CHAPTER 6
OUT OF DESPAIR
‘There was certainly a fear of failure within him when he played for England, and it grew as he struggled to do full justice to his talents’
– Nasser Hussain
My time on the outside of the England Test team ended, quite suddenly and without warning, just over 12 months later on 19 August 1993. I was busy practising at Lord’s, before the start of our Championship match against Northamptonshire, when I was told that Graham Thorpe had broken his thumb in the nets over at the Oval, where England were preparing for the final Test of that summer’s Ashes series, and that I had been summoned across London to take his place in the team.
Perhaps the wheel of fortune had turned – if Middlesex had been due to play away from home in that round of games, I might never have got the call. As it was, I was soon bundling myself and all my gear into a taxi and crossing the Thames with a growing sense of excitement. Hopping out at the front gate and having to walk through all the crowds just before the start of the Test to get to the dressing-room was a real experience.
England batted first, and I was in at number seven. It was a good, hard pitch and I was in at 253 for 5. Mike Atherton, in his second Test as captain after Graham Gooch had stood down following Australia’s retention of the Ashes, had scored a half-century at the top of the order, as had both Gooch and Graeme Hick, but I only made 6 before being caught behind off Merv Hughes.
On one occasion during my short innings, though, after I had inside-edged a ball from Hughes for a single, I was informed by the bowler as he walked past me back to his mark, ‘You don’t f****** know whether you’re a curry-muncher or a West Indian, do you?’ There was simply nothing I could say to that, as Hughes walked on. It was typical Merv and I certainly wasn’t offended: it was just nice to be back in Test cricket!
I was disappointed not to have marked my comeback innings with a decent score, but I’d had no preparation for the Oval, which was so different to the lower bounce that I had become used to again at Lord’s, so my failure was understandable. But I was determined just to enjoy the match, as my participation in it was so unexpected, and it quickly developed into a superb cricket match.
As the third day drew to a close, we were more than 250 runs in front but wobbling a touch at 186 for 5 after the loss of three wickets for six runs. I joined Alec Stewart out in the middle and the first priority was to get through to the close, which we did with me on 12 not out. The next day we took our partnership to 68 before Stewie was out and I had the pleasure of reaching my first Test half-century – in my tenth Test – and going on to 64 before I fell again to Hughes.
We ended up bowling Australia out again, with Angus Fraser taking eight wickets in the match, and Devon Malcolm and Steve Watkin sharing the other twelve. For England, it was a great win at the end of what had been a very tough summer. For me, too, it was a big game career-wise. I had been given a chance of a comeback out of the blue and had taken advantage of it. I was now also in with a shout of selection for the upcoming winter tour to the West Indies.
Atherton, with a major say in selection for the tour, chose to go with youth ahead of the likes of Gooch, Gatting and Gower, who announced his retirement from the game when he was not selected. This meant Graham Thorpe, Nasser Hussain and I were all included in the England squad, but in the run-up to the tour, and also in the first couple of weeks, I was still uncertain about what was expected of me in terms of a batting role – if anything.
It seemed as if the management wanted Stewart to open with Atherton, with Robin Smith and Graeme Hick at four and five. This meant, in effect, that the rest of us front-line batsmen – myself, Nasser, Thorpey and Matthew Maynard – were battling for two places: number three and number six.
It was a great opportunity for us, but the West Indies still had a very handy team in early 1994, especially on the fast-bowling front. But I’d enjoyed my trips to the Caribbean before and I felt happy and relaxed in that environment. We had done a lot of work as a squad up at Lilleshall before the tour, yet I still arrived in the West Indies uncertain of what my role was to be in the batting line-up.
You would think that the selectors would have had a specific batting order in mind when they chose the squad in the first place, especially with regard to the number three spot, which is so crucial in any side. Whatever, in the early warm-up games, there did not seem to be any policy emerging.
There was almost a month of cricket in the lead-up to the opening Test at Sabina Park in Jamaica, including – somewhat bizarrely – the first one-day international, in Barbados, three days before the Kingston Test. I got a hundred in a three-day non-first-class match in St Kitts and then played in both four-day games against the Leeward Islands, in Antigua, and Barbados. In three of my four innings in those games, however, I opened the batting.
