CHAPTER 8

MIDDLESEX DIVORCE

‘The harsh realities of modern county cricket finally caught up with Middlesex after difficulties on and off the field in 2000. It was a sorry enough time when the end of August brought the unexpected departure of two icons, Mike Gatting and Ian Gould. But the loss of Mark Ramprakash in the New Year, to join traditional rivals Surrey, cut much deeper’

– Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, 2001

Finishing fourth in the County Championship in 1994, and then second in 1995, would have represented two very fine years for most counties. For Middlesex, however, so used to regular success, with fourteen trophies in the previous two decades, it was something of a disappointment.

One-day form was generally poor and at best only patchy, and by the end of 1995 there was very much a sense that a great era was coming to a close. Desmond Haynes played his last season for the club in 1994 and although he did not score a mountain of runs that summer his influence both on and off the field was still huge. His was a very big hole to fill.

Dion Nash, the New Zealand all-rounder, was the new overseas player in 1995 and, with 51 wickets and only 351 runs, he more often than not flattered to deceive. By 1995, we had also lost Micky Roseberry, who took up the captaincy of his native Durham, and Neil Williams, who moved to Essex.

Richard Johnson was an extremely promising young seamer, with 36 Championship wickets in both seasons at a cost of 26 and 16 runs apiece, respectively, but he also struggled to stay fit. Angus Fraser and Phil Tufnell were both still international-class acts, while Mark Feltham and Paul Weekes chipped in with useful wickets and, especially in the case of the latter, a decent number of runs.

But it is pertinent that, even in his last two seasons, and in his early 40s, it was John Emburey who finished as the club’s highest first-class wicket-taker. In 1994, he had 52 at 27, and in his final summer he bagged 74 victims at just under 22 runs each. During that 1995 runners-up year Emburey and Tufnell bowled more than 1,300 Championship overs between them and took 142 wickets.

Emburey was such a massive player for the Middlesex teams of the late 1970s, the 1980s and the early 1990s. He was ultra-consistent with the ball and could tie up an end even when not taking wickets. He made important runs in the lower middle-order and, as long-serving vice-captain, virtually took over the side in the field on occasions when Mike Gatting fancied a bit of a breather. He was almost like a joint-captain with Gatt by the end.

As a cricketer, and character, Embers was incredibly astute, shrewd and hard-nosed. He was also a great team man, and I think that his retirement from playing in 1995 really marked the end of Middlesex’s great years. Gatting may have still been in charge when we rocked up for the 1996 and 1997 seasons, but Emburey’s departure left the whole team, let alone his spin partner Tuffers, without a crucial steadying influence – in addition to his huge value as a front-line wicket-taker.

With Gatting averaging 60 and 54 in 1994 and 1995, with John Carr and Keith Brown always solid and occasionally spectacular, and with Jason Pooley doing much to offset the losses of Haynes and Roseberry by scoring almost 1,200 runs at just under 50 in 1995, we were seldom short of runs. My 1,261 at a shade under 55 in 1994, meanwhile, was only a warm-up for an incredible run of form in 1995 following the despair of my Test failures against the West Indies.

Scoring nine centuries in fourteen innings, I finished up with ten in all Championship matches and an aggregate of 2,147 at 93.34, including three double-hundreds: 214 against Surrey in late June, 205 against Sussex a month later and then 235 at Headingley against Yorkshire in late August. It was the form of my life; the only shame was that we couldn’t catch Warwickshire, the eventual champions.

We slipped down to ninth in 1996, as the signs of decline increased, although my 1,406 Championship runs at 52 was a fair individual return. But John Carr’s decision to retire early at the end of the season, to take up the post of cricket operations manager at the newly formed ECB, meant that during the following winter I was asked to become Gatt’s vice-captain for 1997.

It took me by surprise, to be honest, and when Gatt decided at the end of May to stand down from a captaincy position he had held for fourteen years – after only four first-class matches of the season – I was appointed Middlesex captain. In many ways, it was a strange feeling, as Gatt was still intending to play on and, while he was in the team, I’d always assumed he would be the captain. Don’t forget, I had known nothing else.

But, as well as feeling honoured and proud, it was also excellent timing for me because I had avoided all the pre-season hype that would have accompanied my elevation if Gatt had decided to give up the job a month or so earlier. I was able, in effect, to slip into the job with hardly any fuss; with a Championship fixture against Northamptonshire starting at Lord’s only two days later, both myself and the team had to keep our eyes on the ball.

As it was, I couldn’t have wished for a better start. I won the toss, in my first action as captain, decided to bat and both myself and Gatt scored hundreds, as we put on 187 for the third wicket. After topping 500, we then bowled Northants out twice to win by an innings and 57 runs.

