Brian, you might say your actions have caused quite a stir. Andy didn’t take it too well, as you can imagine, and, er, Peter Bowler got nought.’
‘Oh Christ!’ said Rose, and then he noticed a smile creep across Anderson’s face.
‘You jammy bastard,’ Anderson said. ‘Marcus is 100 not out. He’s been bashing it everywhere.’
I finished with 178, my highest score to date.
‘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.