THE Oval has played a big part in my life in cricket. I made my first first-class appearance there and a decade or so later made my England debut. It is also the ground where, thanks to the Australian coach Les Stillman, I rebooted my career.
I always used to enjoy The Oval. The wickets were usually bouncy and quick which, I felt, suited my game, but when I turned up there in early June 1997 I was in a bit of a mess.
A few weeks earlier Les and our new captain Dean Jones swept into the club and I knew straight away that things were never going to be the same again at Derbyshire. They certainly made a favourable first impression. Instead of slogging around the old racecourse in pre-season we were taken to Ampleforth College for three days. It was a traditional old-style fitness boot camp but also a chance to get to know our new coach. Dean arrived a few days later but he had clearly had a big input into how we would prepare for the new season.
Les told a story about his own career which I use myself today when I am coaching youngsters. He’d been a modest cricketer who’d played a few first-class games for South Australia and Victoria in the 1970s. He then worked in commerce and became a middle-ranking manager, coaching the game in his spare time. He was asked by his boss one day to tell a guy who was due to retire that week that if he hung on for another three months the company would throw him a lavish leaving party and present him with a gold carriage clock. Les relayed the information to his colleague who told him, ‘I’ve done 40 years with the company and I cannot do another day.’ So he left that afternoon and Les followed him out of the door.
He didn’t want to end up like that guy, full of regrets that he didn’t follow the path he wanted. So he quit and concentrated on coaching.
He came with Dean after a bust-up at Victoria, where they had enjoyed some success, and were a real double act. Dean’s approach was typically Australian. He was forthright in the extreme and no words were left unsaid when he was on one. Les was a bit calmer but he was good at building relationships with the players and was quick to identify each of our strengths and weaknesses.
What really helped create a positive environment was that Dean and Les had no agenda. Everyone on the staff was considered a first-team player and they weren’t afraid to follow a hunch and back unproven guys. That had a good effect on the team in two ways. Players who thought they were an automatic selection suddenly weren’t sure and the youngsters who felt a long summer of second team cricket lay ahead suddenly had every incentive to impress Dean and Les.
And of course Dean was still a fantastic player. In our second Championship game at Sheffield against Yorkshire, on an admittedly easy-paced pitch, he scored a superb 214. More importantly though, from the perspective of the team, a lad called John Owen, who they had called up for his debut, scored a century.
The atmosphere around the dressing room and the club was the best I’d experienced in my time at Derbyshire. For me, Dean’s approach was just what I needed. I wanted to play hard, aggressive cricket but I also wanted my leaders to challenge me, be hard on me and help me achieve my own ambition, which I’d spoken to Les about in pre-season, and that was to play for England.
But while everyone else seemed invigorated by the new regime and were scoring runs or taking wickets in those early weeks, I was struggling. I got a half-century against Essex in late May, a game I remember more because Devon Malcolm bowled Graham Gooch in both innings with two of the quickest deliveries I’d ever seen. Gooch had just joined the England selection panel and it was Devon’s way of getting back at the chairman of selectors, Ray Illingworth, who had criticised Devon in a book that had just been published.
When we turned up to play Surrey I felt under pressure for my place. In the first innings I got to 24 before Chris Lewis had me caught in the covers. It had been a terrible knock, full of frantic slashes over the slips and much playing and missing. I trudged off feeling very sorry for myself. I realised I had problems and that opposition bowlers had worked me out. They knew I liked width outside off stump and that I was prepared to risk taking on the short ball. Some days it came off but increasingly it didn’t.
I was never one for throwing bats and kit around when I got out so when Les popped his head around the dressing room door a bit later I must have given the impression of being surprisingly calm, even though inside I was totally fed up. So the player who thought he was good enough to play for England asked his coach, ‘What did you think?’ Les gave me a look of utter contempt, as if it was an affront to him merely to offer a response. ‘For someone who keeps telling me he should be playing for England it was one of the worst innings I have ever seen. You will never ever play for England playing the way you do and with the game you’ve got. In fact, you might not be playing for Derbyshire much longer.’
Talk about giving it to me straight. Now I was raging. Normally I would have puffed my chest out and told him I’d prove him wrong but this time I didn’t have an answer. Amid the shock and anger I felt at Les’s blunt assessment I knew he was right. An hour later, after I’d let the anger subside, I found him in the dining area behind the changing rooms. ‘Les, you’re right. If you are such a good coach help me get where I want to be.’ So he did.