Thorpe went in at three in both innings of the Leewards fixture, with Maynard at six. But Maynard, who scored only 25 in his only innings in that match, was then omitted from the Barbados game and I batted at three in the first innings.
Maynard was back at six for the opening one-day international, with Thorpe at three, and I didn’t play. And, when the side for the first Test was announced, the decision was to go with the same top six, and in the same order, with Robin Smith at four and Hick at five.
Thorpe had at least been batting at three at Surrey during the 1993 season, but he was still very inexperienced at Test level at that time, having made his debut only the previous summer against Australia; it looked as though England were desperate to protect both Smith and Hick from the new ball, even though they were both far more experienced, and in the case of Hick, in particular, a long-time specialist at number three with his county.
It seemed as if it was between Thorpe and me for the number three position, with Nasser initially not in the best of form on that tour and – like Maynard – more of a four or five anyway at first-class level. When Thorpe suffered a bruised hand in the field after scoring just 16 in the first innings at Sabina Park, on a very hard and almost shiny surface, as England declined from 121 without loss to 234 all out, another decision was made to send in Robin Smith at three for the second innings.
The match was lost by eight wickets after Hick had scored a brilliant second innings 96 from number four and Courtney Walsh had provoked some controversy by peppering our last man Devon Malcolm from around the wicket. Devon was hanging around for 18 and helping Andrew Caddick to add 39 for our final wicket; Courtney did not think he had done anything wrong in the situation by hitting Devon several nasty blows on the body. I don’t think that the West Indies in this vital opening Test would have minded too much, however, if Devon, who was a real number eleven, had broken a bone warding off the short balls: he was our strike bowler and the one man we had with the sort of pace to respond in kind to the West Indian quicks.
By the time we reached the second Test, in Guyana, we had played the remaining four one-day internationals (of which I played in the last two) and a four-day match in Georgetown against a West Indies Board President’s XI, which was, in effect, a West Indian second team which included Carl Hooper, Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Cameron Cuffy.
Arriving in Guyana for that game was a big moment for me because it was the first time I had visited my father’s home country. It was special, and all the more so because Dad was there and was able to take me to see the village in which he had grown up, which was about a 30-minute drive out of Georgetown, and to introduce me to many of his friends and relations.
I also marked my debut match in the land of my father by scoring 154 not out in the first innings of the game against the President’s XI, watched by Dad and some of his friends. Growing up, he had seen so much of his early cricket at the historic Bourda ground, so this was a wonderful experience for him too.
Sadly, though, when I played in the Test that followed at the same ground I could only manage 2 and 5, being bowled by a near-shooter from Curtly Ambrose in our second innings. We lost by an innings, to go 2–0 down in the series, despite a first innings 144 from Atherton and 84 by Smith.
At the time I felt it was strange to change our batting line-up after just one Test. Maynard was dropped to make way for me, despite scoring 35 in the first innings in Jamaica, with Thorpe dropped down to six, and I was thrust into the number three role. In both innings, I found myself coming in with no runs on the board, first when Stewart was out to Walsh in the second over and then when Atherton was bowled by Ambrose for a duck to the fourth ball of our second innings.
For an experienced Test number three, this would have been a tough ask, and at that stage of my career I was a bit of a sacrificial lamb. I wonder why Thorpe – as at Sabina Park – or Smith or Hick were not asked to go in at three. At the Oval the previous August, in my comeback game, I had been played at number seven . . . now it was three!
I know that Athers and the England management were showing a lot of belief in me and that they were giving me a huge opportunity to establish myself, especially when I was kept in the side at number three for the rest of the series despite never making any score higher than 23. Also, my unbeaten hundred in the warm-up game for the Guyana Test showed that I was in good touch; in fact, I scored 91 and 67 in the one other remaining first-class game, at Grenada, in between the third and fourth Tests.
But deep down I didn’t believe that I should have been playing for England at number three. My expectations of myself in that position, and at that time, were not high enough. I was thinking merely of trying to survive, of hanging in, and not of making that position my own. I knew that I was being used as a buffer between the openers and our middle-order strokemakers, and I believed, at the age of 24, that both Smith and Hick were far better players than me. They were more dominant, with track records significantly better than my own. I was still looking to find myself as a batsman, even at the best of times. An England number three I was not.