One of the reasons why Gatt had decided to stand down was so that he could concentrate a little more on his new job as an England selector. But, as he continued to be a part of the Middlesex team, I found that I could also tap into his experience and leadership knowledge whenever I wanted. I must say that Gatt was absolutely superb during the rest of that season; he encouraged me to do the captaincy job my way, but he was also a big help and never interfered in what I was doing. He was not an overbearing presence at all, although of course I frequently consulted him on tactics, team selection and general issues.

The other bonus for me as captain that year was the fact that Jacques Kallis, then a fast-rising 21-year-old all-rounder who had already represented South Africa, was our overseas player. He was a very gifted cricketer, but what stunned us all was just how quick and effective he could be with the ball. There was one early match against Derbyshire, at Lord’s, when Gatt said that Kallis bowled as fast as Wayne Daniel had done in his prime for Middlesex. He also swung it.

The South African authorities had allowed Kallis to play county cricket only on the understanding that he would not be overbowled, and I was quite happy with that because it made up my mind pretty easily that I had to use Jacques solely as a strike bowler and save up his ration of overs for the most important times. So, whenever the opposition’s best batsman came in, I threw the ball to Kallis. I remember in my debut match as captain that he really worked over Rob Bailey, their captain and number three, in the Northants second innings before finally getting his man.

It was an interesting season, all round, because I had started it just thrilled to be the club’s official vice-captain and soon I was leading the team in what turned out to be a fair run at the Championship. We finished fourth in the end and I enjoyed it immensely. With Kallis, we also had a perfectly balanced bowling attack in which Fraser, Johnson and the emerging Jamie Hewitt – who took 57 wickets – carried the rest of the fast-bowling workload and in which Tufnell was still a top-class spinner.

The summer ended with me scoring more than 1,200 runs at 54, with five centuries, and I also enjoyed making an England return in the Oval Ashes Test. All looked rosy, but little did I know as I left that winter for the West Indies tour that everyone at Middlesex was about to undergo a massive culture change that came with the appointment as first team coach of John Buchanan.

Don Bennett’s 29 years as coach had come to an end in September 1997 and, as I had with Gatting’s excellent but relatively low-key support, I appreciated Don’s quiet presence in the background, and his technical know-how, as I went about my captaincy duties during that summer. There might have been a different captain in charge, but the Middlesex way of going about things hardly changed in those first four months of my leadership. I wanted Fraser, Brown and other senior players to feel that they could come to me with suggestions whenever they wanted, as we had all done with Gatt, as long as it was at the right time – which, again, was the environment in which we had all grown up.

What is more, I didn’t want to change things. Why should I? We were a successful county, we had enjoyed success on a consistent basis over two decades and a lot of people had worked hard to put in place a structure, for practice and preparation and club ethics, that had stood the test of time. Indeed, I saw it as my job to simply build on that solid structure and not to tear it down. Wholesale changes were not needed; any changes needed to evolve.

When I sat down at the end of the 1997 season, I felt that there had also been a positive reaction to my captaincy, especially out there on the pitch. Everyone knew their role, and our progress towards fourth place in the Championship had been very encouraging. In the likes of Johnson, Hewitt, Owais Shah and David Nash, we also had a crop of young talent which, we felt, was continuing the tradition of the Middlesex system in producing its own cricketers of substance.

Paul Downton, who was then on the committee, had a chat with me when the summer was over to ask me specifically about the question of who should be appointed to succeed Don Bennett. The name of Buchanan came up, and I have to say here that at that time I was 100 per cent behind the club approaching him. It didn’t bother me that he was Australian and therefore someone who would be very much an outsider coming into the tight-knit Middlesex world. In fact, I believed his experience of success with Queensland would be good for us and that he would bring some fresh new ideas to the table that could only be a further positive.

There is one other thing I think it is important to say here, too. During my early time as captain I remember Alan Moss, the Middlesex chairman, taking me out onto the balcony at Uxbridge and making the point very strongly that being captain was not just about the number of runs I could score for the team. He was very firm in his assertion that my responsibility now was to run the cricket affairs at the club and to provide a lead on all aspects of cricket performance.

However, it was a message that I hardly needed to hear. I was very strongly of the opinion myself that Middlesex cricket was a dynasty. It was a little bit like how Liverpool Football Club were perceived when I was growing up. Expertise and leadership were passed on down the generations: for Shankly, Paisley and Fagan at Anfield, you could read Brearley, Gatting and Emburey at Lord’s. And, what is more, I am making no idle comparison. Middlesex’s many successes now stretched over many years: I had come up through this system and I appreciated fully why things had worked out the way they had.

As the new captain, and especially as someone taking over after 14 years of the Gatting era, I was very keen indeed to make sure the new generation came through and won trophies and were as professional as those players who had been so successful in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.

I’ll give you one specific example. When I was capped by Middlesex in 1990, it was a very big deal for me. It had been a big target, and a big incentive to perform well, to improve and to be consistent. I knew it had to be earned, and when I got my cap – and my first team sweater – it was a huge moment in my career.

