No Boundaries (12 page)

The next day at the end of training, Malcolm Ashton, the tour scorer, came over to see me. We'd always got on well – he was the king of Balderdash – and I thought he'd probably got some stats I'd asked for.

‘Ronnie, it seems I owe you an apology. I was the person who told the management. I thought mooning the public was out of order and should be reported. I didn't realise I'd got it wrong.'

I wasn't quite sure how to react for a second. Then I said, ‘Malcolm, you can have your opinion about mooning but, as far as I'm concerned, you were bang out of order. You know what it's been like for me on this tour. I'm trying to carve out an international career and you nearly had me sent home for something I didn't do.'

He was full of apologies but I just walked away. I didn't want anything to do with him.

We won the second Test by an innings when Thorpey again came good. I was delighted for Graham. I'm still not sure how he managed it. He'd been a reluctant tourist who wanted to be with his new baby and spent most evenings on the trip getting hammered with Tuffers and me. The guy clearly had stamina as well as talent.

Mike Atherton finally found some form to clinch the third Test, but to be honest the whole tour was now so sour for me that it was difficult for me to care what happened in the matches. By the time the ODIs came round, I was mentally fucked. I wanted to be anywhere else but in New Zealand with England under a management for whom I no longer had any respect. I played in three of the matches, got a couple of wickets and ran one guy out, but I had a nightmare with the bat and was relieved when they left me out of the final game. I just wanted to get home and decide what I was going to do. Right then, my main thought was to pack the game in altogether.

I
’ve always loved those pithy little sayings that sum up how to make the most of life. You know the kind of thing: ‘You can only control what’s in your control’; ‘When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears’; ‘The way a man wins shows much of his character, the way he loses shows it all’. I often used them when I became Essex captain just to get an idea over to the team and some of the guys used to groan when I came out with a new one, but to me they helped instil a positive attitude.

It would have taken more than a whole bloody book full of them to make me positive when I got back from New Zealand. I must have been very hard to live with but again Lorraine was a rock and overlooked a lot of things that normally she would have complained about. I couldn’t see any future. I didn’t usually feel sorry for myself and, if I’d been objective, I’d have realised how fortunate I was compared to many people, yet I couldn’t shake myself out of my gloom. I started to prepare for the new season at Essex by doing a bit of jogging but early on I suffered a panic
attack while I was running. My throat seized up and I found it hard to breathe. It was very scary but I didn’t tell anyone except Lorraine.

I talked to Graham Gooch and Keith Fletcher about the tour and both said they couldn’t understand why the England management had given me such a hard time. They were very supportive but I was still unsure if I wanted to carry on playing cricket. I’d achieved my dream of representing my country and discovered it wasn’t what I’d expected. Those boyhood fantasies of feeling proud to wear the three lions had been spoiled by a group of mean-spirited people who just wanted clones, not individuals with minds of their own. They wanted the equivalent of Stepford cricketers and that just wasn’t me. I arranged to meet John Bird and made up my mind that, if he offered me an even half-decent job at Tesco, I would take it and turn my back on cricket. I think he realised how low I was and had the sense to understand that what I needed was help to cope with the situation, not an easy way out.

Bizarrely after all that had happened on tour, I was invited to meet up with the squad again for a ‘team-building’ session. It was run by former England rugby captain Will Carling and contained all the usual bollocks like trying to cross a river without getting your feet wet or helping each other climb up poles. To me, it was all a bit pointless – if you’ve got as far as being selected to play cricket for England, you should already know what it takes to be a team player and support your mates. But I was determined to show the management they had been wrong about me and, just as in the Algarve, I was among the fittest there. Graeme Hick had been invited to join the group and he was so fit he got the nickname Arnie after Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I matched him in most things,
and each time I performed well I thought to myself, Who’s injury-prone now?

On the second evening, we were all called together to listen to a motivational speaker. I was reluctant to go but I didn’t want to give them any more ammunition to fire at me, so I went along. It turned out to be a great decision.

