David Gower (Text Only)

On the other hand, there is no point in denying that this particular milestone did mean a lot to me. When I did finally pass the magic figure it was a very proud moment. No matter what the future holds, I will be able to treasure that memory, even in the knowledge that someone eventually is likely to come and surpass the new total.

Ironically, as I write this preface for the paperback edition, many of those ‘What does the future hold?’ questions have resurfaced, despite what I would describe as a successful season in 1992. Every time that I have to sit down and compile something for this book, it seems that I have to do so at the same time as having to contemplate life from outside the inner circles of England cricket.

The basic truth that all of us in time come to appreciate fully is that there are no guarantees, hence the merits of being able to ease the inevitable disappointments by maintaining a sense of perspective and balance. Although I am to spend the winter of 1992-93 watching cricket for a living instead of playing it, I can do so comfortably, knowing firstly that I have much on which to look back proudly; secondly, that there is potentially much still to anticipate in terms of a cricketing future; and thirdly, to be spending half of the winter behind the microphone in Australia and India is not exactly a complete disaster.

Thus with cheerful countenance I proffer what follows as a mixture of fond memories and tales of woe, all of which are an integral part of any sportsman’s life, safe in the expectation that, as time goes on, inevitably the highlights will outlive the disappointments.

David Gower

Brisbane, November 1992

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_301a7c9f-8cef-5242-b130-cbb94957d50d)

Fun, style and excellence

I HAVE, during the course of a career stretching back to 1975, won a good many medals and trophies in all parts of the cricketing world, mostly for performances on the field. However, pride of place on my mantelpiece at home is reserved for an award from a national newspaper that does not, on the face of it, mean anything much at all. And yet it means as much, if not more than any cup final medal, or the International Cricketer of the Year trophy I won in Australia in 1982-83. It is a plaque, inscribed with the words: ‘For Fun, Style, and Excellence.’ If I had the choice of words to be chiselled on my tombstone (actually, I suppose I do … where’s the will?) it would be those. In many ways I am happy to forget the mere statistics of a career in cricket, and to remember the fun of it as well as feeling that I have given spectators a little pleasure too. It is a philosophy I carried with me throughout my cricketing career, and despite the fact that it torpedoed me in the end, it is not one I would have changed even with the benefit of hindsight. Fun, style and excellence is a nice way of summing up what I tried to do. I started playing the game because it was fun. I acquired a certain style while I was doing it (unfortunately, ‘laid-back’ was the way it was described most often), and if I have touched excellence at various points along the way (and as I played 114 Test matches I must have got quite close once or twice) then you could not ask for a great deal more.

When young players have asked me for a philosophy of the game, or something to bear in mind when they are embarking on their cricketing careers, I have invariably said: ‘Enjoy it. You started playing the game for enjoyment, and whatever helps you retain that outlook, go ahead and do it.’ If you are not enjoying it for any reason, you cannot bring out the best in yourself. There are times, of course, when you have to push yourself beyond fun, so that you can achieve the results that will give you the satisfaction to make it fun. There may, on the other hand, be a few lessons to be absorbed from this book that may prevent our star of the future from having his head lopped off like I did. Graham Gooch, whose fingerprints – among others – can be found on the lever that operated the guillotine, has accused me, ironically, on more than one occasion, of not having fun – or at least not enjoying the lifestyle on the field as much as I did off it. To a certain extent he was right, and if I am accused of not always sporting a mile-wide grin during a dull game in a howling gale, while cursing to myself for not putting on two pairs of long johns instead of one, then I apologize to him for this major character weakness. This book, I hope, is not a whitewash. I admit to not taking either cricket or life seriously enough at times, but while this has occasionally found me out, I would like to think that my warts are mostly friendly ones.

I do get bored easily and hard graft has never come naturally, but nothing annoys me more than hearing that I fell short of some people’s expectations because I appeared to find the game too easy. I have never found cricket easy. My external appearance has not always been deceptive, and when I once turned up for play one morning wearing one black shoe and one brown one, this was a fairly accurate indication of what I am like first thing in the morning. On the other hand, wearing a smile on your face, or making the occasional facetious comment, is not evidence that you are an idle dilettante either. There is no one way of playing the game that is right or wrong, and cricket is a sport that lays your character bare like almost no other. I was latterly perceived, wrongly in my opinion, to have had a lack of commitment to the England cause, that somehow I rocked the boat with an indifferent attitude. I scored nearly 500 runs in my last series in Australia with this lack of commitment. I did however commit the unpardonable sin of looking more cheerful after a flight in a Tiger Moth than during some of the management’s interminable training routines, on a tour when runs around the block counted for rather more than runs in the middle. There was an atmosphere in Australia in which fun and cricket had no place together which was alien to my interpretation of how to bring out the best of international cricketers, leaving me often at odds with the likes of team manager, Micky Stewart.

