David Gower (Text Only). David Gower

So when someone wanted to talk to you about South Africa, he would sidle up to you and say: ‘Do you know how Karpov and Spassky are getting on?’ or ‘It’s a cool (k)night, but do you fancy a trip up to the Maharajah’s castle?’ However, once I had made the decision not to go, I never attended another meeting. Keith Fletcher, the captain, was another who turned it down, but Boycott, Gooch and John Emburey were strongly in favour. Graham’s tack was that ‘England never offer any guarantees’, and poor old Fletch quickly found out how true that was when he was sacked the following summer. Graham felt that money in the bank was worth more than any potential earning power he might or might not have by turning it down, and it is not always appreciated that he was a lot less confident of his own ability than he is now. He had been dropped before and his career had not blossomed to the extent that perhaps it ought to have done. When they came back from South Africa, and were fighting for their right to play for England, there was a certain naivety about their actions. When you are being offered figures that do not tally with normal cricketing rates, then you have got to assume that there is a price to pay. So although a three-year ban might have seemed harsh, it was nothing more severe than I had expected, and I cannot believe that those who went could have thought otherwise. I make no bones about my own reasons for not going. I was advised that it was likely to be commercially unfavourable for me. As for the 1989 tour, I was literally the last person in the dressing room to know, although South Africa had been a recurring theme almost every year. I had been out there on holiday many times between the two tours, and on one occasion in 1988 had been a guest of the South African Board at a couple of matches. The way I was pumped for information during those games left me in little doubt that another tour was on the cards. Even so, when the news broke during the Australian series in 1989, I had no real inkling before reading about it – like most people – in the morning papers. I can honestly say that had the organizers of the tour offered me a place, my answer would have been ‘No’.

      Because my main ambitions all centred on playing cricket for England and for as long as possible, with or without the captaincy to worry about, resisting the kruggerand did, I think, turn out to be a sound commercial decision. And there is no doubt that I have earned a tidy living from professional cricket. It is not a well-paid sport, however, and while I will not have to spend my retirement years playing the harmonica at the bottom of tube station escalators, nor am I wealthy. I have a lovely house in leafy Hampshire, but when guests come to stay, I am not able to send the Rolls to meet them or offer them the choice of accommodation in east or west wing. Comfortable would be the right word, I think. I would be more comfortable but for a financial settlement after splitting with my former fiancee, and a property deal that singed the fingers, but by and large I have done reasonably well out of the game. I am not in the same league as another of my agent’s stablemates, Gary Lineker, and I certainly can’t afford to do nothing after cricket. Life after cricket, in fact, might require a change of lifestyle, and indeed a change of attitude. Like growing up.

      Fortunately, I have been talented enough to earn wages at the higher end of the cricketing scale, but more importantly from the bank manager’s point of view, I have also had the good luck to be personally marketable. It is not quite true to say that I have sponsored cars to kitchens to lounge suits to underpants, but the spin-offs have augmented a fairly ordinary salary into one that has allowed me to pursue my various pleasures with a certain amount of style. A county cricketer’s wages, on the other hand, are not brilliant. It varies from club to club, and with sponsors playing a bigger and bigger role, certain players can command a useful basic wage. Sponsors helped Hampshire put together a very good deal for Kevin Curran when he was leaving Gloucestershire, comfortably above my own, but Northants in fact were able to top this by similar means. Yorkshire TV’s cash was also instrumental for Yorkshire to secure the services of Sachin Tendulkar, but the lesser players still have to scratch around for work every winter to make ends meet. A senior capped player’s basic last summer was between £12,000-£15,000, which is not a fortune. When I was captain of Leicestershire I was on £ 15,000 and although it was not the money that made me leave, I got a £10,000 rise by joining Hampshire. Had I taken Kent’s offer instead, I would have doubled what I was on at Leicester.

      Clubs will often point out that a player is only required to do six months work, and he has the potential to augment this over the other six, but it very much depends on what qualifications or abilities he has. Some go on the dole, some drive milk floats. Some are driven out of the game because employers eventually decide they cannot afford to give them summers off, as happened to the Leicestershire fast bowler Peter Booth. There were players at Grace Road last winter coaching in the indoor school for about three pounds an hour.

      Missing last winter’s tour to New Zealand and the World Cup might have cost me something in the region of £30,000, about half of which I would have recouped doing other things, such as contributing to the media and one or two other promotional ventures. My agent, Jon Holmes, has been my greatest ally, and I would be worth a lot less without his advice down the years. I have never signed a contract with him, or ever felt the need to. I had a good benefit year at Leicester, and when my earning power was at its maximum we shrewdly tied up a lot of my money in investments, some of which I have since had to sell in order to buy my current house. I do have the odd indulgence, such as a special edition Jaguar XJR-S of which I am very fond, buying paintings, and I have a lot of claret and port laid down in various warehouses so that if I ever do go broke I can either sell it or drink myself to death. I don’t spend my money on anything in particular, apart from music, and I gave up the flying lessons when I got Peter Lush’s bill for twenty minutes in the air in Australia.

      If I leave cricket with no regrets at all, it is probably in the knowledge that I will never have to play another one-day game. Around the world it now attracts more spectators than Test cricket, but from a personal point of view, it was in the ‘watching paint dry’ category of enervation and excitement. I enjoyed it when I first started, probably because it allowed me to play bad shots with some sort of excuse. After a while, though, the repetition of the thing began to wear me down, and the fact that everything was geared – for the fielding side anyway – to the negative side of things. By and large, if a spectator turns up for the last fifteen overs he won’t have missed anything. It is purely about the result, otherwise you wouldn’t be standing there at extra cover wondering why the crowd was going bananas over a leg-bye. I enjoyed the day-nighters in Australia more, for the different atmosphere and theatre they generated, but they don’t stir my adrenalin quite like Test cricket. Latterly, of course, with fielding such an important part of the one-day game, I enjoyed it even less because my shoulder injury would not let me contribute properly. To be unable to do something you actually used to do reasonably well – in my case, throw the ball with slightly more grace than a shot-putter – was frankly depressing. Sunday League games were the worst, and I got to the stage where I almost got resentful about playing in them. The formula is numbing and unless the team is close to the top of the table, the game becomes the chore it shouldn’t be.

      If there is a bonus to Sunday League cricket it is perhaps because you see fewer batsmen wearing helmets, owing to the restriction on bowlers’ run-ups. Ironically, the only time I have ever been badly ‘pinned’ was on a Sunday afternoon in 1977, during a rain-affected ten-over slog, when I top-edged a pull into my face. I first wore a helmet on my first tour to Australia in 1978-79. The idea had been around for a long time, and it was probably only tradition that prevented helmets from coming into general use many years before they did. The more macho characters resisted at first, some of them holding out for years, but very few players have never worn one at all. Viv Richards and Richie Richardson, in fact, are the only two who come to mind. It may have taken some of the romance out of batting, particularly for the spectators, but when you have just collected one on the cranium from the likes of Richard Hadlee, you tend not to dwell too much on the loss of some precious heritage: preservation of your head seems somehow more important. I’ve tried batting without one against quick bowlers, and I remember leaving it behind in the dressing room after tea during a Test against New Zealand at the Oval. I was feeling pretty confident – en route to a hundred – when Hadlee (hackles raised by my impertinence no doubt) let me have one, and it zipped off the side of my head for four leg-byes. He gave me a look that suggested I’d be better off going back to the dressing room to fetch it, but on the ‘lightning not striking twice’ principle, I carried on. Happily without further damage.