Falling for the game

My first recollection of cricket was watching Brian Statham bowl for Lancashire in the mid-1950s. He was an early hero of mine – efficient, non-demonstrative, hard-working – who often didn’t get the praise he deserved. Statham was definitely a role model for me and someone that I hoped I could live up to. Having grown up in Stoke d’Abernon in Surrey, I joined the local club and then went on to Avorians and Old Guildfordians before moving on to play for Surrey Schools, where the club first scouted me.

I went on a Surrey and Middlesex under 19s tour to Pakistan, which was very much an eye-opener, and from there I had a trial season at Surrey for the princely sum of £12 10s. Apart from a little bit at the Alf Gover School in Wandsworth, I never really had much coaching. But by that point I knew I wanted to make a career in the game. I went for a trial at Surrey, and came up through the ranks to the senior side. Not bad for a lad who started out knocking a ball around in the garden with my brother.

Biggest influence

When I first broke through into the England set-up, John Snow had a massive influence on me. I’d been selected as a young bowler to tour Australia for the 1970/71 Ashes. I looked up to him and he took me under his wing. Snowy was a wonderful player with a big personality – an enigmatic guy and a great character. I saw him as a guru, although the guys at the MCC – who ran the game in those days – never seemed to be happy with his behaviour.

England calling

It was 1970 and at that stage I was playing as a goalkeeper for Cobham alongside my cricket career. I had made my first-class debut the year before against Scotland, but Robin Jackman and Geoff Arnold had kept me out of the team so progress was slow. I was down at Crystal Palace FC’s academy when I got a phone call from Ray Illingworth and Colin Cowdrey to say that Derbyshire paceman Alan Ward had got injured and I was asked if I could go out to Australia to join up with the Ashes tour.

There were other players I struggled against, such as Garfield Sobers, Greg Chappell, Allan Border and Sunil Gavaskar, all of them were magnificent batsmen and brilliant players, but there was just something about Viv that made it almost impossible to bowl to him at times. He is by far the best opposition player I came across during my playing days.

Finest delivery

In terms of the greatest ball I ever bowled in my career, you might immediately think of Headingley. But there is one that instantly springs to mind, and that was the one to dismiss Martin Crowe, one of the best players there has ever been, at The Oval in a Test match. It was pitching middle stump but took out the top of off stump, and that was quite unusual for The Oval as it was a flat deck back then.

The modern game

I’ve been banging on for decades that we need an overhaul to improve the standard of county cricket. My solution is a fairly simple one: there should be three divisions of six teams, I would play the first 16 weeks of the season, 10 County Championship matches and six Tests, with all England players available for county selection in those 10 matches.

They wouldn’t necessarily be picked, that would be down to the coaches, and I would have both the new and the existing county Twenty20 tournaments played at the same time across a five-week period, and then a brief and truncated 50-over competition at the end of the season in September. The school holidays come around and we can get kids involved in the T20 jamboree, at city or county level.

Apart from the World Cup I believe that Twenty20 is going to take over from the 50-over form of the game – that’s something we need to accept, and have an intense but more meaningful limited-overs tournament. It’s ridiculous that England are going to be in the thick of a Test series when the new T20 competition [now The Hundred] is going on. It’s a new innovation and you want the star players to be there.