THE STATE OF CRICKET
Imagine if cricket didn’t already exist and someone came along and tried to invent it. Imagine the conversations with broadcasters and members of the public: ‘So, there are two teams of 11 players and they both take it in turns to bat and bowl. There are two players batting at the same time, and their main aim is to stop the ball hitting three pieces of wood sticking out of the ground. In one-day cricket, they bat and bowl once. And a one-day game can go on for 20 overs, 40 overs or 50 overs. I’ll explain what an over is in a minute. But in first-class cricket, they have to bat and bowl twice. But the only people who’ll be able to watch that are pensioners, the unemployed or the unemployable, because it’s played during the week, when most people are at work. If it’s a first-class match between two countries, the game can go on for five days. That’s called a Test. If it does last the full five days, it’s a draw. But it might not last five days, it might last only three or four. Sometimes less. And because people don’t really expect a game to last four or five days, the ground will often be full for the first three days. Bit weird, I know, but that’s just the way we’ve designed it, so that people flock to watch the result being set up but hardly anyone watches the game being won. And when the winning team are celebrating, the cheers are literally echoing around the ground. If they’re celebrating winning a series – I’ll come back to that – they’ll be spraying champagne at each other and feeling a bit stupid, because it doesn’t feel like anyone else is particularly interested. And if it rains you can’t play. Instead, the players sit in a pavilion getting bored and the fans huddle under staircases drinking very expensive beer and burgers. But you don’t rearrange the game for another time, you pretend like it never happened. Did I mention that a Test series might consist of five games and last for months? No? I’m not quite finished yet. Not interested? Oh, fair enough, I’ll try someone else . . . ’
What kind of state is cricket in? It depends on what you’re comparing it to. If you’re comparing it to shove ha’penny, then it’s flying. If you’re comparing it to football, then it’s in a terrible state. But most sports all over the world are in a terrible state compared to football. Football is the benchmark in terms of playing numbers, attendances, fandom, money and media attention, and every other sport is fighting for little scraps. There was a time, not so long ago, when that wasn’t the case. Back in the 1980s, you’d even get snooker on the back pages of the tabloids instead of football. But now, probably the only sport that can shift football is boxing (and only if Anthony Joshua or Tyson Fury are fighting) or rugby union (and only if England are doing well in a World Cup). Obviously, English cricket has had its moment in the sun since, for example the 2005 Ashes and when the national team won the World Cup in such dramatic fashion in 2019, but I suspect they were blips rather than part of a trend. As things stand, English cricket is where it has been for many years, a second-or possibly third-tier sport.
When kids reach 14 or 15, and realise that they don’t want to spend all week working hard at school only to spend all weekend playing cricket because they’ve got mates to mess around with and girls to chase and any number of other things to do, they start drifting off. Cricket is also an expensive game. Modern bats cost a few hundred quid (and break far more easily than old ones, despite not being guaranteed) and there’s also the gloves and pads and other protective equipment to consider. And a lot of state schools don’t play it because they don’t have access to equipment or pitches or nets or groundsmen, which is why there are fewer working-class players in county cricket than there were 100 years ago. Gone are the days when, as the old saying goes, the committees of some counties only had to whistle down the pit shaft to summon a handful of fast bowlers. If the England team has a bad few years when they’re getting thumped by the Aussies and not winning trophies, cricket’s relevance could slide even further.
Whether you think cricket is healthy or not also depends on what you want it to look like. I want Test cricket to be strong, I want England to be good at it and I want the Ashes to be massive. That’s because I think Test cricket is and always should be the pinnacle. But even I realise that that’s an outdated way of looking at the situation. In England, we still get big crowds for Test cricket, but that isn’t the case in other parts of the world. In some countries, Test cricket seems to be hanging on for dear life. I watch Test matches in the West Indies or Sri Lanka and there’s hardly anyone there, even on day one. Then again, people were going on about Test cricket hanging on for dear life when I started playing. Even 20 years ago, the bulk of the crowd for Tests would be English, apart from in Australia, where Test cricket still has huge cultural significance.