Character differences are part and parcel of all team sports, and a diversity of opinion can of course be used constructively. Unfortunately, my relationship with Micky Stewart was not enhanced on this tour, which worried me less than the fact that I was finding it so difficult to communicate with Graham Gooch, who I had known and liked over a much longer period. It seemed to annoy both of them that I could succeed without conforming to the methods they laid down. The attitude that came across was that I did not deserve to succeed. The argument that often came out was that I was not setting the right example to younger players, that I was somehow inhibiting or retarding their development. I didn’t accept this, nor did I find anything remotely like this impression among the other players. I was no different at thirty-three than I had been at twenty-one. The idea, so it appeared to me, was to fit in with whatever the system was at the time, but yet to do what you needed to do yourself to be happy and confident about playing when required.

The fact that our relationship suffered the terminal fracture in Australia was not without its irony or significance. Micky in particular had taken note of Australia’s change in selection policy after we beat them on Mike Gatting’s 1986-87 tour. Bobby Simpson and Allan Border decided that a certain type of character was required to play for Australia, hence the more flamboyant and slightly rebellious people like Greg Ritchie, Tim Zoehrer, Craig McDermott and Greg Matthews all got thrown out. Looking at their subsequent results, you have to say that their decision worked, but at least two of those players got back into the side eventually, proving that no system need necessarily be rigid to the point of inflexibility. If it had happened to me ten years earlier, it would have been easier to shrug off, but not only had I been given a label, I was also approaching that period in my career – if not my sell-by date – when a slightly rebellious older hand could more easily be cut adrift.

When I was left out of the West Indies series in the summer of 1991,I had not been in form for Hampshire, but I did feel they could at least have given me the chance to prove that I still had it in me, or otherwise as the case may be, for one or two of the early Tests. I’m told that Stewart’s report on the tour to Australia suggested that the only reason I wanted to play on was to get the thirty-four runs I needed to beat Boycott’s record. This not only shows a complete lack of understanding as to my own character, but also sums up the peculiar way in which Stewart’s mind operates. True, I would dearly love to have broken Boycott’s record while still in Australia and I continue to rue missed opportunities to do so, but I would say that my primary aim is to still be playing Test cricket for the satisfaction of succeeding again at that level, not just for the sake of thirty-odd runs but for a lot more beyond. Gooch intimated to me early in the summer that it would be easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for me to get back into the England side, which did not correlate with his simple message at the end of the Australia tour to go out and get runs. Whereas I was looking for a bit of a lift, a smidgeon of encouragement from the top, this left me dispirited and with an overriding sense of futility. I knew it had more to do with scoring runs, whatever Graham had said after Australia. Stewart did not seem to want me back at any price. Unfortunately, the way he went about things irritated me and I was not always very good at concealing my feelings. Come to think of it, I do not believe I was, or am, the only player to think this way.

His was a difficult job in many respects and one certainly cannot accuse him of not working hard at it. But despite his efforts and good intentions, I still found him unconvincing and uninspiring. As for Graham, I had – and still have – great admiration for the way he transformed his own game from the late eighties, putting in a huge amount of effort in order to prolong his own career, but it ultimately came close to an obsession for him. He then looked at me in a different light because of it, wondering no doubt why I was not more like him, and it caused us to grow apart. He set off with a method in Australia, and it didn’t work on that occasion. This is not unusual, and it has certainly happened to me. Indeed, every system will have its flaws in this unpredictable arena called international cricket. Yet when I tried to get him to involve more people, to give them a greater sense of their own importance, and above all not to talk at people rather than with them, it merely seemed to bring my motives under suspicion.

