NICK FRIEND: Borthwick was meant to be married on Saturday. Instead, after an online yoga session, he is in reflective mood, looking back on a decade that has seen him change as a cricketer, taking him from Durham to London, via a solitary Ashes Test
Saturday should have been Scott Borthwick’s wedding day. Rather than going through any final preparations, however, he spent the previous week rediscovering what he calls “the Football Manager bug”, finding ways to pass the time during a period of unprecedented uncertainty.
He has taken Wolves into the Champions League in his third season in charge, having begun – as always – with Sunderland, his hometown club, with whom he won the League Cup in his fourth campaign as their virtual manager.
Borthwick cannot help but laugh. The Surrey allrounder turns 30 in a fortnight, by which time he had anticipated being two weeks married.
He is philosophical about it all – he has had ample time to put things into perspective, so much so that he and Steph, his wife-to-be, have announced via Instagram that they are donating what would have been the night’s Jägerbomb bar tab bill to the National Health Service on behalf of their guests.
“Today we’ll be toasting the NHS and key workers who are keeping us safe to plan our wedding for another day,” read the post, alongside a photo of the smiling couple in their sun-soaked garden.
“We had to cancel it, which has been a massive downer,” Borthwick says, speaking on Friday, 24 hours before the big day that wasn’t. The wedding had been organised at Christmas time, a small affair in Manchester with close to fifty guests.
“We had to postpone it about three weeks ago before it really went into lockdown. We were worried about potentially losing all the money and stuff, so we’re in the process of trying to get all the money back from the wedding and then move it to a later date.
“It was frustrating but we can’t blame anybody – it is what it is. We’ll try and plan it for the winter months – whenever the season does come and then finish again, we’ll look for another date. But there are worse things happening in the world, aren’t there?”
As he stressed in his social media post: “It’s not quite the day we planned, but it’s hard to feel sad about it given the huge challenges so many people are facing.”
It is a strange time for any athlete; Borthwick is doing what he can to remain as fit as possible – both physically and mentally.
He is chatting after an online yoga session with his Surrey teammates and he has drawn up his own plan to keep himself active and motivated, including “sprints in the street and an upper-body circuit”. A spin bike is on the way to add some variety to his routine, but “nothing is the same as getting in the nets and bowling or batting for an hour”.
“I’ve got a few balls that I’m chucking around in the garden. It’s quite a small garden, but at the same time it almost feels the size of a football field, the amount of times we’ve used it in the last two weeks.”
Borthwick's wedding had to be postponed as the coronavirus outbreak spread
Football, in actual fact, has played an unusually large role in Borthwick’s last fortnight. He is getting through three hours of Football Manager each day – he played religiously while living on his own in Australia over the winter and has recaptured his fixation for the game.
His fiancée is the head of marketing and communications at Manchester City, keeping her occupied with a stream of conference calls and meetings in the couple’s dining room, while he has set himself up in the sitting room.
A staunch Sunderland fan – he was one of several during his Durham days, he is gradually – steeped in pained nostalgia – steering himself through the second series of the Sunderland ‘Til I Die documentary series on Netflix, though not without a knowing reluctance.
For those with no affiliation to the northeast club, it is a fascinating watch: a fly-on-the-wall look into the demise of an institution of the English game. For others – like Borthwick – with an emotional attachment to the Stadium of Light and the city itself, reliving it has been an emotional wrench and enjoying it all has been a tougher task.
“I know how it ends and it’s a sad ending,” he says with an almost haunted chuckle, the kind reserved only for those who have seen their team plummet to a grim nadir.
“I watched the first two episodes and I mean, as a Sunderland fan, it’s incredibly frustrating and sad to watch. I went to the Checkatrade final at Wembley when we lost to Portsmouth, and then we lost against Charlton in the playoff final.
“I watched the first episode and another one last night. I was just like: ‘God, this is so incredibly frustrating and the club is so badly run. Oh my God.’ I think, as a Netflix viewer, if you weren’t a Sunderland fan, it would be great viewing. But I also think it’s made for that purpose – it’s not made for a football lover, and definitely not for a Sunderland fan. It doesn’t make the club come across that well, does it?
“I enjoyed the first series and I’ll finish watching the second series, no doubt, as well. But I think I watched the first series on a flight somewhere. I watched eight episodes pretty much back-to-back – I think I might have had a few beers as well. I was almost in tears at the end.”
It has not been his only source of reminiscence in recent days. Surrey have sent videos through to Borthwick’s Dropbox with footage of some of his finest knocks – not so much as an analytical tool as for his own mental wellbeing. It has made for lighter viewing – a timely aide-memoire of his talents at a time without cricket.
“I think that watching yourself score runs is a nice way of reminding yourself and keeping your mind focused on what you know you can do,” he explains.
“Naturally, you’re going to miss the game, you’re going to miss being competitive, having a bat in your hand. You miss all that. It’s a good way of keeping in touch – I’ve been watching myself score a few hundreds.
“When we do get back to playing, everyone is going to get back to form or where they think they are at different times. Some guys will go straight into it and be able to smash hundreds straight away, some guys will take time and need to hit 1,000 balls before the first game.”
For Borthwick, the frustration might be greater than most: he ended last season with a century against Nottinghamshire, before breaking his finger a month into a stint in Perth. He began pre-season in the marquee nets at The Oval and felt “like I was playing as well as I ever have done”, before the coronavirus pandemic struck.
A certain fascination accompanies that admission; Borthwick is quick to recognise how far removed the 29-year-old version of his cricketing self is from the youngster that first burst onto the scene 11 years ago as a wide-eyed leg-spinner.