One of English cricket’s biggest problems is its lack of visibility, in that it’s no longer shown live on terrestrial TV. If huge swathes of the population without satellite subscriptions can’t watch it, they’re not going to be into it. The 2005 Ashes series, which was broadcast by Channel 4, was watched by millions and made players household names. But it wasn’t sustainable, for Channel 4 or English cricket. Since taking over, Sky has invested hundreds of millions of pounds into English cricket. Without that money, I’m not sure English cricket would be as healthy as it is today. So how can people say Sky have been bad for cricket? It doesn’t really make sense. Who would be showing cricket if Sky weren’t? Do people really think that BBC2 would clear eight hours a day for five days for a Test match between England and Bangladesh? And do they really think that the money the BBC would pay would prop up English cricket? Pay TV has been necessary to keep the game afloat. And Sky’s coverage is brilliant, they’ve brought it such a long way in the last 20 years.
Cricket has been transitioning for quite a while now, basically since the introduction of Twenty20 at the start of the century. Twenty20 has changed the game in many ways, from the way it’s played to the priorities of players, fans and broadcasters. If you’re a kid now, you don’t want to watch a batsman score a careful 50 from 150 balls, even if it’s for the good of the team. Kids don’t watch that and think, ‘Wow, what a craftsman, what technique, what patience and concentration’, they just think it’s boring. Instead, they want to see someone come out and smash 50 from 15 balls. And a lot of today’s players are the same. I’ll hear them waxing lyrical about the Big Bash in Australia or the Indian Premier League (IPL) or the Bangladesh Premier League or read their social-media posts about how far they or someone else belted a ball, and not be able to get my head around it. Some of these lads will be good players making a decent living, which I can’t blame them for. But we now have the situation where players who work hard to be what used to be called ‘proper’ batsmen – players like Kent and England’s Zak Crawley, who can get his head down and grind out innings against good fast bowling – are earning far less money than Twenty20 specialists who travel the world trying to belt every ball as far as they can, which is dangerous for the longer forms of the game.
As soon as the authorities, broadcasters, sponsors and rich businessmen realised that young people prefer to watch bowlers being smashed all over the park for a few hours than a life and death struggle between bat and ball, that spelled trouble for longer forms of the game. The Indian Premier League turned everything on its head because of the amount of money involved and the glamour associated with it. Suddenly, there were billionaires and movie stars involved in cricket, the sport seemed sexier, the fans lapped up the razzmatazz and players became rich beyond their wildest dreams.
When I started playing cricket, hardly any cricketers were rich. I certainly didn’t expect to make my fortune playing cricket. My biggest ambition was to play Test cricket for England, and the old-fashioned way was to graft in domestic cricket, score lots of runs, get picked by your country, make a name for yourself on the international stage and then earn a load of cash playing Twenty20 for a few years at the end, almost as a bonus. But I suspect we’ll start seeing younger players taking a different route: playing loads of Twenty20, lapping up the glitz and glamour, making a load of cash and hoping that that will be a route into the England set-up. And if it isn’t a route into the England set-up, at least they might be financially secure.
The IPL and Twenty20 in general reflect modern society. I look at Twenty20 like Love Island. To get invited onto Love Island, people don’t have to do anything other than look good. And once they’re on it, they don’t have to do anything other than look good and be slightly amusing for a few weeks. Twenty20 cricket is similar. Players who aren’t even that good can get picked up by an IPL team and earn a lot of money for playing one or two decent innings. They might be the next big thing for five minutes, but at the end of their career hardly anyone will remember them. They’ll just be one of hundreds of IPL players who smashed a few sixes one night in Mumbai or Chennai or Jaipur for some team or other that they didn’t even have any connection to, other than the fact their owner decided to buy them at an auction, usually because some other rich person had bought a player they wanted. There are cricketers who are brilliant in all forms of the game, but they won’t be remembered for what they did for the Rajasthan Royals or Sunrisers Hyderabad, they’ll be remembered for the great things they did for their countries in Test matches or World Cups, whether it’s Ben Stokes for England, Steve Smith for Australia or even India’s own Virat Kohli.