It was all very well to be given that job in Guyana and for the rest of the series, but if I was the preferred number three why had I not been included for the first Test? That fact hardly did much for my self-belief. At Middlesex, I was still number four behind Mike Gatting at three. And, there, I had started out at six and had been gradually brought up the order as I became more established and more confident. In my eyes, as at Middlesex, it was right for the senior players to be in the most important positions – such as Gatt at three – and for the younger players to be groomed in areas of the side where there was a little bit less pressure to perform consistently and when it was really needed.
The way Middlesex brought me on as a player was exactly the right way of doing it. My development, as that of the other young players, was managed in that sense, and I realise now that this just did not happen at England level for me. Perhaps if Gatting had still been England captain, or even in the side, during my first few years at Test level it might have been different. As it was, the only Test match in which I ever played alongside Gatt was at Perth in early 1995 – his last.
There is no way that I want to use this book to make excuses for my early failures as an England batsman, but at no stage during this West Indies tour was I ever spoken to about the batting strategy and what my role, at three, was to be. In many ways, of course, it was bloody obvious: get out there, get stuck in and do your best. And, if you survive the new ball, go on and score a big hundred.
Yes, that part of it was obvious. But the change of batting line-up, from first Test to second, was not explained, nor was I ever told that I would get a run of games at four. Consequently, in every match I felt that I was playing for my place as much as anything, which makes it very difficult to stay relaxed. After all, if they could change the batting order after just one Test, then they could certainly do it again.
In the end, I was very surprised to hold my place at three for all four remaining Tests, especially when the evidence suggested that, like Maynard after Jamaica, I should be jettisoned. Mentally, on that tour, I just didn’t believe that I could kick on and play the major innings that number three batsmen were there for. My aims never stretched beyond getting to 20 or 30. It is interesting that when Chanderpaul was picked by the West Indies for his debut Test in his native Guyana, he was brought in at six and kept there despite enjoying immediate success and clearly looking a class act.
In my case, and especially in 1994 in the Caribbean, a little bit of encouragement from the England management – and some clarity as to their thinking – would have gone an awful long way. A few encouraging words, perhaps along the lines of, ‘We want you to do this, for the benefit of the team, but don’t worry because we rate you and this will make you a better player,’ would have made all the difference. But there was no communication, and no support.
As it was, we limped off to Trinidad and our top six remained the same. I added 66 with Atherton for the second wicket, making my series high of 23, and was disappointed to get out caught and bowled because I was just beginning to feel reasonably comfortable. Nevertheless, we made 328 for a lead of 76, and at 167 for 6 in their second innings the West Indies were struggling.
Crucially, though, the usually reliable Hick dropped Chanderpaul twice in the slips and he went on to 50, and with Winston Benjamin making 35 we were eventually left to score 194 for victory. It should have been 60 or 70 runs less but, by the close of the fourth day, we were 40 for 8, as Ambrose delivered one of the most destructive spells in Test history. He finished with 8 for 24, and we were bowled out for 46, but it was my stupid run out for 1 which really opened the floodgates on that remarkable fourth evening.
Atherton had been lbw to Ambrose to the very first ball of our second innings, so once again I was walking out with the total on nought. From the fifth ball, I worked one away wide of long leg and set off, shouting at Alec Stewart as we crossed to look for a second run. Before the match we had talked as a team about the need to push for every run, and Walsh at long leg had a poor arm and, indeed, bowled the ball in rather than throwing it. So, knowing that Walsh was down there, I wanted to look for two.
As I turned, though, I was suddenly disorientated because I could not immediately pick out Walsh in the outfield. Did he have the ball in his hands or not? Then, just as I was trying to find him, I was aware of Stewie already coming back for a second. It was my call, of course, but I still didn’t know where the ball was. I hesitated, ran, and was run out by Walsh’s return. It still wasn’t the end of the first over and we were 1 for 2.
It is a dismissal that should not happen at Test level. It was a ridiculous way to get out. I was surprised to see Stewie striding back for the second, but we had not batted very much together at that time; with Graham Thorpe, for instance, I have always had a great understanding – we often only need a look, rather than a call.