The former Durham allrounder made his Test debut in the final Test of the 2013/14 Ashes series
In his own words, he was “a floater” in a hugely successful side at Durham – a second spinner to Ian Blackwell, batting down the order among a seam attack that included Steve Harmison, Graham Onions and Liam Plunkett. His first-class debut came in the penultimate game of the county’s 2009 title-winning campaign.
He pinpoints a century four years later in 2013 at No.8 against Warwickshire as a defining moment in all that has followed; Paul Collingwood approached him afterwards and suggested he move up to No.3, where – more or less – he has remained ever since. By then Blackwell, had moved on and Borthwick’s sense of responsibility had grown.
“If I got out, I wasn’t just letting myself down, but letting my team down because we were two down early,” he says. “It was about batting properly and batting how I knew I can bat. I never really changed a lot with my technique; I knew it was sound. It was more the mental side – how can I judge a good ball better, how can I pick the length up a little bit faster?
“As a kid, I was always a top three batter; facing the new ball wasn’t something I’d never done before, though at a much lower standard.”
It is one of the curiosities of the English game, therefore, that Borthwick’s name will always come associated with the image of a young leg-spinner on his Test debut, thrown in for the final instalment of a disastrous Ashes series that led to the breakup of a hugely successful team. On a personal level, it went fine – he took four wickets, but the game lasted just three days and when England next played Test cricket six months later, Moeen Ali was picked as the spin-bowling allrounder.
That summer in the months after his Ashes experience, he scored 1,187 first-class runs, before adding 1,390 in 2015 and 1,084 a year later. His returns have been less grand since, with runscoring in general proving a challenge in the county game; there have been just four centuries in the last three years, compared to eight in the three beforehand.
Borthwick is an honest, thoughtful, impressive character. “A lot has happened between then and now,” he reflects of his Ashes experience. “I’m almost into a second career. It probably feels longer because of that change in my game.”
The England careers of Mason Crane, Adil Rashid, Dom Bess and even Graeme Swann all share a common feature. Each spinner began young and struggled; in the cases of Rashid and Swann, they returned as more polished, confident characters, while Bess’ exploits in South Africa suggest that he has learnt from his first experience. Crane, too, remains just 23 years of age.
Borthwick sees much of himself in each of them – he points first to Crane, a fellow leg-spinner given his Test debut in Sydney at the end of a disappointing series. “As a spinner, you don’t develop until your later years,” he says. “It’s just whether you can press yourself mentally to come back stronger and go away to work on the things you need to work on – whether that’s on a skill level or a mental level.
“My career has changed a lot – I always thought I’d be a batter, but I’m still desperate to be a leg-spinner as well. I still know that I’ve got the skill.
“I think if I had to pick where my skill is probably the highest, I’d probably say I’ve got more skill in my bowling than my batting. I know it’s the hardest skill to do and I know I can do it.
“My bowling has been nowhere near where it should be or can be in the last three years. I’m not saying that I’m not practising it or not wanting to do it – it’s still there and it will definitely come back at some stage. I’ll definitely show again that I can get 30 wickets a year and win games of cricket, which I have done in the past.”
Borthwick has taken just 11 wickets since joining Surrey, instead playing a key role with the bat
Since leaving Durham for Surrey at the end of the 2016 season with 195 first-class wickets under his belt, he has taken just 11 since – four of them came in the MCC Champion County match in Dubai. In last year’s County Championship, he went wicketless.
How does he explain that drop-off? In simple terms, it is difficult, but it is the nature of the beast when it comes to the sport’s toughest art. The desire has never dipped. “Have I developed?” he asks both rhetorically and pensively. “The answer would be no. But again, that isn’t to say my skill level has dropped off – it’s probably the same or even better, because I have learnt a lot more about my bowling action and about myself. That’s why, in my mind, I’m still confident that I can get to where I have been and achieve what I can achieve again some time in the future.”
The question has been asked over the years of whether Borthwick was ready to make his – at this stage – solitary appearance in Test cricket when he did. Yet, to pore over his statistics in 2013 is to point to 34 first-class scalps and 1,121 runs at an average upwards of 41.5. He was part of the Durham side that won a third red-ball title in six years and had, by that point, become his county’s No.3 batsman and first-choice spinner.
Even before 2013, Borthwick had already made his international bow, playing three limited-over games in the space of two months in 2011 as a raw 21-year-old against Ireland, West Indies and India.
He recalls a carefree innocence to those early days, the product of the versatile role he performed for Durham and the captaincy of Dale Benkenstein from whom he learnt so much. “When I was 20 or 21, I probably didn’t see the pressure side of it then, looking back,” he reflects of life as a young wrist-spinner. “I almost took it in my stride a bit because I was a bit young and naïve.”
He is older, wiser and more experienced now. If the opportunity to add to that single Test cap does arise, it will more than likely be as a top order batsman, but with the additional fillip of his leg-breaks.
In a sense, it seems unusual to have focused predominantly on Borthwick’s bowling, such has been his transformation as a cricketer in the time since; he has become a pillar of Surrey’s top order in red-ball cricket – a stoic churner of runs; he holds Championship scores of 216, 188 and 175. That, though, is the fascination of wrist-spin – forever a bearer of intrigue and marvel, mixed in with a hint of curious, inherent distrust.
“I’ve still got ambitions to play for England again,” he stresses. “I know that if I score bundles of runs whenever we do get back on the park, there are still spots to be had in the Test side, along with many other batters on the county circuit who will all be thinking the same.”
In the meantime, though, he has a Wolves team to manage and, if he can bear it, tales of Sunderland’s recent troubles waiting to be relived.
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