Ever since I had been aware of cricket – and the fact that I had grown up in a county with a big club, who won things – I had been aware that Middlesex were regarded as something of a machine. Becoming captain at twenty-seven was the end of my first ten years as a member of this machine, and now I wanted to be the one who led the club forward into their next ten years. I had enjoyed growing up in a dressing-room in which you looked around and said, ‘Yes, I fancy us to win this game,’ and I wanted that to continue. Other counties might have looked at us and said we had a bit of a swagger, but I reckoned we had earned that right because of the trophies in our cabinet.

When I returned from the West Indies tour, however, I soon found that things were very different. What didn’t help, in retrospect, was that I was kept on in the Caribbean – quite unexpectedly – for the one-day international leg of the tour that followed the Test matches. Our last match, in Trinidad, was on 8 April and that meant I was back in England only for a week before we played our opening County Championship fixture, away against Kent at Canterbury.

In effect, I had barely a few days’ rest, and during that short time at home I went up to Finchley, where the Middlesex first-team squad were training, to have my first meeting with Buchanan. But instead of a one-on-one chat, which is what I would have expected John to have wanted, I found myself called into a general squad meeting in which he began to outline the way in which he wanted us to do our jobs.

This included things like the dress code, that he was going to do away with the capping system in which only those who had been capped were entitled to wear first XI caps, shirts and sweaters. We had always dressed in jacket and ties at Lord’s, but he said from now on it would be chinos and a Middlesex polo shirt. On the field, too, we would all wear the same gear. On top of this, Buchanan said that the first team would be required, on virtually all occasions, to travel and meet at 2 p.m. on the day before a game in order to practise and prepare at that venue.

Now, this last point was a big deal for players living in London, and particularly those with young children. We had always travelled late the evening before, so as to miss the London afternoon and rush-hour traffic, and checked into our hotel around 10 p.m. or so. Practice was then done on the morning of a match. This was the accepted Middlesex way, and it was done for a practical reason. Also, those players with young families did not want to leave for a game 24 hours before it started, as it would severely decrease the amount of precious spare time they had at home during what were always hectic summers.

The decision on the dress code was a big thing and I instinctively felt that it was wrong and inappropriate. In fact, overall, I was stunned at what had happened. Buchanan had not run through any of this with me, and even if I had agreed with it I would have wanted the chance to go through it with him before it was presented to the rest of the squad. I was shocked, to be honest, and immediately felt I had been undermined.

It was not until early August, when we had a big showdown meeting, that I knew that Alan Moss told John during the winter that he would be in total charge of first-team affairs. Presumably, Alan had changed his opinion since he had told me to the contrary the previous summer. I can understand that John felt he was in the right to make those initial decisions, but that was never explained to me, neither by him nor the club.

The captain–coach relationship is crucial at any level of cricket, but here was a situation I didn’t agree with, developing right in front of my eyes on the very first day I had met Buchanan. It was undermining the traditional, and highly successful, role of the captain at Middlesex and he didn’t even want to consult with me. From that moment on, there was little or no proper communication between us all summer.

I accept that I must also take some blame for that lack of communication, but, remember, I only played in nine of the seventeen Championship games that season due to England commitments, as it was also a vitally important time in my international career. I had just scored my maiden Test century in the West Indies and I was determined to hold on to my place in order to be selected for that coming winter’s Ashes tour of Australia.

Buchanan, as an experienced coach, should have taken a lead in opening up the lines of communication with me, and although we must share the guilt for what was Middlesex’s worst-ever Championship finish, 17th, I think it was his responsibility – as someone coming in from outside and taking over a team that had just finished fourth – to liaise more with his captain and vice-captain. Keith Brown, my deputy and a highly experienced and respected player, was even more old school than me in his thinking about how things should be done, including dress codes and caps, and he also had three young children, so you can imagine what he thought about giving up a lot of his days off to travel to away matches early.

As it happened, the second game of the season, against Lancashire at Old Trafford, brought an early example of just how contentious Buchanan’s ‘new culture’ was in actuality. On the day between the end of our game at Canterbury and the start of the Lancashire fixture, we were told to be at our Manchester hotel in time for a team meeting and then dinner, starting at 7 p.m. That meant, of course, travelling up during the day and ahead of all the rush-hour traffic around Birmingham and on the M6 in particular.

We were all in the bar in good time when a phone call came through. It was Buchanan, who, with new overseas player Justin Langer also in his car, was stuck in horrendous traffic near Birmingham! Of course, our two Aussies had set off at 3 p.m., thinking it was a four-hour trip to Manchester. They had no idea of the realities of travel across England during the day. You can imagine the comments in the hotel bar when the news was relayed to the lads.

