too: the Reverend Ian Paisley reacting angrily to a surprise visit to Northern Ireland by the Prime Minister.
With Emma already on her way to read the news, I triumphantly handed her what would now be her lead story. Moments later, the news jingle sounded. ‘Radio Leicester news at nine o’clock, I’m Emma Norris. We have just heard that the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, has made a surprise visit to Northern Ireland. This is the reaction of the Reverend Ian Paisley: “Hello, Peter. Peter, can you hear me? Peter?”’
That was the last time I was let loose on the early-morning circuit, but at least, in time, Emma managed to forgive me. We were married in 1995.
* * *
The realisation for the first time that there was life outside cricket was a great eye-opener. It had a profound impact on my game, too. Professional cricket is an uncertain career which can be ended at any time by injury or loss of form, and unless a county player is fortunate enough to enjoy a successful Benefit (a year of tax-free money-raising on his behalf), he will not earn nearly enough to set him up for the big wide world when his playing days are over. To know that all will be well at the end is enormously reassuring.
I took a hundred wickets for Leicestershire in the 1987 season, and the following year I came frustratingly close to the recall to the England team that I had set my heart on. David Gower was again the captain, but it was a disastrous Ashes campaign which, with just the final Test at The Oval to play, stood at 4–0 to Australia. Leicestershire was playing Surrey at Grace Road over the weekend before the Test, and England’s squad had been announced, but time and again the telephone rang in our dressing room with bad news from a succession of fast bowlers reporting to David that they were injured, and could not play against Australia.
By the end of the day David looked a broken man, slumped in his seat and with no idea who to choose for England.
‘What about Agnew?’ suggested Peter Willey from his chair in the corner. ‘He’s bowling pretty well at the moment.’
David’s face lit up. ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘Jonathan, you’re in. Go home, get your England stuff ready, and I’ll call first thing tomorrow to confirm everything.’
Even though I was approximately the seventeenth choice, this was still fantastic news. I called Dad when I arrived home, told him to keep the Saturday of the Test match clear, and dug out my England cap and sweaters which had remained folded in a drawer ever since they were last used, briefly, in 1985. After three dis appointing Test appearances, this was my second chance, and the opportunity to set the record straight that I had worked so hard for.
To be up early next morning to await the England captain’s call was clearly a schoolboy error. David Gower’s idea of ‘first thing’ is what most people would consider third thing, possibly even fourth. It seemed hours before the telephone finally rang.
‘Got some bad news, I’m afraid,’ David began. ‘I couldn’t persuade Ted Dexter or Mickey Stewart, so you’re not in any more. They’ve gone for Alan Igglesden. Know anything about him?’
With that, David must have known his influence as England captain was over – and indeed Graham Gooch succeeded him after that Test. I felt utterly devastated, and knew I would never play for England again, which had been my main motivating force. So when the Today newspaper offered me the post of cricket correspondent the following summer, it was an easy decision to make. I might have been only thirty, which was no age to retire from professional cricket, and I could easily have played for another five years. But it was definitely time to move on.
Chapter Three
Up to Speed
Brian Johnston was always endearingly candid about the good fortune he had enjoyed at key moments in his life. His Old Etonian connections, like ‘Lobby’ de Lotbiniere at the BBC, served him well, and while talent, charm and charisma helped to establish him as a national institution, there have been any number of similarly talented, charming and charismatic broadcasters for whom doors simply have not opened. But let us not fool ourselves. Everyone needs a slice of luck to get started, but it still requires energy, hard work, skill and commitment to make a success of things from there. Johnners always made what he did look incredibly easy, and broadcasting did come naturally to him, but it would be entirely wrong to assume that because it all looked like second nature, his brain was not working nineteen to the dozen.
As a cricketer, I do not think I necessarily had the rub of the green. I might well have played more times for England than I did; but then, I should have made a better fist of the opportunities I did have. Anyway, I am long since over that disappointment. However, from the moment I retired at the end of the 1990 season I unexpectedly benefited from being in the right place at the right time, and from a series of lucky breaks which propelled me at alarming speed onto Test Match Special.
The Today newspaper, now defunct, was a tabloid chiefly famous for its attempt to break the monopoly of Fleet Street and for its pioneering efforts to publish colour photographs, which it managed with mixed success. I wrote a county cricketer’s diary during my last three seasons for Leicestershire, which one year was titled ‘Round the Wicket with Jonathan Agnew’. As you may imagine, this resulted in tremendous ribaldry in the dressing room, and the column was renamed the following summer.
Over the years many former players have turned to writing about the game, but for a national tabloid newspaper to appoint a practising cricketer with minimal training and no experience as correspondent was an entirely new development. It was not universally popular among other journalists, who – rightly, as it has turned out – feared that my appointment would be the start of a trend which would make it very difficult for writers who had not played county cricket, at least, to keep their jobs. Today, the chief cricket correspondents of The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian are former internationals, and more past players write their own copy in newspapers than they used to.
It would be a great shame if the properly trained, cricket-loving journalist found that there was no longer room for him in the press box. Of course former cricketers provide an insight to the game that can only be gained through the experience of having been out in the middle. But ex-players are a rather cynical lot, and having treated the game as a job from a young age, our relationship with cricket is different to that of the fan. We can sometimes be a little jaded, and this is where the cricket-lover can shine, particularly in the coverage of one-day cricket, which has become tediously formulaic. The middle overs of a one-day international have now lost their momentum because of the introduction of ‘power plays’ early in the innings, in which the field restrictions encourage exciting batting. Maybe I have been unfortunate, but I seem to have watched a lot of games recently in which the team batting second loses too many early wickets, producing a dead match that drifts for up to forty overs before finally reaching its predictable conclusion. The last people to ask about the future of one-day cricket are the former players in television and radio commentary boxes. Few of us are enthused by that form of cricket any more, because we have seen too many dull, meaningless games. But it is an element of our job – all too often in recent years – to make one-sided one-day matches sound exciting. Part of a commentator’s brief is to ‘lift’ the programme when the cricket is boring.
This is never easy, and nobody is better at it than Henry Blofeld. His love and enthusiasm for the game shine through every delivery he describes, with his right foot hammering away under the desk. Where would Test Match Special be without Brian Johnston, John Arlott, Tony Cozier and Christopher Martin-Jenkins, none of whom played first-class cricket? The colourful and knowledgeable accounts that we read in the newspapers over breakfast would have been immeasurably poorer without E.W. Swanton, Neville Cardus and John Woodcock, to name just three.
Clearly
