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I made sure the day’s play in the Test was over and done with before texting four or five of the team; Andrew Strauss, who, with his wife Ruth and young son had visited us the previous winter, Kevin Pietersen, Michael Vaughan, Paul Collingwood and Steve Harmison, my colleagues from our Ashes victory of 2005, just saying thanks.
The next time I sent a message to Vaughan he probably wished I hadn’t bothered. Prior to the final Test in Hamilton, the skipper was coming under growing pressure not just because the team had failed to dominate supposedly weaker opposition, but also because of his poor form with the bat, 7 runs in six first-class innings on the tour thus far. When I saw him scratch around for 2 in 11 balls on the first morning of the match, when England slumped to 4 for 3, with the ball zipping around, I decided the time had come to intervene. My text message was brief and to the point. ‘What the hell is going on? Just go out there and whack it.’ I told him. In the second innings he took my advice and, after amassing a glorious four in four balls, he made a ludicrous attempt to slap a good length ball on off stump from Chris Martin to the square leg boundary, only to feather a nick to Brendon McCullum behind the stumps. Vaughan didn’t text me back, but I got the message. It was definitely time to leave England well alone and get on with the rest of my life.
There was one other bit of unfinished local business to deal with. Word had reached me that, on the night of the Heathrow incident, as soon as the other lads heard that I was not going to be getting on the plane with them, poor James Hildreth was distraught. I learned later that he had spoken to one of the other guys and said, ‘I wish I hadn’t said those things to Banger.’ There was a suggestion that he felt responsible for what had happened because of the piss-taking as the coach approached the terminal building. Apparently he couldn’t get rid of the feeling that by saying what he had said he had set in motion the chain reaction that culminated in my collapse.
When I heard that I knew I had to speak to him as soon as the guys got back from Dubai and I did. I told him: ‘Listen, I have absolutely no problem with what you said. It was nothing and it had no bearing on what happened afterwards.’ He seemed pretty relieved. And by then, so was I.
‘In the kitchen, in the living room, in the garden, wherever she happened to be, I’d hand the ball to her [mum], she’d bowl it, I’d hit it, fetch it, carry it back to her and say again “bowl to me, bowl to me.”’
You’ve heard of people who eat, drink, sleep and dream cricket. For a large part of my life, that was me.
My earliest memories are not of teddy-bears, bows and arrows, mud pies or ray-guns, but of bats and balls, and mainly bats. I can’t recall when I first picked one up, but I have retained a fuzzy memory of what happened when I did. It felt great, and even better when I hit a ball with it. That feeling has never left me.
I was born into a cricket-mad family. With my dad Martyn – a stalwart, top-order batsman and brilliant slip fielder for Keynsham Cricket Club, in between Bristol and Bath, good enough to play second team cricket for Somerset and be offered a contract which he turned down – and my mum Linda, already well into her eventual 35 years of making the club teas, it was hardly surprising that I should have an interest in the game.
But an article in the local paper, recording the birth of Marcus Edward Trescothick at 9.15 a.m. on 25 December 1975, weighing a ‘healthy’ 9lb 4 oz, said it all. Under the headline ‘On The Team For 1991?’, it read:
The couple, who live at Glenwood Drive, Oldland Common, already have a three-year-old daughter Anna, aged three.
Said Martyn: ‘I was secretly hoping for a boy, and he will have every encouragement to become a cricketer when he grows up.’
While that first paragraph was apparently put together by someone who had necked a glass too many of the Christmas spirit, the second one was spot on.
Mum tells me I had a little plastic bat thrust into my hands at 11 months old, only a couple of weeks after I started walking, and, from that moment, I went round hitting everything I could find. If there weren’t any balls to whack I’d have a go at those square wooden alphabet bricks, an early indication of my preference for sport over academic life. When I was about two, a family friend called Roger Loader cut a small bat down to a blade of around six inches and gave it to me as a present. It had a bit more go in it than the plastic one and, by all accounts, I was absolutely lethal with it. When mum and I returned after dropping off Anna at school, we’d get back in the house and I’d plead ‘bowl to me, mum, bowl to me’. In the kitchen, in the living room, in the garden, wherever she happened to be, I’d hand the ball to her, she’d bowl it, I’d hit it, fetch it, carry it back to her and say again: ‘bowl to me, bowl to me.’ I never got tired of this. How she didn’t I’ll never know. No wonder, whenever they heard me coming, our pet cats, Cricket and Biscuit, would run for their nine lives. Anna thought I was just plain daft.
When I was four, dad went on a cricket tour to Sussex and came back with my first very own new bat, a Gray-Nicholls Powerspot which I still have at home to this day, and it was carnage. In the living room there were three sets of wall lights, each with two lamps under their own shades. By the time I had finished, of the six lamps and shades only one remained intact. I’d had all the rest. And one day, I managed to put a bouncy rubber ball straight through one of the French doors, clean as a whistle. Mum and dad never seemed to mind too much. In fact I was more likely to get told off for not hitting the ball hard enough than for the latest breakage.
From as young as I can remember, if I wasn’t tugging at mum’s skirts pleading with her to ‘bowl to me’ or outside in the garden with dad, playing cricket, and by now, football as well, I was glued to the television whenever the cricket was on, so much so that mum would often find me standing in front of it, bat in hand, repeating the shots I’d just seen. She is convinced that is how I became a left-handed batsman even though I am naturally right handed. In those days, the late 70s and early 80s, the England side was dominated by right-handed batters like Graham Gooch, Geoff Boycott, Chris Tavare, Peter Willey and Ian Botham. David Gower was about the only one who batted the other way round. So, in mirroring the right-handers I was actually adopting a left-hander’s stance and practising the shots left-handed. The shots played by Gooch and Beefy obviously appealed to me more than the ones played by Boycott and Tavare.
Inevitably there were scrapes. I’ve still got a y-shaped scar on a my left hand from when I tripped on the doorstep bringing in the milk and I very nearly became living proof of the warning passed down by parents to kids from the beginning of time: ‘It’s all good fun until somebody loses an eye’. I had my luckiest escape thus far when I tried to climb up the washing machine, planted both Wellington-booted feet through the open door, slipped sideways, and the door hinge made a deep cut along my eyebrow.
By the age of six, whenever people asked me what I was going to do when I grew up, I didn’t just say ‘play cricket’, I said ‘play cricket, of course.’ At seven, with dad running the junior section at Keynsham, I was already playing for the club’s Under-11s.
At St Anne’s Primary School, I was extremely lucky that one of the teachers, a Rick McCoy, was sports-mad. He ran the cricket in summer and the football in winter, and by then I was even branching out into other sports. Aged nine, at the 1984 Warmley & District Schools