The speaker was Frank Dick, the former director of coaching for British athletics and the man who had helped Daley Thompson and Linford Christie to Olympic glory. He’d also worked with top performers in other sports like Boris Becker, Formula 1 driver Gerhard Berger and the figure-skater Katarina Witt. He had a presence about him as soon as he walked on the stage and grabbed my attention with his opening lines: ‘There are two kinds of people in my world – valley people and mountain people.

‘Valley people seek the calm and comfortable ground of shelter, safety and security,’ he went on. ‘They may talk about change, but do not want to be involved in it, especially if it means breaking from the routine of what’s worked OK up till now. Their concept of achievement is “not losing”, so playing for the draw to them is all that’s needed. They are the people you meet whose sentences start with “I would have…”, “I could have…” or “I should have…” They are the almost people who have many explanations for not making it themselves and only one for those who have – luck. They talk about the risk of losing and yet they are losers – they just don’t know it.’

By now I was oblivious to everything and everyone around me. It seemed as if Frank was talking directly to me. It was as though he’d been by my side over the last few months, witnessed my turmoil and was now giving me solutions.

‘Mountain people have decided that valley life is not for them,’ he continued. ‘And they seek to test ambition on the 
toughest climbs. They know that there is a rich satisfaction in reaching the top and the fight that’s needed to get there. They live for the test of changes and enjoy the resilience required to bounce back from the bumps and bruises that come with the mountain territory. They not only talk about change, they deliver it.’

I was mesmerised all the way through his talk and again his comments might have been directed straight at me when he concluded, ‘I believe that the game is there to be won – and that it’s for
you
to do the winning.’
*

I had to meet this guy. I went up to him afterwards and shook his hand. I wanted to ask him a thousand questions, tell him what I was going through and ask his advice but I wasn’t sure if he was part of the England management structure. I didn’t want them to know what I was feeling, so I just thanked him for a great speech.

But the more I thought about what he’d said, the more convinced I became that he could help me. He’d made me believe my career was worth fighting for, perhaps not with England but certainly with Essex where things had been going great and where I was appreciated by the management, the fans and my team-mates. I needed to talk to him but didn’t know how to go about it, so I rang Medha Laud at the ECB, another of those people in the background who do so much work. The lads always loved her because she sorted things out without any fuss. She gave me Frank’s number. I rang him and explained that I’d like to see him and discuss my career.

 ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Come to my home.’

That was the start of a friendship that has survived to the present day and helped shape my life. He, his wife Linda and their two daughters made me instantly welcome. Frank listened to my story and then not only helped me to deal with the disillusionment but also advised me how I could become physically fitter and stronger. It was as though I’d been given a transfusion of optimism and self-confidence. Suddenly I not only felt that I
could
be a top-performing cricketer, but I knew that I
would
. I couldn’t wait for the season to start.

Two events stand out for me in what proved to be a successful season at Essex. The first was in the car park at Northampton when Graham Gooch took me to one side and said, ‘Ronnie, I’ve only known you a few years but I feel quite close to you and I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to announce that I’m retiring today.’ I was sad because I felt he still had a lot to offer on the pitch, but I also felt extremely proud and privileged that he had chosen to tell me personally. He moved up to a coaching position at Essex and continued to play an enormous part in my career.

The word ‘legend’ is bandied about too freely in the media but Graham is one of the few modern cricketers who deserves to have it attached to his name. His record as a batsman speaks for itself; he was a key member of Essex teams that won six county championships; he was a decisive and honest captain, leading by example; and he was a fantastic trainer – even when he was in his forties, many of us found it hard to keep up with his fitness regime. Above all, he was a deep thinker about cricket and was willing to share his thoughts with people he believed were really interested. Over the years at Essex, Keith Fletcher passed on all he knew to Goochie, and Graham passed it on to me. Nasser Hussain used to call 
me ‘son of Fletch’ or ‘son of Gooch’ in a sarcastic way but I looked on it as a badge of honour. It was a tremendous privilege to work with both of them.

