LOOKING back now, more than 20 years later, 1993 was the year things started to unravel for me at Derbyshire although at the time it didn’t feel like that. For only the fourth time in its history the county won a major trophy, very much against the odds when we beat Lancashire at Lord’s in the final of the Benson & Hedges Cup. Not even a now infamous row in the dining room I was involved in could overshadow our triumph.
Off the field, though, Derbyshire was in a bit of a mess. The club had reached its bank overdraft of £400,000 and halfway through the season three of the major decision-makers, including the chief executive Bob Lark, were made redundant and Bud Hill ended up spending three months as acting secretary along with his coaching duties. Meanwhile, in the dressing room, there were the first inklings that Kim Barnett’s formidable power base was not built on as strong a foundation as we all imagined.
Kim was in his 11th season as captain and that summer he set a new county record for the number of games in charge. As I know from my own experience at Sussex, you almost have to be superhuman to keep yourself motivated to do the captain’s job as long as that, and to keep enjoying leadership, while, of course, making sure your own game is in good order. In that regard Kim had no worries. He struggled with back problems but he was still fitter than a lot of younger players in our squad and still churning out runs for us on a consistent basis. In 1990 he had addressed the squad in pre-season, which was unusual for him, and announced that John Morris was going to be vice-captain. John was well respected by the rest of us and about to have a brief but eventful taste of life as an England cricketer, although after the infamous incident on his only tour to Australia, when he buzzed a ground in a Tiger Moth plane with captain David Gower in 1991, the chance to play Test cricket for his country never came again. That was a shame because I’m convinced he would have flourished at international level. He was a very fine player and had the mental strength to play long, match-winning innings.
At the time I thought that John would eventually succeed Kim as captain but three years on nothing had changed, it was still very much Kim’s ship and he showed little inclination to step down as captain. During the season Phil Russell announced his decision to leave at the end of 1993 to take over as groundsman at Kingsmead in Durban. I felt then that Kim’s succession plan was that he would replace Phil as coach with Dominic Cork, whom Kim had great faith in both as a cricketer and a person, taking over as skipper. John and Pete Bowler, who were both considered potential future captains of Derbyshire, were left frustrated. John departed in 1993 to join Durham and a year later Pete was on his way to Somerset. In their last year the relationship between Kim and John was strained, although they never had any out-and-out disagreements beyond the normal stuff that was part and parcel of dressing room life during a long season.
I could see why Kim had such faith in Dominic. He was being widely tipped for the England team (and duly made his debut in 1995) and in 1993 he took 92 wickets for Derbyshire. On the open market he would have had no shortage of counties keen to secure his services and the club had to do all it could to keep him. Dominic was already a big character in our dressing room, even though he was just 22, with occasionally outspoken views. But he thought about the game and a lot of people at the club shared Kim’s view that he was a potential future captain a few years down the line.
John’s departure left a big hole in our batting that would need filling. The club must have felt I was the person to step in because at the end of 1993 I was offered a five-year contract, something unheard of back then when the most you could expect was three years. I had some very positive discussions with Kim who assured me he would do all he could to help me fulfil my ambitions to play for England. For me that meant playing on pitches that were not as bowler-friendly. That year we’d been without an overseas player for much of the summer after Ian Bishop broke down with a stress fracture of his back. It was obviously a big blow but guys like Dominic Cork, Ole Mortensen and Simon Base were good bowlers in English conditions and on a typically green Derby-seamer, a handful for any opposition. The best word to describe the pitches we played on at Derby that summer would be challenging.
But I signed the contract. Although the length of the deal would cause me problems a few years down the line, when I decided to leave, I was always going to sign it. I was only 23 and it offered me a good pay rise and fantastic career security. That, and the assurances I got from Kim that he would try and make sure our pitches would help our batsmen as much as our seamers, were all the reasons I needed to commit myself to the club.
In the County Championship we dropped from fifth to 15th place but our one-day form was better and I had my best season so far in limited-overs cricket. I scored 652 runs in the Sunday League, passed 50 eleven times in one-day matches and got out in the 90s three times. The innings I remember the most was the unbeaten 53 that helped get us to the Lord’s final. I’d made 58 against Middlesex earlier in the competition and then played my part with the ball in the quarter-final at Taunton which turned into a farce. Rain had washed out two days and Kim and Chris Tavare couldn’t agree on whether conditions were fit for a ten or 20 over slog. Because of this impasse the matter was left to the TCCB to sort out but they refused to reschedule the game. There was no alternative, we were facing another bowl-out.
