A regular feature charting the lives of some of the game’s stars, this week the ex-England skipper picks out the men and moments that shaped his career.
FALLING FOR THE GAME
My dad played in the Manchester Association League, he was captain of the third XI at Worsley Cricket Club. I guess being taken down there every Saturday when I was young was when I first fell for cricket, but I didn’t know a great deal about it.
I was big into football as a kid. That was my passion, and I probably enjoyed football more than cricket until I was about 12 or 13. I liked cricket, but my brother was more into it than me. We moved to Sheffield when I was about nine and my brother went to the local club, at Abbeydale Park. I went along for a net, just to be involved, and the coach liked the way I played.
About a month later they sent me to a Yorkshire trial, and I got in.
But I never dreamt of it as a career.
As a young kid you play sport purely because it’s a hobby and it’s great fun. You’re with your mates, you’re learning the togetherness, the spirit of the team, and that’s what I enjoyed being around.
MOST INFLUENTIAL COACH
At the start of my career, it was Jack Bethel, down at Abbeydale Park. He was the one that gave me the foundations of the game. Then later, Duncan Fletcher was the one who turned me from being an ordinary county cricketer into an international player. He just talked differently and coached different technical ways of playing the game that I’d never even thought about. I have a huge amount of gratitude for what he brought to English cricket and I think it’s sad we don’t really talk about him these days. In fact, of all the people who have done great things for English cricket in the last 20 years, I would put Duncan Fletcher at the top of that list.
When Duncan took the job in 1999, England were eighth in the world, and he just changed the whole set-up of the team and the culture. In many ways he was probably three or four years ahead of his time. I could see the vision of what he was trying to create, but sadly he upset a few people along the way.
BEST YOU’VE EVER PLAYED
Probably at Sydney in 2003 when I got 183. McGrath and Warne weren’t playing but they still had some good players – Gillespie, Mac-Gill, Bichel – and the pitch was a bit spicy in the second innings. Or at the Adelaide Oval [in the same series] when I hit 177 against Australia’s full-strength attack. The series was very much still alive at that stage, we were only 1-0 down at the time.