It was a bad sign. Senior players should carry some weight. Junior players are mostly going to conform come what may, although there are exceptions that prove every rule, and Philip Tufnell was one of them. However, the inference that Tufnell would pick up bad habits from me was hard to swallow. Tuffers might take a certain interest in the attitudes and opinions of players like myself, but Tuffers is the way he is because he is Tuffers. Like the case of Phillip DeFreitas in 1986-87, he had to work out how to mix in international company, and, like many before and since, did not perhaps reach the right note first up. Nor did I hit the right note when I took the aeroplane trip, so it is not a failing exclusively attributable to younger players. Having said that, I think it was getting out last ball before lunch in Adelaide – in the way that I did – that later became more significant in the management’s assessment of my future.

Graham has said that he didn’t feel he ever really got to know me, not deep down anyway, and I can take some of the blame for that in that I have usually presented a flip and light-hearted view of events instead of getting terribly serious. It is, of course, a form of defence that people like myself present to the world to cover up any insecurity or worries that they may have in the same way that many comedians have deeper, darker sides to their natures. Where it told against me was that I gave a false – or not entirely true – picture of how dedicated I was to the game. For instance, I did not much care for Stewart’s training routines, but when I thought I needed hard work I usually went out and did it. Before the Sydney Test I went out and had a private net with Cardigan Connor, who was playing in Australia that winter, along with a couple of local bowlers, and when Stewart later brought this up as evidence of preparation equalling results (I got a century in the Sydney Test), I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I benefitted a lot more from not having him hovering over me while I was practising.

The way things went for me on that tour always gave me the impression that Perth had every chance of being my last Test match. I had been dropped before by England, three or four times in fact, but the coming English summer seemed more than just uncertain. What I found dispiriting and depressing about it all was that with my place under threat, I had dug deep to get 150 against India in the final innings of the previous summer when my place on the tour had been uncertain, and battled hard for my runs in Australia. Now I was cast as a wayward spirit, who sometimes got runs by accident, and it hurt. As a subscriber, however, to the no smoke without fire theory, I do plead guilty to a certain amount of underachievement, and the one thing I would like to have been is just a bit hungrier in the pursuit of runs. I’d hate to guess at a figure, but in about 95 per cent of all my innings I can look back and think: ‘You could have done a bit more there.’

The Boycott record frustrated me in that I could and should have got past it. The compensation, from what I’ve read and heard any way, is that more people enjoyed watching me bat than Boycott. Who knows why we are the way we are? Why do some cricketers have more single-mindedness than others? Why can’t some people give up smoking? I don’t know why I got caught in the gully off wide deliveries more than Boycott did – probably because it was more in my nature and probably because the two previous wide ones had been pinged through extra cover and I enjoyed the feeling enough to try it again. Looking back, there has been a lot of enjoyment, but a lot of frustration as well. Most disappointing of all was the way that it finished. Having watched Hadlee and Richards bow out at the time of their own choosing, you think to yourself, ‘Well I wasn’t too far behind these guys, it would have been a lovely way to go out.’ Instead, the rug was whipped away from under me, and I was left on my arse. It seems to me that you should ultimately be judged by results. If the Stewart-Gooch regime decided that regimentation was the way to get results, and it worked, then fine. I’m not sure, though, that they ultimately applied the same test to me.

The irony is that it sounds as if they modified their rules slightly by the following winter’s tour of New Zealand and for the World Cup. The idea that breaks in a training and practice session could also be beneficial has crept back in, giving the players a little extra respite from the rigorous demands that international cricket makes upon the minds and bodies of its participants. Work and practice must be done – and I fully acknowledge their benefits – but as cricket, in essence, is time consuming, I will always maintain that time off, judged and used wisely, is almost as valuable as another practice session.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_3e20c13c-08a5-5a36-a31f-3d69415ba79d)

Laid back – and think of England

IF fun, style and excellence are three words that I think of most fondly, then the two that have irritated me most (with the possible exception of ‘caught Dujon’) are ‘laid back’. I don’t know why they should annoy me so much, but the mere fact that they do should be evidence in itself that I am not as laid back, whatever that actually means, as people might think. I do, in fact, have a pretty short fuse. I have been known to explode in both dressing room and on the field, and you ought to see me on the motorway, although I do have the happy capacity to hose those flames fairly swiftly. I suppose, though, that I do have this ability to suggest that I am more interested in the Telegraph crossword than the state of play, and that my mid-pitch conversations with batting partners occasionally have less to do with the fact that Ambrose has just replaced Marshall than whether the evening’s repast should involve fish and chardonnay or steak and claret. Mostly, those impressions are spot on – but cricket has always been the sort of game to switch on to and off in my opinion. Spectators nip into the members’ bar between overs, so why can’t players take a mental break at times? In any case, when Ambrose is pawing the ground and there is an outside chance of ending the day with your jaw wired up, chatting about eating a nice steak can have the effect of concentrating the mind wonderfully well.