Kim’s experience of what happened at Bishop’s Stortford in 1991 stood him in good stead. Dominic, Steve Goldsmith, Kim and myself were chosen and I hit the stumps twice bowling off one pace. We won 6-3 to set up a home semi-final against Northamptonshire. That day we bowled well to leave ourselves with a target of 211 and I had never felt more focussed in my career when I went out to join John Morris with just under 100 runs needed and Curtly Ambrose back into the attack. He was bowling superbly as always so looked a little surprised when straight away I took three or four steps forward and hit him for a one-bounce four over midwicket. Curtly was a man of few words but, sure enough, I was on the end of one of his infamous stares as he stalked back to his mark. Did I get under his skin? I like to think so but just doing that to a bowler of his quality filled me with confidence. I was the aggressor in our partnership as we put on 95 in 12 overs to seal victory and I hit the winning runs with 21 balls to spare.
The wicket we used was on the far side of the square and all I remember after hugging John in the middle was turning to see the other lads charging towards us followed by hundreds of Derbyshire supporters. Once again, as had been the case when we clinched the Sunday League title in 1990, our jubilant followers carried me off the field. I will never forget those celebrations. In my 20-year playing career it was one of the major highlights, as special as all the success I would enjoy at Sussex.
A couple of weeks before we were due to face Lancashire in the final the sides met in the Championship at Derby. The wicket was pancake-flat and Dominic was banned from bowling after running on the pitch during the first innings, such was his frustration at the lack of assistance in the wicket. We replied to their 477 with 426, of which I contributed 74, and their declaration on 327/8 left us needing 379 to win on the final day. We were cruising on 216/1. An hour later, after a phenomenal spell of bowling by Wasim Akram, we had been hustled out for 267.
Back then we’d had very little, if any, experience of reverse swing, especially at Derby where the square tended to be very verdant so the ball rarely lost its shine. All of a sudden that day Wasim got the ball to go all over the shop. In seven overs he took 6-11 and while I was at the crease we lost five batsmen for scores of a duck, three, two more noughts and one. As a succession of team-mates departed they were glancing ruefully at Wasim rather than the pitch, which until then had been perfect for batting. A new law had been introduced giving the umpires the power to inspect the ball at any stage of the match. I wasn’t sure whether this applied to batsmen as well but as wickets clattered at the other end I asked Vanburn Holder if I could take a look after Wasim had castled another of our batsmen. He threw me the ball, I gave it nothing more than a cursory glance and tossed it back to him.
Wasim and his Pakistan compatriot Waqar Younis were both extremely skilful bowlers who had the ability to swing the ball late and at high speed. But there normally needed to be some assistance, either in the atmospheric conditions or from a hard, abrasive square that would rough up one side of the ball, to get it to reverse. That day I had never seen a ball do so much. We’d heard stories on the circuit about players putting their finger or thumbnail down the seam and making a slight flap under the leather to create natural resistance. At the end of the over it was easy just to smooth the leather back down and no one would be any the wiser, least of all the umpires who knew as little as the players about this process.
When I got back to the dressing room Kim, who’d seen me looking at the ball, confronted me. ‘What sort of condition was it in?’ he asked. I had to be honest. If there was something wrong with it I hadn’t noticed it and I didn’t really know what I was looking for anyway. Kim headed off to the umpires’ room and returned a few minutes later with the ball, which looked as if a dog had been chewing it. The ball was despatched to Lord’s for further inspection but the TCCB threw out our complaint.
The press picked up the story and Kim told them that I had asked to see the ball, which was perfectly true. It wasn’t mentioned, of course, that I had not accused Wasim or any of the Lancashire players of altering its condition but, not surprisingly I guess, in Lancashire’s eyes I was accusing them of cheating.
The build-up to the final was a wonderful experience. The club paid for wives and girlfriends to join us in the hotel the day before and I remember BBC Radio Derby broadcasting live from the breakfast room as we got stuck into bacon and eggs. I had been a first-year pro back in 1989 when we lost the Benson & Hedges Cup Final to Hampshire, sitting in the crowd and leaving before the finish to get an earlier train home with Hampshire cruising to victory.
We were huge underdogs but we were dangerous opponents because we had players like Dominic and John Morris who were potential match-winners if it was their day. I hadn’t given the Championship match a second thought during preparations for the final but as Tim O’Gorman and I walked back from the Nursery Ground after a pre-match net Wasim completely blanked me when I said hello to him and Gehan Mendis, as they walked past us heading towards the nets.
