Читать книгу Coming Back To Me: The Autobiography of Marcus Trescothick - Marcus Trescothick - Страница 11

‘Is this the same bloke who got all those runs as a kid?’ he asked. “kin ‘ell, what happened to you, then? I thought you were going to be a player. Any chance of you fulfilling your potential? Ever?’

I was sorry to see Andy Hayhurst go when he left at the end of the 1996 season, and just as sad when Bob Cottam was also released. But all of us at Somerset were enthused by the arrival of the man to replace him, the incredibly successful captain of Warwickshire, the recently retired Dermot Reeve.

Dermot was a radical thinker, a livewire who was always questioning and challenging conventional cricketing wisdom. He held certain things as given; firstly, whatever your talent, you had a better chance of employing it effectively if you were super-fit for the purpose. And that meant me. Secondly, very much like Duncan Fletcher later, he wanted players to have more than one string to their bow. And that also meant me. During the time he was in charge he got me fitter and he got me bowling, pretty successfully. The downside was that, at least initially, my batting stalled. I didn’t exactly go backwards but I definitely failed to make any significant progress until my second winter in Australia, in 1998–99.

For various reasons, another young batsman was also starting a difficult period, but in the case of Mark Lathwell it was to end eventually in his premature retirement.

I cannot overstate how brilliant Lathwell was. Sure, he found the experience of playing for England unnerving. The rumour goes that when Graham Gooch rang him up to tell him he was being left out after two Tests against Australia in ‘93, he mumbled something along the lines of ‘Thank God for that.’ But what a talent – a little bit of genius. Sometimes, watching him from the other end, he would amaze you by doing things you would never have seen coming, like shape to leave a ball outside the off-stump, then, with hands quick as a cobra’s strike, blast it through mid-wicket for four. There were occasions when people just could not bowl to him. I know he didn’t really enjoy being under the spotlight with England but he loved playing for Somerset. Why Dermot felt he had to try and change his technique I’ll never know, but attempting to persuade this utterly unconventional batsman to play in a more conventional fashion was the beginning of the end for Lathwell. He eventually lost his love of the game, then after suffering severe injury, when he tried a comeback he realized his heart was no longer in it, which was a tragedy for him and for English cricket.

One good thing did come out of the 1996 season. I met and started going out with a local girl called Hayley Rowse, who had a lovely smile, lovely eyes and a down-to-earth personality that ideally suited my own. I’d glimpsed her a few times, working in the Tony Price sports shop in town and I knew she was interested in cricket. But the first time I tried to talk to her socially, one night in Dellers nightclub, it was pretty clear she wasn’t interested in me at all. I kept trying to catch her eye and pluck up the courage to talk to her, but every time I did she ducked, dived or hid behind one of her mates. I persisted, though, eventually wearing down her resistance and that was the start of a partnership that has since produced two lovely girls and lots of wonderful memories. In later years we shared fantastic times, like the celebrations at The Oval in 2005 and, when the dark times came, I’m not certain I would have survived without her.

Any notion of future success appeared a long way off as I struggled to come to terms with Dermot’s idea of turning me into an all-rounder. I could bowl all right, but only medium-pace semi-filth at best. Even though I had managed to take a hat-trick against Young Australia at Taunton the previous summer, and the first of the three was Adam Gilchrist, Wisden correctly described the move to employ me thus: ‘Trescothick, brought on in desperation to bowl his innocuous seamers …’, a view supported when you consider the identity of my other two Aussie rabbits, Jo Angel and Peter McIntyre.

As for my batting, even accounting for my 178 against Hampshire following the intervention of Brian Rose, I finished the season with 628 runs at 28.54 and at the start of ‘97 I couldn’t get going at all. I opened up with scores of 10, 1, 4, 16 and 4 in the championship, and was quietly taken out of the firing line to play for the seconds for the next six weeks, through June and the start of July.

For all the world it looked as though my decline might be terminal. I was 21 and a half now, the age when, if I’d had what it took, I should have been ready to kick on to the next level. The reality was that I was a second-team cricketer, still seemingly unable to correct a major technical flaw in my batting that had brought my progress to a grinding halt, and being encouraged instead to see myself as a ‘bits-and-pieces’ all-rounder, bowling medium-pacers and bashing it about a bit down the order.