Much of the image is created by your own peers, and how they perceive you. I remember picking up the soubriquet of ‘Fender’ on the 1986-87 tour. The TV drama, although drama is used here in the loosest sense, Bodyline was showing on Australian TV when we were out there, and to give you a clue as to its absolute devotion to historical accuracy, there was one memorable scene of Les Ames completing a stumping off Larwood. As for poor old Percy Fender, he was portrayed as a party-loving, champagne-swilling, ukelele-playing, monocled buffoon – a strokemaker, both on and off the field. As I was well in with the Bollinger man in Sydney, a wonderful man named Rob Hirst, and as the lads curiously felt that I fitted the bill in other respects as well, ‘Fender’ is the nickname I acquired.

The image was further enhanced at a Sunday League match at Cheltenham during my first period as Leicestershire captain, when both Leicestershire and Gloucestershire were so utterly convinced that there could be no possibility of play – it had started raining hard at tea-time on Saturday and was still stair-rodding down at 2 p.m. on Sunday – that the players readily accepted the offer of lunch and hospitality in a sponsors’ tent. We had already left four or five players back in the bar at the hotel, where a Sunday lunchtime jazz band was in full cry, and they eventually staggered into the tent to join the party. While we were getting stuck into the Pimms and sundry other concoctions, the elements outside had transformed themselves into sunshine and wind, and the College Ground’s legendary draining properties were coming into play. In short, while the ground got drier, the players got wetter.

It was round about half past four when one of the officials, Mervyn Kitchen, popped his head around the tent flap, and I confidently expected him to deliver a message like: ‘Don’t bother turning up tomorrow either.’ However, what he actually said was: ‘We think we can start a ten-over slog at ten past five, at which point I said: ‘Nice one, Merv. What are you having?’ His reply was: ‘Captain, I’m afraid we’re serious,’ at which point I spilled most of the contents of my glass and led a concerted weave from tent to pavilion. David Graveney, canny captain that he is, and armed with a certain local knowledge, had remained reasonably sober, but the captain of Leicestershire – and most of his troops – were in no condition to make contact with a medicine ball. I attempted a knock-up on the outfield without much success, declared myself unfit to toss, or in any event to be able to recognize a head from a tail, and entrusted the operation to Nigel Briers. We decided to bat first, largely on the grounds that nine of us at least could get down to some serious coffee drinking, but we were forced to make a late team change when Ian Butcher popped his head around the home dressing room door. His timing was bad, in that Paul Romaines had been busy practising his golf swing with a three-pound cricket bat and Ian’s nose had taken the full brunt. Paul, whose exertions and embarrassment had sent the Pimms rushing to his head, also retired from the contest.

I went in No 4, gave Graveney the charge first ball, and although I never saw it I somehow hit it over long on. I then played several air shots, before deciding to unveil the reverse sweep, and actually made contact with one of them. By some miracle we managed to get 70 or 80, which turned out to be ample. They were something like 20 for no wicket after 6 overs, and every time one of their openers took a swish, a large divot flew out of the ground. It was slightly ironic, I thought, when I brought Gordon Parsons on to bowl – one of the few who had not touched a drop – because his first ball ended up on top of the press tent. I would like to think that our successful defence owed something to my inspirational leadership, but in point of fact they only got as many as they did because I kept diving the wrong way at cover. Mind you, Bill Athey picked up the fielding award for circling underneath an interminable skier to eventually hear it plop to earth about ten yards away. Anyway we won, and in honour of our triumph, I duly led the troops straight back into the tent. There were many questions asked in the Gloucestershire committee room, but the near-total absence of spectators, and the generosity of the press in putting it down as on off-day all round, somehow allowed both sides to get away with it.

There was another, less shameful, incident involving a tent at Grace Road. The visitors were Essex, whose ground at Chelmsford is festooned with hospitality boxes. Their end-of-day drink when they came to Leicester consisted of one crate of bottled lager (warm) bunged underneath the dressing room table. They once protested by taking all the tops off and leaving them there, and on one occasion John Lever had wound me up so much about the lack of conviviality at close of play that I rummaged around in the attic for a miniature one-man tent that I used to play with as a child. I erected it just over the boundary rope at fine leg in a pathetic attempt to imitate the throng of sponsors’ tents Essex would have expected to find at home, took half a dozen bottles of the aforementioned lager down into the tent, and at the end of the day we had a fairly silly ten-minute party in this particular sponsor’s tent.