I can understand him wanting to come into the English game with fresh ideas, but this was just another small example of how theory and practice can be so different when you don’t know the new environment well enough. Buchanan seemed to lack an understanding, and, from what I saw, he simply came to England with a rigid plan that he was determined to stick to regardless of what was in place at Middlesex and why.

Langer’s recruitment, to replace Kallis, was very much down to me, and Justin proved to be a fine servant to Middlesex. I had played against him in the final Test of 1997, at the Oval, and we had got chatting in a corner of the Australian dressing-room when the England team went in to congratulate them on retaining the Ashes – although we had actually won that last match.

I had hardly spoken with him before, but I found that we quickly got on and seemed to have very similar philosophies about cricket and how to go about playing the game. At the end of this chat, I happened to mention that Middlesex were going to be on the lookout for a new overseas player and Langer said that he would be very interested. Indeed, before we left to go our separate ways, he handed me a piece of paper with the telephone number I had requested, plus the words ‘keen for the opportunity’.

I was very pleased during that winter when the committee agreed to approach him. We needed a top-order batsman and, from what I knew of Justin and from the impression he had made on me during our Oval chat, I was confident that he would help to set exactly the right example to the younger players on the staff.

A couple of draws and wins against Somerset and Glamorgan, both at Lord’s, meant that by the beginning of June we were looking quite comfortable, and both Langer and I had made a number of big scores. But while I was away at the opening Test against South Africa, we lost a nail-biting contest against Durham at Lord’s by just one wicket and the season started to go downhill from then.

Moreover, I remember Buchanan taking Gatting out onto the balcony for a chat during one of the early season games and, in effect, according to Gatt, telling him that he should retire from the one-day team and then questioned his commitment to the county. Now, Gatt was continuing his role as an England selector, but he was still a decent player; in fact, he went on to top 1,000 runs at an average just above 43 in what was to be his final season – his 24th – for Middlesex. But it seems Buchanan was really saying that he thought he should go immediately and, as I understand it, he said it in very blunt terms.

Gatt, not surprisingly, was very upset by this. He was holding down the number three position when I was not playing, and number four otherwise, and he – and I – felt he still had an important role in the side, especially with youngsters Shah and Nash both in the middle-order.

The last thing I wanted, as I came and went during the South Africa Tests, was a disgruntled Mike Gatting. I just couldn’t understand why Buchanan would not want to get Gatt onside and to help set the tone for what was wanted from the younger players. Instead, Buchanan apparently wanted him to retire there and then.

Jamie Hewitt was struggling to reproduce the form of the previous summer, and Tufnell was also struggling, and it was obvious that teams were blocking Fraser at one end in the knowledge that they could score the runs they wanted off other bowlers. Shah was having a few issues playing around his front pad and, understandably, was discovering that opposition bowlers had a few plans for him in what was essentially his second season.

But, as the season went on, it became more and more painfully obvious to me that Buchanan did not seem to be doing any actual coaching. He was good at laying out cones for pre-match drills, he was always in front of his laptop during matches, sitting there day after day inputting stuff into the computer, and he had made his decisions about how we should dress and what we should wear on the field. He even wanted to start a team song, but what he definitely did not seem to be doing as far as I was concerned was getting into the nets and giving technical advice to those who clearly needed it. At the very least, if he couldn’t do it himself, he should have got someone else in to work with the batsmen, or the bowlers, but in my opinion he simply did not address those issues.

I should have got together with my senior players, Fraser and Brown and Langer especially, and thrashed things out with John, but I suppose not being around for half the time did not help me to see things as clearly as I needed to see them. I was also immersed in the South Africa Test series, and the team meetings we had when I was around did not achieve a great deal. Buchanan also continued to upset certain players: once, when Tuffers was bemoaning his lack of luck in a game at Leicestershire – about not being able to bowl as well as he wanted and what did we think – John turned to him and said, without a hint of humour, ‘Well, why don’t you retire then?’ That was another senior player alienated!

One of Buchanan’s ‘initiatives’ was to produce wagon wheels of every batsman’s innings, from his own computer, so that we could analyse where we had scored our runs. When I was dismissed for a first ball duck in one match, I disappeared off into the showers to, literally, cool down and when I came out I found one of his wagon wheels on my seat. I couldn’t believe it. There, on this piece of paper, was the following information: total runs 0, balls faced 1, total fours 0, total sixes 0, minutes in 2. At first I thought it was a wind-up, a joke. But no one was around, sniggering. And it soon became clear that Buchanan had printed out this paper in all seriousness. You couldn’t make it up.

Buchanan was also beginning to make decisions about players’ futures, as we got past the midway point of the season. I regret, looking back, that I agreed Jason Pooley should be released at the end of the summer. At the time I felt backed into a corner and perhaps my lack of a relationship with John meant that I agreed to it without really putting my case over properly.

