to be part of an epic victory, gained by 15 runs at 5.30 p.m. on the second day and watched by mum and dad. Some say it was the bowling of Mushy and Caddick, who took 12 wickets in the match and his career-best 9 for 32 in 11.2 overs in their second innings of 72 all out, which tilted the balance our way. I’d like to think my four runs (1 and 3, out to DeFreitas lbw and caught behind) also helped, a notion Mike Atherton found strangely difficult to comprehend when I shared an England dressing-room with him years later. All I remember, in actual fact, was just not being able to hit the ball, apart from two edges through the vacant slip area to third man that brought me the single and the three.
My education was advanced in one other way, though. I was sledged for the first time and not in the general, genial, jokey way that I had been brought up to believe was all part of the camaraderie of the game, but nastily and unnecessarily. Looking back now it was probably just a throwaway line long forgotten by the bloke who said it, the Lancashire batsman Nick Speak, but, at the time it left a sour taste. After Warren Hegg had caught me off ‘Daffy’ in the second innings, Speak walked up to Wasim within my earshot and said: ‘This bloke is sh**.’ I’ll never forget it because it annoyed me so much. It wasn’t the worst thing he could have said and I could handle myself all right, but I was a 17-year-old kid trying to find my way in the game and to me what he said just amounted to an attempt to bully me, no more no less. I used to get a lot of that stuff. To me, it wasn’t really sledging, or trying to get under someone’s skin or put them off their stroke. It was bullying, pure and simple. And I have always hated bullies. In years to come, whenever dressing-room banter crossed the line I made it my business to keep an eye on things.
I was due to get another go in the next match, against Worcestershire at New Road, but I then managed to make myself fairly unpopular with the club by turning out to play for Keynsham the next day without telling them, diving on the boundary to stop a four and knackering my knee. The county’s mood with me barely improved for the rest of the season. At least I was consistent. At the beginning of July I followed up my 1 and 3 with 6 and 0 against Sussex at Taunton and rounded things off nicely with 4 and 0 against Leicestershire at Weston Super Mare in mid-August. No wonder they never bothered taking me on any away trips. Fourteen runs at 2.33, with allowances, expenses and, remarkably, two win bonuses from my three matches, I was working out at around £250 a run.
But Peter Robinson, our coach, kept faith. I had wondered when I joined whether the coaching staff might try and get me to change or adapt my batting style, but they didn’t, even though I was clearly struggling to cope with the demands of playing at this level. My game was basically the same then as it is today, with a few adjustments. For my big scoring shots, on the offside and straight I would cut and drive, sweep or slog-sweep the spinners and pull or whip the quicks off my legs hard and, if safe, in the air. There was always talk about my footwork, or lack of it, but my game was based on my knowing exactly where my off stump was, and playing with my head and body still, straight and facing wicket to wicket. Robbo kept telling me to stick to what I was good at, encouraged me to express myself and I was still scoring good runs in the seconds, including my first 2nd XI century against Kent, for whom a lad called Duncan Spencer was making waves as a tearaway paceman. Whatever questions were already being asked about my technique, at least I was able to show my courage against the fast stuff was never going to be in question. It wasn’t much use on my first England Under-19 tour that winter, however, under skipper Michael Vaughan, against the Sri Lankan spinners.
* * *
Luck. However you dress up a person’s life or career, whatever talent a person has or whatever opportunities arise, somewhere along the line everyone needs luck in order to succeed.
I had mine when I needed it most, soon after the start of the 1994 season, just around the time when some at Somerset might have been starting to have second thoughts about me. Though Robinson and Bob Cottam insisted they would carry on backing me, others at the club might not have been so sure after my wholly unimpressive baptism in championship cricket. Prior to the start of the season, Bob called me in and told me that, at some stage, they were going to give me a run of at least three championship matches to see how I was progressing. He didn’t spell out what might happen if I failed, but my two-year contract would be up at the end of the season and a decision on whether I was worth persevering with would have to be made one way or the other before then.
I started brilliantly, scoring 0 and 7, again versus Lancashire, batting down the order at Southport at the end of May. So promoting me to open in the next match against Hampshire at Taunton at the start of June was either a tactical masterstroke or one of the last few remaining rolls of the dice. It looked very much like the latter when, on two, the West Indies paceman Winston Benjamin sent down another very quick ball, I fended it off and waited for Tony Middleton, under the lid at short leg, to bring this latest epic innings to a close.
They say your whole life flashes in front of you in the instant before you buy the farm; even as the ball was travelling towards Middleton, ready and waiting no more than three yards away on my left-hand side, with the roar of celebration beginning to gurgle up from the pit of Benjamin’s stomach, I had more than enough time to work out the following equations: 1+3+6+0+4+0+0+7+2 = 23, and 23 divided by nine = not enough (2.55 recurring, in fact).
And then Tony Middleton dropped the ball. I could have kissed him. Eight runs later I had, as Wisden recorded, ‘escaped single figures for the first time’ in my ninth first-class innings, and I went on to make 81, an innings I must have played in a trance because I remember absolutely nothing whatsoever about it. After two days of rain, our declaration and a double forfeiture of innings meant they were chasing 333 to win on the last day and we prevailed thanks mainly to the 90mph bowling of Andre Van Troost, our Flying Dutchman who remains the fastest bowler ever to come out of the Netherlands, and, swearing his head off in a unique twisted mixture of English and Dutch, the most unintentionally hilarious when angry as well.
I was away. Opening with Lathwell for almost all of the remainder of the season, I followed up my maiden first-class 50 with another, in my very next innings against Yorkshire at Headingley and then, at Bath a week later, my first hundred, against Surrey. Lathwell kicked off with a double in our first innings, Somerset’s first-ever on this ground, then I scored 121 in our second as we declared on 329 for six, setting them 470 to win and had them 48 for three at the close on the Saturday.
I was ecstatic and spent the rest of the evening down the road at Keynsham with Eddie Gregg, Lee Cole and the rest of the lads, playing silly drinking games, like spoof and piling up beer mats on the edge of a table, flicking them up with your hand from underneath and seeing how many you could catch. Once a club cricketer, always a club cricketer. Utterly bladdered by the end of all this, I crashed out that night wondering if life could ever get any better. And the runs kept flowing like Taunton scrumpy.
The day after we had finished off Surrey by 317 runs, I made 116 against Oxfordshire in my NatWest debut, then four 50s in the next six championship innings, and, at the end of July, another century, against Sussex at Hove. At that stage, from and including the innings when Tony Middleton gave me a second chance against Hampshire back in May, my run of scores in the championship read 81, 54, 26, 121, 55, 0, 53, 59, 8, 87, 0 and 115. Forget 23 in my first nine innings, I had made 659 in the next ten, including six fifties and two hundreds.
Now, up to this point I’d never exactly been thought of as the next Che Guevara; even at school I was more of a hopeless case than a rebel with, or without, a cause, but what happened next took me about as close to challenging authority as I had ever been before. In the middle of this unbelievable about-turn and run of form against some of the best bowlers in the country I had to stop playing for Somerset and start playing for the England Under-19s.
At the beginning of August, instead of playing two championship matches against Durham at Taunton and Middlesex at Lord’s, I had to play in two Under-19 one-day internationals against India and the first of three Tests, again under Michael Vaughan and, unbelievably irritatingly, at Taunton. There was just no comparison in the standard of cricket, and while it was, of course, always an honour to represent my country at this level, I felt it was also a complete waste of my time. My heart wasn’t in it. I wasn’t being arrogant or getting too big for my bangers, it was just that I knew I would learn so much more playing