It would take something pretty special to blow me out of the doldrums, to remind myself and everyone else that my talent was worth renewed attention and support – and then, in a four-day game against Warwickshire 2nd XI at the County Ground, it happened.

I’d taken four wickets in their first innings of 296, but when we were bowled out for 176, me for 21 by the Aussie-bred all-rounder Mike Edmond, their second innings 491 for six declared (Edmond 135) meant we were set a mere 612 to win in a day and a half. What made the idea of winning even more fanciful was that Andy Cottam, a batsman and left-arm spinner and the son of Bob Cottam, had had his right knuckle broken in our first innings and would be unable to hold a bat, let alone use it the second time round.

Even when we finished the third day on 241 for two, with me not out 91 and Mike Burns not out 50, everyone believed the final day would be all about surviving for the draw.

I don’t quite know what came over me, to be honest, but from the first ball of the next morning I just launched myself at the bowling. Whatever they bowled and wherever they bowled it, I smashed it.

After an hour or so, my stand of 154 for the third wicket with Burns ended, and it was about this time that someone noticed that there were only ten of us present. Unbeknown to all but a couple of us, Andy Cottam had headed off home to Seaton, about a 45-minute drive away, to drown his sorrows at the fact that he would probably be out for the rest of the season. It had never occurred to him, or anyone else, that he might actually be needed on the field.

Then, as the afternoon session progressed and I put on 144 for the fifth wicket with Luke Sutton, of which he made 34, somebody jokingly said ‘We’d better get Peter Anderson to go find Andy …’ and someone else, reading a scoreboard of around 480 for five said: ‘Christ, we better had, at that.’

So Anderson was duly dispatched to Seaton to try and track down Andy, tell him what was going on and get him back to the ground just in case. The club secretary had a shrewd idea Andy would be in the pub. His problem was, which one?

There were 16 pubs in Seaton, a popular holiday destination in North Somerset, and Anderson tried most of them. By the time we reached 500 he had looked for Andy in The Fountain Head Inn, The Ship Inn and The Dolphin Long Bar. By the time we scored 520, Anderson had scoured The Barrel of Beer, The Masons Arms, The Harbour Inn and the The Hook & Parrot. No sign of Andy either at The Gerrard Arms, The Kingfisher or The Eyre Court Hotel. Finally, with us now on 550 for five, Anderson found his man, somewhat the worse for a few pints, dragged him into his car and sped off back to Taunton.

Anderson’s foot never left the accelerator, while Andy Cottam spent the entire journey with his window open trying desperately to blow away a certain fuzziness.

Back at Taunton, Edmond was in full swing again, and three wickets in quick time left us seemingly stranded at 595 for nine. ‘Well tried, Banger,’ some of the Warwicks lads congratulated me, as we all prepared to walk off, before the sight of Andy Cottam making his way somewhat unsteadily towards us stopped everyone in their tracks.

‘I’m coming, Banger.’ he called out to me. ‘I’m coming out to bat.’

No one was quite sure if this was supposed to be some kind of gag. But Andy, his hand wrapped in bandages and hanging limply from his side, kept on coming, the match was still on and we needed 17 to win.

‘Right, Banger,’ Andy breathed all over me. ‘You get the runs and I’ll just run.’ And that is what we did, up to 604 with just eight to get, when I turned a ball from Edmond behind square on the leg-side and Andy called out ‘YEESSS …!!.’

The problem was Andy’s judgement was still somewhat impaired, so much so, in fact, that he hadn’t noticed the fielder coming round to try and restrict us to the single that would mean he must face the bowling.

‘Run two!’ I shouted as we crossed, knowing I had to protect Andy from the bowling at all costs. I nearly made it too, but a direct hit from Mike Powell beat me by a foot, run out for 322, my highest-ever score in any form of cricket, made from 417 balls, with 53 fours and three sixes.

As a result I was soon back in the 1st XI and the club decided to persevere with me for a couple more seasons at least, and set about finding ways to help me over the hurdles I kept bumping into.

It took another season at home and two winters away for me to finally crack it.