But even I realise that saying that Tests are the ultimate form for cricket comes with a bit of snobbery. West Indies cricket was in a terrible place for years and years. They went from being the most powerful Test team in the world in the early 1990s to also-rans in the space of less than a decade. Kids fell out of love with it and they stopped producing world-class players, I suspect because people who might have been batsmen concentrated on football instead and people who might have been fast bowlers concentrated on basketball. But the fact there has been a bit of a resurgence in West Indies cricket is down to Twenty20. Players like Chris Gayle, who was probably the most famous Twenty20 player in the world for a few years, made cricket attractive again, the West Indies won a couple of World Cups and you could argue that without Twenty20, cricket would be on life support in the Caribbean. I’m not sure if the West Indies will ever be a force in Test cricket again, but if you’re winning Twenty20 World Cups, does it really matter? Then when you go to India, cricket there is like football is here, except maybe bigger. And Indian cricketers who make a name for themselves in the IPL earn more than Premier League footballers. Once they retire from cricket, they never have to work again. People argue that Twenty20 has ruined the delicate balance between bat and ball, but I wouldn’t worry about that. There are lots of problems with cricket, but I’ve never been one to complain about wickets being too flat and bowlers not having enough assistance. There were periods in history when bowlers had the edge, and now batsmen have got the upper hand. Fans have always liked to see runs, so we should give them what they want. The challenge for bowlers is to learn new things and be more skilful.
Far more of a worry than international cricket is first-class domestic cricket. The County Championship actually costs the counties money to play it, because hardly anyone watches it. How long can that carry on? It makes no sense. If hardly anyone watches something, year after year, the only rational thing to do is to stop doing it. Surely at some point in the not-too-distant future, someone will take over the domestic game – some innovative thinker, who’s maybe only a young kid now – and think, ‘Hang on a minute, I’m all for tradition, but if the County Championship is being played to empty grounds, what’s the point of it? Who’s it aimed at? Why are we spending money to keep this afloat when we could be playing Twenty20 cricket – which people watch and makes money – all the time instead? And players now get selected for England on T20 form.’ That’s when massive changes will take place, not just in England but all over the world. The purists will dig in and fight, but the changes might just save the game and assure its future.
No other branch of the entertainment industry would continue doing the same thing if hardly anyone was interested and it was losing money. If hardly anyone was watching Top Gear, they’d pull the plug mid-series. If a musical in the West End was only 10 per cent full every night, it wouldn’t last a month. If your band went on tour and was playing to a handful of people in arenas, the tour would be cut short and you’d probably break the band up. If the County Championship does ever come to an end, it will be like when old high-street chains like Woolworths go under. Everyone will be running around clutching their heads and crying and shouting about how much they loved it, and when you’ll ask them, ‘When was the last time you watched a County Championship game?’ they’ll reply, ‘Oh, not since I was a kid’, just like people hadn’t been to Woolworths for decades. How does it make sense to be upset about losing something you weren’t interested in in the first place? I’m interested in county cricket and I like it, but does it make sense?
The County Championship is the worst business proposition imaginable, an almost impossible sell. If you went on Dragon’s Den with that idea – ‘Right, it’s a game that hardly anyone will want to watch in person, which will lose loads of money and will be propped up by TV money, although hardly anyone will want to watch it on TV either, because they’re all watching sports that make sense like football instead’ – they’d not take you up on the offer. When I played the game, I wanted to win the County Championship so badly. The fact that I didn’t still irritates me today.
People sometimes ask me, ‘How can we make first-class cricket cooler or sexier?’ I’m sorry, but sitting there in the cold at eleven o’clock in the morning watching Derbyshire versus Leicestershire will never be cool or sexy to a lot of people. You can chuck millions of pounds of marketing at it – ‘Forget about Love Island, get yourselves down to the County Ground in Derby and you might get to see some cricket between the rain!’ – but people aren’t stupid. Watching Derbyshire versus Leicestershire wasn’t even cool or sexy 100 years ago. The difference is, things didn’t have to be cool or sexy in days gone by, they could be interesting and complicated and eccentric and that was fine. Now, unless something is marketed as cool or sexy, people think it’s a waste of time. Perhaps those people in authority who keep pushing the shorter forms of the game are the wise people and people like me and other ex-players and journalists who think the longer forms of the game are king are delusional.
