I’ve always preferred watching my teams bowl to watching them bat. When your team are batting, your instinct is to maintain the status quo, and you don’t really want to see anything dramatic happen. At least, I don’t. I certainly didn’t in the 1990s, when England’s middle order carried a hairline fracture that could snap at any second, and I would watch an entire batting session through my fingers, praying desperately for nothing exciting or noteworthy to take place.
When your team are in the field, however, you’re willing the action on. Perhaps even more so when things are going badly. Sure, your bowling attack may be getting thrashed around the park right now, but it only takes a single ball to get a batsman out. Nothing can rob you of that tiny moment of hope when the ball leaves the bowler’s hand. Every delivery is a miniature grenade of possibility.
Bowlers are cricket’s demolition artists. The batsmen head out into the field, their hard hats on, to spend minutes, hours, sometimes days carefully constructing the largest and most stable edifice they can. Meanwhile the bowlers do their damnedest to knock it down. It’s like reverse Jenga: instead of removing the blocks with surgical care, the bowler is just hurling stuff at the tower from 22 yards away. Unfortunately, England bowlers did not, at the time, have a great reputation for accuracy. Or pace. Or penetration. Most of the time you wouldn’t have backed them to punch their way through a Japanese paper screen.
The motley cast of returning characters seemed to be gathered from a bag of factory misfits: here, a terrifyingly fast but woefully inaccurate strike bowler; there, a rhythmically predictable but utterly unpenetrative medium-pacer. There were a couple who were neither fast nor accurate, but were left-handed, which England’s selectors hoped would confuse the opposition. There were also a number of Australian leftovers, unable to break into their own state side. The selectors would try them in endless new permutations, looking to fit the misshapen pieces together. They – and I – genuinely believed that if only the correct combination could be found, England would be a powerful and vicious machine that would thresh through the opposition.
There was nothing remotely vicious about the men who made up England’s pace attack. I adored them, especially the few who managed to hold down a semi-regular place in the side. Take Darren Gough: you would have needed a heart of solid cyanide not to love him. From the moment he had bundled on to the pitch against New Zealand, in the spring of ’94, his broad-shouldered, big-bottomed presence had energised the England side. He bustled, he buzzed, he brimmed with enthusiasm; his bowling was full of life, his batting full of dare. He reminded me of a kid from my old Whizzer and Chips comics: the cheeky rascal who gets one over on his teacher, then sneaks a sticky bun and hares off down the street, leaving the baker shaking his head with a rueful grin. He felt like the team’s lucky mascot, even when they lost.
I was also especially fond of Phil DeFreitas, a rare veteran of the days of Gooch and Gower, a man who ran up to bowl with his head leaning over as if making a bid for freedom from the rest of his body. Stood alongside his teammates, ‘Daffy’ looked small and sinewy, although his stats showed him to be six foot tall. He also seemed far too pleasant a man to be a frightening fast bowler. But you could see the earnestness of his efforts in his face and that strange, contorted delivery stride. He was reliable, and while that may not sound a thrilling quality in a sportsman, England’s unstable exploits were already teaching me to prize it more highly than rubies.
No bowler was more dear to me, however, than Angus Fraser. Fraser was the most reluctant of sporting heroes. He took to the field with a hangdog air only emphasised by his giant proportions, and there was little of the natural athlete about his running or his bowling. Every jogged step elicited a pang of sympathy – it all just looked such hard work. And yet he was the precision weapon in England’s arsenal. In each of the giantkilling victories I had witnessed – against West Indies in Barbados, and Australia at The Oval and in Adelaide – Fraser had been the destroyer. He had done it all with an air of modesty and exhaustion, and a funny little flannel flapping at his crotch as he ran down the wicket, his finger wagging at the sky.
The pace attack is supposed to be the most aggressive of cricket’s fraternities, but the men I admired didn’t snarl or strut or swear. OK, I’m sure they did swear, but they didn’t do it in such a way that I could hear, or lip-read, so my innocent ears remained protected. I imagined DeFreitas as a super-helpful uncle, and I could sense a gruff kindness behind Fraser’s Eeyorish expression. Even Gough, who had earned the tag of housewives’ favourite, was a safe choice: cuddly, not sexy. It says something, I think, that my cricketing favourites were the same as my mother’s. They were all the types of solid, dependable men of whom she approved.
And then, in June 1995, Dominic Cork erupted into my life.
