room. And the fact that England were knocked out of the competition at the end of the group stage, the day before the song was released, somehow said it all.
‘Let’s get things fully in proportion,’ wrote John Etheridge in the Sun: ‘This was only the most catastrophic day ever for English cricket.’ Alec Stewart, who had led England to a Test series victory over South Africa the summer before, was sacked as captain and replaced by Nasser Hussain for the upcoming series with New Zealand. Tim Lamb, the Chief Executive of the Test and County Cricket Board, tried his best. ‘The carnival lives on,’ he suggested. There was a modicum of interest in the remainder of the tournament. Bangladesh, still not playing Test cricket, beat the mighty Pakistan in a meaningless match, but it was not until much later that the 33–1 odds against them doing it assumed any significance in the eyes of the wider cricketing public. And after a last ball semifinal between Australia and South Africa, when Allan Donald’s run-out prompted accusations of choking, the Aussies duly thrashed Pakistan in a damp squib final at Lord’s after Pakistan almost inexplicably elected to bat first in overcast conditions and were skittled out for 132 and lost by eight wickets.
Duncan Fletcher had duly been appointed to take over as coach, but he insisted England would have to do without him for the Test series against New Zealand, as he was committed to finishing the season with Glamorgan. And that is why he was at Taunton at the start of September coaching them against us.
Even though I felt I had made that crucial technical breakthrough in Perth the previous winter, my early season form had been inconsistent again and I went back to the nets for more repetitions. And I have the great England and Middlesex workhorse Angus Fraser to thank for getting me going again, when I batted against him in a championship match followed by a National League 45-over match, from 21–25 July.
Years earlier, Gus had been one of the presentation panel handing over The Cricketer Magazine award for the outstanding young cricketer of 1991, after my 4,000-run season. I’d played against him a few times since then and, while you could normally rely on Gus not to have a good word to say about anything or anyone, he’d barely opened his gob.
This time was different and the result was dramatic. His celebrations were fairly low-key when he got me out for eight in the first innings, probably because he thought I was not worth wasting his breath over. But he was in an absolutely foul mood by the time he bowled at me second time round after a 320-mile wild goose chase to
