Mum and Dad still live in the same house and I was round there recently having a look at the garden, and it occurred to me that the layout there is probably responsible for a quirk that I have in my bowling action. I have a bit of a cross-action, in that my front foot goes across to the right too far when I bowl, across my body (compared with how a normal person bowls, anyway). It actually helps me to swing the ball and has helped in particular against left-handers, enabling me to get closer in to the stumps bowling over the wicket, giving me a better chance of getting an lbw.
In the layout opposite, the main set of arrows from top to bottom show my run-up and pitch in the garden. The two-way arrows towards the bottom show where I threw the ball against the kitchen wall and smacked it back across the patio. You can see there wasn’t a straight line coming down from the side of the greenhouse to the fence where the wickets were on the other side of the garden, so I had to adjust and come across myself in my action. It had never occurred to me until recently, but that could well have led to the way I have bowled ever since. So perhaps every time I dismissed Matthew Hayden when I was playing for England, I should have been thanking my dad for putting the greenhouse in such a daft place.
Not so far from our house, about a ten-minute walk (fifteen if you had a heavy bag), was our local cricket club, Pudsey Congs, which is where I went to start playing some proper cricket. I started going down there at the age of 11 and, to begin with, we played eight-a-side, sixteen overs per team, with four pairs of batsmen going in for four overs at a time, and losing eight runs every time one of them was out. From the first time I went, I was really keen, and I think Mum was even keener to have me out of the house. Soon enough, the cricket club became the centre of my little universe.
I was lucky to have such a good club just down the road. I suppose that anywhere you go in Yorkshire you’ll never be far from a decent cricket club, but I certainly couldn’t have done much better than having Pudsey Congs—or Pudsey Pongos, as we were known—right on my doorstep. It was a friendly place with a good family atmosphere, the bar would be full most nights and the first team played a very decent standard of cricket, in the Bradford League first division.
I worked my way up through the junior sides and was then drafted into the third team for a season when I was 15.1 played a couple of second-team games as well that year, but to my amazement, the next season I was fast-tracked into the first team by Phil Carrick, the former Yorkshire left-arm spinner who was captain of the club. Ferg, as he was known to everyone (think ‘Carrickfergus’), had obviously seen something in me that he liked.
I wish I was In Carrickfergus Only for nights in Ballygran I would swim over the deepest ocean…
I’d been a bit of a late developer up to this point. As well as my cricket, I’d done some judo and played quite a bit of rugby, but I gave those up because all the other lads were bigger and broader than me. From the age of 16, though, I really started to grow and, as a result, my bowling began to develop. To this day, I’m not sure exactly what Ferg saw in me, maybe just a big fast bowler’s arse and an ability to swing the ball.
I certainly used to swing the ball in the nets at Congs, but that might have had something to do with my special ball. There was one ball in particular that I used to keep for bowling with in the nets and I looked after it lovingly. At home, I would get Cherry Blossom shoe polish out of Mum and Dad’s cupboard, put a dollop of that on the ball and buff it up with a shoebrush. Then before nets on a Wednesday night I would give the ball one last polish with a shining brush, and make absolutely sure that nobody else nicked it when I went to practice. That was my ball and nobody else was getting their grubby mitts on it.
For all that Ferg whistled me up into the first team at Congs, for the first few games all I did was bowl two or three overs and spend the rest of the innings fielding, wondering when I was going to get another bowl. After a few games, I started to find this frustrating. ‘Ferg,’ I said, ‘why do you want me here playing a fifty-over game if I’m only going to bowl a few overs?’ The answer was that he was easing me in, allowing me to get a feel for first-team cricket before too much was expected of my bowling. He didn’t want to rush me because this was, after all, a very decent standard of club cricket, probably the best in Yorkshire (and therefore, so some locals would have you believe, probably the best in the world).
As the season progressed, I started to bowl a few more overs, but I was given an early idea of the quality I was up against when we played Spen Victoria. That was the game I came across Chris Pickles, the Yorkshire all-rounder who was coming to the end of his county career but spent his weekends terrorising club bowlers. He just used to come in and blast it; most of the grounds weren’t very big and he could smash 100 in no time.
I opened the bowling that day and had one of the openers caught at slip with a lovely outswinger (no shoe polish involved this time, just the new ball curving away nicely). Pickles was next in and he wandered out to ask the other opening batsman what was happening. ‘Oh, it’s just swinging a bit,’ his mate said.
I’d heard all about Pickles, so I ran in really hard at him next ball. The ball swung alright, and landed on a length, but he just plonked his front foot down the wicket, hit through the line of the ball and sent it soaring over cow corner, where it landed on top of some faraway nets. I couldn’t believe it. I just stood halfway down the wicket, hands on my hips, looking at him with a puzzled expression on my face. He ambled down the wicket, tapped the pitch with his bat, and muttered out of the corner of his mouth: Anti-swing device, son. ‘Antiswing device.’
So I was on a steep learning curve, but I loved the atmosphere and I just wanted to bowl. We had a good team, 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