including former Yorkshire players like Ferg and Neil Hartley, and current ones like Richard Kettleborough, while James Middlebrook came up through the ranks with me. We also had some very useful overseas players, such as VVS Laxman from India and Yousuf Youhana from Pakistan. I’d be bumping into them again later in my career.
Lax was only 19 when he came to us, but it was clear he was a class act. After one game in which he’d scored a few runs and I’d taken a couple of wickets, we were chatting to Ferg in the clubhouse. ‘One day,’ Ferg said, ‘you two will play against each other in Test match cricket.’ We just laughed at him and told him not to be so daft. Lax had only played a handful of games and I was a raggy-arsed 17-year-old who’d just broken into Pudsey Congs first team, so it was a pretty outlandish thing to say.
The sad thing was that Ferg didn’t live to see his prediction come true. In January 2000, at the age of 47, he died after suffering from leukaemia. Less than two years later, I played for England in Mohali against an India team that included VVS Laxman.
He was a great man, Ferg, and I miss him terribly. It’s impossible to overstate his influence on me in those early days at Congs. He really took me under his wing. Whether we were out in the field or chatting in the bar after a game, he always had time for me. With my bowling, he would always emphasise to me the importance of length. ‘Length, Matthew, length.’ He’d tell me to go to the nets, put a hankie down on a length and see how many times I could hit it in an over. I used to spend hours doing that, going up to the nets at Congs after school and bowling on my own at a set of stumps with a hankie or a lump of wood on a good length. And then, when we were playing a match on Saturday, I would have Ferg standing at mid-off and growling at me. Even now, fifteen years later, when I bowl too short or too full, I can sometimes hear Ferg’s gruff voice grumbling in my ear: ‘Length, Matthew, length.’
But I must have been getting my length right most of the time, because in 1995, after only a couple of seasons in the first team at Congs, Ferg recommended me to Yorkshire. I was still only 18, doing the second year of my A-levels at Grangefield comprehensive, but when schoolwork allowed I was able to take the next steps of my cricketing education in the Yorkshire Second XI.
In general, club cricket with Pudsey Pongos prepared me pretty well for life on the county Second XI circuit. There were always new lessons to be learned, but I don’t remember feeling particularly out of my depth at any point, at least not from a cricketing point of view. But one thing that is drastically different about playing three-day matches, and spending a lot of time on the road as a result, is that you spend a hell of a lot of time with your team-mates.
This is a group of young blokes, many of whom are easily bored and need to find things to occupy their underdeveloped brains, a situation that inevitably results in a lot of practical jokes. For quite some time in the Yorkshire second team, I felt well out of my depth in terms of the pranks. And to make matters worse, the prankster-in-chief was the coach himself.
Doug Padgett was a coach from the old school, a former Yorkshire batsman who had been the club’s coach for donkey’s years and usually travelled with the second team. He was a good bloke, but he had a time-honoured way of making a new lad feel welcome.
Take the piss out of him whenever possible.
This is the man who would welcome a lad making his debut by sending him round to take the day’s lunch order. ‘Here, Twatook,’ he would say (he called all the younger lads Twatook). ‘Do the lunches for us, will you? Go round and see how many of the lads want steak and how many want salmon, then nip to the kitchen and tell the chef.’ So the new lad would eagerly set about his task, taking all eleven orders, only to find when he got to the kitchen that the only option available for lunch was lasagne, something that Padge and the other ten players were only too well aware of.
Another trick of Padge’s was to ask a new lad to go to his car and find out the Test score from the radio. James Middlebrook was one who stumbled into this trap. ‘Midders, Twatook, nip to your car and find out the Test score for us, will you? There’s a good lad.’ So off Midders trooped to his car and sat there for ages, frantically tuning and re-tuning the radio in an attempt to find Test Match Special. He returned slightly crestfallen, having failed in his mission.
‘Sorry, Padge, the Test match doesn’t seem to be on the radio today.’
‘No, Twatook, it wouldn’t be. They don’t play Test cricket on a Wednesday.’
A lesson swiftly learned for Midders, who would think twice before his esteemed coach sent him off on any errands again. I’d say I felt sorry for him, but most of us suffered in a similar way, some worse than others.
Midders got away lightly compared to the poor young whippersnapper who had travelled with Padge on an away trip to Glamorgan a few years earlier. This was before my time, but the tale was often told of an unnamed player—let’s just call him Twatook—who sat in Padge’s car for the long drive down to Wales along with a couple of his new team-mates.
As they travelled down the M5 and started to approach the Welsh border, Padge turned to the young lad sitting quietly in the back.
‘You have got your passport with you, haven’t you, Twatook? We’re about to go into Wales.’
‘Erm, erm, erm, no Padge, I don’t think I have,’ came the timid reply.
‘Oh Christ, didn’t anybody tell you? We’re going to Wales. It’s a different country. What are we going to do when we get to the border? We’re going to have to hide you.’
So Padge pulled his car over, opened the boot, moved several cricket bags to the back seat and told his victim to lie down in the boot until they had crossed the border. Young Twatook climbed in, snuggled down and Padge slammed the boot lid shut. He drove off into Wales, leaving his captive in the boot to think about the foolishness of forgetting his passport. Once the border had been safely negotiated—armed checkpoints and all—the hostage was released, poor lad. I’m sure Padge felt that it was all good character-building stuff.
Where Padge had led, there were plenty of disciples ready to follow, which has made the Headingley dressing-room a dangerous place to be at times over the last few years. Probably the biggest irritant in the Yorkshire team in recent years—myself aside—has been Anthony McGrath.
The problem with Mags is that he is easily bored and he likes to fill his time by pissing off his team-mates. A few years ago, one of his little pet projects was to put his team-mates’ cars up for sale in Auto Trader magazine, always at a bargain price carefully calculated by Mags himself. The advert for the car would usually say something along the lines of:
‘Owner forced to move abroad, Price reduced for quick sale. Please call…’
and then include the player’s mobile phone number. Inevitably, for such a bargain, these adverts attracted plenty of interest from potential buyers, prompting an endless stream of phone calls to the victim’s mobile. Time after time, he would have to say, ‘I’m sorry for the misunderstanding, but it’s not for sale.’ Which could be quite amusing on the first two or three occasions. But when it came to the 25th call in the space of an hour, it could start to become more than a little irritating.
Bogus adverts aside, Mags has often been implicated in one of the great scandals that has swirled around the Yorkshire team for several seasons now. This is the ongoing mystery of Jack the Snipper, a long-running case that has yet to be cracked and
