an SOS call from England to get to Lord’s asap to be on standby for the second Test.
Almost as soon as he arrived he was told he was no longer required, so he was steaming when he got back to Taunton to resume the match, and when I played and missed a few against him early in my second dig, he was ready to burst.
‘Is this the same bloke who got all those runs as a kid?’ he asked. “kin ‘ell, what happened to you, then? I thought you were going to be a player. Any chance of you fulfilling your potential? Ever?’
There’s only one way I’m going to shut him up, I thought to myself. So I smashed him and his mates all round the park for the next six hours. I finished with 190, my career best, and was only dismissed when run out by a deflection at the non-striker’s end. Gus never stopped. ‘Come on child prodigy, you know where the edges are, now try using the middle,’ and ‘Turn the bat over, mate. The instructions are on the other side,’ and he grew steadily more purple by the over. Gus was a great bowler for England who defied early injury to become an indispensable line and length merchant. But even in his hey-day it all looked so bloody hard and by this stage of his career he fully lived up to the description by Martin Johnson of the Daily Telegraph of running in to bowl ‘looking like he’d caught his braces on the sightscreen’. And this day the harder he tried the more knackered he looked and the worse his outlook on life became until it got to the point when even his team-mates were trying to avoid eye contact in case he had a go at them. It was a hot day and the pitch had died and gone to batter’s heaven and they all knew it was only a matter of time. Finally, when Paul Weekes let one past him like a matador shepherding a raging bull, then retrieved it from the boundary with a slight smirk on his face, Gus kicked the turf, confronted Weekes with his best double-teapot and asked him ‘And what do you think is so f***ing funny, you gutless tw*t’, and everyone fell about. Gus finished with figures of none for 106 and, after I scored 110 in 97 balls in the one-day match that followed, my undying thanks for helping get me in nick for what turned out to be the turning point of my career.
I’d never met or spoken with Duncan Fletcher before the fateful match between Somerset and Glamorgan at the County Ground, at the start of September. I didn’t speak to him during it either. The fact is I never exchanged a single word with England’s new coach until April the following year and we’ve never ever discussed the events of the second day’s play to this day.
In later years, when talking in the media and in his autobiography about how I came to be selected, first for England A that winter in Bangladesh and New Zealand, then for the senior one-day and Test sides in the summer of 2000, Duncan always referred to the innings I played that day as the moment he recognized my potential to play at the highest level.
As a team and a club we were experiencing a wide range of emotions. First, on 29 August, we suffered the disappointment of losing the NatWest final, to our local rivals Gloucestershire, who won an unmemorable contest by 50 runs at Lord’s. Two days later, we secured promotion to Division One of the CGU National League by beating Glamorgan under floodlights and in front of a full house at Taunton. We made 257 for nine, to which I contributed nought and Rob Turner 50. And some of our supporters took the opportunity of Duncan’s first visit after being appointed England coach-in-waiting by reminding him what they thought of Rob. One banner read simply: ‘The best wicket-keeper in the country is here.’ And he took three smart catches as we bowled them out for 222 to win by 35 runs.
Forty-eight hours later, on 2 September, 20 wickets fell on the first day on a juicy track. Glamorgan bowled us out for 203, we then bowled them out for 113 and then I went out and played if not the best innings of my career so far, without a shadow of doubt the most important, 167 with 25 fours and five sixes, one of which, apparently, damaged a tombstone in St James’s churchyard.
I can honestly say the thought that I was on trial in front of the new England coach never entered my head for a moment. And if you believe that, you probably also believe spaghetti grows on trees. But as Duncan later made plain it wasn’t just the number of runs I scored that day that impressed him, it was the fact that one of the bowlers I scored them off was the South African all-rounder Jacques Kallis, who I had faced all those years ago in age-group cricket, whom Fletcher coached as a boy at Western Province and who he now rated as probably the best all-round cricketer in the world.
For some reason, whether it was Duncan’s pre-conceived plan, or just Kallis’s idea to try and shut me down on a still lively pitch, but, running in at a very respectable pace from the old pavilion end, and with Duncan watching every ball from above third man on the new pavilion balcony, he kept trying to bump me and, at that time of my life still being pretty much a compulsive hooker, I hardly left a ball. Instead, I just kept smacking him for four over square leg, with the odd six thrown in.
At the end of a dismal summer for England, when they followed up their poor showing in the World Cup by losing 2–1 to New Zealand even though they took the first Test at Edgbaston, the Sun printed a photograph of a burning set of stumps and bails underneath the headline ‘English Cricket RIP’, and the Board, driven by Brian Bolus, the chairman of the International Teams Group, duly instructed the chairman of selectors David Graveney, new coach Fletcher and the newish captain, Nasser, that the time had come for a clear-out and the introduction of some new faces, starting with the squad for the winter tour to South Africa.
The first time Nasser had ever met Duncan was when they came together in the autumn to begin planning the squad, and Nasser told me later that one of the first names Duncan raised was mine. Nasser said that had he done so a year later he would immediately have gone with Duncan’s judgement and picked me, but this time decided against it because he himself hadn’t seen enough of my batting nor known enough of Duncan to understand that when he said he had seen something in a player it was almost always something worth seeing.
‘Let’s keep an eye on him, anyway,’ they agreed. So while Michael Vaughan, Chris Adams, Darren Maddy and Gavin Hamilton were taken on the senior tour to South Africa, I was selected for the A team tour to Bangladesh and New Zealand, alongside Rob Turner, who Chris Read pipped for the role of Alec Stewart’s understudy in South Africa but who still had many backers to eventually take over as No. 1.
Of the four new bugs in South Africa, Vaughan made the biggest impact, walking out to bat on his debut in Johannesburg with England on 2 for two, which became 2 for four before he got off the mark. He kept his head to make 33 then, after a couple more useful scores, was made man-of-the-match for his 69 in England’s successful run-chase in the rain-affected final Test at Centurion Park; the South African captain Hansie Cronje had offered England a target, for reasons that remained his own until the match-fixing scandal broke and the truth of his deal with a bookmaker to ensure any result except a draw finally emerged.
I didn’t exactly set Bangladesh or New Zealand on fire, but the memory of events the previous summer in Taunton obviously stayed with Duncan because he insisted I should come back early from Somerset’s pre-season training in Cape Town in the spring of 2000 to attend an England training camp at Mottram Hall, Cheshire. Duncan also monitored my early season form, including a painstaking (i.e. long and boring) 105 out of 262 against Leicestershire in May – from 138 for seven Ian Blackwell and I put on 100 for the eighth wicket. All that I needed now was a chance and in late June, it came.
Nick Knight cracked a finger batting in the second Test against West Indies at Lord’s, which Hussain had already missed with a broken thumb, and England needed batting cover for the upcoming NatWest triangular one-day series with Zimbabwe and West Indies. On 2 July 2000 David Graveney dialled my number for the first time and changed my life.
Somerset had been on the road down in Maidstone, playing a four-day championship match against Kent, followed by a 45-over match on the Sunday. I was dog-tired and settled down in the back of Rob Turner’s car for the journey back to Taunton with a bag of sweets, ready for some kip, but decided I should