The other major event was reaching the final of the NatWest Trophy for the second year in a row. After the disappointment of losing to Lancashire the previous September, we were all determined to make a better fist of it this time. But for a while it looked as though I might not get the chance. The semi-final was at Chelmsford against Glamorgan and, midway through my tenth over, I tore the intercostal muscle off my rib. It felt as though someone was grinding glass into my side. They gave me an injection and pumped me full of painkillers so I went out to bat as high as a kite. I was aware of the nagging pain in my side but didn’t give a damn and went on to score 51 and see us to the brink of victory.

A lot was made of an incident when I was finally out lbw and I guess it looked bad on TV but was really nothing. The ball rapped me on the pad and I set off, head down, for a run. Halfway down the wicket, I met the bowler, Darren Thomas, who had just seen the umpire’s finger go up and was punching the air as he turned back towards me. Instead of the air, he caught my helmet and knocked me to the ground. On TV it looked like a great right hook, but it was a complete accident and probably hurt Darren’s hand more than it did me.

As we celebrated reaching Lord’s, our physio James Davis broke the bad news: an intercostal injury would take six to eight weeks to fix. That just wasn’t good enough. There was a Lord’s final against Warwickshire in three weeks and I was desperate to have another crack at it. I remembered Frank Dick telling me about a wonderful doctor in Munich who looked after Bayern Munich and the German national
football team and who had performed miracles on some of Frank’s athletes. I decided I would go and see him. It was the first of many trips I made to the genius named Dr
Hans-Wilhelm
Müller-Wohlfahrt.

Over the next few days my body was like a dartboard. ‘Healing Hans’, as he was dubbed, explained that he didn’t use steroids or painkillers, just amino acids to speed up the body’s own healing process. ‘Normally, your body takes what you eat, passes it through the gut into the blood and that goes to the injured area and repairs it. With a little rest and physiotherapy you get better. All we do is shortcut the system by supplying what your body would eventually create directly to the injured tissue. It speeds everything up.’ Within two weeks, I was pain-free and felt perfectly fit.

I played in a four-day game in the week leading up to the final. I didn’t risk bowling but I batted and fielded and it all seemed to be OK. We made our way to London to stay in the hotel next to Lord’s before the match but it was London as we had never seen it. It was the weekend of Princess Diana’s funeral and it was incredible to witness at first hand the outpouring of public grief. On the Friday night, Lorraine and I went out to look at the sea of flowers people had placed around Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace. It was slightly unreal seeing people standing sobbing or hugging strangers, united in mourning for someone they had only known through their television and newspapers. The following day the funeral cars came past the door of our hotel on their way to her burial at Althorp. Lorraine and I were both in tears as we stood among the mass of people who had been waiting on the pavement for hours just to get a glimpse of the coffin. Even more flowers were strewn across the road, as if to cushion her final journey.

It was all incredibly emotional and somehow added to my nervousness later in the day when I had the fitness test to see if I could play in the final. Lord’s was closed so the whole Essex team found a clear spot in Regent’s Park for a final practice for the biggest match of our season! It was a bit like those pictures you see of the 1950s when kids put down coats to mark the wickets. It was impossible to bat but we did some catching practice and then measured out a rough wicket for me to test my ribs. I hadn’t attempted to bowl since picking up the injury and was a bit apprehensive as physio James Davis taped me up but, as soon as I let the first ball go, I knew I was all right. I bowled for about 40 minutes with no reaction: I was ready to play.

I stiffened up overnight but a good warm-up and the adrenaline that kicks in when you play in a big event saw me through. I completed my 12 overs at the cost of just 22 runs and took a wicket as we restricted Warwickshire to 170. Paul Prichard and Stuart Law took us to the brink of victory and then Nasser helped Stuart finish the job. We’d made amends for the failure the year before and I had picked up my first winner’s medal. After all the traumas of the winter tour, the doubts and fears when I got home and the drama of the last couple of weeks, it was one of the sweetest feelings I ever had. Now it was time to push on again.