Authors: Ronnie Irani
‘There’s no need to be like that.’
‘No need? You bring me in here to threaten me over something that could have been handled with a quiet word. You tell me you’ve contacted the chairman of the ECB and the chairman of selectors about me, before you’ve heard my side of things. And all because you don’t think I rode a bike the way you think I should. Martyn, you’ve been working
with me all through the tour. Have I ever flunked a moment’s work?’
Martyn Moxon looked uncomfortable and Gatting was red-faced. I don’t think he had expected me to come back at him.
Mark Alleyne spoke up for the first time: ‘Look, guys, maybe this has got blown out of proportion. Let’s regroup and get on with the tour.’
As soon as I got out of the room, I went and found Michael Gough and told him what had happened. I said, ‘You are just making your way at this level so make sure you don’t give them any reason to pull you up. Put in even more effort, so they can’t say anything to you.’
Once again, any pleasure I got out of touring for my country had been destroyed by a management who wanted everyone to conform to their notion of what was right. I have always prided myself on being a team player, always gone out of my way to back my captain, to encourage young players and be supportive to those who are having a bad time either personally or from lack of form. I was being tagged as the bad boy of the party once again. It was so disheartening that my future as an England player always seemed to be in the hands of those who didn’t appreciate me.
Gradually my energy levels came back and I played in one or two of the ODIs and did quite well, putting on some runs with a promising-looking batsman called Marcus Trescothick. He was one of the finds of the tour and, when I got back and Nasser asked me who had impressed me, I immediately said, ‘Trescothick. He’s the best batsman in the country at the moment and could do a job for England. He’s a top
left-hander
, got all the strokes, loads of time, a great temperament and is a good gripper in the slips as well.’
‘Are we still talking about Trescothick or are we on Bradman now?’ Nasser mocked.
‘I’m telling you, he’s the real deal. The other guy who’s ready is David Sales of Northampton.’
‘We like lardy cricketers, do we?’ Nass grinned.
‘He’s a big lad but he’s athletic and, make no mistake, he can bat.’
Nasser was still sceptical but I understand that, when he mentioned Tres’s name a few weeks later, Duncan Fletcher agreed with me, so Nass came on board and Marcus went on to play 76 Tests and 123 ODIs.
I finished the New Zealand tour in good form, so, when Andrew Flintoff picked up an injury in South Africa, I thought I might get a call-up to replace him but instead they sent Craig White. They’d already included that joker Gavin Hamilton from Yorkshire, a player who chirped so much I always thought he must live on bird seed, so I concluded my England career was over. The injustice of it burned me up. I decided to ring David Graveney and ask him why I’d been overlooked. I’d always got on well with Grav. I’d played against him when he was at Durham. He was good company and a decent bloke. Everyone thinks they know better than the chairman of selectors, but I thought on the whole he did a good job and felt the press treated him unfairly.
After the usual pleasantries, I got to the point of the call: ‘Grav, don’t take this the wrong way but I need to know something. I had a good season at Essex, was first-choice
all-rounder
for the final Test at the Oval and went on the A tour where I did really well once I’d recovered from chickenpox. I realise why Andrew Flintoff got the nod ahead of me but I can’t work out why I wasn’t called up once he was injured. What’s that all about?’
‘I understand what you’re saying, Ronnie. But you got a poor tour report from New Zealand. Mike Gatting said you were a bad influence on the young players. And you do have form on this. You are not considered a good tourist.’
‘Grav, that’s a joke. Is that why I wasn’t picked?’
‘It certainly didn’t help your cause. I have to say I was surprised when I read the report because you’ve always been fine when I’ve been around you and I like the way you play your cricket, but they are the management and I have to go by what they say.’
‘Grav, I’m shattered. I’ve always been a team player and I work for the team to do well even if I’m not playing. Gatting’s criticisms in New Zealand were a joke and the stuff before that was bullshit. David Lloyd was wrong when he accused me of going on tour injured and the mooning incident wasn’t anything to do with me. So how come I’m a bad tourist?’