As I became more savvy about my adopted sport, I had quickly begun to consider myself an expert. To begin with, I had merely repeated whatever my mother told me; now I was cribbing the opinions of newspaper columnists and TV commentators. I was increasingly confident in sharing ‘my’ views, and these included which players should and shouldn’t be in the England team. I would loudly tout the merits of up-and-coming players who I had never seen play, and I would campaign tirelessly for their selection, mainly to my mother.
Mostly we would agree, but the more I learned about the sport, the more I was prepared to challenge her orthodoxy. And I knew more than Mum about the 23-year-old newcomer who lined up against West Indies at Lord’s. It was the second Test of the summer (true to form, they had lost the first) and Cork was filling our screen. His blond hair was brushed forward and to one side, in a style that hinted at a quiff – as James Dean as he could manage, without stooping to anything as cissy as gel. He was tall and lithe and seemed to be made up entirely of acute angles, from his chin to the pointy tips of his ears. His gangly limbs reminded me of a badge I’d worn in the Brownies. I’d been an ‘Imp’, and the anarchic yellow figure that had been embroidered on my sleeve perfectly captured Cork’s angular energy.
He bowled England to victory with seven wickets in the second innings – the best bowling figures of an England player on debut, a performance that would have been eye-catching enough on its own. But it was Cork’s manner that really startled me. He delivered the ball trailing the other arm in the air to create a dramatic silhouette. And when he celebrated a wicket, he leapt up to punch the air with his fist, sometimes both fists, the holler of an Indian chief on his lips.
Nothing, though, matched the testosterone thump of his lbw appeals. As soon as the ball hit a batsman’s pad, Cork would jump round to the umpire in a massive burst of masculinity, his arms aloft, his legs spread, his mouth fixed open in a leonine roar. He held that star-shaped pose – back arched, knees buckling – as long as it took to get the answer he wanted. The bravado was astonishing. It was meant to intimidate the opposition and the umpires, but it horrified my mother.
This scowling, howling, chest-beater of a man fitted nowhere in the categories of England bowlers I had grown to know and love. There wasn’t anything fatherly, or brotherly, or avuncular about him. I couldn’t imagine Fraser executing a swift half-turn and bellowing his destiny at the heavens – well, I’m not sure his back would have taken it anyway. Mum thought Cork was crass and vulgar. I thought he was great.
When I was 11 my school friend Philippa, the one who loved Bros, had lots of other posters on her bedroom walls too: INXS, New Kids on the Block, groupings of young men lounging in ripped jeans, toplessly. My intuition told me that I was supposed to like them, but I didn’t. They were so confrontational, all those naked torsos. I’d always loved Craig McLachlan from Neighbours, but when I saw him up there, an undersized waistcoat flapping nonchalantly open, it felt like the start of a dangerous quarrel.
By my mid-teens, it was obligatory to have a picture of David Hasselhoff or Jason Priestley on your wall, six-pack rippling, a slight sheen suggestive of— what? I had no idea. The sight of all that flesh was confusing. I could feel deeply in love with Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard, but the moment he revealed so much as a chest hair a strange chill would affect my insides and I had to fight the urge to hide my face and giggle. I didn’t really want to see men as sexual creatures – definitely not naked ones, anyway. The men of my most romantic fantasies were impossibly remote and tightly buttoned into frock coats: Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, Monsieur Paul in Villette.
With no experience of boyfriends, I couldn’t really fathom what having one would entail, or why it might be nice. Most of the teenage males who trespassed on my daily life were pretty offputting, especially the pupils of the boys’ school that adjoined our own. At the age of 11, I had begun encountering these creatures on the coaches which ferried us to and from school. It was here they felt free to unload their minds of all the putrescence that had been fermenting there overnight, and the sexual frustration they’d been tamping down in class. I vividly remember in my first week, sitting alone and virginal on the scratchy seats, being told how ugly I was, then asked for a handjob.
Afraid of these new creatures, I decided early on simply to despise them. During school hours, they were penned in the next enclosure to us, behind a pair of black gates that were emphatically out of bounds. Naturally, therefore, that was the cool place to hang out. Ominous warnings were issued by the headmistress to stay away from The Black Gates, and for swots like me they became a place of legend where only the most dangerous girls would venture. I occasionally wondered if my life would be different if I were brave enough to tag along – then I reminded myself that the prize wasn’t worth it. Who were these people? Had they faced down Courtney Walsh or castled Mark Waugh?
Caring as much as I did about cricket did not make my interactions with boys any easier whatsoever. Sure, you might think that my teenage love of the game would provide some common ground. You might imagine it would gain me some respect, or even a special place in their affections. But you would be wrong, because you would be fundamentally mistaking the motives of the boys I knew.