Being bowled out for 46 was also humiliating and the series was now lost. We then turned up in Grenada and, of course, the practice facilities there, as was so often the case in the Caribbean, were almost non-existent. I think one of the reasons why overseas players are generally mentally tougher than the average English cricketer is because they grow up unused to having proper practice and preparation facilities; therefore, when they step out onto the pitch for the actual match, they have to concentrate fiercely and learn to survive while they get attuned to the conditions.
I remember going out to bat in that match and having to work really hard due to our lack of preparation. But I also remember that despite my own good performances as an opener we played very poorly against a West Indies Board XI, for whom a local leg-spinner called Rawl Lewis took nine wickets in the game, and we ended up losing by eight wickets.
The general mood in the camp was summed up as Robin Smith and I were preparing to go out and open the second innings. Keith Fletcher, the England coach, came up to Robin and told him to get his head down and play well. Robin answered, in his usual cheery way, ‘OK, coach, I’ll do my best,’ at which point Fletcher, clearly feeling the pressure of our poor cricket, exploded. ‘You’ll do more than your f****** best, and don’t get out again to the leg-spinner.’ (Smith had been caught off Lewis in the first innings.) Robin was slightly taken aback at this outburst, but he didn’t get out to the leg-spinner; he was lbw for nought padding up to Anderson Cummins in the first over!
And so we went into the fourth Test, in Barbados, on the back of another humiliation and in some disarray. Yet an unchanged team was named, and England went on to win by 208 runs – the first visiting Test side to do so at the Kensington Oval for 59 years – with Alec Stewart scoring magnificent hundreds in both our innings. On the opening day, I came in at 171 for 1, after Atherton was out for 85, and managed 20 before being caught at the wicket off Winston Benjamin.
Once again I had got a start but failed to go on. Whereas Alec had a method and trusted it totally, even when his tendency to go back and across, looking to score off the back foot, got him lbw, I was still doubting my own way of playing. I was still looking for a method to bring me success at Test level.
After further scores of 3, in the second innings at Barbados, and then 19 in our only innings in the high-scoring drawn final Test in Antigua, where England replied with 593 to the West Indies’ 593 for 5 declared and Brian Lara’s then world record 375, I was very down about my own game. I had played some good shots in my Antigua innings and felt fine, but then I padded up to an inswinger from Kenny Benjamin and was lbw.
I was very disgruntled with life, and as I was sitting quietly by myself in the pavilion Viv Richards sauntered over and said hello. He asked me how I was, and I told him, and he replied, ‘You have got everything, to me, but there is still something clearly missing.’ I asked him what he thought that was, and he said, ‘Belief.’ I will never forget that. Viv was my idol, and it was kind of him to have a word with me because he could obviously sense my despair. And, of course, when I thought about it I realised that the whole of his own great career had been based on belief. He actually used to intimidate Test bowlers – not the other way around – with that massive belief and self-confidence.
Perhaps, in those early years of my England career, I didn’t like to admit it to myself, but Viv’s words were spot-on. I did hear what he said, and appreciated his support and his view, but it took me another four years to get my first Test hundred, so it definitely took me a lot longer than it should have done to find a method, and a trust – a belief – in that method. How that happened I will come to later, but for now all I will say is how disappointing it is to look back and see what a sad indictment it was of the then England management that there was no one on hand to give me the help and advice I needed.
I had the technique and the application – and the desire – to be successful at that level. I often felt comfortable at the crease and felt that I could be a Test batsman, but I still kept on finding ways of getting out. I was immersed in my game and continually practised hard to the best of my ability, but I required the England coach, and his support staff of assistant coaches generally, to prepare me fully for the big games. I needed to organise my method, and I needed someone to talk to about it. But there was nothing being offered by anyone.
Left out of England’s plans for the rest of 1994, as a result of my poor four Tests in the West Indies, and also omitted from the following winter’s Ashes tour squad, I found myself instead selected as vice-captain to Alan Wells on the England A tour to India in the early months of 1995.
It was a highly enjoyable trip, with some excellent cricket against an India A side boasting the likes of Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, Rajesh Chauhan and Paras Mhambrey. We won all three five-day Tests and also the one-day series, but I didn’t stay in India for the whole tour.
Midway through, after I had scored 99 and 36 not out in a tense opening Test win in Bangalore, I was called up to England’s tour of Australia as a replacement for Graeme Hick, who had suffered a slipped disc. We had just arrived in Calcutta, where the second five-day match against India A was to be played, and such was the urgency of the command for me to get to Australia I had to pack my bags again hurriedly and leave without the chance to say my goodbyes to most of my teammates.