When Wasim bowled that beamer at me I didn’t feel any pain at all. It was the first ball I’d faced and I guess my initial reaction, like everyone else, was complete surprise. It struck me flush on the left shoulder as I tried to weave out of the way. I went down on my haunches and our physio, Ann Brentnall, came out to give me some treatment. There were boos in the crowd and Wasim waved his hand at me. Was he trying to apologise? It didn’t feel like it at the time. The umpire, Barry Meyer, gave him a warning and the game carried on. These days he would have been banned from the attack but Meyer must have thought Wasim’s hand-waving gesture was an apology.
I was certainly a lot angrier when I got out for 11 and we had lurched to 66/4. Back then there was a lunch break during the final and when I returned to the dressing room they were replaying the incident on the TV in the corner. Jack Bannister, who was commentating for the BBC, called it a disgrace and the more it was shown the more frustrated I was becoming. Eventually, Pete Bowler put his arm around my shoulder and took me off to get something to eat.
The players’ dining room at Lord’s isn’t the biggest space and when we got there we had to squeeze past a table where Wasim was sitting with a friend. Just as I approached him he burst out laughing, presumably at something his pal had said. I lost it. Leaning over as he looked up I whispered, ‘Do that again and I will knock your fucking head off.’ Wasim stood up and towered over me but I wasn’t going to back down. This time I jabbed him in the chest and repeated my threat. In a book Wasim later claimed that I’d threatened him with a butter knife but that was categorically not the case. By now a few more players were in the dining room and after a few moments of silence I heard the unmistakable voice of David Lloyd, the Lancashire coach, in the corner. ‘Now then young man. Sit down. Calm down. And have your lunch.’ So I did. I think the only other words spoken in the dining room for the next 40 minutes were, ‘Do you want custard with that?’
The incident certainly affected me better than Wasim and as a team we were transformed when we resumed our innings. The sun had come out, conditions had eased and Dominic hit a sensational 92 not out. Tim O’Gorman made 49 and Karl Krikken added 37 not out to get us to 252/6 from our 55 overs while Wasim’s 11 overs went for 65 and he was their most expensive bowler. By no means was it a match-winning total but it represented a great recovery from 66/4.
Early in their reply I took a superb slip catch, low to my left and one-handed, to get rid of Steve Titchard and that lifted the team and I hugely. Before the game Kim had stressed that we should try and keep Mike Atherton out there as long as we could. He wasn’t exactly instructing us to deliberately drop the ball if he gave us a catch but we knew that if he stayed in for any length of time it would chew up a lot of balls.
Atherton scored 54 and although Lancashire still had eight wickets left, after an hour’s break because of rain, they needed 112 from 17 overs which, back then, took some getting. Neil Fairbrother looked as if he might play a match-winning innings but we bowled and fielded superbly before Frankie Griffith conceded just four runs from the final over, which he bowled in semi-darkness, and we had won by six runs. I’m sure Kim had planned for Alan Warner, who finished with 3-31, to bowl the last over but Frankie sent down six yorkers and a few moments later I was charging off the pitch, stump in hand, with hundreds of jubilant Derbyshire supporters in pursuit.
At the presentation on the balcony we each shook hands with every Lancashire player, including Wasim, but there was still no apology. An hour or so later though, as we were sitting in the dressing room celebrating, Wasim asked to see me and he did apologise. He said he was trying to bowl a yorker and that it wasn’t intentional. Apology accepted, although it was a lot easier to take having just won the trophy.
I’m happy to say that since that day I have never had a problem with Wasim, in fact when we have played together in charity games we’ve always had a laugh. One of his last matches in England came a decade later when he was playing for Hampshire and I was at Sussex. He was desperate to lead them to a Lord’s final in his last year before retirement but I managed to take 21 off him in the penultimate over of a NatWest Trophy tie at the Rose Bowl and we got home by four wickets. Wasim, competitive to the last, was totally crestfallen that he had lost Hampshire the game.
Our celebrations at Lord’s continued long into the night. Derbyshire had now won four trophies in their history and I had been involved in two of them. My abiding memory of the hours that followed our victory is of our supporters drinking champagne out of the trophy when we passed it around in the Tavern pub next to the ground.
It was a wonderful moment for the players and the club but there was never much chance of us building on it. Although there was a change at the top in 1994, with Alan Hill replacing Phil Russell as coach, Kim led the side for the 12th successive season. The departure of John Morris was filled by the signing of Phil DeFreitas from Lancashire and Colin Wells, who came up from Sussex. Two more players with big characters and plenty to say to add to the mix but the environment around the team did not encourage a great deal of open discussion. Instead, we started to question some of Kim’s decisions behind his back so the atmosphere steadily got worse.