Everything came to a head at the end of July, when we were crushed by 144 runs by Hampshire in a NatWest Trophy quarter-final at Lord’s. Keith Brown had rung me up a couple of days before, as I was in Nottingham helping England to beat South Africa in the fourth Test, and said he thought that the players should be given a day off on 27 July, the day before the game, as they had just come through nine days of cricket out of the previous ten. I agreed to this request. The players would benefit more from a day’s rest and we would meet early at the ground and practise hard before the game. I felt nothing would be achieved by getting all the players into Lord’s for a net session on the 27th, which would also involve more than two hours of travelling for some of them, when they were all tired anyway.

I soon got to hear that Buchanan, predictably, wanted the players to go in, though he relented when both Brown and I said no. Unfortunately, after I had won the toss and decided to bowl first, we had a nightmare. Hampshire scored 295 for 5 from their 60 overs, and at 65 for 5 in reply we had nowhere to go. Langer and Keith Dutch then put on a bit of a partnership, but it was mere damage limitation. It was a huge disappointment.

On the following day I received a phone call to say that Buchanan had given a no-holds-barred interview, with David Lloyd of the London Evening Standard, in which he slagged off the Middlesex team and severely criticised the senior players for not doing what he wanted, for not embracing his ideas. He also mentioned the lack of practice on the day before the game, when he had wanted to bring the players in.

I was outraged by this because, in my eyes, the worst thing you can do is go to the press to air your grievances in public. If you have something to say, of that magnitude, then you say it in private. The press will obviously speculate – that is their job – but in my opinion John had stepped over the line.

Soon after this, we had a big showdown meeting. Paul Downton was there, as well as Buchanan and myself and several of the committee. It lasted for two hours, and at the end of it Downton asked both John and me whether we were prepared to start again and work together for the following season. I said I was, given certain understandings, but I assume that John was not prepared to resolve his differences with me because he resigned soon after.

I had grown up at Middlesex with the captain as the main man in charge and Don Bennett very much in the background, and although 1997 had shown me how effective that kind of relationship could be I am certainly not of the opinion that the coach has always to defer to the captain. Don had his influence, even if his profile was low, and if the captain was all-powerful then what would be the point of having a coach at all in a management capacity?

The Kevin Pietersen–Peter Moores affair of winter 2008 is a good example of how the captain and the coach must have a relationship based on mutual respect and the ability to compromise in the decision-making process, but to present a united front to the rest of the team, and to the outside world. Pietersen has huge strengths as a player and is very professional, but part of being captain is compromise and communication. To a lot of people in cricket, Moores may not be the best coach in the world, but he has worked hard to become a better coach and has achieved a lot. I think there was quite a bit of snobbery in the England camp because Moores had not played Test cricket, but you don’t have to be a great player to be a great coach.

Also, Pietersen doesn’t know everything there is to know about cricket. He is only in his late 20s. I simply don’t agree with all those pundits who keep on about the captain being the person, in cricket, who has to run the whole show. It’s an old-fashioned idea, in my opinion, because today’s game, and the demands of it at international level, is so different to how it was in days gone by.

Ironically, when Buchanan did not return, the club turned to the man who had always been earmarked as the next coach, Mike Gatting. He had retired as a player at the end of the 1998 summer and had been given the post of director of coaching. Should he have been given this job, even on a player–coach basis, in 1998? I’m not sure, ideally, that Gatt wanted to go straight from playing into coaching, or management, but with Bennett still in the background to offer technical advice when necessary I suppose the club could have saved Buchanan’s salary and even spent it on acquiring a couple more players. In my view, we were a bit short on the playing side in 1998 – and in the next couple of seasons, too, for that matter.

Buchanan’s short reign brought a lot of division and upset, and his outburst in the Standard in particular was damaging to the club and demoralising for the players, as well as undermining my authority as captain. The club also gave me the impression during that period that they accepted the criticism he had put into the public domain and believed everything that he was saying. Nowadays, too, people say Buchanan must be a great coach because of what Australia achieved when he was in charge of them. But the skill levels of the players he had at his command during those years were incredibly high; in the whole history of the game, indeed, it is arguable that they were the best team there has ever been.

Unfortunately, my lasting impression of him is of someone who seemed to work on the periphery of things without getting into the nitty-gritty of actual coaching – for example, going into the nets and working with players on technical aspects of their game. What we needed was a coach who could help players to bat better and bowl better. That’s how you win cricket matches. Also, his apparent disregard for some of the traditions of Middlesex cricket – things that had helped us to be one of the most successful counties for two decades – was ill-judged. He even turned up for cricket committee meetings in the pavilion at Lord’s in shorts, cricket socks and floppy hat. Everyone else sitting around the table was wearing jackets and ties – because that was how it was. John might as well have had corks hanging from his floppy. He looked like he had just strolled in from the outback; he didn’t see why he should even think about making an effort to adapt and accept a Middlesex tradition.

