Driving Ambition - My Autobiography Page 3

  Fortunately, however, I managed to pull it off in the end, and my next destination was independence in the form of an economics degree at Durham University.

  2

  ALL THE GEAR, NO IDEA

  I step onto the train at Beaconsfield Station. This is the heart of the commuter belt and it is obvious to everyone that I am hopelessly out of place. Everywhere are suits and laptops; serious City types are preparing for a long day of meetings and deal-making. I manage to find a seat in the corner and, although I am in a jacket and tie, my cricket bag takes up the majority of the corridor, making it very difficult for the overweight stockbroker to get past, holding his newly acquired Chiltern Lines cup of coffee. Trains, rush hour and large sports bags don’t seem to go together too well.

  As I watch the Buckinghamshire countryside transform into a more urban landscape, with semi-detached houses and industrial estates appearing alongside the track, I allow myself to think about what might lie in store for me today.

  It was August 1996 and a few days before I’d had a call from Andy Wagner, my coach from school, telling me that he had put my name forward to someone called Ian Gould at Middlesex, who had invited me down to Lord’s for a net session to have a look at me. The message was pretty short and to the point. I was to get down to the ground for an 11.30 a.m. net session, and because the 1st XI were playing a County Championship game that day, I was to wear a jacket and tie. That was it. My introduction to the world of professional sport awaited.

  It wasn’t as though I felt completely out of my comfort zone. I had been at Durham for a year and in my first season for the university I had played against enough county 2nd XI players to know that on my day I could match any of them. All my team-mates from the Durham University side were either contracted to or trialling with county sides, and the idea of playing professional cricket was becoming more and more appealing.

  My problem, though, was that I was essentially unknown. I had never been part of any of the age-group sides for a first-class county, and although I had managed to play for Oxfordshire Under-19s for a couple of years, with reasonable success, I hadn’t been impressive enough to send county scouts scurrying back to report that they had found the next great hope.

  The good players in my age group, the likes of David Sales or Owais Shah, were already sampling the delights of first-class cricket. They were being talked about as part of the next golden generation of English batting. They had contracts firmly in place. They looked good in their county tracksuits. They belonged.

  I was, in contrast, an outsider. No real pedigree, no real contacts in the county game. My route into the professional ranks depended on nothing other than scoring runs when it mattered. There would be no one to report on a glorious hundred I scored a couple of years back, or the incredible pull shot I managed to hit against an England bowler. My stats up to that point were modest and I was a public school-educated student. In short, I was just the sort of person to put off the rank-and-file county coaches and players. The years of privilege and opportunity that had been afforded to me up to that point were about to be rendered useless.

  If I thought the train journey was uncomfortable, getting through Marylebone Station was infinitely worse. In my deep concern not to be late, I had set off too early and was now jostling with the experienced station campaigners. They had been taking this route for years and knew how to find a way past an inept Marylebone first-timer, who had shown enough bad judgement to bring an enormous cricket bag with him.

  By the time I emerged from the throng and walked out of the station, I felt completely flustered. I had managed to get the bag stuck in the automatic ticket barrier and the rest of the commuters were less than impressed by my antics. The day was not going well.

  Any hopes that things might get a little easier in the slightly more familiar surroundings of a cricket ground were soon dashed. The security team at the Grace Gates were not sufficiently impressed with my jacket and tie and cricket bag to let me in, and a hurried phone call had to be made to Ian Gould to check that I was, indeed, kosher. I could just about hear Ian’s Cockney tones on the other end of the phone telling them that ‘The bloke is OK. He is just a triallist. Send him up to the dressing room.’

  I made my way past the more friendly stewards at the front of the pavilion with a little more ease and was even given some remarkably accurate directions on how to get to the dressing room. I was to ‘go through the Long Room, but be careful with your bag; there are plenty of members about. Then, go up one flight of stairs, veer to the right, go through the door marked “players and officials only” and the door to the dressing room will be in front of you.’

  In hindsight, I probably should have thought about the timing of my entrance into the dressing room. It was 10.45, and any cricketer would know that interrupting players in the crucial fifteen minutes before the start of a game is not a great idea. The idea is worse still if the side is batting and the openers are going through their elaborate preparation routines, shadow-batting, skipping and the like.

  As I opened the door, the extent of my mistake became abundantly clear. The eyes of all the players instantly focused on the anonymous outsider who had the gall and arrogance to interrupt them at such a crucial time. The first face I recognised was that of Mark Ramprakash, Middlesex’s most famous player, who had once again found himself out of the England team and was, I subsequently learnt, ‘not in a good place’. He showed a fair amount of restraint in doing nothing more than scowl in my direction. The other players, including Angus Fraser and Phil Tufnell, just looked at me, eager to see what I had to say about my intrusion.

  ‘I am really sorry to bother you guys, but I’m here for a trial and was told to report to the dressing room. I think I’m meant to see Ian Gould,’ I just about managed to mumble, conscious that my heart felt as if it was going to explode and that my face had turned bright crimson.

