David Gower (Text Only). David Gower

I am always fighting a battle with the little man up there in my head. I believe that it is all part of the character: some parts may be good, others not so good. Some people have the capacity to put a padlock on the brain and throw away the key – mine likes to go for a wander. More often than not, I don’t like it any more than an exasperated spectator, or selector, but no-one is entirely free of weaknesses, and this happens to be one of mine.

      The philosophy I’ve tried to live by is to retain a sense of enjoyment in what is a sport as well as my livelihood. If you can be successful by asserting your own character rather than someone else’s, that to me is the ultimate in personal satisfaction. Sure, I’ve fouled up many times, but it would be a tedious old game if we all came out of a factory would it not? At the same time, there is a lot of satisfaction in succeeding almost against your own character – such as grinding it out when you are itching to give it a go – but it’s not something I have managed all that often. I was annoyed with myself for getting out in that first Test innings because I realized that I had missed out on the chance for a really big one. But, character failing or not, I wasn’t going to sit around all day moping about it.

      What I envy any new Test player is the feeling you get before your first game. It’s an event just to walk into the dressing room for the first time, where there might be one or two players you have never even met before. Just looking at the team sheet gives you a buzz – Brearley, Wood, Radley, Gower … it’s a big thrill just to see it pinned up there. There is a special feeling about a Test match dressing room for the first time, a sense of anticipation and excitement that is beyond anything I’d had before, and corny though it sounds, the blood does start pumping a little harder through the system. And then, once you have played for your country, it gives you a billing to live up to when you return for a county match, and maybe puts a bit more pressure on you as well. As a young up and coming potential England player you are allowed to make the odd mistake, but as an actual England player you’ve got less leeway in terms of how other people see you. A lot more, for instance, was expected of someone like Mark Ramprakash after he had played relatively well in his first Test series against the West Indies.

      Cricketers, by and large, are a very supportive lot, but some pros look at their colleagues and opponents with fairly critical and sometimes jaundiced eyes. This is especially true if it concerns the solid county cricketer who is never going to play for England casting his eye over the fresh-faced youngster who has just won his first cap. When Sachin Tendulkar, at seventeen, scored a century at Old Trafford to save India from defeat against England in the summer of 1990, one English player said, ‘Let’s see how he goes at the Oval when the ball will be up around his nostrils.’ It’s the traditional English reaction to someone doing well.

      I averaged 51 against Pakistan and 57 against the New Zealanders later that the summer, but if a lot more was expected of myself at Leicestershire after I had made it into the Test side, the bare statistics of 1978 do not suggest that they were fulfilled to any great degree. Nine games, 15 innings, one not out, 347 runs, top score 61, average 24.78, and in the county game against Pakistan I was bowled by Liaquat for not very many. In a season like that, with six Tests and four one-day internationals, you end up by playing barely any cricket at all for your county, and given the poor scores I made when I did, it was probably fair to say that I batted for England and fielded for Leicestershire. My county average has always been significantly lower than my Test average, and as such it is hardly surprising that the odd grumble from the ranks of the county membership has come my way. The bigger the occasion the better I seem to perform. Yet overall, I was definitely on a high at that stage in my career, and my form for England at least was good enough to win me a place on my first overseas tour that winter. It was a memorable tour both for me – a century at Perth and a decent amount of runs overall – and for the team itself, although a 5-1 victory in the series had a lot to do with an Australian side seriously depleted by the absence of the rebels playing for Packer.

      The 1978-79 tour to Australia was as one-sided as the final score suggests, but Australia felt the player-drain to Packer more acutely than we did. Both the Chappells, Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh were signed up by World Series Cricket, and while they had some talented younger players to call upon – Kim Hughes and Rodney Hogg, for example – the key difference between the two sides was experience. To some extent, the Australian system allows their players to scale the jumps from grade to state to Test cricket a shade more easily than our own, but a good, inexperienced team will rarely beat a good experienced one and 5-1 was an accurate reflection of our dominance. Having said that, Hogg, in short spells, was as quick and mean a bowler as any I have faced, and he also had the temperament to match. When I was leaving the field with a century to my name in Perth, the fact that I had edged and missed a few against him early on had clearly been festering with him, and he came up and called me an ‘effing imposter’. It didn’t bother me though. As with most Australians it was nothing personal, merely business. Hogg was capable of some curious moods, and after bowling three or four lightening overs on a flattish track at Adelaide he suddenly ran off the field. His captain, Graham Yallop, was as confused as everyone else, and had to run off the field himself to find out what was going on. It turned out that Hogg was claiming he had been attacked by a bout of asthma, but no one really understood why he decided to vanish when he was bowling so well. His method was to bowl flat out for short spells, take a breather, then come back for another burst of the high velocity stuff. Hogg took a lot of wickets in that series, but in all other respects there was no contest. Even the captaincy – Brearley versus Yallop – was one-sided. Brears was baited by the Aussie crowds, who clearly thought he was as stuffy a Pom as Jardine, but as a skipper, he had a very hard core to him.