I suppose it all added to the general image, although ‘laid back’ was largely an invention of the press. The words press and invention have not been entirely separable throughout much of my career, even though I have had some highly complimentary things said about me as well, and the TCCB’s concern about the altered concept of modern cricket reporting led them to appoint a media relations manager in 1988. They were also considering at one stage organizing some sort of press awareness course for England players – pitfalls for the unwary, so to speak. In point of fact, there are also pitfalls for the wary these days. Your first exposure to the press is normally a pleasant one, in which the callow youth picks up his weekly copy of the Loughborough Echo and finds his score faithfully reported somewhere near the back page. As time goes on you save the clippings: as time goes further on, you screw them up and hurl them towards the wastepaper basket. When I first started playing, the dunce’s cap superimposed on a player’s head – so beloved of the tabloids when we were getting hammered by Australia in 1989 – was not even an idea. I can recall in my early England days being asked to pose topless and sit on top of a circus horse, although I can’t imagine Hobbs or Hammond ever having accepted this sort of request.

I have tried not to get too carried away by some of the things that have been written about me, or indeed too upset, but there are times when you just cannot believe what a complete stranger has just written about you. One of my regular tormentors has been a reporter for The Sun, who has poured out some amazing vitriol about me. We sat in the same press box in Jamaica when I was hired by The Times for the 1989-90 West Indies tour, and I thought about introducing myself, but really could not think of what to say to the guy. In most respects, though, it hurts more if you are lambasted by comments in the ‘serious’ papers, such as when I was advised after the first Test against Australia at Headingley in 1989 to book in for a lobotomy at the same time as my shoulder operation. I shan’t mention his name, but suffice to say that, in terms of this book, he is a ghost writer of his former self.

Pure human instinct dictates that if you are criticized by the media, you don’t really like it. Cricketers do not care much for criticism from former players, and players are incredibly defensive nowadays. Most of the bad language in a Test match dressing room comes from players reading the morning papers, or listening to some former player giving you stick on TV. Having said that, I still believe that players and the press have to work together, and for my own part, I would like to maintain my own interest in the game through the pen or the microphone. Reading rubbish about yourself in a newspaper is not the most difficult part for a player, unpleasant though it might be; it is the thought that someone might pick it up and believe it. Interpretation is another problem, in that you can sometimes say something perfectly innocuous and see it blown up, taken out of context, or both. If you go through a press conference with an unsmiling face you run the risk of being called angry, and if you crack the odd joke you become flippant. Sometimes you can see the question that comes attached to a limpet mine, and sometimes you can’t, but you certainly have to be on your toes.

There are other times when you find yourself abroad, and being ripped to shreds by people who have not even left the country. It happened on the 1985-86 tour to the West Indies, where there were also many unfamiliar reporters – tennis correspondents, you name it – specifically sent to dredge up the dirt, that it was a sheer relief to talk to a cricket reporter. I remember seeing a copy of the Daily Mirror in Barbados that devoted an entire centre spread to rip into our off-the-field activities, including one piece from a woman fashion correspondent who was there on holiday and had spotted someone daring to have a bottle of wine with his evening meal. None of them had a clue about cricket, and even the bloke who covered the tour for the Mirror was a stand-in seconded from some other sport. Years ago, a cricketer’s private life used to be respected by newspapers, but that ethos has long since passed away.

With regard to the genuine cricket press, England players these days regard it almost as an obligation to fume and rant, but it frequently becomes counterproductive. It is too easy to moan about what is being said or written. In some ways it is cathartic – it allows you to let off steam – but it is not necessarily useful in terms of producing the right mood and spirit that you need to play the game. If you can talk yourself into ignoring the media most of the time, take the view that they are getting on with their job and we are getting on with ours, then that is the ideal approach. We have to coexist, however uneasily. It is very hard at times, but each time a player gets involved, he is wasting his energy on a conflict that is always fruitless.