  ‘Well, if that is the case, I suggest you ---- off to the second-team dressing room down the corridor and leave us in peace,’ came the less-than-friendly response from Angus Fraser, hero of Bridgetown and all-round England stalwart.

  It was far from the ideal opening to my long and extremely happy association with Middlesex County Cricket Club.

  The trial went well enough, despite a couple of my future team-mates thinking that I showed more promise with my left-arm seamers than my nervy batting. Well enough, in fact, for ‘Gunner’, the appropriate nickname for Ian Gould, the second-team coach who had once played in goal for Arsenal, to promise that he and Don Bennett, the club’s first-team coach, would come and watch me play for Oxfordshire Under-19s against Middlesex Under-19s the following week.

  ‘Then,’ he said, ‘we will take things from there …’

  It was hardly a ringing endorsement of my play in the nets, but he hadn’t dismissed me out of hand.

  Amazingly, little more than three weeks later I found myself in conversation with Ian Gould at Harrow CC. I had just completed my 2nd XI Championship debut, scoring 98 in the second innings, before succumbing to nerves and running myself out. In addition, I had blazed the Middlesex Under-19s attack all over the park for a run-a-ball 84 for Oxfordshire Under-19s and had also impressed in my limited-overs 2nd XI debut, scoring 64 against a strong Warwickshire team that included Paul Smith, one of the important cogs in their successful Championship-winning team, as well as Darren Altree, who was generally regarded as the quickest second-team bowler around.

  ‘Straussy,’ he said with a rare smile on his face, ‘I have just spoken to Don Bennett and we have decided to offer you a two-year summer contract. If I was you, I would go down the rub-a-dub-dub and get completely rat-arsed!’

  I followed his advice, and despite waking up the next morning with a thumping head to go along with tired muscles that were unused to fielding for a full day, I felt on top of the world. I was now a professional sportsman. It was something that I had always dreamed of being. I was going to get the opportunity to test my skills against the
best cricketers in the country. I was going to travel around and play on the country’s most hallowed grounds. And more importantly, I was going to get paid for doing it. In addition, I now qualified for those shiny white tracksuits that all my new team-mates were wearing, emblazoned with Hill Samuel Asset Management, the Middlesex sponsors. I could also help myself to brand-new Nike cricket boots and trainers. I was no longer the outsider. I belonged.

  Unfortunately, there was one small problem with this potential sportsman’s paradise. In short, I had all the gear and no idea. The end of the summer meant a return to Durham University for my second year, and as lovely as it was to be able to tell my team-mates that I was now a professional cricketer, I didn’t have the first idea about what that actually meant. As far as I was concerned, all I had to do was turn up and play, and my natural ability and cool temperament would see that I was successful. After all, it had worked in my trial matches.

  Anyway, there was so much other stuff to do at university. I was still playing rugby and looked as if I might make the 1st XV that year, and I was still jumping headlong into the obvious student pitfall of sampling the delights of north-eastern nightlife. For some unknown reason, I had also managed to get sucked into smoking excessively, and it was only a massive asthma attack towards the end of my time at university that prompted me to kick my twenty-a-day habit. Somewhere near the back of my priorities lay my economics degree, with its ludicrously lax demands on my time of eight hours a week in lectures. There didn’t seem to be any time left for training and over the long, cold winter, as my mental discipline drained away, my waistline expanded accordingly.

  ‘---- me, you look like the Michelin man,’ said Ian Gould as I returned to Middlesex, in July 1997, after a disappointing second season with Durham University. ‘Seems to me you’ve been enjoying that student lifestyle a bit too much. Well, we are about to find out if you have been doing any work. Go and join the lads. We’re doing a sprint session.’

  Suddenly I felt very nervous, in the same way as someone who turns up at an exam knowing that they haven’t revised for it. How was I going to hide the fact that I was incredibly unfit? Would my natural athleticism somehow get me through?

  I got the answer to that question at the end of the third set of shuttles. Straining to make sure I wasn’t lagging too far behind my team-mates, I pushed myself too hard and, snap, I felt my hamstring go. It is to this day the only time I have had a muscle injury. As I was writhing around on the floor in pain, Gould’s face appeared in my blurred vision.

  ‘Just what I thought, you lazy -------.’

  I spent five weeks recuperating, but for the rest of the season I was public enemy number one at Middlesex. Everyone seemed to have made up their mind that I was a waste of time. I could do nothing right. My only source of solace came from Ben Hutton, my best mate from school, who Middlesex had picked up on a summer contract earlier in the year. Unfortunately for him, he was tainted by the association and both of us were seen as outcasts: public school-educated softies in a world operated by hard, working-class cricket professionals.

  Cricketers have an amazing ability to forgive character flaws (or fitness flaws, for that matter) as long as you go out there and perform. Unfortunately for me, my confidence had taken such a dent from being vilified by my coach and team-mates that scoring runs became next to impossible. I didn’t know how to play decent spin bowling, having never really had to face it before, and even my normally strong back-foot game was starting to let me down.

  My nadir came in the last game of the season, against Somerset. Among their ranks was a Dutch cricketer by the name of Andre van Troost. He was commonly thought of as the quickest bowler in county cricket, but his pace was in no way matched by accuracy. He was famed for bowling beamers, bouncers, no-balls and wides. Normally you would get a combination of all the above in every over he bowled.