Discounting the dickwads on the school bus, I did have some male friends. At least I realise now that they were friends; at the time, I was never sure. We went to the same church, and the same youth group, and they – Jez, Ben and Chris – enjoyed only one thing more than their games of no-rules football, and that was ceaselessly tormenting me and the rest of the girls. Our Friday night hangouts were a constant bombardment of teasing and bickering. Unfortunately, they were no Spencer Tracys, and we were no Katharine Hepburns. It wasn’t a battle of wits so much as a debilitating and drawn-out siege.
The other girls, who went to mixed schools or had brothers, were more au fait with the infuriating manners of the teenage male, and handled it far better. My friend Verity had a glance so icy you could see the stab wound it left. But I had no such weapon, and was the easiest bait. All the boys had to do was tell me that the England cricket team were crap and I’d turn puce and begin to splutter. Unfortunately, my team was constantly providing them with fresh ammunition: individual failures, collective collapses, bowling figures that read like darts scores. If all other taunts failed, a reminder of England’s 46 all out in Trinidad was a sure thing. It would instantly prompt me to wail that they’d won ‘the very next Test!!’ and the boys knew they had me on the hook for the rest of the evening.
We hung out more as we grew older, the boys, Verity and me. The boys didn’t get noticeably more mature – when we went camping, they’d pee on our tent one night, and let it down the next – but, then, neither did I. I let them provoke me all the time. I guess I liked the rush of feelings, and the sense that I was defending my team’s honour. My naive enthusiasm may have driven Verity to despair – ‘You’re such a weirdo,’ she would tell me, lovingly, to my face – but it was an ideal characteristic for supporting England, a team that demanded a particularly imperishable sense of loyalty.
Discovering my voice, and my identity as a contrarian, made me feel surprisingly powerful and alive. The only thing I really hated – what made me squirm and die inside – was when the boys teased me about the players. ‘How can you fancy Michael Atherton?’ they’d ask, and I’d recoil as if someone had accused me of incest, or listening to Rick Astley. Ugh! The idea I might want to kiss one of my cricketing heroes was disgusting.
I had been off sick the day they taught sex education in biology, and my parents never gave me ‘the talk’, assuming the job had been done elsewhere. This all suited me, as I didn’t like to think about the physical act of sex at all. It made me squeamish and uncomfortable and the mere mention of it – even by a girlfriend like Verity – would make me blush. So I didn’t consider all those pictures of cricketers on my walls to be pin-ups. They were more like imaginary friends than objects of lust. My feelings about the England team were on a rarefied plane.
‘But you do! You fancy the pants off him!’
And then would come the blush, the unquenchable blush, which only confirmed to Jez and Chris and Ben everything they had said, and made them say it again, louder.
It takes me a little while to reach Dominic Cork. It’s not that I don’t know where he is. He’s regularly on the radio, and he pops up on my TV screen too, as a pundit paid to give his opinions on whatever games are going on around the world. But he’s not responding to my emails or my phonecalls. Each message I leave attempts to sound more winning than the last. I know that, in reality, I’m coming off as increasingly desperate.
Perhaps it’s fitting that he should be a difficult quarry. After all, Cork is more than a former fast-medium bowler with a decent inswinger and the ability to crack a ball through the covers. He was once cricket’s unicorn.
In the aftermath of the 1980s, when a titanic figure known as Ian Botham had clobbered batsmen and bowlers with equal glee, there was a widely held belief that England would never succeed until they found someone to replace his all-round role in the team. People talked and wrote as if Botham were King Arthur, and the end of his reign had caused Camelot to crumble. Only the miraculous emergence of one who could both open the bowling and bat at number six would return Albion to its former glory.
The legend took hold, and selectors scoured the country for the next Botham. Over the following decade, many were invited to prove their worth. There were challengers who had the heart, but not the fitness, like Craig White; others had the fitness, but not the brain, like Chris Lewis. There were ‘bowling all-rounders’ who proved more use as batsmen, and ‘batting all-rounders’ who kept losing their wicket, and a couple of bustling figures whose greatest claim to Botham’s mantle was shopping from the same XL rack. No one could do the job. Four contenders – Mark Ealham, Ronnie Irani, Adam Hollioake and Ben Hollioake – racked up the paltry sum of 17 Tests, 369 runs and 26 wickets between them.