It is interesting that when I met John again midway through the 2009 summer, during his spell here working with the England coaching set-up, he was very civil to me and I think he would also acknowledge now that he could have done things differently when he was at Middlesex.

I also remember, at the end of that embarrassing NatWest Trophy defeat, wandering down to the Tavern for a drink and having the club’s cricket committee chairman, Andrew Miller, launch into me for, in his opinion, undermining everything the club was trying to achieve and not doing my job properly. For a start, this was not the sort of thing to be seen – and heard – in a public place, and also where was he getting this opinion from, as he was never in the dressing-room, and why would he not even listen to anything I wanted to say? I thought his behaviour that evening was extremely poor, for someone in his position. I lost respect for him, and it also went a long way towards contributing to the impression in my own mind about the way the club as a whole was heading.

Cracks were thus beginning to appear in my lifelong relationship with Middlesex, and sadly they were not to be healed – despite the appointment of Gatting for the following season. Again, it seems strange that Gatt himself had not taken a stronger lead against Buchanan within the club, especially after the early season conversation they had had out on the balcony. But Gatt had other things developing in his cricket life at that time. I think he just decided to take a back seat and concentrate on what was his last summer as a player.

Perhaps I should have spoken more clearly and passionately to the club’s committee about what I thought was going wrong. But, at 28, and with my own England ambitions also uppermost in my mind, I was not educated enough in the workings of a county cricket club to play those sorts of political games – even if I had wanted to. I was a cricketer, not a politician, and what had happened reinforced my belief that it is vital for a county captain to have a good head coach, or team manager, or whatever you want to call it, working alongside him.

Anyway, Gatting’s new appointment was not universally greeted with unrestrained joy by all the Middlesex players. A number of them expressed caution, wishing to reserve judgement, because although Gatt is larger than life, massively experienced and has a track record as a captain and player that is out of the top drawer, he was never going to be the sort of quiet, in-the-background, organising-and-planning coach that Don Bennett was.

If you want someone to lead you out of the trenches, then Gatt is your man. There is no doubt he can inspire and knows his stuff. But he still wanted to be in the thick of things as coach. The mickey-taking culture that had been central to his long years as captain did not go down so well with the younger players who were now coming through on to the staff and, unlike me, had never seen Gatt in his pomp as a great player. When Gatt talks cricket, I am listening, because I have seen at close hand just how good he was. But some of the young guys found it difficult to take, especially when he was sometimes a little bit late or disorganised in practices.

We had Langer back as overseas player in 1999, but the only other signings were Mike Roseberry, who returned after four seasons at Durham, and Richard Kettleborough, an opening batsman who had been on the fringes at Yorkshire. The only fresh blood on the bowling front was Simon Cook, a medium pacer who had come through from the junior ranks and made his first-class debut in our opening Championship fixture of the season. Keith Brown had also retired.

It deeply concerned me as we went into the 1999 season that despite such a poor year in 1998 the club had made no significant signings. The batting relied heavily on Langer and myself, and the bowling on Fraser and Tufnell. It was no surprise that, once again, we struggled and eventually finished 16th.

But what did anyone expect when we were often taking the field with as many as five or six uncapped players? Some of the youngsters, like Shah and Strauss and Nash and Ben Hutton, might have had talent, but they were still kids. It didn’t help either that Richard Johnson was out of action for ten weeks of the season with injury, or that we got through seven different pairs of openers during the Championship campaign. On one occasion, some wag in the dressing-room said that I should get padded up and go and wait by the pavilion gate because I was bound to be in very soon after the start of our innings!

The summer of 1999 was also a difficult one for me, England-wise, but going away again regularly to play in the four-Test series against New Zealand did not do very much for my attempts to get on top of the problems we were having at Middlesex.

There were, in the end, many reasons why I decided to resign from the captaincy, but chief among them was the fact that I thought it unfair in the extreme for people at the club to still have high expectations of what we should be achieving. My view was that you only had to look down the teamsheet to realise that we were no longer a force to be reckoned with in the county game.

I’m sure that Gatt, too, would probably accept some of the responsibility for our performance as a team during that summer. He was a big personality who had been brought in to do a big job, but did he strike the right balance between trying to gee everyone up and providing a calming influence in the dressing-room? Some of the best coaches I have known are calm and considered personalities who keep their emotions under wraps, especially in the dressing-room environment.

Overall, I wasn’t enjoying my cricket – and the difficult England series against the New Zealanders was horrible to play in, too – so by September I had made up my mind to give up the captaincy. After batting in quite a carefree manner at Lord’s to score an unbeaten 209 in our second innings to help us secure a draw against Surrey, who had just been crowned champions, a watching Don Bennett came up to me and said quietly, ‘You’ve made the decision, haven’t you?’ He just knew, from my body language, I suppose, that I had cast off the burden.