Although there have been one or two disasters along the way, and my Test career ended in a way that left a slightly sour taste in the mouth, it is nice to be able to reflect that the good times far outweighed the bad. I cannot, in all honesty, claim a memory of elephantine proportions, but certain moments stay with you quite vividly. My first Test century against New Zealand at the Oval in 1978, my first century overseas against Australia at Perth later that year, my double century against India, and involvement – either as captain or player – in a good many Test series triumphs.

I had the experience of playing with or against any number of famous players, and if I had a mentor in the professional game, it would have to be Ray Illingworth. As someone who had done little more than give it a swish at King’s School, Canterbury, it was a good education to learn the serious aspect of the game from a man with one of the harder noses in professional cricket. There was a good atmosphere at Grace Road under lily’s captaincy, and it was also a benefit for me to launch my career in one of the better county sides around at that time. He had his foibles, and the amount of mickey-taking he took from the other players without it in any way undermining his authority reflected a happy dressing room. In some ways, the club never recovered from his return to Yorkshire in 1978, and the way things turned out, I wonder whether Illy regretted leaving. However, he was never one for power sharing, and as Mike Turner was very much in charge at Grace Road, the chance to become player-manager at Yorkshire rather than remain answerable to Mike at Leicester was the more attractive option.

It’s ironic to think back now that Mike actually gave me £5 a week more than I was asking for when I signed my first contract in 1975, because in all my time at Leicester, the prime topic of conversation was how little we were paid in contrast to other counties. Mike, who more or less ran the club, was impossible to crack on wages – on almost anything come to that – and he was the sort of man who commanded either love or hate in his business dealings. He was known as the Ayatollah, because he had to have a finger in every pie that came out of the oven at Grace Road. Whether it was picking the side, or some piffling request from a gateman, Mike had a say in it, and he took such a work load on himself that he only really slowed down (and then only minimally) when he had a heart attack. As an administrator he was second to none, knew his cricket, and as far as I was concerned he was very supportive. If you were on the wrong side of Mike he was a hard opponent, but if you were on the right side he was a good friend and ally. Much of the good work he did for the players, myself included, was done quietly behind the scenes and with no great drama.

The player I was closest to at Leicester, both in cricketing outlook and as a kindred spirit, was Brian Davison. Davo was a larger than life character, and no-one could possibly have guessed from his early wild man days at Grace Road that he would end up as a member of parliament in Hobart, Tasmania, which is where he and his family emigrated after a long career at Leicestershire. I assume his canvassing methods are slightly different to those he employed in the Rhodesian army, when the members of the opposition were dangled from helicopters to help them in conversation. He was a destroyer of a cricket ball, and a phenomenally strong man – nor would you aim to get on the wrong side of him. When his nostrils flared, it was time to make yourself scarce. He liked a drink, smoked like a chimney, but there was a highly cultured side to him as well, and he became, among other things, quite an expert in antiques. He was appointed captain of the club in 1980, a short engagement that ended with too many adverse umpires’ reports, but I loved batting with him for the confidence he exuded at the crease. I loved driving with him rather less, as he tended to solve traffic problems with 90 m.p.h. excursions on the wrong side of the road. On his day, he would murder any bowler, and although he now lives in Tasmania, we still keep in touch.

I also learned a lot from Roger Tolchard, not least in refusing to play him at golf for money. His will to win at everything manifested itself in a self-appointed handicap of about 18 when he was closer to scratch. Tolly, who was my landlord in those early days at Leicester, was a fabulous one-day batsman, who was perhaps never quite the same player after having his cheekbone caved at Newcastle on the 1978-79 tour to Australia. He was not the most popular player on the circuit, as he consistently got up people’s noses, and as a teetotaller never gave himself the chance to undo the damage in the bar afterwards. However, he was a marvellous influence in our own dressing room, and was always at you about your cricket. I took over from him as captain in 1983 when the club fired him, a decision that he certainly did not expect at the time, and which closed the door on his career with an emphatic thud.

My closest mate in the England team has been Allan Lamb who made his debut about four years after mine. He is the only man I know who has been collared by a policeman on the beat for using a mobile hand-held telephone: he was in a traffic jam on the King’s Road in London and doing about 1 m.p.h. Lamby is a remarkably straight-up-and-down guy, with as large a capacity for having a good time as anyone I’ve met, is an extraordinary good host – dangerously so – and has this huge energy and vitality that rubs off on any dressing room he is in. He has, down the years, been the wheeler-dealer of the England team, having as good an eye for business as he has for a cricket ball. On his day, he is as ruthless a destroyer of good bowling as anyone. Like most South Africans he is fond of the outdoors, and has now become something of the English country squire, always out hunting, fishing and shooting, and it was Lamby who was with me when I first went down the Cresta Run, another little part-time diversion that we will come back to later.