Their first idea was to send me to Australia to get fit and, playing for Melville in Perth alongside Andre Van Troost and Jason Kerr, I did, swimming in the sea, playing golf with my mates and good standard grade cricket against players like Justin Langer and Damien Martyn. The whole experience of fending for myself definitely helped me grow up fast, even though I suffered occasional moments of homesickness and realized I was missing Hayley a lot, especially as the house we all shared in Cottesloe was worse than my first lodgings in Taunton. The thought of sleeping under the stars might appeal to romantics but this was different. I was gazing up at the stars through the holes in my bedroom ceiling and any piece of food that wasn’t nailed down was pinched by rats the size of bears.

But I was determined to get through it and the regime instigated by a coach called Peter Wishart made sure we were kept busy. Up at 7 a.m. to do yoga and stretches, breakfast at 8 a.m., then either play or train in the morning, have lunch, train some more in the afternoon and finish off with a race against the great whites in the evening. The day we arrived in Perth we read reports of a shark attack so that kept you on your fins.

While I had some success with the bat, it was only when I returned to Perth the following year to work with Peter Carlstein, the world-renowned batting coach from South Africa whom English counties enlisted every winter to help out their young players, that I was finally able to make the breakthrough.

Peter took a thorough look at my game and confirmed what we already knew, that my strength outside off-stump was also my biggest weakness. The fact was when bowlers put the ball in that area, I never knew when to leave well alone and ended up chasing everything.

Of course, with the power and eye and timing I possessed, if it was my day I would still be able to score plenty. But when it wasn’t, or the ball deviated slightly off the seam I was dead in the water. For three years, any one of a number of seasoned county and sometimes Test bowlers would line up to bowl just around or outside off stump with a full array of slips and gulley and just wait for me to play one shot too many. My worst and most humiliating experience came when I batted against the canny Indian pace bowler Javagal Srinath in a Benson & Hedges match. He bowled at me for about six overs and I reckon on average I must have played and missed about four times an over. And by now my feeling of win some/lose some had been replaced by the horrible fear that if I didn’t come up with an answer soon I would be finished for good.

Peter and I discussed the issue and he devised a new plan. Instead of saying that’s my game, that’s what got me this far and if it’s risky, so be it, we set about overcoming my instincts and retraining my brain.

Instead of playing the game the bowlers wanted me to play I would say to them: ‘No. If you want to bowl out there, that’s fine by me. Bowl there as long as you want to but I’m not playing your game anymore.’

One aspect of Peter’s training was utterly ruthless, and its roots lay on the beaches of the Caribbean. They say that one of the reasons the great West Indies batsmen of the past were not only fantastic, exuberant strokeplayers but also able to occupy the crease for long periods, was the first law of beach cricket; when you’re out, you’re out. In those days most of these guys learned their cricket playing on sand flattened and hardened by the sea and when it was your turn to bat you made sure you made the most of it because when you were out you wouldn’t get another go until it came round to being your turn again, and with so many kids wanting to play, that might be days.

Peter employed the same principle with the group of us he was coaching now. He would set a maximum time for you to bat in your session, with the bowling machine cranked up to speeds in excess of 90mph, but no minimum. It wasn’t ‘half an hour each, lads – enjoy yourself’ net practice. As soon as you were out against the bowling machine, whether it was first ball or the 1,000th, that was that. Any loose or flabby off-side shot and I would be sitting on my backside waiting for as long as it took for all the other guys in the group to get out as well and for my turn to bat to come round again, and that could take ages. It didn’t half concentrate the mind.

A golfer will tell you it takes about 3,000 reps to change a golf swing. It took me about 3,000 balls from bowlers and bowling machines to get me to the point where I could actually make my own conscious decision about whether to play at the ball or not, rather than just see it and try and hit it.

And then, finally, one bright clear, hot Perth day, in the middle of making 180 for Melville against Gosnell, one ball in particular told me I was going to be all right.

I saw it leave the bowler’s hand, and I recall watching it so closely that the rest of what followed happened in super slow-motion, even though the ball was travelling around mid-80s mph. I saw it pitch about two yards in front of me and slightly to my off-side and realized I had all the time in the world to make a clear choice whether to play it or not. And in the instant I made my decision to leave it, a small happy bomb went off inside my head. I’d got it. By George, I’d got it.