He asked me to go back to the hotel that night and think about the cricketer I wanted to be and that we’d meet at The Oval at 7.30 the next morning to start work, long before the other players arrived to practise. When I got to the ground at about 7am I still didn’t know what sort of player I wanted to be, only that I wanted to be better. Back then the players used to park behind the stands at the Vauxhall End, climb the stairs into the ground and walk around to the pavilion. As I made my way up the stairs all I could hear was the sound of the ball hitting the bat. When I got to the top there in the nets, on their own, was Graham Thorpe, who had made 185 earlier in the game, hitting balls back to his coach, Alan Butcher. I sat behind the net for a few minutes watching Thorpe hit throw-downs, one after another. That was my Eureka moment. That’s who I wanted to be, or at least a right-handed version. Graham Thorpe, a player I’d first encountered at the Schools Festival in Oxford a decade or so earlier but now established as one of the best batsmen in the world.
I had always stayed left side of the ball, side on and trying to get on to the front foot so I could attack anything on or outside off stump. Les got me over to the off stump and aligned me to get me looking straight back down the pitch so, at the moment the bowler released the ball, I could hit it straight back down that pathway. We scratched out lines in the net where he wanted my back and front foot to go to help me come into the ball straighter. It’s a popular trigger movement these days but back then most players stayed side on and looked to get a big stride into the ball. It was a major reconstruction and I honestly believed that after that initial session, which lasted no more than 45 minutes, that I would be fixed. When Les told me this was just the beginning I felt a bit despondent, although I was determined to stick with it. I was committed to change, all I needed once I had got used to the new trigger movements was to get my timing right. Back and across, back and across, back and across…
In the second innings I was keen to implement my new technique and scored 42. I felt awful and really scratched around. When I got out I felt worse than I had in the first innings and told Les it must have looked bad. His reply surprised me, ‘It was the best innings I have seen you play. It was an innings that matched your desire to play at the highest level. All that was missing was timing, and that will come with practice.’ What Les could not comprehend was that I had started work on a fundamental technical adjustment in the morning and implemented it in a game situation the same day. ‘I admire your courage,’ he added. I left feeling absolutely elated.
It was a major turning point in my career. I was committing my game to Les but neither of us could have foreseen how quickly it would pay dividends. Three days after the Surrey game ended we played Hampshire at Southampton and I batted for 407 minutes – more than a day – and scored a career-best 239, hitting 27 fours and five sixes. Afterwards, Les told me a story about Dean, who would often struggle to back up a good score. He was right. Since the double hundred at Sheffield he hadn’t passed 50 in the Championship, although his one-day form was superb and he went on to score 1,151 runs in the limited-overs game that summer, a new county record. ‘Don’t make it a one-off, back it up, back it up,’ was the message he drummed home all the way back to Derby.
I got out to Anil Kumble for one when we beat India for the first time since 1932 in our next game but in the following Championship match against Middlesex at Derby I scored 125 and 136 not out, the first time a Derbyshire player had made hundreds in the same game since 1990. By then my movements and timing were in synch. Even against such experienced operators as Angus Fraser, who would always bowl that nagging length that you weren’t sure whether to come forward or play back to I just felt I had so much time to play the ball. Anything short I would punch through the leg side and anything full I was drilling back down the ground. The only downside was I’d lost the ability to play the cut, but that was always a risky shot for me and because I was scoring in other areas it didn’t matter. I scored six hundreds and finished with an aggregate of 1,590 runs that season.
All around me team-mates were feeling the benefits of the new regime. Kim dropped down to number five and scored 1,436 and passed the Derbyshire record for the most first-class runs. Phil DeFreitas (62 wickets) and Devon Malcolm (70) had great seasons with the ball and Andrew ‘A.J.’ Harris took 48 in his first full season. We started to win games consistently and Mike Horton and the committee rightly gave themselves a pat on the back for choosing Dean and Les. In August we won four matches in a row and suddenly had a chance of winning the Championship. We went down to Taunton and had Somerset eight wickets down chasing 383. Dean was criticised for a cautious declaration afterwards but the thing that really did for us was when Jason Kerr was bowled by Daffy first ball and the umpire, Tony Clarkson, ruled that Kerr hadn’t been ready to face the delivery. He went on to score an unbeaten 68 and save the game.