For a short while, however, Cork had seemed the real deal. After the thrill of his debut at Lord’s, England were 1–1 in their six-Test series against West Indies, only to be disgraced in the next game at Edgbaston. I was furious: not with them, but with the Birmingham groundsman, whose pitch had sent balls rocketing about the batsmen’s heads, making it the perfect early Christmas present for the opposition bowlers. The result was defeat in two days and a little over an hour, and Cork was one of the few to emerge from the debacle with any credit, taking four cheap wickets and batting longer than any but the veteran Robin Smith in England’s all too brief second innings.
Before the two sides met again, I had got myself a job. Well, not a job so much, in that it paid nothing. But my mum had been nagging me to get some work experience. In one of the cricket magazines I read, I’d seen an advert for a company called Cover Point that sold video highlights of each month’s major cricketing events. Presuming that the workers’ only task was to watch cricket all day, I had offered my limited office skills (tea-making, photocopying, etc.) for free, and they had accepted.
The business was based in the house of its owner, Paul, and consisted of a handful of men doing technical things with VHS and Betamax machines. I was installed in an attic room and asked to type up the player interviews they had recorded. Paul was a nice man with a short fuse, and I was happy to stay in my attic where I didn’t have to listen to his shouty phone conversations. I spent my days transcribing the thoughts of John Emburey and Paul Downton, and eating the same ham sandwich I requested for lunch every day because I was too nervous to think what else to ask for.
The week of the Old Trafford Test, Paul called me downstairs to his office. He was going to interview Michael Atherton in Manchester the next day, he told me. Would I like to go with him?
I said yes. Of course I said yes. I said yes and I said thank you, and then I immediately regretted my decision. The waves of nausea I felt as soon as I had committed to the trip stayed with me all the way up the M6 the next morning. Paul was a terrifying driver – he actually reversed down the hard shoulder when we missed our turning – but even that couldn’t distract me from the horror of meeting my favourite sportsman in the world. I was desperately prone to blushing, an uncontrollable reaction that embarrassed me more than the thing that prompted it. I knew that today, something was going to embarrass me. I was sure of it. And the only thing that could prevent my own mortification was death which, in spite of that sliproad manoeuvre, wasn’t imminent enough.
At the ground we met up with Paul’s cameraman and the three of us sat in the empty stands waiting for Atherton, who had headed for the showers after training. I was mute, still battling the urge to vomit. Throwing up on the England cricket captain now seemed a very real prospect, and when he finally joined us, a pink towel slung casually round his neck, I nodded my head and bit the insides of my cheeks.
My role was to hold a large, heavy and utterly phallic microphone, and since I had to stay out of shot while Atherton sat in the stands, I had to kneel at his feet. There wasn’t much room, my legs were twisted painfully beneath me, and my arms were soon burning from the effort of holding the microphone still. I was far too self-conscious to look up, so I stared fiercely at the mic instead, willing myself not to drop it.
I have no idea what Atherton must have thought of this strange, mute girl with a look of desperate concentration on her face. But my policy worked: I got through the interview without turning candy-floss pink, and without speaking at all. As Atherton left, I was letting out a sigh of relief, when the cameraman remarked as loudly as he could: ‘You can put your tongue away now, Emma.’
I glanced despairingly at Atherton’s back as it retreated amid the stands, and I swear I saw a hitch in his step.
In spite of what was, and possibly still remains, the most embarrassing moment of my life, my trip to Old Trafford meant I felt a strong personal claim on the events that followed there. Ironically, I didn’t get to see much of the first two days, because it turned out that those who worked at a cricket highlights video company did not, as I had imagined, down tools on the Thursday and Friday of a Test match. Instead of watching England bowl out West Indies for 216 then build a solid reply, I spent most of those two days watching an old man called David Steele tell a story about getting lost in the pavilion on his way to bat at Lord’s in 1975. (The anecdote probably took half an hour, but my tortoiseian typing speed required I listen to it over and over, until Steele’s white hair and black eyebrows were burned on the back of my retina.)
By Saturday morning, I knew I had thoroughly earned my right to the remote control. I may even have claimed to my sister Kate that I needed to watch every ball of the cricket ‘for work’. Cork batted like a scamp; his shots were kosher enough, but there was something in his stance, the way his head ducked to meet the oncoming ball, that made the whole thing look improvised. He scored swiftly, and each of his runs seemed to be stolen from someone else, be it the bowler, the fielder or the cricketing gods themselves. As it turned out, they were: at lunchtime, we saw slow-motion footage of Cork’s foot sliding backwards into his stumps and a bail gently sliding to the ground. Technically, Cork had been out, but since no one had noticed or appealed, he had slyly replaced the bail and carried on. It was metaphysics in motion: the tree had fallen and made no sound.
