to know in order to understand what is going on inside his head sometimes. He loves a piss-take, with a bit of niggle for good measure, and enjoys getting some stick too. But I am not sure how flattering he found physical comparisons to a certain famous Russian when the alert Jonathan Agnew spotted the likeness. Aggers’s photo of Nasser interviewing Graham Onions, with the caption ‘Vladimir Putin talks to President Ahmadinejad’, is the funniest thing I have ever seen posted on Twitter. A cracking lookalike double.
Nasser didn’t often see the funny side of things when he was playing the game, probably because he was so unfortunate when he batted. As a cricketer, he was just Unlucky Alf, so often the recipient of deliveries that nobody else got and nobody on the planet would have played. Miracle delivery, grubber, snorter – Nasser attracted them. Add to that the fact that he was never out – it was either that the pitch was wrong, it was a shit decision or the wind was blowing the wrong way – and you get the full picture. He was just ‘one of them’.
His most unfortunate dismissal came in Trinidad during the 1998–9 tour of the Caribbean, when a delivery from Carl Hooper did for him good and proper. The ball literally rolled along the floor after pitching and hit him on the shoe plumb in front of off-stump. It was a stonewall lbw decision and made him look a bit of a twit. But how on earth are you meant to play a ball like that? I am sure that is what was going through his mind as he trudged off muttering, kicking at everything in his path, his bat bouncing off the floor. When he got to the dressing-room, he found Atherton, his sympathetic captain, killing himself with laughter. What else can you do when a team-mate gets one of the unplayables? We sometimes run the footage back now, during rain delays, if our discussions have taken in batting on tricky pitches, and someone will inevitably ask Nasser: ‘How do you play that? What would you recommend? Commentators have always said you’ve got to get forward. You don’t appear to have …’
‘Forward? Forward? How do you get forward when it’s rolled along the floor like a marble?’ he flames. On some matters time has not been a great healer with Nasser.
Generally he has mellowed with age. At the time of that match at Port-of-Spain, however, his tendency to ire was at its career height, and with that in mind, his team-mates would prepare and protect themselves against the Mount Vesuvius moment. My youngest lad Ben was with us on that tour and was employed as a look-out by big Angus Fraser, who fancied a kip in the dressing-room but was only too aware of Nasser’s appetite for destruction when dismissed.
‘Listen, if that Hussain bloke gets out, you come and wake me up straight away. No messing,’ Gus warned our lad. Now to this day I am not sure whether it was the comic nature of the demise that threw him off guard, a sense of adventure or genuine absent-mindedness, but Ben failed to carry out his task. Poor old Gus was fast asleep as the cricket equipment in Hussain’s path was redistributed around the place. He awoke with a judder, an action which only served to increase the velocity of the rant. ‘So, you don’t want to watch me bat, huh?’ Nasser raged. ‘You would rather go to sleep when I’m batting. Not worth watching, aren’t I?’
So, with one of his mates beside himself with laughter and another snoring as he entered the room, Nasser completely lost his cool and thrust his fist through the front of a wooden locker, an action which brought a premature close to his strop, as he could not pull his hand back out without incurring some serious damage. With splintered pieces pointing this way and that, doing so could have severed his hand, so here he was, his fury not sated but forced to contemplate one of international cricket’s great injustices from a stationary position. Fraser was anything but stationary, as he hot-footed after Lloyd junior, whose ability as a nightwatchman was in keeping with others’ efforts on the tour. ‘Why didn’t you come and wake me up, you little swine?’ Gus bellowed, as he chased our Ben round the back of the stand.
I am not sure Nasser wanted to dwell on his dismissal after freeing his mitt from the hurt locker, or whether there was much mileage in doing so. Had he wanted to analyse the freakery of his downfall, it would have involved a process which seems incredibly antiquated now. Those were the days when cricket was in its initial stage of embracing technology, and players could watch themselves back on video – but this meant that we, as a touring party, were forced to lug around huge cases of VHS cassettes and three enormous television monitors. We would have tapes upon tapes of Brian Lara, Steve Waugh and Waqar Younis in action, a library of footage designed to help us assess their strengths and weaknesses, in addition to hours of footage of our own players both from net sessions and in match scenarios. Trailing this archive material around, however, was seriously hard work. Just consider the fact that with no flat TV screens this meant huge tubes and boxes. We had three steel box containers to transport around, and even then because of the limit on screens it meant players had to share. If Alec Stewart was watching his front-foot driving, he might be given the hurry-up because Jack Russell wanted to have a gander at someone’s bowling, or how he kept to Phil Tufnell in the last Test. It seems unfathomable that technology has moved on so much that a decade later, if you want to prepare yourself for the pace of South Africa’s Dale Steyn, you could be watching the last six deliveries he bowled in international cricket within seconds of the thought popping into your head. Press half-a-dozen buttons and you can be privately studying his last few wickets on your mobile phone.
Most of Nasser’s preparations these days are to do with going somewhere for free, or at an hour which will allow him to be in bed before dark. He might have earned a reputation as a rabble-rouser as a cricketer, but he is fairly chilled in his everyday life. We wind him up something rotten about being tight, and he lives up to the reputation, but I hate to admit he can be quite generous at times. That’s not to say that if he sees something for nothing, the eyes do not light up. He always enjoys things more when he’s on the cadge. One of the first questions he asks when we get up to anything on days off is ‘How much will it cost?’ And it never ceases to amaze me how the best golf courses Nasser has ever played always seem to be the ones that offered a complimentary round or were paid for by the sponsors or hosts. If you are out for dinner with him, he will often disappear as soon as the main course is done, which means he lopes off without paying. It makes it look as if he’s a blagger but, in the interests of truth and to collapse a myth, I can confirm that the settling up is done the next day. It is not the fight with the moths he is concerned about in opening his wallet at the table, he just has a habit of hitting the hay by nine o’clock.
There are rumours that he sleeps in his cap, because off screen you rarely see him without it. Indoors or out, he perpetually has that sports casual thing going on. He was wearing it one day as we drove on the freeway in South Africa, on the way back from a round of golf, when we got pulled over at a compulsory road block. Men who wear caps for the hell of it always arouse suspicion, and so when he produced his driving documents in the Afrikaaner heartland, I warned him: ‘I think we’re going to be here for some f—–ing time, what with your name an’ all.’ Neither of us was quite sure what was going on, but this burly policewoman was chuntering away completely in Afrikaans. She was not in the upper percentiles of the country’s intelligentsia, shall we say, and with communication at breakdown, and the process seemingly interminable, I started ordering my breakfast. ‘I’ll have double egg, bacon, sausage and tomato,’ I began. She had waved us on before mention of the fried bread, so the distraction tactics clearly worked.
We didn’t want her sifting through her records for too long, because Nasser could easily have been a feature on there. He had already crashed two vehicles on the trip – those Hertz hire jobbies which are the size of a mobile home – to earn the tour nickname Mr Magoo. One day, in Port Elizabeth, we set off from the hotel, with a little lad running alongside us, dodging through the traffic. Nothing too unusual in that: you often get cricket-mad lads who will do anything in their desperation for the signature of a former England captain. But it was not a pen he was holding up, it was part of our charabanc that had fallen off. Nasser had scraped the side of the car, and this lad was saying, ‘Your trim, sir.’
As it happened, his signature was not required at the time, adding insult to injury, but it was needed later in the piece as he had to fill