‘Sorry, Ronnie. But I can only go by what I’m told.’
I felt sick. It all seemed so unjust. But I was determined they wouldn’t drag me down again. I would prove them wrong by doing even better at Essex.
O
ne of the best decisions Lorraine and I ever made was to buy the first addition to our family. He weighed in at nine stones and Eric the Doberman was a massive bonus at a bleak time in our lives.
The new millennium arrived in a frenzy of optimism around the world but Lorraine and I had been through a horrendous spell. She had twice suffered the trauma of miscarriage, which was heart-breaking for me but much worse for her, especially as I wasn’t able to be around as much as I should have been because I was trying to sort out the problems in my career. We both wanted children badly but began to fear it would never happen.
Sadness like that is not the kind of thing you can share with blokes in a dressing room. And, no matter how much you love each other, it’s sometimes easier for a husband and wife to keep their fears to themselves in case you hurt the other person. I think it must be very hard to be a woman and I know that, like most men, there have been many occasions when I haven’t really grasped what my wife was going
through. As a man, you want to help and to be a comfort but it’s not always easy to know when to be strong and when to be soft, when to let them sort things out for themselves because that’s what they want to do, or when to try to take the problem away. I know I have made things worse by trying to do what I thought was right and there have been times when I should have put my career on the back burner for a few days and spent the time with my family.
Eric turned out to be something of a lifeline for both of us. He provided Lorraine with company and comfort when I was away and I just loved the fact that, whenever I came home, his silly little stumpy tail would wag (they were still docked in those days). I would take him running and he always cheered me up. Almost as soon as we got Eric, Lorraine became pregnant again. I’ll let her tell you the full story in a later chapter, but I am convinced that Eric’s arrival played a part in that.
A lot of people have the wrong idea about Dobermans. Because they are so big, people assume they are aggressive but I think dogs reflect the temperament of their owners. Eric and our latest acquisition Zara (a Doberman pup) are great about the house, terrific with the children and would only act threateningly if I ordered them to in some kind of emergency. I was particularly chuffed when I met former Leeds United footballer Gary Speed on
A Question of Sport
, and he told me Eric Cantona had a Doberman. I knew that man had taste!
I had a bee in my bonnet that I wanted to move house, or rather I wanted to find somewhere I could build my dream house. At first Lorraine thought I was nuts. As she said, we were living in a gorgeous cottage in Great Waltham, one of the nicest villages in Essex, so why would we want to move? Her doubts increased tenfold when I showed her what I was
planning to buy – an unprepossessing 1940s house down a lane in Felsted. It was another charming village but the house wasn’t a patch on the one we were already living in. It had no central heating, mice in the attic and had become too much for the elderly couple who lived there and so was rather rundown. But I had got to know a local builder and seen what he could do, and I thought he might just be able to turn this plot into something that we could have only dreamed of when we were growing up in Bolton.
I’d met Nick Bones a few years before and we’d done a couple of deals together, including buying a pub that he had converted into two terrific cottages. If I could get my sums right, I reckoned we could knock down the 1940s house and Nick would build us a really special home on the site.
I needed to get a price on our place in Great Waltham and the first assessment wasn’t encouraging. The estate agent reckoned he could get
£
195,000 but I’d been looking at a lot of houses by this stage and thought his estimate was low – certainly too low to allow me to do what I wanted to do. I had a word with the guy who was selling the house in Felsted. He was much more upbeat and managed to get an offer for
£
250,000 on the table within three days. We then managed to negotiate the price on the Felsted property down to
£
265,000. So far the figures added up. But then there was the small matter of cash to demolish the existing place and build the new one. I reckoned the total cost was something over half a million and I would need an initial mortgage of
£
80,000 to get things under way. Time to call on an old friend.