Laws of proportion and probability just didn’t seem to apply to Cork. His half-century was celebrated with a standing ovation round the ground and the England players were all on the balcony to recognise him. (I remember being horrified that Mike Watkinson, a 33-year-old playing his first Test, was sporting a low-slung vest. I didn’t know why it upset me so at the time, but life has since taught me that those items should only ever be attempted by Channing Tatum chest-alikes.) By Saturday evening, West Indies had lost three wickets but the ever-dangerous Brian Lara was still in, and I’d gone to bed oscillating between an irrepressible hope and a learned pessimism.
The first over of a day’s play is imbued with a kind of holiness. True fans hate to miss it. Some think it sets the tone for the day’s play, others that it’s when batsmen are at their most vulnerable. I don’t share either of these beliefs, but I do love the thrill of the build-up, as the bowler marks out his run-up with exaggerated strides and hops, and the fielders scatter enthusiastically to their positions, the most energetic you see them all day. Since my teenage days, I have kept to my own start-of-play routine. I make ready my viewing sanctum: there are the tea and biscuits to fetch from the kitchen, the sofa to pull into position. I’m all settled by the time the bowler starts his run-up and the crowd (a third empty, because the dilettantes are still missing) makes its weird lowing sound to accompany it. It’s not that I believe something will happen in that first, precious over, it’s just that, if England are bowling, I so desperately want it to.
I was in my pyjamas and still groggy with sleep when Dominic Cork bowled his first four balls on Sunday morning. When his fifth ricocheted off Richie Richardson’s bat and into the West Indies captain’s stumps, I let out a breathy noise, a zombie groan of barely sentient excitement. The next ball thumped into Junior Murray’s pads, and now I was upright, my fists clenching the air in an unconscious parody of Cork’s own. I couldn’t have been more suddenly awake if someone had applied a defibrillator to my chest.
I knew not to expect a hat-trick. No Englishman had taken a hat-trick since 1957. The term is misleadingly familiar, perhaps because of its footballing equivalent – you’re far more likely to score three goals in a 90-minute match than you are to take three wickets in consecutive deliveries. But the statistical rarity can’t prevent you hoping, or tensing every muscle in your body, or shouting confusingly unladylike things at the screen – things you’ve never said before, phrases like ‘go on, my son’ and ‘this one’s yours, Corky’ and ‘c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, C’MON!’
Mum was with me, of course. Moments of high drama like this were a testing ground, a time when I discovered just how far I could push the boundaries of our maturing relationship. Normally, a mere ‘oh my God’ got a quick rebuke. But who knew what was allowable under this sort of duress? I might even swear.
Cork stood at the end of his run-up, his hair swept horizontal, his cheeks and nose under a stripe of sunblock – a wannabe rock star on his evolution to Adam Ant. He squinted into the sun, then leaned forward and ran, his elbows pumping behind him, prancing upright as he reached the crease to fling the ball at the new batsman’s middle stump. It hit neither stump nor bat – only the resounding middle of Carl Hooper’s front pad.
Every man on the screen screamed their appeals, and so did I. In the heartbeat that followed, my stomach pitched and rolled. And then the umpire raised his finger, and Cork sank to his knees, his teammates leaping on top of him until he was completely obscured. Me? I cried. I wish I’d had a different reaction – that I’d leapt into a hug with my mum, or at least ventured a ‘bloody hell’ – but I didn’t. I just stood there, my limbs shaking from the shock or the lack of a more substantial breakfast than custard creams.
As the unnecessary tears squeezed out of my eyes, I suspected that I didn’t know myself at all. Why did such an arbitrary occurrence – three wickets in three balls – feel so miraculous? Where did these sensations even come from? Was this how Cork felt, too? Or was this strange thunderclap of feelings a mere echo of his achievement, a wish-fulfilment facsimile of emotion transmitted across the airwaves into my living room?
I still don’t know. Maybe I can find out from Cork. He’s finally responded. He’s covering a major international tournament for Sky, and he’s promised to hang around in their studios at the end of one of the matches to talk to me. The studio lot, perched on the very edge of west London, is a sequence of hangar-like buildings connected by enclosed walkways, their industrial grey brightened here and there with aggressive flashes of colour carrying upbeat corporate messages. At ground level are small plots of earth in the very first stages of cultivation. When I arrive, I’m required to have my picture taken. I feel like I’m checking in on an interplanetary colony.