It was still a big decision for me to make because I loved being captain of Middlesex. My last game in charge was at Worcester, and I ended up 87 not out as we batted out for another draw in a rain-ruined contest. I had announced my resignation just before the start of the match, in which Ed Joyce made his county debut, and, looking back at the scorecard, I see that five of our top seven were uncapped players – as was Tim Bloomfield, one of the quick bowlers.

The County Championship was also split into two divisions after that 1999 season and so we were condemned to start the 2000 summer in the second tier. Immediately, that meant we were one of nine counties who could not aim to be county champions. It was not a nice feeling to be dubbed ‘second class’ in all but name.

Shah and Nash were capped early in 2000, both, I thought, prematurely, as they had hardly established themselves as permanent fixtures in the side. Nash had inherited the keeper’s gloves from Keith Brown simply because there was no one else to do the job when Keith retired, and Shah had another poor season and was actually dropped from five of the last six matches. To me, the decisions to award them caps at that stage of their careers was a kick in the teeth for every capped Middlesex cricketer who had preceded them and another example of how standards had lowered since my early years at the club.

One of the other reasons I stood down from the captaincy was that I had been awarded a benefit year in 2000, and I thought it best for me and the club if I was no longer in charge. Benefit summers are often so difficult for players with regard to juggling playing responsibilities and benefit commitments.

But the bottom line was that I was getting very disillusioned with Middlesex and the constant problem of not being able to compete. You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that many other professional cricketers around the country would have loved to come to Lord’s and play their cricket at the home of the game? Well, we didn’t seem to be attracting any. There was no structure and no plan.

I had wanted to bring in Dominic Cork for the 1999 season, as I knew him well and believed that he would be just the sort of all-round cricketer, and especially strong with the ball, who would make a big difference to us on the field. I also realised that the 1999 season would be a real watershed because of the decision to split the Championship into two divisions; I felt we had to do all in our power to ensure we finished at least in the top nine. I went to the committee during that winter with a list of 17 names, all of whom would have added something to our side. Nothing came of it. And so, as I sat there in the autumn of 1999, dropped by England, as well as having given up the Middlesex captaincy, it was all very depressing to contemplate my 14th season at the club in 2000.

In light of Duncan Fletcher’s decision to try me as an England opener that summer, I also opened for Middlesex in our first few Championship games, with limited success. But it was after I was dropped again by England, following the Lord’s Test against the West Indies, that I began to settle into an excellent run of form (back at number four) that saw me end up at the top of the county’s Championship batting averages. After me on 64, and Langer on 61, the next best average was Strauss’s 33. Tufnell, Fraser and Johnson took more than 160 wickets between them, but there was little else from anyone in either the bowling or the batting. Nothing had changed. We were still a very poor side, and we finished second from bottom in the new division two.

Langer, who had taken over the captaincy, was now the one facing all the problems that had driven me to distraction, and he put his heart and soul into trying to drag Middlesex around. He and I have always got on very well and it was hard for me to watch him going through the same process as I had suffered. Gatting and Ian Gould, the coach, decided to resign from their posts at the end of August, which completed the sorry picture.

By then, I had become aware of the mutterings about me leaving – although, to be quite honest, the rumours began to appear before I had really begun to contemplate it. Richard Johnson was also thinking about leaving and I recall having a chat with him about it on one occasion because he was at a more advanced stage than me in his planning. In the end, he went with his gut instinct and left for Somerset – as did Keith Dutch.

At the end of the season, I was called into a meeting by Downton. Vinny Codrington, who had just finished his first year as secretary, was also there, as were Angus Fraser and Phil Tufnell. We had a long chat about things, and part of the reason I was there was that the club had decided on a policy change and would now be offering players only two-year contracts as a maximum.

Ever since establishing myself in the team I had been on a permanent three-year contract – in other words, as you finished one season, you automatically had another year added on. I was astonished, and not a little angry. I had just averaged 64 and I wasn’t a kid! I couldn’t understand, especially given the speculation in the media that had been swirling around me about my future, why they were not snapping me up on as long a deal as they could. Middlesex weren’t exactly blessed with proven, experienced players.

Anyway, the result of our further discussions was that the club officials turned round and said I could have the three-year contract I wanted. In a way, this was even more disgraceful. It felt as though they were making it up as they went along. As if they didn’t know what they were doing.

At the end of the meeting, Codrington said, in answer to my expressed concerns about the immediate future of the team, that I should not worry because with all the good youngsters coming through we would be a good side in five years’ time. I couldn’t believe that, either. What was I supposed to do? Carry on for five more years of my career and be content for Middlesex to bring up the rear? We had had three bad years and I couldn’t see any change in our fortunes at all; I couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. And what would happen when Fraser and Tufnell were not around to take the majority of the wickets? They weren’t getting any younger, and although Angus was being lined up as captain in succession to Langer, who was not coming back as the overseas player for 2001 because of Australia’s Ashes tour, he, in particular, surely did not have long left.