At least you used to be able to say that the County Championship was a breeding ground for Test cricketers, but even that’s not the case any more. Nowadays, someone will score a few runs in Twenty20 cricket, play a few funky shots and hit a few sixes, and everyone will be talking about them playing Test cricket for England. Or a player will be rested for England games and end up playing in the IPL instead, for a lot more money. If someone wants to prioritise playing Twenty20 cricket for franchises all over the world, good luck to them. But if you want to play Test cricket for England, you’ve got to earn your spot by churning out runs week in, week out in the County Championship and be available when picked. Otherwise, it makes first-class cricket irrelevant.
I’m not sure the cricket authorities really know what they want cricket to be. We’ve got Twenty20 cricket, 40-over cricket, 50-over cricket, three-day cricket, five-day cricket – which some people think should become four-day cricket. They seem to be chucking as much as they can at a wall and hoping something sticks, and now they’ve come up with a new tournament called The Hundred. The Hundred has had a lot of criticism from traditionalists, not least because it’s set to be played by city-based franchises rather than the traditional counties. But I get what they’re trying to do – put on a competition in the summer holidays, when the weather is at its best and families are looking for things to do, broadcast it on the BBC, which has to be a good thing, and build everything else around it. I hope it’s a success and I’ll do my best to make it one.
Being a cricket presenter isn’t necessarily what I want to be, but I felt like I had some sort of responsibility to get involved with The Hundred. There’s been unprecedented amounts of money spent on it (although probably not enough to get the Indian lads interested) and if it doesn’t work, the repercussions for the game could be terrible. So I think we’ve all got to try and make it work, even if we might have some misgivings about the tweaks they’ve made, like introducing city franchises and 10-ball overs. Did I think we needed another format? Probably not. But when all things are said and done, and whatever you want to call it, it’s just another game of cricket. It’s people bowling and people trying to hit fours and sixes and generally entertain.
I remember when the ECB signed a deal with Ian Stanford for a $20 million Twenty20 match between England and a West Indies XI in 2008 and everyone going on about how it might be the end of cricket as we know it. But as soon as they realised they stood to earn a few quid from it, loads of those ex-players suddenly wanted in on it. Ian Botham came out and said he loved the idea, said Stanford could be great for the game. And then when it all went tits up, he said that the ECB should never have gone along with it. It’s funny what money does to people, and we’re seeing it with The Hundred. I’ve had conversations with people who have said how rubbish and pointless it’s going to be, and the next week I’ve found out that they’re going to be working on it. Then they’re all over the media, telling everyone how it could be the saviour of English cricket. As for the players involved, of course they’ll be happy with it, because it means they’ll get to bag a few more quid and show off their talents on terrestrial TV.
But something has got to give. It won’t be 50-over cricket, because that allows for so much advertising, which funds the game, especially in India. And it won’t be Twenty20 cricket, because it’s still popular. So I suspect it will be the first-class game. I’ve always been an advocate for fewer teams playing fewer first-class games of a better standard. That might mean creating regional teams, like the state competition in Australia. Their competition isn’t that strong, but if more care was taken over an English regional competition, the standards were high and games were marketed as events, I think it could be a success. Just as important, it would be a far better breeding ground for Test cricketers. But that’s not going to happen any time soon, because the people in charge of the counties are incredibly proud to be part of the County Championship and too steeped in tradition to support anything that threatens their existence.
Ultimately, the public decides how successful or out of time something is, and they’ve been deciding with their feet and remote controls for a long time now. Cricket’s fundamental problem is that times have changed. Nothing can survive on tradition and nostalgia alone and almost everything eventually goes out of fashion. Look at snooker: in the 1980s, it was all the rage. Even before he became world champion, Dennis Taylor was a household name mainly because he wore his glasses upside down and Kirk Stephens was rock and roll because he wore a white waistcoat. Now, almost everyone you meet thinks snooker is dull, even though the standard is miles better than it was back then. I’d also argue that the standard of cricket is higher than it was. There are fewer batsmen who can stay at the crease for hours on end, but they have got more skilful and found lots of different ways of scoring runs. For that reason, I’d also say it’s a better product than it was. But just as snooker will always be snooker, cricket will always be cricket. Either you’ll be into it or you won’t, however much they try to dress it up or make it cooler or sexier.