* * *

In 1999, cricket in England was at a pretty low ebb. England’s 1998–99 Ashes trip had ended in a 3–1 defeat. David Lloyd, the coach, had been on a final warning from Lord’s after his comments about the bowling action of Muttiah Muralitharan the summer before and, soon after returning from Australia, ‘Bumble’ announced he would be stepping down at the end of England’s involvement in the forthcoming World Cup. The main contenders for his job were Bob Woolmer, the former England Test batsman currently coaching South Africa, Dav Whatmore, Sri Lanka’s coach and Duncan Fletcher, the Zimbabwean who had gained a big reputation for his work with Western Province in South Africa and later Glamorgan, but not big enough for Simon Pack, the ECB official interviewing him for the job, who greeted him with the words: ‘Hello, Dav.’

It was England’s turn to stage the World Cup that summer, and that gave me the chance to face Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne for the first time, though I’m fairly certain that, for them, the event did not go down as one to tell the grandchildren. Australia, with Glenn, Shane, Mark and Steve Waugh, Michael Bevan and Shane Lee far and away the best team in the world, came to Taunton for a warm-up match, the highlight of which was when I pulled the best pace bowler of his generation for four. ‘Not bad,’ I thought to myself. ‘Not bad at all.’ I looked towards him to see if I might have earned a reaction, a ‘good shot, mate’, a wink, a growl, anything would have done. Nothing. Not a glimmer.

From the host nation’s point of view, the great global celebration of world one-day cricket was a complete cock-up from start to finish. The ICC marketing department decided to hire Dave Stewart from the pop band Eurythmics to write and perform the official tournament song and, when he launched it at Lord’s on the eve of the first match between England and Sri Lanka, on 14 May, the effect on the assembled media was profound.

The song, entitled ‘Life Is A Carnival’, had a passably catchy tune, but the lyrics were something else. At no point was any mention made of anything to do with cricket and the accompanying video, which appeared to be a jumpy-camera home-movie remake of the film One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, was unintentionally hilarious. In it, a group of patients from a mental institution dressed in white tunics ‘escape’ from the medical staff supposed to be looking after them and run off to play a game of cricket. Quite what message Stewart was attempting to convey was beyond everyone. The song and video were met with stunned silence in the press conference, except for a few record company stooges hooting: ‘Whoh, whoh, whoh’ at the back of the room. And the fact that England were knocked out of the competition at the end of the group stage, the day before the song was released, somehow said it all.

‘Let’s get things fully in proportion,’ wrote John Etheridge in the Sun: ‘This was only the most catastrophic day ever for English cricket.’ Alec Stewart, who had led England to a Test series victory over South Africa the summer before, was sacked as captain and replaced by Nasser Hussain for the upcoming series with New Zealand. Tim Lamb, the Chief Executive of the Test and County Cricket Board, tried his best. ‘The carnival lives on,’ he suggested. There was a modicum of interest in the remainder of the tournament. Bangladesh, still not playing Test cricket, beat the mighty Pakistan in a meaningless match, but it was not until much later that the 33–1 odds against them doing it assumed any significance in the eyes of the wider cricketing public. And after a last ball semifinal between Australia and South Africa, when Allan Donald’s run-out prompted accusations of choking, the Aussies duly thrashed Pakistan in a damp squib final at Lord’s after Pakistan almost inexplicably elected to bat first in overcast conditions and were skittled out for 132 and lost by eight wickets.

Duncan Fletcher had duly been appointed to take over as coach, but he insisted England would have to do without him for the Test series against New Zealand, as he was committed to finishing the season with Glamorgan. And that is why he was at Taunton at the start of September coaching them against us.

Even though I felt I had made that crucial technical breakthrough in Perth the previous winter, my early season form had been inconsistent again and I went back to the nets for more repetitions. And I have the great England and Middlesex workhorse Angus Fraser to thank for getting me going again, when I batted against him in a championship match followed by a National League 45-over match, from 21–25 July.

Years earlier, Gus had been one of the presentation panel handing over The Cricketer Magazine award for the outstanding young cricketer of 1991, after my 4,000-run season. I’d played against him a few times since then and, while you could normally rely on Gus not to have a good word to say about anything or anyone, he’d barely opened his gob.

This time was different and the result was dramatic. His celebrations were fairly low-key when he got me out for eight in the first innings, probably because he thought I was not worth wasting his breath over. But he was in an absolutely foul mood by the time he bowled at me second time round after a 320-mile wild goose chase to London and back. He had been batting as night-watchman at the end of the first day when he received an SOS call from England to get to Lord’s asap to be on standby for the second Test.