The Sky Sports building is a futuristic glass cube, its entrance guarded, inexplicably, by two giant models of Mike and Sulley from Monsters, Inc. I climb the stairs and spot Dominic Cork before he sees me. He’s at the other end of the first floor, backlit by the bright sunshine that floods through the floor-to-ceiling windows. But there’s no mistaking that silhouette, its upward thrust, its pointy joints. ‘I don’t wear make-up normally,’ he smiles, when I get near enough to see his face.
We head to the café, where the colony workers are refuelling in between shifts: Cork nods to one and it takes a second for me to realise that it’s the former England captain Michael Vaughan. There’s a lanyard with his studio pass draped around Cork’s open-collared shirt, beneath his grey, TV-ready suit. He will have to head back into the studio eventually – there’s a breaking story that the Sky Sports News viewers require his expert opinion on – but he’s in no hurry, and he’s more than happy to relive old times. After all, he says, they were the best days of his life.
He still remembers the frustration of waiting for his first Test cap – he was considered more of a one-day player – and how, when he did get selected against West Indies, he’d hurt his back playing for Derbyshire. ‘I went to a specialist and said, “I don’t care what you do, you’ve just got to get rid of this pain,”’ he remembers. Three days later he hit his first ball in Test cricket for four runs. ‘People say, “Why did it go so well?” and I think it’s because I was that desperate. I so wanted to prove myself and make sure I grabbed on to my chance.’
Cork’s speech is fast and fluid. I’d worried, from his reputation for confrontation, that he might be a little prickly, but you can tell that these days he’s a professional talker. As for the hat-trick, I had been nervous he might not remember anything at all: sportsmen who have enjoyed the out-of-body experience they call ‘being in the zone’ seem to lose all conscious thought during their finest passages of play. Some later claim that they can remember nothing of their performance, like those murderers who come to with bloody hands and no knowledge of the crime they’ve just committed.
I’m lucky. Cork can remember everything about his victims. He tells me that before the start of play Atherton had made ‘a little speech’ to his troops. ‘We were still up against it, and he said, “Look, we’ve got to do something, something’s got to happen.” And I just stuck my hand up and said, “Give it me. I’ll bowl. I want to bowl.”’ The first three balls he bowled were ‘average’ and the fourth was a no-ball. ‘I thought, “This hasn’t been a great over.”’ So he refocused. He thought hard about the next ball hitting the top of off stump, and it did, albeit via the inside of Richardson’s bat. ‘He was so unlucky,’ says Cork, ‘but I thought, “I’ll take that.” How many times as a bowler have you had a batsman play and miss, and you get nothing?’
Carl Hooper was due in next, so when Junior Murray walked out to the crease ‘. . . we thought, “That’s a bit strange. What’s up with Hooper? Is he ill?” And that gives you a bit more spark.’ Cork knew how to bowl at Murray, who tended to stay back in his crease and work the ball leg-side. ‘Get it full and straight, make him play. Soon as it hit him I knew – I didn’t really have to turn around to the umpire.’ But being Cork, he threw his legs wide and appealed himself hoarse anyway.
He can still recall his internal monologue as he walked back to his mark for the final ball of the over. ‘I remember thinking, how many times have I seen it on TV – how many times have I seen it on the field – when the bowler hasn’t got the hat-trick ball straight? So all I kept saying to myself was, “Bowl straight.” I even visualised the actual ball. I knew how Hooper played. I knew if I got it slightly outside off stump with a little bit of reverse swing he’d go across his stumps. It was either going to go through bat and pad and bowl him or get him lbw.’
Cork can remember thinking how loud the crowd sounded as he ran in – like a stadium of 90,000 people, not the mere 8,000 that were there. He knew Hooper was out the moment the ball hit his pads. ‘But I thought, “Will the umpire think that he can’t give two lbws on the trot?” So I turned round and my appeal stance went even wider, I was nearly doing the splits.’ He laughs. ‘I think my whites did rip, actually. And I remember seeing he’d got a shudder in his finger, and thinking, “He’s given that out, what do I do now?” I didn’t know what to do. So I just fell to my knees.’
Few of us know what it’s like to experience a moment, however brief, as a sporting god. Cork’s pose looked, from the outside, like a moment of unadulterated ego: his arms aloft, rooted to the ground like a statue of himself, while his teammates ran up from every corner of the field. But now I hear him describe the moment I wonder if his stance was more shock than awe. ‘I just didn’t know what to do,’ Cork repeats, his eyes wide at the memory. ‘It takes a while for it to sink in.’
Fans rarely had a neutral view of Cork. His showmanship just didn’t allow for it. There were those who thought that it was a fillip to see someone demonstrate such out-and-out passion while playing for their country. And then there were those who found his aggressive posturing unnecessary, who considered his histrionics thoroughly infra dig. These people tended to remark, sniffily, that such behaviour wasn’t appropriate for a gentlemanly sport.
