So, with plastic boots firmly strapped on, I walked out into the late-afternoon sunshine to bowl my first over in first-class cricket. Illy set the field for Lancashire’s opening batsmen, David Lloyd and Andy Kennedy, both wearing the slightly faded blue caps bearing the red rose of Lancashire that I had so coveted as a child; at one point I had written cheekily to Lancashire CCC while I was at Taverham Hall to ask if they could post me one. I was sent a sheet of the players’ autographs instead.
Nervously I paced out my run-up, and down the hill I rushed, with my head swimming. Because of the massive adrenalin surge, the first delivery was a huge no-ball, called by a startled umpire David Constant, who I know wanted to be kind to an eighteen-year-old lad in his first match, but simply could not ignore the fact that I had overstepped by at least two feet. It was not the most auspicious of starts, but the fourth ball swung sharply from a full length and shattered Lloyd’s stumps. I remember leaping about all over the place in sheer delight, and Illy trotting up with his hand outstretched to offer his congratu -lations while Bumble turned and plodded forlornly towards the pavilion.
Since that initial, brief encounter when he was such a senior cricketing figure and I was a complete novice, Bumble has become a very good friend. Exactly twenty-five years later to the day, on 19 August 2003, my telephone rang at home. I picked up the receiver:
‘Hello?’
‘What were you doing twenty-five years ago?’
‘Er, I’m not sure. Is that you, Bumble?’
‘Yes, and twenty-five years ago today you got me out, you bastard.’ Bang: the telephone went dead.
By then Bumble and I had enjoyed several summers together on Test Match Special, and he was my partner in crime in many a wind-up of Johnners. Henry Blofeld also suffered cruelly before Bumble left us to become England coach, and finally moved to Sky television.
I quickly learned that Illy was right about most things. There were some amusing stories doing the rounds about him never accepting that he was out when he was batting. Like the time he was facing the Glamorgan fast bowler Alan Jones, who always released an explosive grunt to rival Maria Sharapova’s when he let the ball go. On one occasion Jones beat Illingworth all ends up and demolished his stumps, only for Illy to claim, when he returned in high dudgeon to the dressing room, that he had mistaken Jones’s grunt for the umpire calling ‘No-ball,’ and naturally changed his shot.
It was a great shame that he and Mike Atherton never hit it off when Illy was the England manager in 1994. Illy’s tough and uncompromising style of management was hopelessly out of date by then, but he remains the best reader of a cricket match I have ever met. I remember one match against Lancashire when he brought himself on to bowl to the towering and massively destructive figure of Clive Lloyd. Illy was concerned about the position of Chris Balderstone at deep square leg. ‘Come on, Baldy!’ he scolded. ‘I’m bowling uphill and into t’wind on a slow pitch. You should be ten yards squarer.’ Balderstone duly moved ten yards to his right as directed, Lloyd played the sweep shot and the ball went absolutely straight to him: he took the catch without moving a muscle. A fluke? I do not know, but boy, was I mighty impressed.
Illingworth was a blunt character, brought up in the old-fashioned way and as canny in his regular bridge school whenever rain stopped play as he was on the field. Thanks to him, I was sent to Australia that first winter on what was called a Whitbread Scholarship. My dad and I went down to London to be given the good news by one of his great heroes, Colin Cowdrey, and before I knew it I was on my way to Melbourne. I was picked up by the legendary fast bowler Frank ‘Typhoon’ Tyson.
Like his predecessor Harold Larwood, Frank had been welcomed to Australia when he moved there after his playing days were over, despite having blown away the Aussie batsmen in a spell of fast bowling at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1954–55 that is still talked about in reverential terms. Frank took 7 for 27 in a furious spell to skittle Australia, and now he was the coach of Victoria. He was also, as I discovered when I moved into his house, still very competitive, especially after a surprisingly small amount of beer. ‘Reckon you’re fast, then?’ he would suddenly announce, putting down his can and grabbing a tennis ball, which he would then proceed to hurl quickly and comically all around his back garden until it vanished into the hedge.
Frank was great. He despatched me all over Victoria to coach in small towns and rural communities. I was only eighteen, and this was a whole new world to me. On the weekends I played for Essendon, a top-grade club in north Melbourne, and experienced at first hand the strength and competitiveness of club cricket in Australia. Three years later I played in Sydney for Cumberland Cricket Club, where John Benaud, Richie’s brother, was captain. If Richie is quiet, measured and immaculately turned out, then John – fourteen years Richie’s junior – is a veritable party animal. He was a highly successful journalist in his own right, becoming editor-in-chief of the now defunct Sydney Sun, and his colourful nature is best illustrated by the ban from cricket that he received in 1970, when he was captain of New South Wales, for insisting on wearing a certain type of ripple-soled cricket shoe that had been outlawed by the authorities. He played the first of his three Tests two years later, his top score being 142 against Pakistan. The twenty-year gap between John and Richie’s Test debuts is surpassed by only one pair of brothers, Johnny and Ernest Tyldesley, whose great-great-nephew is one Michael Vaughan.
It was hardly surprising that Ray Illingworth was infuriated, albeit affectionately, by the distinctly laid-back approach of the youthful, curly-haired David Gower, who would also captain Leicestershire and England. There is an argument that had Gower had the dedication to fitness and practice of, say, Graham Gooch, he might have scored more than his eighteen hundreds for England. But he would not have batted with the carefree elegance that made him one of cricket’s greatest attractions, and the criticism he so often received for perishing to apparently casual shots was born of onlookers’ frustration at knowing his innings was over long before they wanted it to be. It is fair to say that I was also from the Gower school of training and invariably he and I would be some distance behind the rest of the pack, chatting as we jogged along the canal towpath from Grace Road to what used to be Leicester Polytechnic for pre-season training every April.
Although there was always keen competition for places in the Leicestershire first team, the dressing room was usually a friendly place. There would always be a disgruntled player or two who was not in the side, and who would sit chuntering on the fringes, but if you were playing well, and scoring runs or taking wickets, county cricket was about as pleasant an occupation as you could possibly find. My career could be divided up into two sections: the first being when I was an out-and-out fast bowler and played for England when I probably should not have done; and the second being when I slowed down a bit, learned how to swing the ball and did not play for England when I probably should have done.
My first Test, against the West Indies in 1984, was the final game of a five-match series of which the Windies had already won the first four. Let us say that when I joined the England camp, morale was a little on the low side. There was humour all right, but it was of the death-row variety, with everyone apparently bowing to the inevitable before a ball was bowled. Graeme Fowler and Chris Broad, the opening batsmen, who had every right to be shell-shocked after the ferocious and downright dangerous bowling they had faced that summer, went about their preparations cheerfully, if resignedly. The pride in playing for one’s country burned strongly, and the effort put in would be absolute, but despite that, it seemed everyone knew realistically that we would not win.
I did not know many of the other players very well, including Ian Botham, who was a massive presence in the dressing room. I found him very intimidating – not physically or in an unpleasant way, but because he was a superstar, and totally out of my league. It helped me that David Gower was captain, and that I knew him well. But I felt rather sorry for Richard Ellison, who made his debut alongside me, as he not only had the Botham factor to deal with, but also Gower, whose status was every bit as lofty as Beefy’s, if a little