us and we scuttled off home to bed, feeling a lot more sober than we had done an hour or two before.
I suppose that these days were my first real taste of freedom, the slightly wild days that everyone needs to get out of their systems. No real responsibilities, no ties, just a fantastic opportunity to make the most of. Some people get that when they go travelling or to university; I was being educated in a rather different sense, concentrating my studies on taking wickets and downing beer.
I even ended up smoking cannabis once or twice, something I’d never even encountered back in Pudsey. And I’ll never forget the first time I tried it, with a bloke called Dean who I played indoor cricket with. We’d been out drinking and playing pool, and Dean then drove us in his VW Beetle to the top of a multi-storey car park that had amazing views over the whole of Jo’burg. He then took his weed out and rolled us a joint. In South Africa, the cannabis is so cheap that they don’t tend to mix it with tobacco, they just smoke the stuff on its own, which makes it pretty powerful, especially if you’ve never touched the stuff before. Dean had certainly touched the stuff before; I hadn’t.
Unsurprisingly, it hit me in a big way. To start with, I got the giggles, uncontrollably. Whatever Dean said, it made me double up with laughter. We then went on to a 24-hour kebab and burger joint to satisfy our munchies. I remember ordering my kebab, sitting down for a while and then walking up to collect my food. All of a sudden, I started to feel really ill. I was going to pass out and I started to panic, thinking of all the stories you see on the news of people who die the first time that they take drugs. And I distinctly remember thinking:
‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die! I don’t want to die, I’m too young to die! What will my mum and dad say if I die like this, slumped in a kebab shop after taking drugs?’
As far as I know, I didn’t die on that occasion. I was woken up shortly afterwards by a big fat bloke handing me my kebab. But it shows how naïve and inexperienced I was that I thought I might be killed by smoking cannabis for the first time.
And so my education continued. I’d better say at this point that, while all these shenanigans were going on away from the cricket field, I was still doing my stuff for the Pirates on a weekend. Both seasons that I was there I ended up as the club’s bowler of the season, something that still makes me proud when I think of it. If you’re turning up to a place where nobody knows you from Adam, the best possible way to make yourself popular is to prove you’re worth your salt as a cricketer.
But more importantly, I really did learn a lot more than just how to live the high life in Jo’burg. Those stories are just the silly bits that stick in my memory the best. But my eyes were opened in a much broader sense by having to make friends in a foreign country, by learning the culture, working out what makes different people tick and how to fit in with them yourself. And I was doing this all on my own. I might not have had much in the way of responsibilities in Jo’burg, but the experience made me much more capable of standing on my own two feet in the future. It’s an experience that gave me a lot of confidence and one for which I shall always be extremely grateful. So thanks again, Ferg, another masterstroke.
If those two years in Jo’burg helped to broaden my views of the world in general, it was during the two seasons I spent playing for Free State in Bloemfontein that I learnt some of my most enduring cricketing lessons. I was much more sensible there. The focus was well and truly on the cricket.
Apart from the fact that I was playing in the first-class game rather than club cricket, the pitches were much more challenging for a seam bowler. Whereas in Jo’burg I’d been bowling at altitude, swinging the ball around on pitches that were often green mambas, in Free State there was no altitude and the tracks resembled the Ml. They were flat, flat, flat, so you had to do a bit more than run in and turn your arm over if you were going to get a decent batsman out.
Ironically, it was bowling on a seam-friendly wicket at Headingley that had got me an invitation to Bloem in the first place, which was a complete and utter fluke. In August 1998, seventeen months or so after I’d finished my second season with the Pirates, South Africa had just lost a Test series in England and were having nets at Headingley before the start of a one-day series with England and Sri Lanka. By this time I was 21 and I wasn’t quite a regular in the Yorkshire side, but I was getting there.
When the South Africans were in town, I was just coming back from injury and it was suggested that I go and bowl at them in the nets at Headingley. As they were preparing for a one-day series, I was bowling with a white ball and the practice pitches at Headingley were sporting, to say the least. It was swinging and seaming all over the place. I steamed in and I must have bowled out every South African batsman, more than once in some cases. Shaun Pollock, Jonty Rhodes, Hansie Cronje: it was quite a list of conquests. They made me look like the best bowler in the world. It was extremely generous of them.
South Africa’s bowling coach on that tour was Corrie van Zyl, who was also a coach at Free State. After I’d finished bowling, he wandered up to me and casually enquired whether I had any plans for the winter. I didn’t, as it happened, so he asked if I fancied going out to Bloemfontein to act as cover for Free State’s bowlers. Given the time I’d had out in South Africa before, this was an opportunity that I wasn’t going to pass up. A couple of months later, I was on my way back there.
I had to bide my time once I’d arrived, though, because the Free State management were reluctant to pick an overseas player ahead of the established locals, particularly in the SuperSport Series, the four-day competition. But I was bowling well in the nets, I turned in some decent figures in one-day cricket and took plenty of wickets in club cricket for the Peshwas. Above all, on those hard, flat pitches, I was learning the value of bowling maidens, boring a batsman out and making him give his wicket away.
I wasn’t given a real run in the four-day stuff until February, but in my second game, against Eastern Province in Bloem, I got five for 60 in the first innings and two for 19 from twenty-one overs in the second innings. They couldn’t really drop me after that.
I was lucky at Free State to play with some very handy cricketers and, when we were at full strength, we had a pretty powerful side. If they weren’t away on international duty, we had Gerry Liebenberg as captain, Hansie Cronje, Nicky Boje and, best of all for me, we had Allan Donald.
Just to turn up at the Free State nets and watch AD go about his work was an inspiration. At the time, there was no bigger superstar in South African cricket, but he would have as much time for a young lad at the Bloemfontein nets as he would for Hansie Cronje. A nicer, more modest and down-to-earth bloke you couldn’t ever wish to meet. Within a few weeks of me being there, AD had roped me in as a babysitter for Hannah and Oliver, his kids, while he and Tina went out for the evening. We’ve been firm friends ever since.
He was also a real help with my bowling. When I arrived in Bloem, I was having a few problems with my run-up and bowling lots of no-balls. To my amazement, AD took me to one side and took a load of time to help me get it right. He moved markers, watched my take-off and landing, and helped me to work out how I could find my rhythm. With his help, I soon got myself sorted.
He also gave me a few tips on reverse-swing, which I didn’t know much about in those days. I was playing in one game at Goodyear Park when AD was just watching, playing with his kids on the boundary and having a drink with the groundsman in the family enclosure. I was bowling at the time but, in the overs in between, I was fielding on the third-man boundary and I signalled to AD to come over for a chat. He came down and I said to him: ‘Al, I need to know something. It’s reversing out there, and I know how to reverse it in to the batsman, but how can I get it to go away?’
‘You know how you try to bowl inswingers with a normal ball, pushing it in with your fingers and your wrist?’ he said. ‘Well, just turn the