Dean had made another wildcard selection for that game, a slow left-armer called Glenn Roberts who came in for his debut, but he struggled while in the next game, at home to Warwickshire, Dominic Cork suffered a broken shoulder when he was hit by Dougie Brown and was unable to bowl. We then lost by four wickets. Leicestershire, a relatively small county like ourselves, ended up champions but if I’m honest I never felt we could win the title. We didn’t have a decent spinner, which had been an issue at Derbyshire for a number of years, and we lacked the experience and nous to negotiate those tense last few weeks of the season.
Dean’s philosophy throughout the summer remained the same, in fact it was the creed by which he lived his life. Play hard, leave nothing on the pitch and be brutally honest, both with yourself and your team-mates. He was constantly challenging individuals in the team. ‘Did you do your best?’ I liked that you could go hard at him as well, challenge what he said and the assumptions he made about how you felt. As soon as we left the dressing room Dean was happy to share a beer or two with you and forget what had just been said. It was open and honest but towards the end of the season I sensed that not everyone shared my views on Dean and Les, and in particular some of the senior players led by Kim. I didn’t agree but I could understand their view. Did they really want another season of being challenged and shouted at one minute by someone who a few minutes later would try to be everyone’s best mate?
I liked Dean’s approach and Les had been a fantastic help, but as the season came to an end I knew it was a minority view.
Despite having had my best first-class season there was no reward in the form of England recognition, even on the A tour. I was absolutely devastated. It was one of the lowest points of my career and for a few days I was inconsolable. I had enjoyed working with Dean and Les but deep down I knew I had to leave. I was convinced the ‘Derbyshire factor’ was stopping me fulfilling my ambitions to play for my country. I was prepared to give it one more year there but I also vowed that it would be my last.
It was well known around the circuit that I had itchy feet and a few weeks after the season finished I took a call from Alan Wells, captain of Sussex. They wanted me and were prepared to pay what it took. I was flattered but a couple of weeks later Alan was sacked and his departure sparked a major exodus from the club with five more established names leaving Hove. There was talk of interest from Yorkshire, with whom I had a strong affinity because Dad was born there, and Nottinghamshire. I’d got a few mates in the dressing room at Edgbaston and I consoled myself with the thought that if I did leave I would have plenty of options. At 26 I might not have still been the player I wanted to be but I was at the peak of my earning powers.
Dad was chief executive of Southend United and through working with players on transfers he got to know the agent Jonathan Barnett, who had sorted out Dean Jones’s Derbyshire deal. That winter we had lots of discussions as to how I would get out of my contract, which still had two more years to run. In football players moved all the time even though they were under contract. A player would be tapped up and offered more money elsewhere, the club would dig their heels in and eventually after a stand-off they invariably sold him to cut their losses and get an unhappy player off their hands. Nothing like that existed in cricket; it was very rare that anyone was released by a county when they were still under contract. Jonathan’s idea was to get the club who wanted me to pay Derbyshire the final year of my contract, a kind of transfer fee if you liked. ‘Any county that wants you enough will pay it,’ he told me. At the time I was earning around £38k a year, which was about average for a capped player of my experience.
We broached the subject that winter with Derbyshire but not surprisingly they dug their heels in. I remember reading all sorts of nonsense at the time that we were going to take our case to the courts but if those discussions took place they lasted no more than a few seconds. We knew we would have to sit tight.
When I reported back at the start of the 1997 season part of me still hoped that the anti-Jones and Stillman faction had weakened during the winter but within a few days it was obvious this was not the case. Andy Hayhurst had come in to coach the second XI which meant another person was bringing ideas to the mix. Dean seemed distracted when he arrived. His wife was on crutches and struggling to get around, having broken her ankle, so with two young children to look after he had more responsibilities at home. Meanwhile, Les was increasingly aligning himself away from Dean as battle lines were drawn and another Derbyshire row came slowly to the boil.
Les was quite political and while he wasn’t in the same camp as the guys who wanted Dean out, he had backed Dean at Victoria and lost his job and he could sense history was about to repeat itself.
The atmosphere wasn’t nasty but it seemed we were going through the motions again, the energy we’d had a year previously wasn’t there. The anti-Jones faction knew he would in all likelihood be leaving at the end of the season so there wasn’t the need to impress him anymore. Predictably, we started the season slowly. In fact it wasn’t until August that we won our first Championship game and by then Dean was back in Australia and Les had been completely ostracised by the players.
