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