Finances prevented Derbyshire from bringing in a coach with a higher profile than Bud, who will admit himself that he was over-promoted and found it tough to deal with a dressing room full of big egos, including mine. I didn’t have a bad summer. In the Championship I scored 926 runs, more than anyone else, but I did not feel there was an improvement in our wickets. Early in the season we played Durham at Chesterfield and the game produced 1,570 runs. Kim insisted that we had to play on pitches with more grass and Ken Roe, who was the chairman of our grounds committee, resigned in protest. I had most of my 926 runs by the beginning of June, including my only hundred at The Oval, but after that, as we started playing on more seamer-friendly pitches, I struggled to adapt again. I wasn’t the only one. Mohammad Azharuddin had returned but after scoring 205 in that Durham run-feast he hardly scored a run and at various times we lost Kim, Pete Bowler and Frankie Griffith to injury. Kim dropped down to number five so Adrian Rollins, a powerfully-built opening batsman, got his opportunity. We lost both knockout quarter-finals at home on pitches prepared so we could fight fire with fire in the mistaken belief that our seam attack would prove to be better than our opponents’. That didn’t help the mood around the club much.
Halfway through the season Brian Bolus, one of the England selectors, spoke to me after a day’s play during which I had made a few runs. He told me that I was pencilled in for an A tour that winter if I maintained the form I had shown in the first half of the season. I was absolutely elated but the possibility of finally representing my country seemed to inhibit rather than inspire me. I finished the season with 926 Championship runs although I would have got to 1,000 had five of our last six days not been lost to rain. For the first time since 1927 no Derbyshire player reached the 1,000-run landmark and as the season wore on I got more and more frustrated. I wasn’t very good at dealing with situations I couldn’t control, such as the state of our wickets, and didn’t react very well. The meeting with Bolus should have given me all the incentive I needed to try and forget all the other distractions in an increasingly discordant dressing room and kick on, but I didn’t. This was the first year of my new five-year contract but by the end of that summer of 1994 I had started to regret making such a long-term commitment. For me, Derbyshire had gone a bit stale.
Kim might have sensed the same for at the beginning of 1995 he announced that it would be his last year as captain. We had a new chairman in Mike Horton by then, a driven, dynamic individual determined to drag the club in a new direction. We got on well. He sorted out the club’s finances, which had been in a mess, and because he was a Derby lad and a visible presence at our home games the supporters liked and identified with him.
On the playing side it wasn’t a great year unless you were a bowler. Between them, Devon Malcolm, Alan Warner, Phil DeFreitas and Dominic Cork, who made his England Test debut at Lord’s that summer, took 290 Championship wickets. But their consistency was not matched by our batsmen. I scored 1,084 runs but we finished 14th in the Championship and made no progress in the one-day competitions.
To help shore up the batting we’d signed Daryl Cullinan, the experienced South African. His arrival pushed me up the order to three which I wasn’t pleased about having, I felt, produced my best performances at four. But, as with Mohammad Azharuddin before him, I wanted to learn from Daryl and was happy to have the peg next to his in the changing room, although as the summer unfolded he gave very little away. Even Daryl will admit he took his cricket perhaps a little too seriously back then. He’d barely been introduced to the other lads on the day he arrived when he decided to get something off his chest. ‘Look guys, I’m a serious bloke and I’m very serious about my cricket,’ he told us. ‘I don’t like practical jokes and I don’t like banter. By all means you enjoy that but do not involve me.’
So of course when we played at Lord’s a few weeks later Dominic Cork borrowed his car keys while Daryl was out batting and drove his Mercedes right round to the Nursery End and parked it in a spot tucked away by the groundsman’s sheds that probably only the groundsman himself knew existed. We were staying at a hotel across the road from Lord’s and would walk back there after play so it wasn’t until the final day that Dominic faced his dilemma. Did he have the bottle to leave Daryl’s car hidden away? Some of the other lads egged him on but in the end he drove the car back round. Daryl never mentioned it but he certainly didn’t forget it or the merciless stick he would take from guys like Colin Wells about the South African rugby team during that World Cup year.
On the penultimate day of the season the lads decided to throw a party in the changing room after play. We were on our way to beating Lancashire and only had to take a couple of wickets in the morning to complete our victory. A load of beers were brought in and we had a great night until a few of the lads noticed that Daryl, who hadn’t come along and who would be flying home immediately after the game, had already immaculately packed his coffin, probably to ensure he didn’t have to stay in Derby a minute longer than was necessary. It was an easy target for a few of his more boisterous team-mates who filled the coffin with a mixture of Guinness, blackcurrant juice and lager. And I mean filled. When the lid came down just enough seeped out of the top and trickled down its sides.