Dean resigned after he’d cocked up a declaration and we lost to Hampshire at Chesterfield, but the incident that made his mind up to leave took place not on a cricket field but the golf course at Breadsall Priory, not far from the County Ground. We had a few serious golfers in the squad while Dean loved the game too and one afternoon after nets he asked if anyone wanted to join him for 18 holes. No one was keen so I said I’d accompany him and off we went. We were putting out on the first green when I heard some familiar voices a few yards away walking down another fairway. We looked over and there were Kim, Phil DeFreitas, Karl Krikken and Dominic Cork. Dean didn’t say anything but his expression told me he was absolutely devastated. Of course he understood players were free to do their own thing but he couldn’t figure out why they wanted to play without him or another team-mate. We hardly spoke for the rest of the round but that was the moment Dean knew he had lost the dressing room. He probably started packing his bags that night.
He was crucified for the declaration which left Hampshire needing 310 in 59 overs, a target they reached easily. Even I thought it was ridiculously generous but his argument was he had been prepared to gamble to get us a precious win. By now the local press were being briefed about an increasingly toxic dressing room atmosphere and the day after the game Dean walked into the office of the chairman of cricket, Ian Buxton, and resigned. He was on the plane home that day but if the club thought that things would settle down they were mistaken. Before he left Dean issued a statement, which had been sanctioned by the club, pouring rubbish on Derbyshire and hammering some of the players for a perceived lack of commitment towards him, for struggling to come to terms with what was needed to be a successful player and being unable to take personal criticism. Les had warned the club management weeks before that if they didn’t back Dean he would walk and Dean was never one to glad-hand with committee members anyway. He would be left scratching his head when they criticised players in front of him. ‘Why don’t they pull for their team? I can’t understand it,’ he told me after one committee meeting.
Dean’s departure left Les completely out on a limb. While Andy Hayhurst got more involved with the first team Les ended up with the seconds but within a few weeks he wasn’t involved at all with the playing side. But because his house in Victoria had been rented out and his kids were settled in school he spent quite a bit of that summer taking them around the tourist attractions of England once they had broken up, so at least they benefitted out of another Derbyshire implosion!
Phil DeFreitas was appointed captain but Kim was still very much in charge of the dressing room and once the dust had settled he called the players together. He wanted to issue a statement answering some of the criticisms made of them by Dean. The club warned him against doing so and I told him I would not be one of the signatories. My stance wasn’t unexpected of course, but I felt sorry for some of the younger lads in the squad who were coerced into signing because of peer pressure from the senior players.
Kim went on local radio during our next match against Warwickshire at Edgbaston, when Ian Blackwell made his Derbyshire debut, to expand on the statement. The club fined Kim £1,500 and it was suggested that the players chip in to help him pay. As soon as that was mentioned I told them I would not be getting my chequebook out. At our next match at home to Sussex, Kim spent part of the game off the field drafting a press release in response to the committee’s decision to censure him and outlining that nine of the ten players had offered to chip in to pay the fine. It didn’t take the press long to work out who the odd man out was.
By then I’d had a meeting with Phil and made my own position clear. I told him I was finished with Derbyshire and would be leaving at the end of the season, come what may. I added that I was happy to continue playing but I reiterated that when I did so it would not be for this team but for the club, its supporters and myself. I was done with that group of players. Phil picked me for the next few weeks which I was grateful for because it would have been easy to dump me in the seconds and let me rot for the rest of the season. Fortunately, Ian Buxton was quite sensible throughout all of this. He recognised mistakes on both sides and when we met he promised that I could leave at the end of the season, providing I remained 100 per cent committed to Derbyshire between now and then which I was happy to do. I repeated what I said to Phil, which Ian accepted, before he offered me the captaincy for the rest of the season which came as a total surprise. I politely declined his offer. If the others weren’t going to listen to Dean Jones what chance did I have?
In any case, I was desperately trying to keep a low profile after an incident just before Dean departed which drew me into conflict for the first and not the last time with the TCCB’s disciplinary panel and a certain Shane Warne.