Lamby and Ian Botham are similar characters in many respects, and there is a common denominator in my relationship with them in that I can’t keep up with either after dark. He has never shirked a challenge, and the fact that this applies off the field as well as on it has dropped him into the fertilizer once or twice. ‘Both’ is quite a vulnerable character, who tends to overreact if people set out to rub him up the wrong way in a bar, as many have, but he can also be as good as gold. He’s much brighter than people give him credit for, and because he has done so many things, there is a lot of depth to him. Again, contrary to public opinion, he does not down the nearest bottle of Beaujolais nouveau in one gulp (although I dare say he could) but is actually quite a discerning wine buff. He’s exceptionally loyal to his friends, and can be equally hard on people he has no time for. It is perfectly possible, also, for people to change categories with him, and one example was Leicestershire’s Les Taylor. Botham had no time for him at all until the 1985-86 West Indies tour, but when he found out what a character Les was, they became bosom buddies. It was said that I had problems captaining him, but rarely ever did, and I always enjoyed playing with him.

I enjoyed playing with Graham Gooch until that last tour to Australia in 1990-91, but we have been good mates down the years, and I have nothing but admiration for what he has achieved for himself. He is, as most people are aware, an intensely private man, extremely shy with people he doesn’t know, and has become more and more dedicated over the years. He was a good bit wilder in his younger days, which might surprise some people, but as time has gone on he has become immersed in the game, and in making money out of it. He is still a social animal, with a dry sense of humour, but can be horribly intransigent at times. He always resented the punishment that was dished out to him for going to South Africa in 1981, and it is either an irony or a triumph for his character, depending on your point of view, that a cricketer who was banned for three years by his country has now become a national figurehead. Whether, when we drifted apart in Australia, he thought I had become a subversive influence I don’t know, but it cooled our relationship and this has left me a little sad.

Whenever I have come in for criticism during my career, I have invariably been compared, unfavourably, with Geoff Boycott. Why could I not have been as single minded as he was? The answer is I don’t really know, but as I said before, I might possibly have entertained a few more people than he did. He always liked being the centre of attention (when he’s on TV he always speaks louder than anyone else) and would like to be loved more than perhaps he is. He has always been an enigma. He can be very rational, he has an immense knowledge of the game, he’s a very fine analyst of techniques and of situations within a game, and he is, potentially, one of the world’s great commentators. He certainly has the knowledge and understanding, but unfortunately you have to temper that with a very one-eyed view of the rest of the world, which largely centres around himself. I’ve never managed to finish one of his books (although in fairness this applies to most books I pick up) but the gist always seems to be: ‘I’d have done this, I’d have done that,’ and all the rest of it. Everything is based on G. Boycott. There are the archetypal Boycott stories, such as the time he reckoned he had cracked John Gleeson’s googly but refused to tell anyone else in the dressing room how he had done it.

The only time I ever heard him admit to feeling vulnerable was in India, at a cocktail party in the grounds of the Maharajah of Baroda’s palace, when he sought me out for a heart-to-heart and said that he didn’t think people understood him properly. Well, following a conversation in his hotel room during a previous trip to India, I certainly knew someone who did not understand him. Me. We had arrived in Bombay for the Jubilee Test after the 1979-80 tour of Australia, a match I remember for three distinct reasons. Firstly, Both did his ‘Wilson of the Wizard’ bit and more or less won the game single-handed, then there were two strange incidents on the field. John Lever turned a ball off his legs for two, dislodging a bail as he did so. When he got back to the striker’s end he realized that no-one had noticed, surreptitiously put the bail back on, and got away with it. The other, even odder event, concerned Boycs, who had got a thin tickle down the legside to the wicketkeeper and was given out. However, at no stage did he look up at the umpire, and simply carried on marking out his guard and doing a spot of gardening. Eventually, the umpire put his finger down, the Indians appealed again and this time Boycs was given not out. It was extraordinary. I did not get any runs in that game, and had also had a poor tour to Australia. (I did get 98 not out in Sydney, having enjoyed a lot of luck in getting to 40, then ran out of partners when Willis lost his wicket. It was a barren period for me.) During the Bombay Test, I had some autograph sheets that needed signing, and I popped in to Boycs’ room at the hotel to get a few signatures. He looked up at me and said: ‘I can tell thee what tha doing wrong, tha knows.’ Pause. ‘But I’m not going to.’ I thought to myself: ‘Thanks very much’ and walked out.