The one thing that leaves me cold about cricket, as it does with all sports, is the fact it’s become so tied to technology. I’m not a technophobe, I just think that there’s too much technology about that solves problems that don’t exist. That sort of technology leaves me cold, whether it’s to do with sport, cars or anything really. When I’m driving a fast car, I actually want to be driving it, not the car driving me. I don’t want to be looking at a load of touch screens, I just want a speed dial to tell me how fast I’m going and hear the roaring. Too much reliance on technology makes things sterile. Look at Formula 1, it should be the most exciting sport in the world, but an awful lot of people find it dull. In modern sport, there is so much computer analysis and everything is so professional and planned to within an inch of its life, it’s almost as if they’re trying to take chance out of it. I’ve always said that sport is an art, not a science. It should be creative and unpredictable, not nerdy and calculated. That’s why people love sportspeople who are unconventional and why Tyson Fury is so popular. He’s flawed but he’s interesting. In fact, he’s interesting because he’s flawed. He’s a free spirit and you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen when he speaks into a microphone or enters a ring. When he comes on my TV screen, I can’t take my eyes off him.
Ben Stokes is similar. He’s a brilliant cricketer, but I wouldn’t put my house on him. He might walk out and score the best 100 you’ve ever seen or he might get caught in the slips third ball, having a right go. I’d rather that than watch someone blunt 100 in a day and a half. Not interested. People don’t like perfection, which is why when a sportsperson gets too good, the public turns on them. ‘Good’ becomes synonymous with ‘boring’. We’ve seen it across all sports, from Steve Davis in snooker to Michael Schumacher in Formula 1 to Floyd Mayweather in boxing. Steve Smith is getting to be that way, unless you’re Australian. His Test average is 63, so he’s going to get at least that whenever he bats. Well done, Steve. I don’t like predictability and probably would have hated Don Bradman. Imagine going to watch a cricket match and knowing that someone was probably going to score a 100?
I think Steve Smith is brilliant, as a player and a bloke, and I won’t hear a bad word against him. But as I said when I interviewed him in Australia a few years ago, ‘Steve, to me you’re like beetroot in a sandwich.’ He was a bit perplexed, so I had to explain to him that, like beetroot in a sandwich (which Aussies love), he shouldn’t really work but he does. As a player, he annoys me so much. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to bowl to Steve Smith. I’d probably abuse the shit out of him. I’d have to. And what makes him more annoying is the fact that he doesn’t mean to be annoying. Just the way he leaves the ball would drive me round the bend. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself having a go at him. But then I’d feel all conflicted, because he’s such a nice lad. It’s easier to get stuck into someone when you know they’re a prick.
Other than the abuse, I’d bowl to him just like any other batter. I’d bowl my best ball, pitch it on or just outside off-stump. Bowlers create more problems for themselves by changing what they usually do to suit him. Just bowl as you normally would and make him hit your best balls. If he’s doing that successfully, just try and hit him on the head. Bowl bouncers and set fields for that. But that’s easier said than done, because if he started doing that extravagant leave of his, it would wind me up so much. The last person I saw leave a ball like that was England wicketkeeper Jack Russell, and everyone thought he was daft.
Actually, Jack Russell was daft. When I was 17, I was 12th man for Jack and one of my jobs was making his Weetabix at lunch. He gave me strict instructions to put milk on his Weetabix at 1.04, so that they were ready for him when he came off at 1.15. The first two days were fine, but on the third day I put the milk on a bit late. I gave him his Weetabix, he had a taste and said, ‘Did you put the milk on a 1.11?
‘No, Jack, 1.04, just like you said.’