It was the start of a nightmare journey, however. I left Calcutta at 10 a.m. on the Wednesday morning and finally arrived in Adelaide, where England were playing the fourth Test of the Ashes series, via a 24-hour overnight stop in Bangkok and a connection in Brisbane, where I was able to watch on television in an airport lounge Mike Gatting complete his last Test hundred with a suicidal single after an interminable time in the 90s! An Indian journalist helped me to get on the flight from Calcutta, as my name didn’t seem to be on their computer; I then had to pay £600 in excess baggage for all my gear. I checked myself into the Bangkok airport hotel because they, too, didn’t seem to know that a room had been reserved for me.
When I finally got to Adelaide, though, it was in time to field as a substitute on the last day, when Devon Malcolm bowled as quick as I have seen him (I was at leg gully and praying the ball didn’t come to me!), and to join in the celebrations of a rare England win. The Ashes had already been retained by Australia, but this was a real boost for the team and the hundreds of Barmy Army supporters who were then just starting to appear on England tours.
At 2–1 down, it was also possible now for England to level the series in the final Test in Perth and, when we arrived there, I suddenly found myself in the frame for selection. England’s management decided to field six batsmen, plus Steve Rhodes, the wicketkeeper, and four quick bowlers. And so, on the first day, as Australia moved steadily towards an eventual first innings total of 402, I was called upon to bowl a lengthy spell of my non-turning off-breaks (I was the only ‘spinner’ in the team) to provide a bit of variety.
Towards the end of the second day, following a slide to 77 for 4, I walked in to resume my Test career again – this time at number six, you’ll notice – and by the close I had reached 14 not out. Graham Thorpe, my partner, had just gone past his fifty, and the next day we added a further 125 runs before Thorpey was stumped off Warne for 123. I went on to 72, my highest Test score, before Warne also got me out by going around the wicket and bowling me off both my front and back pads with a ball that pitched about two feet wide of leg stump.
It was a slightly unlucky dismissal, but I was happy to have batted well, and to have expressed myself with some good strokes on a pitch with good bounce and pace. I had gone to the crease determined to enjoy myself and felt little pressure because my call-up had been so unexpected. Craig McDermott bowled really well, especially in the second innings, when we were bowled out for 123 to slump to a heavy defeat, and of course there was Warne and a young Glenn McGrath, who took six wickets in the game but was slapped around by Thorpe in his brilliant century. I think Thorpey was at his very best in 1994 and 1995, when he picked his bat up like Lara, and his pulling and cutting was magnificent. His strokes really flowed from him in those years.
I also made 42 in England’s second innings, the top score, after coming in at 27 for 5. It was soon to be 27 for 6 when Atherton was out immediately the following morning, but Rhodes and I added 68 for the seventh wicket to offer at least some resistance. Four days after that Perth Test had ended, though, I was back in India, playing a one-day game for England A at Indore. It would just not happen now.
Yet I really enjoyed that winter, however surreal it seemed at the time to be batting one minute on low, slow Indian turners and the next on one of the quickest and bounciest pitches in the world at the WACA. But it had given me the chance to show that I could adapt to different conditions, and flourish in both, and I finally flew home from Bangladesh (where England A went for a week following the three one-dayers in India, in which I scored 36, 70 and 57) thinking and believing that I had made a bit of a breakthrough.
How wrong I was. Yes, I had something to build on, but in 1995 the West Indies were our opponents once more and, for me, that meant trying to exorcise the demons that came in the tall shapes of Ambrose and Walsh. In all my years in the game, they are the most difficult bowlers I have ever had to face, because there was something about their height, their consistent line and length, and their ability to bowl long spells and keep up the pressure on you that I never came to terms with. Plus, of course, in England in early summer batting was never going to be easy.
Driving up to Headingley for the opening Test in early June, I felt as confident as I’d ever been before an England game; in May, I had played in all three Texaco Trophy one-day internationals against the West Indians, scoring 32, 16 and 29 not out from the middle-order as we won the series 2–1, while the memory of Perth was still fairly fresh in my mind.