On the tour of India in 1981-82 Boycott had the world record for Test runs in his sights, and he passed it with a century at Delhi. Our next game was in Calcutta, and although he got a couple of rough decisions, it was as if the whole mental effort of getting past the target had drained him of motivation. After the second dismissal he went straight to bed, stayed in his room through the rest day and reports came back through his lady friend that he was very ill. The doctors were called in, and we didn’t see him again until round about lunchtime on the final day. With the game heading for a draw, we were still in the field, and as we went out again after lunch, Boycs turned to the boys left in the dressing room and said: ‘Anyone fancy a game of golf? I need some fresh air.’ It was widely believed that if he really required fresh air (always assuming you can find any in Calcutta) then perhaps he should have been inhaling it out on the field. Anyway, he took himself off to the Tollygunge Club for nine holes, and the overwhelming feeling that Boycs’ personal ambitions were coming a long way before the team’s general well-being, and the suspicion that his continued presence would be divisive on a tour already proving difficult in terms of morale, earned him an early ticket home. He left us a farewell note, pinned with a corkscrew to the side of a very pleasant redwood cabinet in the team room of the Oberoi Grand Hotel. Some of his unscheduled time off, of course, was spent organizing the Breweries tour to South Africa.

He’s certainly different. He takes his ginseng tea with him everywhere, and he even had it written into his contract with Sky TV in England that he had to have a ‘proper’ cup or mug – no plastic. There are times when you can get on with him, and he has a lot to offer – although he got up Lamby’s nose during coaching before the last tour to the West Indies when he did everything except sing My Way to us. Technically and mentally he was a very strong player, although his first philosophy was always not to get out. We dropped him from the one-day side in Australia once, and when we brought him back he suddenly discovered a few shots. He had a lot of guts, and the number of runs he scored points to him being a more than useful player.

Boycs always made me concentrate harder when I was batting with him, although this was largely to avoid getting run out. He did me once in Jamaica, and during a Test at Edgbaston I erred on the side of safety when he glided one down behind square, declining his call for a single. Not long after, he returned the compliment after I’d knocked one into a space, and at the end of the over he said: ‘If you’re not going to run mine, I’m not going to run yours.’ He has the ability to be extremely charming, and an equal ability to be a complete sod. He has said many times that a combination of my ability and his brain would make quite a player, and I would admit that had I had more of his application and dedication to the game I might have scored a lot more Test runs than he did. I might not, however, have had quite so many chums.

I would count Mike Gatting among them, and we go back a long way. I have always admired his fighting qualities, and I thought it was typical of him to have scored so many runs in the summer of 1991 when he came back from South Africa. People who thought he would not have sufficient motivation without the incentive of a Test place, did not know the man. He murders bad bowling, and his eyes come out like organ stops when a spinner comes on. His eating habits are legendary, and the biggest shock I had all last summer was reading a report of a Middlesex game in the morning paper in which the captains, Gatt being one, had agreed to waive the tea interval. He has acquired a little dangerous knowledge about wine and crosswords, and although he invariably finishes the Daily Telegraph puzzle, he is not averse to putting a word in that fits the space rather than the clue. I like Gatt, although we are not that similar, and we don’t often seek out each other’s company after hours. I have never spoken to him on the subject, but it is rumoured that Micky Stewart told Gatt that he was about to be reappointed England captain ahead of me in 1989 when Ossie Wheatley applied his veto. What with getting sacked in 1988, his mother-in-law dying soon after, getting fined by the TCCB for an unauthorized chapter on the Shakoor Rana business in his book, and then getting knocked back by Wheatley, it was perhaps not surprising that he took the South Africans’ money later that summer.

Mike remains a very committed cricketer and loves his role as Middlesex captain, following in the footsteps, if not the style, of Mike Brearley and the likes, and continues to bat with complete assurance and disdain for most opposition bowling. He has a down-to-earth approach to both the game and the people who play it which endears him to most of those who play under him, who in turn are prepared to excuse his foibles in exchange for his support and leadership.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_f86768bf-badb-5433-a706-2fd1c69856ff)

A millionaire? That’s rich