When I got to the ground the following day six or seven of the players were already on the pitch loosening up, which was unusual because the time for our formal pre-match warm-up was still 20 minutes away. Daryl walked in, exchanged a terse good morning greeting with me, opened the lid of his coffin, which had his Derbyshire sweater, now a very dark blue with purple stains on the badge breast pocket, lying on top and closed it again before walking out in silence. Having not witnessed what had happened the previous night I rushed out to warn the others. After we’d completed our victory and Kim had said a few words Daryl, who hadn’t even been on the field for the last rites of the match, walked in, picked up his wallet and car keys and left again. A moment later, just as we were starting to relax, he burst through the door and pointed to Dominic Cork, Colin Wells, Phil DeFreitas and Karl Krikken one by one. ‘If any of you fuckers ever come to South Africa watch your backs.’ Dominic’s face went white. With England due to tour there that winter he took the threat very seriously. Poor old Karl Krikken was in a right flap too, which was understandable as he hadn’t even been at the party the night before!
The highlight of that year for me was my maiden double hundred, although its aftermath led to me asking to be released from my Derbyshire contract for the first but not the last time.
We were playing Kent at Maidstone and the wicket was flat. Aravinda de Silva scored a brilliant 255 for them and what impressed me the most about his innings was how he rarely hit the ball in the air. I learned from that and it was only when I got past 150, and fatigue started to creep in, that I began to take a few risks. Until then I had played as well as at any time in my career. It had been a hot day and when I got back to the hotel I was all for an early night, but Phil felt this landmark in a player’s career should be celebrated and ordered a bottle of champagne from the bar which three or four of us duly shared.
In an attempt to exert his authority Bud Hill had instigated a midnight curfew and, amazingly, it hadn’t been breached up until then but that night I think I got back to the room I was sharing with Dominic at a minute or two past midnight. I was too tired to contemplate breaking the curfew properly and sampling Maidstone’s nightlife and as soon as my head hit the pillow I was out like a light. The following day we played Kent in the Sunday League and I scored 79 but, unusually for me, had a bad day in the field and dropped four catches, three of them on the boundary. There were certainly no recriminations afterwards from either Bud or Kim but the following day, after we’d returned to Derby, Reg Taylor, the club secretary, called me into his office.
He congratulated me on the double hundred and then told me that I’d broken the midnight curfew and was going to be fined. I told him that yes, I hadn’t been back in the room bang on midnight but had only been a minute or two later than that and asked for a little leeway, bearing in mind I’d scored 216 a few hours earlier. I knew for a fact that others had broken the curfew but I didn’t want to exacerbate the situation. But my pleas cut no ice with the secretary so I told him that I wasn’t going to pay the fine and I wasn’t going to play either. If that’s how Derbyshire wanted to treat me then I was effectively going on strike.
Reg reported this to Mike Horton and after a brief standoff the fine was rescinded and I was given a verbal warning instead. My strike was off but I was still fuming about my treatment and a few days later I wrote to the club asking to be released. It was nothing more than a warning shot because I knew legally I had no chance of getting out of the contract, which still had three more years to run. I felt it was in my best interests to get a fresh start somewhere where batsmen would be valued a bit more than I thought they were at Derbyshire. I desperately wanted to play for my country but I was no nearer even an A tour than I’d been a year earlier after my conversation with Brian Bolus. Back then my ritual when the winter tour squads were announced was to get in the car and drive into the countryside and listen to the announcement on the radio. Once they’d got to Butcher I knew I’d be spending another winter at home.
A couple of days after the season ended I took a surprise phonecall from Dean Jones, the Australian batsman and a player I greatly admired. He had just been appointed Kim’s successor as captain, which was a complete shock to me, and said that he would be bringing Les Stillman, the successful coach of Victoria, with him. ‘Look Grizz, it’s a fresh start,’ Dean said. ‘I want you to bat at number three and I promise to give you my proper backing. I’ve seen enough of you to know that you can have a very good career. See you next April.’
Having been so despondent a few days earlier, as I contemplated a long winter trying to extricate myself from my Derbyshire contract, I felt elated. Finally, things appeared to be changing at the club and when I withdrew my request to leave Mike Horton wasn’t in the least bit surprised. ‘I think Les and Dean will get the best out of you,’ Mike said. He had no evidence to back up that statement but he was spot on.