Of the two camps, I should have fallen in the latter. I loved the gentility of cricket, the way it claimed to belong to a different era. It offered a sheltered fantasy world for someone who craved the safety and delicacy of chivalry – a teenager who wanted the opposite sex to be courtly, not manly, and who would prefer it if everyone pretended that people didn’t have sex until they were married. Cork suggested a world of men who didn’t play by those rules. A world I wasn’t ready for.
But if his methods got results, I wasn’t going to complain. Australia was full of bowlers far shoutier, swearier and stroppier than Cork, and I’d have given them British citizenship in a heartbeat. I didn’t hold with the snobbery that said Cork was an apocalyptic sign that cricketers were becoming evermore like footballers. The footballers I’d seen doing goal celebrations on the TV looked far less aggressive than Cork; they rocked babies, or did silly dance moves, or ran around with their shirts stuck halfway over their heads like toddlers.
I assumed that Cork was just a bit big-headed and decided that, in this case, it was absolutely fine to indulge his antics. It didn’t occur to me that the entire thing might be a performance – that Cork was not an ever-gushing fountain of machismo, but a young man doing a war dance for the benefit of the opposition, the supporters, and himself. Beholding the grey-suited man in front of me who is courteously answering my questions, that scenario does make a lot more sense. ‘Cricketers, sportsmen, we’re actors on a stage,’ he says. ‘That’s what we do. We can’t deliver lines, but we act with our skill.’
I ask where he learned to play the part, and he doesn’t hesitate: ‘My dad,’ he says. Cork remembers playing with his older brothers in the backyard – football, most often – ‘. . . and my father really drilling it into us: “You go out there and you push your chest out, and you show them. Whatever you do, you actually believe you’re better than the opposition.”’
And he did, such as in the summer of 1998, when he decided to wind up his South African opposite number Brian McMillan, a physically huge man, by calling him ‘the bus driver’ whenever he came in to bat. ‘I went a little bit too far. We clapped him in at Headingley, and when he was out, I said, “There you go, off to start your engine!” And he came looking for me at the end of the game. He’s a big lad, someone said he’s a Hell’s Angel as well . . . I ran. “Oh God, I’m off, see you, lads . . .”’
What did he think of being called a showboater? ‘Showpony,’ he corrects me. ‘That was what Geoffrey Boycott called me. But I loved playing for England! I loved cricket!’ I can see it even now, the zeal of a man who wants to entertain. ‘I was just a guy who wanted to do well for England, and sometimes my enthusiasm took over. I didn’t see it as showboating. I saw it as living the dream.’
‘After all,’ he says, ‘would you call Ian Botham a showboater?’ He, too, wore his heart on his sleeve, and it was Botham’s passion that had inspired Cork to play cricket in the first place. A nine-year-old Cork watched Botham’s 1981 Ashes heroics on a portable TV in a caravan on a family holiday and decided he wanted to play for England – up until then he’d only wanted to drive a Yorkie lorry. The little boy grew up to make his England debut in Botham’s last ever one-day match. ‘He came straight up and put his arm round me and said, “I’ll look after you.” And that was good enough for me. Everywhere he went I went. I was like his lapdog.’
Cork says he’s never stopped being in awe of the man. ‘Still am! And I work with him now. I play golf with him, and I’m still starstruck. I give him ten-foot putts – “Oh, don’t worry about them, you’re Ian Botham!”’ Did it feel like hubris, then, to be named his heir apparent? Cork shakes his head. ‘It didn’t bother me in any way,’ he says. ‘A lot of people found it pressure, but I didn’t find it pressure. I just thought it was quite nice, a compliment.’
He didn’t ascend to Botham’s throne, in the end. ‘I was never going to be as good as him. I thought in my mind I could be, but realistically it was never going to happen.’ His bowling progressed in fits and starts, and his batting never lived up to its promise, or the standard of a Test-class all-rounder. Cork thinks he just didn’t practise enough: ‘Generally because I was so tired from bowling, but that’s no excuse.’ He still played a role in some of England’s memorable rearguard actions and, for fans like me, his presence down the batting order offered a reassurance more totemic than it was real. Perhaps some of his best work was done sitting in the dressing-room as the next man in, bolstering the fiction that England had plenty more batting to come.