Almost as soon as he arrived he was told he was no longer required, so he was steaming when he got back to Taunton to resume the match, and when I played and missed a few against him early in my second dig, he was ready to burst.

‘Is this the same bloke who got all those runs as a kid?’ he asked. “kin ‘ell, what happened to you, then? I thought you were going to be a player. Any chance of you fulfilling your potential? Ever?’

There’s only one way I’m going to shut him up, I thought to myself. So I smashed him and his mates all round the park for the next six hours. I finished with 190, my career best, and was only dismissed when run out by a deflection at the non-striker’s end. Gus never stopped. ‘Come on child prodigy, you know where the edges are, now try using the middle,’ and ‘Turn the bat over, mate. The instructions are on the other side,’ and he grew steadily more purple by the over. Gus was a great bowler for England who defied early injury to become an indispensable line and length merchant. But even in his hey-day it all looked so bloody hard and by this stage of his career he fully lived up to the description by Martin Johnson of the Daily Telegraph of running in to bowl ‘looking like he’d caught his braces on the sightscreen’. And this day the harder he tried the more knackered he looked and the worse his outlook on life became until it got to the point when even his team-mates were trying to avoid eye contact in case he had a go at them. It was a hot day and the pitch had died and gone to batter’s heaven and they all knew it was only a matter of time. Finally, when Paul Weekes let one past him like a matador shepherding a raging bull, then retrieved it from the boundary with a slight smirk on his face, Gus kicked the turf, confronted Weekes with his best double-teapot and asked him ‘And what do you think is so f***ing funny, you gutless tw*t’, and everyone fell about. Gus finished with figures of none for 106 and, after I scored 110 in 97 balls in the one-day match that followed, my undying thanks for helping get me in nick for what turned out to be the turning point of my career.

I’d never met or spoken with Duncan Fletcher before the fateful match between Somerset and Glamorgan at the County Ground, at the start of September. I didn’t speak to him during it either. The fact is I never exchanged a single word with England’s new coach until April the following year and we’ve never ever discussed the events of the second day’s play to this day.

In later years, when talking in the media and in his autobiography about how I came to be selected, first for England A that winter in Bangladesh and New Zealand, then for the senior one-day and Test sides in the summer of 2000, Duncan always referred to the innings I played that day as the moment he recognized my potential to play at the highest level.

As a team and a club we were experiencing a wide range of emotions. First, on 29 August, we suffered the disappointment of losing the NatWest final, to our local rivals Gloucestershire, who won an unmemorable contest by 50 runs at Lord’s. Two days later, we secured promotion to Division One of the CGU National League by beating Glamorgan under floodlights and in front of a full house at Taunton. We made 257 for nine, to which I contributed nought and Rob Turner 50. And some of our supporters took the opportunity of Duncan’s first visit after being appointed England coach-in-waiting by reminding him what they thought of Rob. One banner read simply: ‘The best wicket-keeper in the country is here.’ And he took three smart catches as we bowled them out for 222 to win by 35 runs.

Forty-eight hours later, on 2 September, 20 wickets fell on the first day on a juicy track. Glamorgan bowled us out for 203, we then bowled them out for 113 and then I went out and played if not the best innings of my career so far, without a shadow of doubt the most important, 167 with 25 fours and five sixes, one of which, apparently, damaged a tombstone in St James’s churchyard.

I can honestly say the thought that I was on trial in front of the new England coach never entered my head for a moment. And if you believe that, you probably also believe spaghetti grows on trees. But as Duncan later made plain it wasn’t just the number of runs I scored that day that impressed him, it was the fact that one of the bowlers I scored them off was the South African all-rounder Jacques Kallis, who I had faced all those years ago in age-group cricket, whom Fletcher coached as a boy at Western Province and who he now rated as probably the best all-round cricketer in the world.

For some reason, whether it was Duncan’s pre-conceived plan, or just Kallis’s idea to try and shut me down on a still lively pitch, but, running in at a very respectable pace from the old pavilion end, and with Duncan watching every ball from above third man on the new pavilion balcony, he kept trying to bump me and, at that time of my life still being pretty much a compulsive hooker, I hardly left a ball. Instead, I just kept smacking him for four over square leg, with the odd six thrown in.