‘You did, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, Jack. Sorry, Jack, I forgot . . . ’
Nowadays, I’m always being asked if Ben Stokes is better than I was. Personally, I think it’s a bit unfair on Ben, because he’s a left-handed batsman and I got left-handed batsmen out in my sleep. Ask Adam Gilchrist and Brian Lara! I’m only joking. Sort of. Let’s just say that I was a better bowler than he is and he’s a better left-handed batter than me. Saying that, I’d get Ben out every day of the week . . . But seriously, as well as being a fine player, Ben now has something that’s impossible to quantify: stature. Ian Botham had the same thing, and I had it a little bit. If you considered Ben’s bowling in isolation, you’d think it was just all right. He’s a decent bowler, because he’s quite quick and swings it. However, because it’s Ben Stokes bowling those same deliveries, it’s a completely different proposition. Whenever Ben comes on to bowl, it’s an event. Everyone is thinking, ‘Ben Stokes has got the ball in his hands – and he makes things happen.’ Botham was the same in the second part of his career. He’d be sending down deliveries at barely 80 mph and getting wickets based on reputation, because batsmen were playing the man rather than the ball. And when Ben walks out to bat, you can almost see the panic on the faces of opposition players. Bowlers will be thinking about doing things differently, instead of doing what they should do, which is bowl their best deliveries.
It’s not just cricketers who use their reputation as a weapon. You get comedians who have been around for years and earned the right for people to laugh at them. Their material might not even be funny any more, but people want to laugh at them regardless. Some young comedian might follow them on the stage, have loads of great jokes and not get anywhere near as many laughs, because no one knows who they are. It’s the same with old singers, whose voices have cracked and can’t reach the notes like they used to. Taken in isolation, their voices are shot to bits. But people still want to hear them, because of how good their voices were in the past.
So when I say that Ben Stokes’ ability is bolstered by his reputation, that’s not trying to do him down, that’s the ultimate compliment. Not many people in this world have that kind of presence. Even when Ben’s standing in the field, he has an aura about him. He lets batsmen know he’s there, just by the way he carries himself. That’s an incredible weapon for a sportsperson to have in their armoury. He still wouldn’t get me out though, and if we’re going to make this a Top Trumps contest, I reckon I’ve got him covered when it comes to fielding. He does a lot of diving in the slips, whereas I just stuck my hands out. When it comes to fielding, sometimes less is more. Ben might be more agile and look quicker than me, but I was a chess player, quick in the mind and a few moves ahead. You don’t have to be diving anywhere, just read it! And it didn’t matter if you stuck me on the boundary, I didn’t drop a catch in the outfield between 1998 at Nottingham and the Big Bash in 2013, when I shelled a skyer. Fifteen years without dropping a ball, I was absolutely gutted.
I had a pretty weird career, in that I was injured for my first 20-odd Test matches. I couldn’t bowl properly because of a knackered back and wasn’t a good enough batter to make up for it. I had a few years when I was quite useful, including the 2005 Ashes series, before getting injured again. Then I had a couple of good series towards the end of my career, when my bowling was as fast as it had ever been, my batting was coming together a little bit and I honestly thought I was coming into my own as a cricketer. But then injury forced me to retire at 31. So it looks like I never really fulfilled my talent or promise. But my legacy, as people like to call it, is more complicated, in that some people look at my numbers and conclude that I underachieved, while other people get all romantic and conclude that I was better than I was. I’d like to get rid of those 20-odd Tests at the start of my career, because I was rubbish. After that, I was a decent cricketer who had some good days and was usually more influential against better opposition. But I feel uncomfortable when people suggest that I was a great cricketer. I wasn’t, my numbers and averages tell you that. But that doesn’t bother me, because I was never just batting or bowling, I was always battling something else, whether it was injuries, depression, an eating disorder or all sorts of other things. So when I look back on my career, I’m actually really proud of it. I think I did all right.
But joking aside, Ben Stokes is a better cricketer than I was, although he’s got plenty of work to do to be considered England’s greatest ever cricketer. Jimmy Anderson’s taken more wickets than any other fast bowler in Test cricket, and while England has produced plenty of excellent players – people like Ben, Ian Botham, Alastair Cook and Graham Gooch – I’d argue that in the modern era, Jimmy is the only Englishman who is a genuine all-time great of world cricket. For what he’s done on wickets all over the world, he’s right up there with the likes of Glenn McGrath, Curtly Ambrose and Wasim Akram. And he’s from Burnley! Ben might get to that level, but he’s got Jacques Kallis to aim for, and he scored over 13,000 runs and took 292 wickets in Tests. When Ben retires, I hope he’ll be spoken about in the same breath. But to do that, he has to do more than smash it about and score the odd eye-catching 100. He has to be consistent. That’s tough for an all-rounder, because it’s hardly ever the case that both parts of your game are where you want them to be. If Ben can find that consistency, who knows.