In that Leeds Test, however, nothing seemed to get easier. It was a re-laid pitch, quite quick and lively, and I got hit on the head by Kenny Benjamin. Although still batting at number six, I scored only 4 and 18 as England, put in on the opening morning, were bowled out for 199 and 208 and lost by nine wickets. The West Indies attack of Ambrose, Walsh, Benjamin and Ian Bishop shared out our 20 wickets like sweets in the playground.
This was Ray Illingworth’s first Test in sole charge of the England team, following the sacking of Keith Fletcher after the Australia tour, but there was still no conversation about my role in the side. We had a lengthy tail, with Phillip DeFreitas at seven and Darren Gough at eight, so at six was I to concentrate on defence in a bid to protect that tail for as long as possible, or attack in the hope of getting as many runs as possible in whatever time I had? Sadly, in both innings, I didn’t last long enough to face this conundrum, but the fact that there was no planning again did nothing for my overall mental preparation.
When we got to Lord’s for the second Test, I did not feel good. Our top six batsmen were the same, but this time Stewart opened as well as keeping wicket and Robin Smith dropped down from opener to number five. I went in at 185 for 4 in our first innings, and Carl Hooper was bowling. When you played against the West Indies in that era, this was a considerable bonus, but even then I could not get going against them. Eager to get off the mark against Hooper’s tidy but relatively unthreatening off-spin, I hit a couple of good strokes off the middle of the bat but straight to fielders. Frustrated, I did what I shouldn’t have done and that was try to force things. The result was an edged drive to slip, and I was walking off with a duck feeling that I had thrown it away.
Worse was to come in the second innings when, fighting for supremacy in a thrilling Test we were eventually to win by 72 runs with Dominic Cork, on debut, taking 7 for 43, I completed a pair at the start of the fourth day after coming to the crease the evening before. It was a shattering dismissal for me, caught off Bishop, and although England went on to win it was difficult to join in the celebrations wholeheartedly because I knew I would be dropped yet again. I had felt vulnerable throughout that Lord’s Test, and with a pair to my name the return of this fear of failure had dealt me a grievous blow. My ambitions of Test match success were once again in ruins: my runs in Perth had been but another false dawn.
To put the icing on the cake, I then had to hang around at Lord’s, feeling miserable as the other England players went their separate ways, because the Middlesex squad were due to meet there in the early evening to board the team coach which would take us down to Cornwall (yes, Cornwall!) for a NatWest Trophy tie the next day against the minor county at St Austell. We arrived there at about one o’clock in the morning, so we didn’t even get a proper night’s sleep before we were up again and down to the ground to prepare for the game.
Sportsmen react in different ways to extreme disappointment, however, and my own answer was to try to take out my anger and frustration on opposition bowlers. I resolved to go out and see how many runs I could make in the coming weeks and months. I was driven on by this desire to make up for these latest failures with England and to show that I was far better than a horrible pair at Lord’s seemed to indicate.
After a much-needed day’s rest following the long journey home from Cornwall, I went into our County Championship fixture against Surrey at Lord’s determined to be aggressive. I also had a new bat that I had bought from Cork during the Test; it just felt good when I was fiddling around with it in the dressing-room. I had hardly practised with it, but I suppose I wanted a new start and so a new bat seemed as good a way of going as any.
Anyway, whatever the reasoning behind it, I hit 37 fours with it and scored 214 as we beat Surrey by an innings and 76 runs. Everything suddenly seemed so easy – perhaps because I wasn’t facing Walsh and Ambrose! But I also wanted to go out and enjoy myself; I was fed up with my international trials and tribulations. As my choice of bat indicates, too, there was almost a devil-may-care attitude to my approach in those days immediately after the Lord’s pair. And, relaxed by that, I found my footwork, my timing and my strokeplay were helped and the runs just flowed.
By this stage of my professional career, too, I had fully absorbed a lesson that Mike Gatting had drummed into anyone who was listening during our travels around the county circuit: never be satisfied by the number of runs you make; ‘get some runs in the bank for a rainy day’. Now, after the despair of the Lord’s Test, I was ravenous for runs and I was also enjoying batting too much to give anything away. The result was a stream of big scores, including two more double-hundreds and a total of nine centuries (or double-centuries) in fourteen championship innings. That season, I made ten scores of a hundred or more and topped 2,000 first-class runs for the first time, while averaging 93 in the County Championship.
