Published in 2015

In a dimly lit wine store just off London’s Borough Market, David Gower huddles in his moleskin overcoat around half a dozen bottles and as many tasting glasses. He’s been collaborating with Laithwaite’s, handpicking wines from around the cricketing world in tune with the World Cup, and these are his favourites. “Oh, I make them all myself,” he says, with the conspiratorial wink of the seasoned anchor. “Personally. Couple of weeks here, couple of weeks there…”

Naturally, he’s a Burgundy man.

“When I was first a county pro on £25 a week, there was lots of beer, but I’m not very good on beer so I needed to find someone to drink wine with. Expenses were about 3p a night so the only thing we could drink was Arc De Triomphe, the irony being it was undrinkable. The great thing is trying different wines – that’s my great joy. It’s not so much going, oh I like that, I’m going to drink several thousand bottles of that and then die, but actually trying new stuff.”

We begin with the Indian red, the Mumbai-produced Sula Nasika Zinfandel. I’d like to report that its boisterous overtones and spicy aftertaste let off fireworks of dancing girls in this fusty old English palate, but I know less about wine than I do the IPL. I do, however, know quite a lot about David Gower.

Discounting a spiky redhead called Elizabeth Carpenter, David Gower was my first love. I was 10, he was 33. We first met at The Oval, 1990, the final day of England-India. I’d never seen a Test match before and my dad roused me early that morning to get to London to see Gower bat, for we must be quick or we’ll miss him; he’d evidently staked many a day on Gower’s cover-drive-on-the-move and lost more than he cared to recall. He wasn’t going to let his boy miss this one, all 20 minutes of it.

In the event, the old flirt batted all day for 157, in his blue socks, mostly helmetless in the autumn balm. There we sat in the Laker Stand, two rows back from a famous classical guitarist lounging across three seats, and along from a parody in a Panama, invoking “David” to disturb the pigeons on the outfield to make us “pigeon pie for tea”.

Gower had this pull over grown men as well as little boys. The innings secured his place on that winter’s Australia tour, his fifth. There, he would make two sublime hundreds, with the second and last of his nine Ashes centuries an unforgivably beautiful 123 at Sydney. “It was a good hundred,” he recalls of that Sydney knock, “and it was defiant; the irony being, it was largely defiant in the face of my own captain.”

Ever since that day in south London, I’d felt a powerful connection with my man. I worked on my Gower saunter, practised those airborne flicks, adopted the lean-on-the-bat repose at the non-striker’s end, and got busy cultivating an industrious nonchalance. I even bought some blue socks.

Why, though? Why him? Because his face told stories. Because his bat, as Ian Healy once remarked, made a different sound to everyone else’s. Because, as the great sportswriter Frank Keating saw it, he never denied his nature to himself. And because he evinced in every sinew and sentiment that elusive human thing that cancels out most other claims to pre-eminence: class.

“I remember the word ‘languid’ being used about me,” he recalls. “I didn’t mind that. The art of it, in sport, is to still be able to achieve something. It takes someone like Federer to achieve great things and make it look good. If someone says to you that you make it look easy while understanding that it isn’t – that is the highest compliment.”

And so we wend our way around the modern game until, unprompted, he brings up Pietersen. I wonder if, for all the unedifying bits, he recognises something of himself, not just in Pietersen’s battles with authority but in their shared fate to be forever prodded and probed for ‘playing the way they play’.

“Well, Pietersen is an interesting modern case,” he says. “There was a guy doing extraordinary things in Test cricket. Now he is a mercenary basically, and still saying silly things from the sidelines. I’d much prefer it if he’d not been sending texts to South Africans during Test matches, or if he’d somehow worked out that even though he thinks he gets on with 90 per cent of the team, if he could have got on with the crucial 10 per cent, which includes most captains, then he could still be doing what he wants to do, which is playing international cricket and entertaining us.”

I ask him if he’s read his book. “You must be joking! Have you?” It’s the longest suicide note in history, I tell him. “Well, we’ve all had points to make over the years,” he adds. “It seems to be the rule that if you make a good point but it doesn’t gel with the management it becomes a bad point and it’s going to cost you. So protests have to be judged. How you put it is almost as important as the point. It’s the same in politics.”

It’s election year, and I’m keen to know if my man has repositioned himself over the years. Does he hold any politicians as heroes? “I’ve not normally kept politicians as heroes, it’s got to be said. One thing that bugs us all when it comes to elections is the sheer weight of hot air and bollocks. The sheer amount of bollocks you will sift through. And you think, ‘Well, on balance, who would I trust most?’ Would you trust anyone? Is that Lib Dem way in fact the best way through this crisis?”

Surely he’s not for turning? “Oh, don’t worry about that. That would be a wasted vote. But the other thing that pisses me off about politics is the way that it is apparently allowable to criticise someone for saying something 20 years ago. Let’s face it, cricket moves on, politics moves on, the country moves on, the economy goes up, down, left, right and centre. If a politician has to abide by something he said 20 years ago, that’s just unfair – it’s crass. I can’t say I’m a fan of people defecting to UKIP for no apparent reason, but in general we need to adapt to our changing world and circumstances.”

He packs a velvet punch, does Lord Gower. These days he potters about, listening to Alt-J, shouting at the ref at his daughters’ hockey matches (“They’ve got to be told…”) and getting wound up with his family for being late for things. And wine, of course. We’re over an hour into our plonk-tasting session masquerading as an interview. We shake hands. I’m absolutely ready to buy a bottle of the gorgeous South African Pinotage. It’s been yet another slightly surreal episode with my first true hero. And they say you shouldn’t meet ‘em.