Ironically, as I write this preface for the paperback edition, many of those ‘What does the future hold?’ questions have resurfaced, despite what I would describe as a successful season in 1992. Every time that I have to sit down and compile something for this book, it seems that I have to do so at the same time as having to contemplate life from outside the inner circles of England cricket.
The basic truth that all of us in time come to appreciate fully is that there are no guarantees, hence the merits of being able to ease the inevitable disappointments by maintaining a sense of perspective and balance. Although I am to spend the winter of 1992-93 watching cricket for a living instead of playing it, I can do so comfortably, knowing firstly that I have much on which to look back proudly; secondly, that there is potentially much still to anticipate in terms of a cricketing future; and thirdly, to be spending half of the winter behind the microphone in Australia and India is not exactly a complete disaster.
Thus with cheerful countenance I proffer what follows as a mixture of fond memories and tales of woe, all of which are an integral part of any sportsman’s life, safe in the expectation that, as time goes on, inevitably the highlights will outlive the disappointments.
David Gower
Brisbane, November 1992
Fun, style and excellence
I HAVE, during the course of a career stretching back to 1975, won a good many medals and trophies in all parts of the cricketing world, mostly for performances on the field. However, pride of place on my mantelpiece at home is reserved for an award from a national newspaper that does not, on the face of it, mean anything much at all. And yet it means as much, if not more than any cup final medal, or the International Cricketer of the Year trophy I won in Australia in 1982-83. It is a plaque, inscribed with the words: ‘For Fun, Style, and Excellence.’ If I had the choice of words to be chiselled on my tombstone (actually, I suppose I do … where’s the will?) it would be those. In many ways I am happy to forget the mere statistics of a career in cricket, and to remember the fun of it as well as feeling that I have given spectators a little pleasure too. It is a philosophy I carried with me throughout my cricketing career, and despite the fact that it torpedoed me in the end, it is not one I would have changed even with the benefit of hindsight. Fun, style and excellence is a nice way of summing up what I tried to do. I started playing the game because it was fun. I acquired a certain style while I was doing it (unfortunately, ‘laid-back’ was the way it was described most often), and if I have touched excellence at various points along the way (and as I played 114 Test matches I must have got quite close once or twice) then you could not ask for a great deal more.
When young players have asked me for a philosophy of the game, or something to bear in mind when they are embarking on their cricketing careers, I have invariably said: ‘Enjoy it. You started playing the game for enjoyment, and whatever helps you retain that outlook, go ahead and do it.’ If you are not enjoying it for any reason, you cannot bring out the best in yourself. There are times, of course, when you have to push yourself beyond fun, so that you can achieve the results that will give you the satisfaction to make it fun. There may, on the other hand, be a few lessons to be absorbed from this book that may prevent our star of the future from having his head lopped off like I did. Graham Gooch, whose fingerprints – among others – can be found on the lever that operated the guillotine, has accused me, ironically, on more than one occasion, of not having fun – or at least not enjoying the lifestyle on the field as much as I did off it. To a certain extent he was right, and if I am accused of not always sporting a mile-wide grin during a dull game in a howling gale, while cursing to myself for not putting on two pairs of long johns instead of one, then I apologize to him for this major character weakness. This book, I hope, is not a whitewash. I admit to not taking either cricket or life seriously enough at times, but while this has occasionally found me out, I would like to think that my warts are mostly friendly ones.
I do get bored easily and hard graft has never come naturally, but nothing annoys me more than hearing that I fell short of some people’s expectations because I appeared to find the game too easy. I have never found cricket easy. My external appearance has not always been deceptive, and when I once turned up for play one morning wearing one black shoe and one brown one, this was a fairly accurate indication of what I am like first thing in the morning. On the other hand, wearing a smile on your face, or making the occasional facetious comment, is not evidence that you are an idle dilettante either. There is no one way of playing the game that is right or wrong, and cricket is a sport that lays your character bare like almost no other. I was latterly perceived, wrongly in my opinion, to have had a lack of commitment to the England cause, that somehow I rocked the boat with an indifferent attitude. I scored nearly 500 runs in my last series in Australia with this lack of commitment. I did however commit the unpardonable sin of looking more cheerful after a flight in a Tiger Moth than during some of the management’s interminable training routines, on a tour when runs around the block counted for rather more than runs in the middle. There was an atmosphere in Australia in which fun and cricket had no place together which was alien to my interpretation of how to bring out the best of international cricketers, leaving me often at odds with the likes of team manager, Micky Stewart.
Character differences are part and parcel of all team sports, and a diversity of opinion can of course be used constructively. Unfortunately, my relationship with Micky Stewart was not enhanced on this tour, which worried me less than the fact that I was finding it so difficult to communicate with Graham Gooch, who I had known and liked over a much longer period. It seemed to annoy both of them that I could succeed without conforming to the methods they laid down. The attitude that came across was that I did not deserve to succeed. The argument that often came out was that I was not setting the right example to younger players, that I was somehow inhibiting or retarding their development. I didn’t accept this, nor did I find anything remotely like this impression among the other players. I was no different at thirty-three than I had been at twenty-one. The idea, so it appeared to me, was to fit in with whatever the system was at the time, but yet to do what you needed to do yourself to be happy and confident about playing when required.
The fact that our relationship suffered the terminal fracture in Australia was not without its irony or significance. Micky in particular had taken note of Australia’s change in selection policy after we beat them on Mike Gatting’s 1986-87 tour. Bobby Simpson and Allan Border decided that a certain type of character was required to play for Australia, hence the more flamboyant and slightly rebellious people like Greg Ritchie, Tim Zoehrer, Craig McDermott and Greg Matthews all got thrown out. Looking at their subsequent results, you have to say that their decision worked, but at least two of those players got back into the side eventually, proving that no system need necessarily be rigid to the point of inflexibility. If it had happened to me ten years earlier, it would have been easier to shrug off, but not only had I been given a label, I was also approaching that period in my career – if not my sell-by date – when a slightly rebellious older hand could more easily be cut adrift.
When I was left out of the West Indies series in the summer of 1991,I had not been in form for Hampshire, but I did feel they could at least have given me the chance to prove that I still had it in me, or otherwise as the case may be, for one or two of the early Tests. I’m told that Stewart’s report on the tour to Australia suggested that the only reason I wanted to play on was to get the thirty-four runs I needed to beat Boycott’s record. This not only shows a complete lack of understanding as to my own character, but also sums up the peculiar way in which Stewart’s mind operates. True, I would dearly love to have broken Boycott’s record while still in Australia and I continue to rue missed opportunities to do so, but I would say that my primary aim is to still be playing Test cricket for the satisfaction of succeeding again at that level, not just for the sake of thirty-odd runs but for a lot more beyond. Gooch intimated to me early in the summer that it would be easier for