Ben certainly had a fine 2019, what with that incredible match-winning innings in the World Cup final and an excellent Ashes series. I actually did the opening ceremony for the World Cup, which was an absolute shambles and will probably go down as one of the worst moments in television history. We were meant to be broadcasting during breaks in the ceremony, but no one told us, so there was loads of dead air. Paddy McGuinness was trying to speak but didn’t have a cameraman and I ended up trying to interview someone I wasn’t meant to interview just to fill time (it was actually Pakistani Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai, although I didn’t know that at the time). The good part was, they gave me five tickets for the final, which meant I finally got to experience what it was like being a cricket fan. I’d often wondered what it must be like sitting in one of those seats, and it turns out it’s a bloody long day. The last two hours were amazing, but I had to watch everything else to get to that point. And I did find myself thinking, ‘I’d love to be playing in this game.’ It’s not like I wished I was Ben Stokes, but I did wish I had the opportunity to influence the game in the way he was influencing it. I don’t think that will ever go.
As soon as the England lads had lifted the trophy, I had to jump in the car and drive to Scarborough because my boys were playing there for Lancashire. But it was amazing to see England win it in person, because part of me thought it wouldn’t happen. I backed them to win it before the tournament, because I’m patriotic and thought they were the best team. But we almost always mess up on the biggest occasions, that’s just the English way. So when we got to the final, I thought we were going to get turned over. And I still thought we were going to get turned over until about the last 20 minutes. After that, everything went in our favour. First, Trent Boult caught Ben Stokes but stepped on the rope, and then Ben was awarded another six after a throw ricocheted off his bat and over the boundary. How we won that game I don’t know, because there is absolutely no way that should have been given as six. The biggest game in cricket, watched by millions of people all over the world, and they got the rules wrong. How can that happen? There weren’t just two umpires, there was a third and a fourth umpire watching it upstairs. And none of them knew that it should have been five runs instead of six. I didn’t know the rule either, but I was a fan sat in the crowd! The Kiwis took it well, as they had to, but I bet they were seething inside. Had any of those four umpires known the rules, they would have won their first World Cup, not England.
After winning the World Cup, England’s players should have been everywhere and lionised as heroes. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and players’ agents should have been working overtime, trying to get those players all over the radio, on chat shows, panel shows, Question Time, Newsnight and Saturday Superstore, in the papers, on websites, pretty much anywhere that would have them, for their own benefit and the benefit of English cricket. But English cricket is terrible at marketing itself and its players. When I was playing, one of the ECB’s big things was wanting players to be recognised by at least 10 per cent of the population. That doesn’t sound like many people, but it’s actually a very ambitious number. We had a meeting about it, and when I asked how they were going to achieve it, they replied, ‘We just want you to be recognised.’
‘But how are we going to make that happen? What are we going to do?’
‘We hadn’t really thought about that. We’d just like you to be.’
They didn’t have a plan of action, it was just some woolly notion. It seemed that nothing changed much after I retired, which meant that the World Cup victory, which was shown on terrestrial TV and watched by millions in the UK, wasn’t capitalised on. I know from working in TV that producers, commissioners and the like aren’t interested in having cricketers on shows because they don’t sell. They don’t usually play on terrestrial TV, the public don’t know who they are, so TV people aren’t interested in them either. So England winning the World Cup was the perfect time to get players out there, promoting themselves and the game. But it didn’t happen, the euphoria quickly died down, and how many of those England players would be recognised if they walked into a pub today? Probably Ben, but that’s about it.
Then again, I remember doing a Morrisons advert just after retiring and getting recognised more than I ever did playing cricket. I think they must have been showing it a lot during X Factor breaks. That made me realise how small the world of cricket is. Now, there are people who watch me on various things who don’t even know I played cricket, like I used to watch Andrew Castle present GMTV and have no idea he played tennis.