  Gunner, in an attempt to, on the one hand, give us the benefit of his considerable experience and, on the other, frighten the life out of us, brought us all together before the toss.

  ‘Van Troost is playing, lads. I have one bit of advice for you. Don’t try and hook him. He is too quick, and you will either end up in Taunton infirmary or back in the hut. Leave him well and see him off.’

  You can imagine the look on Gunner’s face as I trudged back to the pavilion after yet another single-figure score. You guessed it, I had hooked Van Troost with all my might, only to see the ball balloon pathetically to the square-leg fielder. I sat in my corner of the dressing room, hiding my head in my hands. Over the season I had averaged an embarrassingly disappointing 13 with the bat. I had no confidence in myself. I was a broken man.

  Barely twelve months on from the joy and exhilaration of becoming a professional sportsman, I was suddenly at a crossroads. I had one year to go on my contract, but if the next twelve months resembled the last in any way, I was toast. For the first time in my life the prospect of failure stared me straight between the eyes, and I didn’t like it. There was only one way to go. Somehow I had to become a professional sportsman.

  When I look back, I was actually very lucky that the MCC had finally given the go-ahead for six university centres of excellence to be established in order to encourage ambitious young cricketers to finish their studies before committing to the game. Graeme Fowler, the ex Lancashire and England opening batsman, was appointed director of the Durham UCCE. Paul Winsper (who went on to become fitness coach for Newcastle United) was brought in to give us conditioning advice and we were also given access to psychologists and physios.

  Overnight, the Durham University CC had gone from a ramshackle organisation of talented students – one of whom had the unenviable task of captaining, coordinating practices and getting people to turn up to matches on time – to a highly professional set-up. It was just what I needed and, after my repeated failures the previous season, I didn’t have to be asked twice about my commitment.

  I gave up rugby, got a gym membership and, for the first time in my life, started to put in some serious work. It was all a bit of a struggle, given that I had my final exams to prepare for, but I soon realised that there were actually a lot more hours in the day if I could break the habit of setting my alarm to wake me just in time for the lunchtime edition of Neighbours.

  I became something of a sponge, listening to Graeme Fowler recounting his days of fending off the mighty West Indians and playing alongside Wasim Akram, and I also started practising properly. Rather than just having a hit and a giggle in the nets, I started treating them as opportunities to hone my game and make progress. Much of this change of focus was probably lost on my team-mates at Durham, who had long since come to the opinion that I was a bit of a joke, more a figure of fun than a potential England cricketer. More importantly, though, I was beginning to look in the mirror and see more mental steel to go with a stronger and healthier body.

  * * *

  My return to Middlesex in the summer of 1998 was not accompanied by any of the doubt that had consumed me the previous year. I knew that I was well prepared, I knew that I had improved immeasurably as a player and I had also now completed my studies. My 2.1 in economics was in many ways a gold-plated invitation to join one of the financial powerhouses in the City, but for me it was nothing more than a safety net that I had no intention of using.

  I was determined – more determined than ever – that I was going to make a success of being a professional cricketer.

  Needless to say, with that sort of attitude and confidence, things changed dramatically. I seemed to get runs every time I played for the second team (although getting hundreds was proving a little difficult), and I was enjoying just as much showing off my new-found physical prowess to the rest of the lads. Amazingly, I had gone from being surprised and intimidated by the fitness of county cricketers, to being surprised and disappointed by how unfit they all were in the space of twelve months. I was now one of the fit ones, and as such I was a little frowned upon by those who were likely to be shown up
in the communal sessions.

  As is often the case in cricket, things moved more quickly and more dramatically than I expected. By July, my name was mentioned as being the next in line if a position became available in the first team, and by August David Nash, one of the talented prodigies and a great mate of mine, was sent back to the second team and I took his place.

  Not for the first or last time in my life, the opportunity to show that I could prosper at a higher level brought out the best in me. The innings I played against a decent Hampshire attack that included Nixon McLean, a highly talented and frighteningly quick West Indian fast bowler, still goes down as one of my finest. I remember hardly playing a false stroke, and I was surprised and astounded when I was out to a freakish catch at third slip for 83. They were my first runs in first-class cricket, and from that moment on I knew that I could make a career as a cricketer.

  There were to be no other great successes in the last couple of games of the season, but by the time the nights started drawing in and the sporting public’s attention turned towards the football season, I was preparing to take on another great challenge: going out to Australia to play cricket.

  Throughout the season I had been making arrangements with Luke Sutton, one of my mates from university who was making decent progress at Somerset as a keeper/batter, to spend the winter out in Sydney playing Grade cricket. For me it promised to be a great adventure. At the age of twenty-one, it would be my first chance to travel independently, having missed out on the fabled gap-year that many students embark upon to learn about the world (and women and alcohol) before starting their studies. I would also be able to play cricket in a great climate and hone my skills. All in all, the prospect sounded like a dream come true. The reality, as always, was slightly different.