His was a difficult job in many respects and one certainly cannot accuse him of not working hard at it. But despite his efforts and good intentions, I still found him unconvincing and uninspiring. As for Graham, I had – and still have – great admiration for the way he transformed his own game from the late eighties, putting in a huge amount of effort in order to prolong his own career, but it ultimately came close to an obsession for him. He then looked at me in a different light because of it, wondering no doubt why I was not more like him, and it caused us to grow apart. He set off with a method in Australia, and it didn’t work on that occasion. This is not unusual, and it has certainly happened to me. Indeed, every system will have its flaws in this unpredictable arena called international cricket. Yet when I tried to get him to involve more people, to give them a greater sense of their own importance, and above all not to talk at people rather than with them, it merely seemed to bring my motives under suspicion.
It was a bad sign. Senior players should carry some weight. Junior players are mostly going to conform come what may, although there are exceptions that prove every rule, and Philip Tufnell was one of them. However, the inference that Tufnell would pick up bad habits from me was hard to swallow. Tuffers might take a certain interest in the attitudes and opinions of players like myself, but Tuffers is the way he is because he is Tuffers. Like the case of Phillip DeFreitas in 1986-87, he had to work out how to mix in international company, and, like many before and since, did not perhaps reach the right note first up. Nor did I hit the right note when I took the aeroplane trip, so it is not a failing exclusively attributable to younger players. Having said that, I think it was getting out last ball before lunch in Adelaide – in the way that I did – that later became more significant in the management’s assessment of my future.
Graham has said that he didn’t feel he ever really got to know me, not deep down anyway, and I can take some of the blame for that in that I have usually presented a flip and light-hearted view of events instead of getting terribly serious. It is, of course, a form of defence that people like myself present to the world to cover up any insecurity or worries that they may have in the same way that many comedians have deeper, darker sides to their natures. Where it told against me was that I gave a false – or not entirely true – picture of how dedicated I was to the game. For instance, I did not much care for Stewart’s training routines, but when I thought I needed hard work I usually went out and did it. Before the Sydney Test I went out and had a private net with Cardigan Connor, who was playing in Australia that winter, along with a couple of local bowlers, and when Stewart later brought this up as evidence of preparation equalling results (I got a century in the Sydney Test), I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I benefitted a lot more from not having him hovering over me while I was practising.
The way things went for me on that tour always gave me the impression that Perth had every chance of being my last Test match. I had been dropped before by England, three or four times in fact, but the coming English summer seemed more than just uncertain. What I found dispiriting and depressing about it all was that with my place under threat, I had dug deep to get 150 against India in the final innings of the previous summer when my place on the tour had been uncertain, and battled hard for my runs in Australia. Now I was cast as a wayward spirit, who sometimes got runs by accident, and it hurt. As a subscriber, however, to the no smoke without fire theory, I do plead guilty to a certain amount of underachievement, and the one thing I would like to have been is just a bit hungrier in the pursuit of runs. I’d hate to guess at a figure, but in about 95 per cent of all my innings I can look back and think: ‘You could have done a bit more there.’
The Boycott record frustrated me in that I could and should have got past it. The compensation, from what I’ve read and heard any way, is that more people enjoyed watching me bat than Boycott. Who knows why we are the way we are? Why do some cricketers have more single-mindedness than others? Why can’t some people give up smoking? I don’t know why I got caught in the gully off wide deliveries more than Boycott did – probably because it was more in my nature and probably because the two previous wide ones had been pinged through extra cover and I enjoyed the feeling enough to try it again. Looking back, there has been a lot of enjoyment, but a lot of frustration as well. Most disappointing of all was the way that it finished. Having watched Hadlee and Richards bow out at the time of their own choosing, you think to yourself, ‘Well I wasn’t too far behind these guys, it would have been a lovely way to go out.’ Instead, the rug was whipped away from under me, and I was left on my arse. It seems to me that you should ultimately be judged by results. If the Stewart-Gooch regime decided that regimentation was the way to get results, and it worked, then fine. I’m not sure, though, that they ultimately applied the same test to me.
The irony is that it sounds as if they modified their rules slightly by the following winter’s tour of New Zealand and for the World Cup. The idea that breaks in a training and practice session could also be beneficial has crept back in, giving the players a little extra respite from the rigorous demands that international cricket makes upon the minds and bodies of its participants. Work and practice must be done – and I fully acknowledge their benefits – but as cricket, in essence, is time consuming, I will always maintain that time off, judged and used wisely, is almost as valuable as another practice session.
Laid back – and think of England
IF fun, style and excellence are three words that I think of most fondly, then the two that have irritated me most (with the possible exception of ‘caught Dujon’) are ‘laid back’. I don’t know why they should annoy me so much, but the mere fact that they do should be evidence in itself that I am not as laid back, whatever that actually means, as people might think. I do, in fact, have a pretty short fuse. I have been known to explode in both dressing room and on the field, and you ought to see me on the motorway, although I do have the happy capacity to hose those flames fairly swiftly. I suppose, though, that I do have this ability to suggest that I am more interested in the Telegraph crossword than the state of play, and that my mid-pitch conversations with batting partners occasionally have less to do with the fact that Ambrose has just replaced Marshall than whether the evening’s repast should involve fish and chardonnay or steak and claret. Mostly, those impressions are spot on – but cricket has always been the sort of game to switch on to and off in my opinion. Spectators nip into the members’ bar between overs, so why can’t players take a mental break at times? In any case, when Ambrose is pawing the ground and there is an outside chance of ending the day with your jaw wired up, chatting about eating a nice steak can have the effect of concentrating the mind wonderfully well.
Much of the image is created by your own peers, and how they perceive you. I remember picking up the soubriquet of ‘Fender’ on the 1986-87 tour. The TV drama, although drama is used here in the loosest sense, Bodyline was showing on Australian TV when we were out there, and to give you a clue as to its absolute devotion to historical accuracy, there was one memorable scene of Les Ames completing a stumping off Larwood. As for poor old Percy Fender, he was portrayed as a party-loving, champagne-swilling, ukelele-playing, monocled buffoon – a strokemaker, both on and off the field. As I was well in with the Bollinger man in Sydney, a wonderful man named Rob Hirst, and as the lads curiously felt that I fitted the bill in other respects as well, ‘Fender’ is the nickname I acquired.
The image was further enhanced at a Sunday League match at Cheltenham during my first period as Leicestershire captain, when both Leicestershire and Gloucestershire were so utterly convinced that there could be no possibility of play – it had started raining hard at tea-time on Saturday and was still stair-rodding down at 2 p.m. on Sunday – that the