First published in issue 19 of Wisden Cricket Monthly

When writing a biography you subsume your own life in a way because for probably two years, and then a little bit longer when the book comes out, you’re thinking about that person almost constantly. You go to bed thinking about the book and it’s the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning, so you do live their life.

I won’t write a book about anybody that I don’t admire because you don’t really want to be waking up in the morning thinking, “Goodness, I don’t like this bloke but I’ve got to finish the book”. They’re on your shoulder, constantly. I’ve been lucky because with every biography I’ve done I’ve got to know the families really well. They almost become your family.

When it came to writing A Clear Blue Sky I did all the homework I would normally do for a biography, so before I went to see Jonny I literally read everything about him, I read everything about his dad, I got the old cuttings out of the Yorkshire Post and went through the files.

We’d meet at a hotel which was kind of the midpoint between where he lives and I live and we’d do three-hour sessions. I think we had four or five of those and then we had another three or four sessions at Headingley of about an hour-and-a-half each. If I ever needed him he was always available. Jonny, his mother Janet, his sister Becky and his father’s best friend were just so incredibly helpful and honest.

The thing about Jonny is he prepares and works tremendously hard. Once he’s decided he’s going to do something then he does it, and he’d thought about what he was going to say. On the first morning that we met he said, “I think we should start the book with the century I scored in South Africa”, and I said, “I was about to say exactly the same thing to you”. He committed himself to the book and once he had made that decision to actually do it, he was going to give it everything that he’d got.