At the end of a dismal summer for England, when they followed up their poor showing in the World Cup by losing 2–1 to New Zealand even though they took the first Test at Edgbaston, the Sun printed a photograph of a burning set of stumps and bails underneath the headline ‘English Cricket RIP’, and the Board, driven by Brian Bolus, the chairman of the International Teams Group, duly instructed the chairman of selectors David Graveney, new coach Fletcher and the newish captain, Nasser, that the time had come for a clear-out and the introduction of some new faces, starting with the squad for the winter tour to South Africa.

The first time Nasser had ever met Duncan was when they came together in the autumn to begin planning the squad, and Nasser told me later that one of the first names Duncan raised was mine. Nasser said that had he done so a year later he would immediately have gone with Duncan’s judgement and picked me, but this time decided against it because he himself hadn’t seen enough of my batting nor known enough of Duncan to understand that when he said he had seen something in a player it was almost always something worth seeing.

‘Let’s keep an eye on him, anyway,’ they agreed. So while Michael Vaughan, Chris Adams, Darren Maddy and Gavin Hamilton were taken on the senior tour to South Africa, I was selected for the A team tour to Bangladesh and New Zealand, alongside Rob Turner, who Chris Read pipped for the role of Alec Stewart’s understudy in South Africa but who still had many backers to eventually take over as No. 1.

Of the four new bugs in South Africa, Vaughan made the biggest impact, walking out to bat on his debut in Johannesburg with England on 2 for two, which became 2 for four before he got off the mark. He kept his head to make 33 then, after a couple more useful scores, was made man-of-the-match for his 69 in England’s successful run-chase in the rain-affected final Test at Centurion Park; the South African captain Hansie Cronje had offered England a target, for reasons that remained his own until the match-fixing scandal broke and the truth of his deal with a bookmaker to ensure any result except a draw finally emerged.

I didn’t exactly set Bangladesh or New Zealand on fire, but the memory of events the previous summer in Taunton obviously stayed with Duncan because he insisted I should come back early from Somerset’s pre-season training in Cape Town in the spring of 2000 to attend an England training camp at Mottram Hall, Cheshire. Duncan also monitored my early season form, including a painstaking (i.e. long and boring) 105 out of 262 against Leicestershire in May – from 138 for seven Ian Blackwell and I put on 100 for the eighth wicket. All that I needed now was a chance and in late June, it came.

Nick Knight cracked a finger batting in the second Test against West Indies at Lord’s, which Hussain had already missed with a broken thumb, and England needed batting cover for the upcoming NatWest triangular one-day series with Zimbabwe and West Indies. On 2 July 2000 David Graveney dialled my number for the first time and changed my life.

Somerset had been on the road down in Maidstone, playing a four-day championship match against Kent, followed by a 45-over match on the Sunday. I was dog-tired and settled down in the back of Rob Turner’s car for the journey back to Taunton with a bag of sweets, ready for some kip, but decided I should probably switch on my phone for the first time that day to check my messages.

‘Hello, Tres,’ this one began. ‘It’s Grav. Can you give me a ring, please? Nick Knight’s broken a finger. We want to bring you in as cover for a couple of games and see what happens. Can you call me back as soon as you get this?’

Blimey, I thought. And then I thought again. First I wanted to check it wasn’t a crank call and second, if it was true, I needed to tread carefully. I knew how desperate Rob was to get a chance himself. I didn’t want to start punching the air and going off on one because I knew how disappointed he might feel at being overlooked again.

‘Hello, Grav.’ I said, as quietly as I could, without whispering. ‘It’s Marcus here.’

The rest of the conversation was pretty much a blur and afterwards, my first reaction was to ring the world, mum, dad, Hayley, Eddie Gregg and my mates at Keynsham, everyone. Yet at the same time I didn’t want to trample all over Rob’s feelings.

I needn’t have worried, of course. When I did tell him, Rob was thrilled for me. So I hit the phone big-time and, of course, everyone was massively excited. And all pretence at remaining cool, calm and collected went out the car window. Inside I was jumping up and down that I was going to be given a chance to do what I had dreamed of doing ever since I stood in front of the telly at home copying those far-away figures in white.