Things went a little sour, for a time. Two years after his brilliant debut summer, he pulled out of England’s tour to Zimbabwe because his marriage was falling apart; when he joined up with the team in New Zealand, he was, according to the press reports, both unfit to play and a difficult man to get on with. I heard he had an on-field spat with Atherton, I say. Cork nods – he can’t even remember what triggered it. ‘It was something about how he wanted me to bowl, and I just threw him the ball and said, “Well, if you can do any better, you bowl.” It was very disrespectful. I apologised straight after to him, and I regret it.’
It was, he says, ‘just emotions, again’, and he points out that he batted in the partnership that won the New Zealand Test series on the final day. ‘There were a lot of things that were said about me – David Lloyd said they considered sending me home. I never understood why. I still don’t now.’ Well, some of his teammates said that he didn’t seem to want to be there. The problem with wearing your heart on your sleeve is that you can end up being a downer for others. ‘Maybe I was a little quieter at night,’ he says, ‘but I was still giving it my all on the pitch. I was justified to be there.’
The quest for England’s next great all-rounder moved on; other candidates received the false anointing. Cork’s story had progressed from medieval fantasy to soap opera to something far more mundane – the common narrative of the nineties paceman. He fell in and out of form, and got injured from bowling too much. Sometimes he found himself left out of the team for no discernible reason. ‘I think the worst time for me was 1999 when I couldn’t make a World Cup squad of 30 players,’ he snorts. ‘I remember saying to David Graveney, the chairman of selectors, “You’re having a laugh, mate. There’s something wrong.”’
Still, Cork did have some magic remaining – his ability to give his best when there was something to prove, and the pressure was at its greatest. ‘It was like somebody giving me a can of energy drink. Like somebody had injected adrenalin into me. Lights on, here we go. Now it’s time, now I’ll show people.’ When West Indies returned to England in 2000, Cork was recalled to the team at Lord’s. Like a member of an ageing boyband reforming for a comeback tour, Cork brought out all his greatest hits. Having taken seven wickets for 52 to help set up a surefire win, he found himself sent in to bat with England teetering on the brink of defeat.
‘Walking through the Long Room,’ says Cork, ‘I heard, “Here we go, we’ve lost this game . . .” It inspires you when the members are giving up. I remember going out there and losing wickets at the other end, then Goughy walking to the crease. I’m all serious. And his first words to me are: “Ay up, lad, just think how famous we’ll be if we win this Test match.”’ England were 28 runs short of their final innings target, with only the nervous Matthew Hoggard left to bat. ‘I said to Gough, “Look up there at Hoggard. He can’t even watch – how’s he going to bat?”’ Cork scored 33 as England squeaked home, and took another man of the match award at Lord’s.
That series contained the last great international performances of his career – while he played on another ten years on the county scene, his Test career was over by 2002. I wonder if the vintage Cork sitting in front of me now has any regrets about his career. He isn’t apologetic about how he played the game – ‘If I can’t show a bit of aggression, if I can’t show people I’m a winner and that I would die for the country, then for me there’s no point in playing’– but he does sound just a little rueful. ‘Sometimes that over-exuberance, or perhaps the over-aggression, went a bit too far. If you look back now that would be one thing I would perhaps change.’
Cork suspects his behaviour coloured people’s judgement, and might even have meant he played fewer Tests than he wanted. ‘I just thought, “It doesn’t matter what they think, I’m playing for England.” Unfortunately, you have to think, now, it does matter . . . If I knew everything I know now I’d have maybe done things a little differently.’ He was, he says, ‘more innocent’ back then, and a little naive.
I want to share tales of my own naivety, to show him that I too know what it was like to be over-eager in the England cause. But I’m not sure that nearly swearing in front of my mum counts as common ground. It’s one thing for a fan to want to see inside a sportsman’s head, but it’s unlikely the fascination runs the opposite way.
Just before Cork leaves to go back on air, I ask whether he ever imagined he might be a pin-up on someone’s wall. The proposition confounds him. ‘You’re having a laugh, aren’t you? No. Ridiculous! I put a bit of zinc on, I’m going to war. I’m not thinking, “I’d better get me Lypsyl on and all that.”’ He’s still scoffing when he stumbles unexpectedly on a childhood memory. Perhaps the image has whisked him back to thoughts of his own embarrassing teenage crushes and skincare regime. ‘People laugh at this, but growing up, I was a very shy inward boy,’ he says. ‘And I would have to really force this . . . my type of . . .’ he hesitates, his quick-pour conversation running dry. ‘What am I trying to say? The way I am . . . I had to force it out. The person I wanted to be.’
I picture the teenage Cork in his bedroom, looking up at a picture of Ian Botham on his wall, and choosing who he is going to be. We had something in common all along.