I topped the national averages, won a nice £10,000 award for heading a player-ranking list and was named Middlesex’s player of the season. I had never batted better. Apart from those two Tests against the West Indies, my game had gone to another level and the ultimate reward was selection for England’s winter tour to South Africa.
Illingworth, the England supremo, went on record before the tour to say that he was going ‘to get Ramprakash right’. As it turned out, the only time he actually spoke to me directly during the whole winter was when he sidled up to me as I was waiting to bat in our first warm-up game in South Africa, at Nicky Oppenheimer’s private ground, and said, ‘We want you to kick on here and do well on this tour,’ to which I replied, ‘OK, great.’ That was it for three months.
For some reason – probably for the same reasons as in the Caribbean two winters earlier – I was soon earmarked again for the number three batting spot, despite the more senior status of Graham Thorpe, Graeme Hick and Robin Smith in the three positions below me. Yes, number three was proving to be a problem for England: since 1987, there had been only six centuries scored there in Tests, and by six different batsmen. But should I really have been thrust into that position again, especially with a pair at Lord’s as my previous Test experience, when someone as well established and good against fast bowling as Smith was down at six?
Perhaps, too, there should have been a proper discussion with me about my role in the side. Perhaps I should have demanded it. But, as throughout my career, I have been happy to do what I have been asked to do. As a player, it is very difficult to refuse to do something in a team game where all your teammates are depending on you to do the job you have been allocated.
Athers actually came to me at the end of the tour and said he felt I had been negative about the chance to bat at number three. I felt he was covering himself. At the time I think he should have tried harder to understand what it was like to be in my shoes, still trying to establish myself in the England side after a number of years. In my position, in effect the more ‘junior’ of the middle-order batsmen in that squad, what would he have wanted for himself?
Perhaps he didn’t want to go up to one of his senior players – like Smith or Hick – at the start of that tour and tell them that they had to do number three. It’s a little bit like the situation England were in at the start of the 2009 summer. I know Ravi Bopara came in against the West Indies in the opening Test and scored a hundred at number three, but at the time it was my opinion that Kevin Pietersen – as the number one batsman in the land – should have been told he was the best option to go in at three.
He should have been challenged to become England’s Ricky Ponting; in other words, go in at three and dominate because you are the best player and you can best shape the game from that position. Then I would have had Paul Collingwood at four and either Bopara or Ian Bell at five – assuming that Matt Prior was at six because of the need still to field five front-line bowlers due to the injury absence of Andrew Flintoff.
Back at the end of 1995, though, when I got the nod to bat at three in the opening Test at Centurion, I decided to treat it as another golden opportunity and I did try to be positive. South Africa were a tough side to play in their conditions and in Allan Donald, Brett Schultz and Shaun Pollock, making his Test debut in this game, they had a high-quality pace attack.
Our main strike bowler was Devon Malcolm who, famously, had routed the South Africans with 9 for 57 at the Oval in August 1994. But here in South Africa, and despite being described early in the tour by Nelson Mandela as ‘the destroyer’ when we met the great man at a game played in Soweto, Malcolm’s confidence was all but shattered by the attitude towards him of Illingworth and Peter Lever, the bowling coach. Devon was working his way back steadily from a knee operation, but Lever and Illingworth seemed determined to change his action and it led to a huge confrontation. I don’t remember there being much wrong with Dev’s action when he scattered South Africa’s batting at the Oval.
I was rooming with Devon during one of our warm-up games in East London and I remember one evening that he was on the phone for hours to his wife, Jenny, discussing what he should do. Devon himself was thinking about flying home because he was so upset at the management’s general attitude to him, but he didn’t really know what to do and Jenny said she would support his decision to leave the tour. As it was, he stuck it out, but his relationship with Lever and Illingworth never improved and, from my perspective, it was a remarkable own goal by the England management to upset their number one strike bowler even before the series had started.
The first Test, though, which Malcolm missed, was completely ruined by rain, with the last three days all washed out, and there was only time for us to reach 381 for 9. Hick made a superb 141, in what was probably his best Test innings, but on a slowish pitch I got an edge to a ball from Donald and was out for 9.
It was frustrating not to get a second innings opportunity, and despite a few runs in a three-day game against Free State, I was feeling on edge again as we arrived in Johannesburg for the second Test. I didn’t feel comfortable with life, but I was named again at three in what was the same top six as at Centurion.