We played Australia at the start of their tour and the game was live on Sky Sports. Before going out to bat I asked Dean how to play Warne, whom I’d never faced before. He told me to treat him like an off-spinner and hit against the spin. I had got to seven when he bowled me his slider, the ball that goes straight on. I got deep in the crease and managed to deflect it fine for four runs. Shane was already appealing when the ball pitched because he thought it was going to skid on. I turned to see where it had gone, looked up and saw Shane running past me to celebrate with Ian Healy. I told the umpire, Vanburn Holder, that I’d hit it for four. I can still remember his reply now, ‘I know you hit it, but I’ve given you out.’ Vanburn had made a mistake and if he’d admitted as much then I would have just had to accept it. This exchange between Vanburn and I and was repeated a couple of times before I dragged myself off. On my way past Healy he tried to be sympathetic, ‘Tough luck mate.’ I turned and replied, ‘You’re surely not going to claim that are you?’ Which was the worst thing I could have done because within seconds the entire Australian team, including the lads who had brought on drinks, were giving me a load of abuse to which I responded with a few choice words of my own, pointing the bat at them as I got back to the pavilion. For the first and only time in my career I threw my bat across the dressing room, damaging it badly on the corner of my coffin, which only made things worse.
Not long after that I was summoned to the chairman’s office. The whole incident had been replayed several times on Sky and the TCCB had already been in touch with Derbyshire. The upshot was a £750 fine and some bad publicity in the next day’s papers. I partly redeemed myself in the second innings by scoring 91 from 76 balls to set up a one-wicket victory, Derbyshire’s first over Australia since 1919. I attracted a lot of positive reviews for that knock but the damage had already been done.
I only made one Championship hundred that season and finished with around 900 fewer runs than I’d made in 1996, but my one-day form was excellent. I scored 445 runs in 11 Sunday League games and in the quarter-final of the NatWest Trophy made an unbeaten 129 against Sussex. It remains one of the favourite innings of my career because of the circumstances in which it was made.
I spent most of the night before the game vomiting down the toilet. Not only was the dressing room atmosphere at the club pretty toxic, it appeared the water system was contaminated as well because when I got Sam to phone Ann Brentnall on the morning of the game to tell her I was too ill to play it emerged she’d had the same conversation with about eight or nine other players. I was asked to report to the ground anyway and remember sitting in the dressing room as one ashen-faced team-mate after another walked through the door. Thankfully Kim won the toss and we batted because if we’d been in the field I’m not sure we’d have been able to bowl. We did no warm-up as such and I had to change my whites twice before going out to bat because of a toilet emergency!
It was a warm day but the pitch was flat and Sussex’s attack was fairly modest. I hardly scored a run for the first ten overs but the adrenalin slowly kicked in and I started to feel a bit better. Suddenly I was playing as well as I had all season and celebrating a hundred. I finished on 129 and our total was a new record for 60-over matches. Even after that, though, the response to my efforts was pretty lukewarm. One of the lads told me afterwards that the consensus was I should have sacrificed my wicket at the end so we could get a few more runs. A new competition record clearly wasn’t enough.
Those extra three hours or so batting enabled a few of our bowlers to rest and we were confident of defending our score, only for Rajesh Rao to take the game away from us with a brilliant 158 not out as Sussex chased 328 to win with four wickets and four balls in hand. Talk about every dog having its day. Raj played brilliantly but we didn’t bowl or field well. Phil, by his own admission, wasn’t the greatest tactician but his bowlers let him down and our last chance of salvaging something from the season had gone.
I played in a couple more Championship games but just before a Sunday League match against Leicestershire at Grace Road in late August I was approached by Andy Hayhurst who told me they were going to give a few youngsters a go and that I was being left out. My only motivation by then was to try and beat Kim’s record for the most one-day runs in a season of 1,123 by a non-overseas batsman. I was on 988 and with four league games left I thought I had a good chance but it wasn’t to be. I packed up my kit for the last time. My Derbyshire career was over.
I’m frequently asked what my relationship is like with those former team-mates now, nearly two decades later, and I’m happy to report that by and large we have no problems when we bump into each other at Derbyshire reunions or PCA golf days. A few years ago I played against Kim for the Glenn McGrath Foundation against an Old Derbyshire XI at Chesterfield and we had a good chat. I think we both accept that we said and did things at the time that we now regret. Kim also moved on at the end of 1997 to join Gloucestershire and I think moving to a new county helped revive his career. I still see the likes of Pete Bowler, Tim O’Gorman, John Morris and Karl Krikken and have a good relationship with all of them. I have no axe to grind with Dominic Cork either. Corky was, shall we say, the most interesting character at Derbyshire back then.
In September 1997 all I could do was look to the future. It was time for pastures new.