Brilliant! And typical of the man who has helped make my transition from cricketer to broadcaster such a positive experience. Sometimes, when I look across the desk at him at six in the morning, it’s hard to realise he is the same person I used to watch run out for Manchester United when I was just 15 years old. It’s at moments like that I reflect on what an incredible journey I’ve enjoyed.
THE VIEW FROM MY BEDROOM WINDOW
If ever a kid was destined to become a cricketer it was me. From 26 October 1971, when I weighed in at 8lb 6oz, I was surrounded by the sights, sounds and smells of the game. Mum and Dad took me home to our house in the mining town of Atherton in Lancashire but, by the time I really became aware of what was going on around me, they had bought a house in Bolton, on the boundary at Heaton Cricket Club. From then until I left home in 1994, I slept in a bedroom with a window overlooking the pitch and, as a child, the outfield became my playground.
My dad, Jimmy Irani, came to England from his home in Bombay, where his grandfather had settled to avoid persecution in his native land, then known as Persia. Dad claims that, when he arrived here in 1961 to play cricket, he only intended to stay six months but he got captured by a pretty 16-year-old Lancashire lass named Anne Main and has been here ever since.
I guess my great-grandfather was the first in our line to be called Irani, which means of Iran. I don’t know if it was a slur in 19th-century India but there have often been comments about it since, especially in the last few years as the political scene in that part of the world has made the headlines. I think Dad suffered some abuse when he first came to England in what was a much more racist time than now, but he was helped by the fact that even then cricket was a multi-racial sport, so he was soon accepted because he was a good player and no one noticed his name any more.
It never really bothered me, though there was an incident when I was about eight involving my first playground girlfriend that sticks in my mind. She was cute and we used to play in the same group and I seem to remember I once snatched a tentative kiss. But one morning she came up to me and said, ‘I told my mum my boyfriend was Ronnie Irani and she said, “Why are you going out with a Paki?”’ It was the first time I’d realised my name was unusual for a lad from Bolton and suddenly all the other kids were teasing me. I was hurt and confused. It only lasted a few days but, at an age when you desperately want to fit in, it was embarrassing and was definitely part of my toughening-up process.
I never had the chance to get to know Dad’s family. His mother died young, shortly after he arrived in England, which I know knocked him back because, in those days when plane travel was out of reach of ordinary people, he wasn’t able to get home to see her before she passed or to attend the funeral. He talked to me about her, about how strong she was, and I wish I’d met her. His father visited us in England. I don’t remember him, although there is a picture of him holding me as a baby and I still have a gold rattle that he gave me with ‘Prince Ronnie’ engraved on it. I knew Mum’s family well – her mother and grandmother were still alive when I was young and there were my aunties Janet and Glad and uncles Johnny, Phil and Ian. It was a tight-knit family and into sport in a big way.
To say Dad loves his cricket is a bit like saying Alex Ferguson likes to win football matches. He played every year until a heart-valve operation forced him to quit in 1999, aged 64. He was captain of Daisy Hill Cricket Club for 12 years and every Saturday and Sunday our family would go to matches, Dad playing, Mum helping with the teas and me just soaking it all up like a sponge. Most of my early memories are of running around the outfield during breaks in play, messing around on the swings and slides or being in pavilions, surrounded by men dressed in white. As soon as I was big enough, I would prepare Dad’s cricket bag, whiten his boots and rub linseed oil into his bat. It was a labour of love – and also earned me 50p.
I had a toy bat almost as soon as I could walk and Dad would ‘bowl’ a spongy ball to me in the living room while he watched Coronation Street. My first six was back over his head beyond the far end of the sofa, and my first paternal pieces of advice were ‘Never throw your wicket away cheaply’ and ‘Bowl to your field’. I also remember him saying, ‘Cricketers are like cowboys in a gunfight – they only get one chance. If you make a mistake in football, you can come back. In baseball, it’s three strikes and you are out. But in cricket, when the finger goes up, that’s it. It’s a one-ball game.’
Jimmy Irani is not one of those ‘the game is the thing’ people. He likes to win and he started to bring over professionals to boost Daisy Hill’s chances. It worked – they won five championships and had several near-misses while he was in charge. These guys used to become part of the family and some of my first cricket coaching came from Sonny Ramadhin, the great West Indies spin bowler from the era of Worrell, Walcott and Weekes. Dad would tell me to stand very still by the sight-screen and watch Sonny bowl. ‘See if you can spot which way the ball will spin as it leaves his hand.’ Dad always wanted me to be a spinner but, as I grew up, I realised it is a skill that is all-consuming and I enjoyed batting, so didn’t want to spend all my time mastering the black arts later perfected by the likes of Shane Warne and Phil Tufnell. I also didn’t like the idea of being swiped all over the pitch, even though Dad assured me I would pick up a lot of wickets from miss-hits.
Javed Miandad, the Pakistani superstar, was only a teenager when he spent a season in Bolton but he became my idol. That year he scored more than a thousand runs and took over a hundred wickets despite missing the last six games. He lived with us and not only made sure I held the bat correctly, he also buttoned up my blazer and sent me off looking neat and tidy on my first day at school. I worshipped him and from then on I used to comb through the Cricketer magazine or the Benson & Hedges Yearbook to find out how he’d done. Even when he went on to become one of the greatest ever batsmen and a Pakistan legend, he never forgot my family. I remember when I toured Pakistan with England A, he sought me out and invited me to spend the evening with him and his family.
I’m not sure what Dad would have said if I’d done a Billy Elliott and said I wanted to become a ballet dancer but fortunately the situation never arose because I was sport mad from the start. Every night, I’d race home from school, grab a sandwich that Mum would have ready for me, then dash back out to play with my mates. Whether it was in the genes or all that gilt-edged coaching, I seemed to take to most sports quite easily and I was lucky because I was always taller and stronger than most kids of my age. That probably had something to do with Mum’s home cooking and the fact that Dad’s ‘day job’ was in the meat business, which meant we would often have steak for breakfast.
I went to kick-boxing classes, played basketball for the north of England, and had tennis coaching with a guy who reckoned I was like a young Roscoe Tanner because I could hit the ball hard at eight years old. But my two passions were cricket and football. Funnily enough, once I was old enough to start playing in teams, which was around the age of six, football was the sport Dad and I shared most, simply because in the summer we would be playing cricket in different matches.
Football was the main sport at my senior school, Smithills Comprehensive. We had some inspirational teachers in Gary Dickinson, former sprinter Steve Caldwell and Stuart Bowman. It wasn’t a job for them: they had real enthusiasm for their sport and loved passing that on to the kids in their charge. They could be tough – if you messed them about they would hang you up on the coat pegs and leave you dangling. They demanded high standards and wouldn’t allow us to drop below our best. Steve Caldwell introduced the idea of warming up before football matches. We would line up on the halfway line in our reversible kit – red for home, white away – and he’d have us stretching, running