The result was a struggle to get to just 4 before being bowled, by Donald, and in our second innings – which will always be remembered for the way that Mike Atherton scored 185 not out and, with Jack Russell’s obdurate 29 not out in four and a half hours, saved the match – I was bowled off an inside edge for a second-ball nought as I tried to drive Brian McMillan. I was attempting to be aggressive, but yet again it just didn’t happen for me.
It was another chance of a run at Test cricket squandered; as against Pakistan in 1992, after the West Indies tour in early 1994 and against the West Indians once more in the summer of 1995, I could not take that chance. Dropped for the third Test in Durban, it was one of the very lowest points of my life. The rest of the tour passed very slowly and it was tough to motivate myself to practise my cricket – something which I’d never experienced before. I went out running, and kept myself fit, but I just couldn’t face many nets. Perhaps it was unprofessional, but I was in a dark place.
Yet, just when I was least expecting it, something happened that not only lifted my spirits, but also, in time, rejuvenated my whole career and led – in 1997 and 1998 – to my best years as a Test batsman. It also changed my approach to batting and at last gave me the trusted method I had been seeking ever since my Test debut in 1991.
It is sad to relate that the vital information that I was looking for came from a member of the South African opposition – and not from the England management. Then again, that is to take nothing away from the man who gave me what I was looking for because it just shows what a great cricket man he was, as well as being a world-class coach. He was also an Englishman.
Bob Woolmer, who is sadly no longer with us, spoke to me just when I needed someone to do so. As coach of South Africa, he technically had nothing to do with England’s players, and I didn’t really know him either, despite the time he had spent as a coach in English cricket with Warwickshire.
It was during the fourth Test, at Port Elizabeth, that I happened to be sitting in the shared players’ viewing area – doing my 12th man duties yet again – when Woolmer caught my eye and asked me how I was. I said that I was feeling pretty demoralised, and a bit deflated, and I sat down near him. He commiserated with me and said that things had clearly not gone my way. He then asked, adding that his comment was based only on what he had seen of my batting that winter, whether I was watching the ball as closely as I could.
After a couple of minutes’ chatting, I realised what Bob was driving at. He was asking, was I watching the ball in the bowler’s hand? Then, was I watching where the seam was in his hand? And, more than that, was I watching where the gold writing was on the side of the ball?
What he was really thinking was that my mind was too cluttered when I was at the crease, that there were too many other things getting in the way of what was most important of all: watching the ball. I had to watch it out of the hand, through the air and almost onto the bat itself. I had to free my mind of everything else. I had to concentrate so intently on the ball that nothing else could intrude into my thoughts.
Bob, as a great coach, could see that I was worrying about too many things. I had to get back to this basic discipline and commit 100 per cent to it. There were many highly successful players in the game’s history who did not have orthodox techniques – such as Sobers and Viv Richards, for instance – but they all watched the ball right onto the bat and that enabled them to succeed and to be true to their talents.
We only spoke in all, I suppose, for about five minutes, but I thanked him for what he had told me and it had a huge impact on me. The information he had given me really made me think; one of the first things it made me do was get back into the nets and practise. It had given me food for thought and I wanted to test it out, to feel how it worked for me.
I realised that, in five years at international level, I had never really watched the ball closely enough. Later, when Justin Langer came to play at Middlesex, I realised that he – like a lot of other top players – was massively into this discipline, too. No pun intended, but Bob’s words were a real eye-opener for me and they also gave me a huge amount of encouragement. I decided to take his thoughts on board and I got myself back into a positive frame of mind, and actually played in a couple of the one-day internationals that ended the tour to South Africa.
I was also called up on standby for England’s World Cup quarter-final defeat against Sri Lanka in Faisalabad in March because of an injury to Neil Smith, but I didn’t play and – although it was to be another 17 months before I was involved with England again – I began the 1996 season much heartened by the work I was now doing to improve myself as a batsman capable of succeeding at Test level.
At 26, I had taken a lot of blows, but I had also had a lot of experience of what playing international cricket was all about. Thanks to Bob Woolmer, too, I had something else to take with me into the next phase of my career: a nugget of information as valuable as if it had been pure gold.