Alan Leach had been my accountant since the days of the fruit and veg shop in Bolton. I’d played junior football with his son Andrew, and after the match Alan was the guy
you always wanted to get a lift from because he had the best car, an Opel Monza, and he would take you to the shop and buy everyone a Mars bar and a can of pop. I went to his office in Horwich and we fixed the mortgage. As I was signing the papers, the lady who worked for him said, ‘Take good care of this money, Ronnie, because they won’t release any more until they’ve seen what you’ve done with it. The next lot of cash will depend on the value of what you’ve built with this lot.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I joked. ‘I’ll put it in stocks and shares until I need it.’
She went pale. ‘Whatever you do, don’t do that. It’s far too risky.’
I assured her I was joking and with the cash in place set about applying for planning permission. The architect advised me to ask for much more than I wanted on the grounds that planning committees usually reject the first application on big projects. ‘Then you can apply for what you really want and you will almost certainly get it,’ he said.
It seemed logical, so we put in an application for two houses on the plot and duly got knocked back. Just in case we got another negative decision, the second application was for a single house, much bigger than we wanted and costing a lot more to build, and sod’s law they accepted it. Suddenly I needed more cash.
I approached another adviser I had been using in London and he suggested I should put some money into the shares of a company called Affinity Internet Services, one of the
fastest-growing
dot.com companies and a sure thing. I took his advice and, ignoring that warning voice at the back of my head, bought a thousand shares at
£
60 each out of my first mortgage money. Within a few weeks the shares were worth
£
80 each, I’d made 20 grand profit and decided to sell. But my adviser urged me to stay in. ‘They will go to
£
120,’ he said. ‘I’m negotiating to get some more.’
I didn’t buy any more but I didn’t sell, and the next few weeks were like a long, drawn-out nightmare in which I was trapped in an ever more horrendous car crash. Each day as I looked in the newspaper, the shares slipped back. They were soon down to
£
60 again, then
£
40. I was panicking but the adviser assured me they would bounce back. They never did and very soon they were down to
£
5 and unsellable. In effect, they were worth nothing at all.
While all this was going on, I was grappling with being the new captain of Essex in a period when all kinds of things were starting to bubble under the surface, mainly involving Stuart Law. At times it was only Eric’s little tail wagging that kept me going.
It was clear that, with Nasser’s England commitments, he couldn’t continue to captain Essex and Graham Saville asked me to take over. I was thrilled. The county was going through a transition period and there were a few rumbles in the dressing room, but I was up for the challenge. I was proud to be asked, even though I knew I’d have more problems from Stuart Law.
Stuart was one of the finest batsmen I ever shared a stand with. He had a typical Australian attitude to sport: tough, no quarter asked or given, always determined to win, and then, as soon as play was over, off to unwind with a beer. With his ability to score runs, you have to ask yourself why he only played one Test match for his country. He was certainly talented enough. The only reason I can come up with is that the Aussie selectors weighed up his character and decided they didn’t want him in the dressing room.
At times he could be terrific company and, as I’ve said, a match-winner. He was great to bat with. Unlike someone like Nasser, who completely concentrated on his own innings, Stuart was willing to talk and encourage the guy at the other end. Yet, whenever I think of him, I’m reminded of the story of the scorpion on the camel’s back. The tale goes that they are both in the desert and the scorpion is desperate for water. The camel gives it a ride to a water hole and, as it bends down to let the scorpion get to the water, it gives the camel a poisonous bite. ‘Why did you do that?’ asks the camel. ‘I carried you across the desert to find water.’ The scorpion replies, ‘I don’t know. It’s just in my nature.’
Stuart had an uncanny ability to hurt his friends. Paul Prichard was supposed to be his big mate at Essex yet, when there was a discussion about what was going wrong, Stuart said: ‘We know who the problem is. I travel with him every day.’
Stuart was never a big supporter of Nasser and I was aware in my time as vice captain – and now as captain – that he was encouraging a certain amount of dissent. I suspect it was mainly because he felt he should have had the job. He’d been a successful club captain in Australia and had skippered the Australian U19 side. But I also think it was just in his nature.
It’s quite easy to undermine a captain if you want to. There are always people who are out of the side or don’t think they are getting enough bowling or batting high enough up the order, and are there to be picked off. If you are not careful, splits can occur, which is very unhealthy. It’s not important for everyone to get on as best buddies in a dressing room – there are too many different characters for that – but you should be united in wanting the group to do well.