The tin lid was put on it when Codrington shared a taxi with Tuffers and me back to Lord’s, from the restaurant in which we had held the meeting, and he proceeded to tell both of us that, if it were up to him, he would sack Paul Weekes (who had endured a very poor season) there and then. I was outraged. He wasn’t paid to have opinions on the make-up of the playing staff and, anyway, didn’t he know that Weekes was a very good friend of mine?

It was all pretty obvious how the club were thinking, and as a professional with a limited number of years at the top I didn’t want to be messing about. Every time I went to practise in the nets, or to train at the gym, or to bat in the middle, I was trying to improve myself and get the best out of my ability. But it was now a shambles at Middlesex. There was no direction and no possibility of us even getting promoted from division two, let alone challenging again for the county title.

The more I thought about it, the more I knew I had to move. I did speak to both Kent and Essex in addition to Surrey, but Surrey were always my first choice. I knew all their players and was good friends with a lot of them, and they had won the Championship for two years running. I also did not want to have to move away from my London home, especially with Cara having been born in 1997.

Friends like Martin Bicknell, the Surrey opening bowler, and Keith Medlycott, their former spinner, who was first-team coach, both indicated to me that Surrey would be interested (although neither believed that I would actually leave Middlesex), and I also rang Adam Hollioake, the captain and another good friend, who was on holiday in Hong Kong, to ask him if he thought I would fit in at Surrey – if I were to move.

Having heard nothing to dissuade me otherwise – and technically, of course, Surrey were not allowed to make an official approach unless Middlesex released me from my existing contract – I made my decision. I asked for a meeting with Middlesex, and I sat down and wrote a letter to outline my reasons for looking to move. This was important for me, because I didn’t want to leave that meeting without saying everything that needed to be said – I also wanted Middlesex to have the chance to respond to what I had set out on paper.

Phil Edmonds, the club chairman, Vinny Codrington, the secretary, and Angus Fraser, the captain-elect, were present to meet me at Lord’s, and I took with me a lawyer friend, as I didn’t want to be on my own at such a meeting. I felt I needed an ally in there, which again tells you a lot about how my relationship with the club had broken down.

When we got into the meeting, I gave all three of them a copy of my letter, which set out, clearly and concisely, my thinking behind the decision to ask for a move. I listed the reasons I wanted to leave Middlesex, including such factors as I didn’t feel the club were being ambitious enough, I wanted to play division one Championship cricket and that I wanted to play for a more high-profile team who were going to challenge for honours. I also said that a change of scenery would be good for me, and that I wanted to learn from playing with different players.

Once they had read through it, Codrington was the first to speak and, in a perky, upbeat voice, he said, ‘Well, I suppose that’s it then.’ In my opinion, this was unprofessional behaviour. I wonder how he has remained in that job for so long now. What was he doing, saying that, when both the chairman and the captain of the club were there?

Edmonds, quite rightly, said, ‘Hang on, are you sure about this, Mark? Are you convinced that moving away is the right thing for you to do?’ I replied that I had thought long and hard about it, and that it was a huge decision for me to make, and that there had been so much to weigh up. Angus, meanwhile, never once looked up and, as my conversation with Phil continued, he just kept looking at the piece of paper. I don’t think he looked up at all, in fact, and he didn’t say a word.

After a few more questions, Edmonds said that my request would go before the full committee and the matter would be discussed. I left, and later I was told that the committee, having debated it, had refused to release me from my contract. I wondered what I should do and thought about writing again directly to the committee. But a few people at the club, whom I trusted and respected, said to hold on and to relax and wait.

Easier said than done, of course. But when the committee met again on 31 January it was discussed once more, and I reckon the delay was that they were playing for time because there were rumours that they wanted to do a deal with Surrey, in which Ben Hollioake would come to Middlesex in a sort of exchange arrangement. Perhaps, though, they were just being bloody-minded.

Anyway, there was never a chance that Ben would want to go to Middlesex, or that Adam Hollioake and Surrey would agree to him going, for that matter, but the upshot of that 31 January meeting was that my release was agreed.

The very next day I was at the Oval, signing my Surrey contract. Paul Sheldon, the chief executive, was worried because the club’s budget for 2001 had already been set out and they would have gone over that if they had paid me my agreed annual salary for the year. I simply said I was happy to sign the three-year deal they were offering and that they could make up the balance of my 2001 salary in years two and three.

That was swiftly agreed. Everything was done with total professionalism. Everyone at the Oval was immediately and genuinely welcoming, and I knew right away that I had done the right thing.