First published in 2015

Before the summer of 2000, my favourite England cricketers were Gooch, Atherton and Hick. Since then, they have been Gough, Caddick, Harmison and Anderson. A switch in allegiance from batsmen to bowlers. That straightforward. That clear cut.

It’s a truism that it’s bowlers who win Test matches, but despite this I think a lot of us grow up with our focus on batting. When you play as a kid, one-on-one against your dad or a friend, it’s runs that matter. Most runs wins, because in those situations it’s always 1-1 when it comes to wickets.

I was hardly new to cricket in 2000. There are photos of me holding a bat at the start of the Eighties at an age when I can barely stand, yet I think it was only really as a result of that summer’s series against the West Indies that I came to truly relish the excitement brought by a wicket.

If you don’t bowl out the opposition, barring moronic declarations from the opposition, you cannot win. Runs may steer a game, but a clutch of wickets can redirect it so much more sharply. In 2000, it was hard to avoid having your breath taken away by the U-turns.

Perhaps it was Ed Giddins who started things off. His 5-15 against Zimbabwe in the first Test of the summer seemed to recalibrate the attack such that Gough, Caddick, Cork and White felt obliged to take ever-cheaper wickets to retain their places in the side. Catches were taken, appeals upheld, and later in the summer Caddick appeared to be hitting the stumps as often as not. Even Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh couldn’t keep up.

In that regard, the fourth Test at Leeds delivered, and just as being at the ground was no guarantee that I’d be moved by what I saw, so being elsewhere was no guarantee that I wouldn’t, for I experienced the most exciting passage of play while scrambling about the rocks of Anglesey’s coast while pretending to fish.

I am not a fisherman by any stretch. But what I do like is lounging about in the sun, listening to the cricket on the radio with a cool box containing far too much food within easy reach. When you learn that ‘fishing’ can be like a day at the Test, but at the seaside, you graciously accept a rod and practise your futile, unproductive casting.

Not that I got much practice in. My abiding memory is of repeatedly darting towards the radio to hear what had just happened as Andy Caddick fashioned some parallel world where wickets were as likely as runs – four in an over as the West Indies were dismissed for 61 with the promise of glorious slow motion footage of stumps being spread on that night’s highlights.

For a short while, as swing, seam, bounce and accuracy combined, Caddick seemed like the finest bowler who ever lived. Hell, for a time he was the greatest bowler who ever lived. And a giddy Headingley crowd knew it.

It was life-affirming collective euphoria. It was five days’ worth of wickets – all the meaningful action, all the excitement, all the fun – constricted into just two days.

By the time Dominic Cork and Craig White reduced the tourists to 39-5 in the fifth Test, carnage had become standard operating procedure. And if even Lara could be dismissed for a golden duck, there was always a chance, forever after, that things could change for the better in an instant.