The 2000 season was the first after the county
championship had been split into two divisions and Essex were in Division Two. I’ve never been a big fan of dividing the competition. I can see that it adds a bit of excitement with promotion and relegation but one of the key points of the county game is to prepare players for Test cricket, yet under this system you are condemning half the players to never playing against some of the top internationals who are in the other division. And the English weather can make winning and losing such a lottery that you can find good sides relegated because they’ve been unlucky with the rain one summer.
Still, if there is a prize to be won, I’m always up to try to win it and my first season as captain saw Essex in contention for promotion despite losing a number of matches to a miserable summer. In the end, it came down to the last session of the final match and a bit of kidology on my part.
Going into the match against Warwickshire at Chelmsford, we were in the third and final promotion spot. Our opponents were one place behind us and two or three other clubs also had a chance of overtaking us, especially Nottinghamshire and Gloucestershire who were playing each other at Bristol. A draw and bonus points might be enough for us, but I was aware that the other two would do everything in their power to make sure they got a result and the winner could just pip us.
Warwickshire tore us apart on the first day. Their opening pair, Mark Wagh and Michael Powell, each hit centuries and put on 230 for the first wicket. On day two, they reached 400-8 and their captain Neil Smith cleverly declared, giving them maximum batting bonus points while denying us extra bowling points. Our strategy was changing. Our first priority now was to reach the 251 we needed to avoid the follow-on.
Before long we were 63-3 with Paul Prichard, Paul Grayson and Stuart Law back in the pavilion. I went in with Darren Robinson and he played a superb innings, just missing out on his century. By the close of play, I was unbeaten on 72 and we still needed 43 to reach our target.
I spent much of Thursday night tossing and turning, going over the figures in my head, trying to work out the best way to handle things – and wishing I’d paid more attention in maths class at school. When I got to the ground on Friday morning, it was raining hard and no play looked likely, which changed everything again. It put pressure on Warwickshire, who definitely needed a win. I realised that Neil Smith was in the market for a deal that would give them a chance of victory and decided it was time to use some of the negotiating skills Fil Mercer had taught me in the fruit and veg market.
Sky were covering the match and, when Ian Botham interviewed Neil and me to fill some of the time as the rain poured down, I made it clear that I thought all Essex had to do was to keep on batting until we reached 350. That would give us three batting points and, with the four for a draw, I confidently predicted we would go up. Deep down, I felt we needed to win to be certain but I could see that my apparent confidence was swaying Neil towards offering more than he wanted. We had a couple of chats during the day and I kept repeating that, while I was happy to try to make a game of it, we still felt that we could bat it out.
The final day loomed and it was still raining. Neil was desperately keen to reach a compromise and agreed that, if we declared where we were, they would set us a reasonable target. That was just what I’d been hoping for, but I said I’d have to think it over, pointing out that the wicket was much tougher to bat on now and would give their attack
all the aces. We knew from Ceefax that Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire were playing and likely to get a result, so we were now both desperate to get our game on. It was half past one before the umpires decided it was fit to play. I declared at our overnight score, Warwickshire hit eight runs off three balls and then declared, leaving us to chase 201 and themselves 56 overs to get us out. It was a generous declaration and our dressing room thought we just needed the weather to hold for us to win. By tea, we were 64-4 and struggling.
It was now down to me and Stephen Peters, a youngster finding it hard to live up to his junior promise which had seen him score a century for Essex at 17 and be a star player for England U19s. He was taking time to adapt to first-class cricket and made a shaky start to his innings but I kept talking to him and gradually he blossomed and played one of the best knocks of his career. It was the kind of situation I’ve always relished and, despite playing in light rain, he and I got on top of the attack. I thumped one of Graham Gooch’s favourite straight drives to the boundary to clinch victory with 17 overs to spare. We had secured second place in the table and won promotion. It was time to uncork the champagne and celebrate my first success as a captain.