Facing up: Graeme Fowler on the 1983 World Cup, the psychological side of cricket and T20 v Tests

GRAEME FOWLER: I think there is every chance that people will sit down at 18 and decide with their parents if they are going to sign a red-ball or white-ball contract

This article was published in the June 2019 edition of The Cricketer

The World Cup is about to start – does it take you back to the tournament you played in (1983)?

The biggest disappointment in my cricket career was the semi-final against India at Old Trafford. They were horrible wickets there back then, but I was used to batting on them [being a Lancashire player]. I knew if I got a good score we’d be all right, but if I didn’t, I didn’t think the rest of the lads would be able to cope, and I was proved right [he scored 33]. It was a helluva tournament. You’d play. Get pissed. Next day you’d wake up. Drive to the ground. Early night. Next day, play. Get pissed. And so on.

It wasn’t just us. Every team thought it was a party. The Test and County Cricket Board didn’t take one-day cricket seriously. We were told to buy a suit – every other team had a uniform. I only met the Queen on that one occasion and she said (how embarrassing is this?): “Why don’t you have a uniform?” We played 55 overs that tournament – the rest of the world played 50. Ridiculous.

You have written a new book. What was your intention with it?

The first one – Absolutely Foxed – was semi-autobiographical about me, but the publisher wanted this one – Mind Over Batter – to be semi-autobiographical about my cricket and how I thought about things. There are also slightly educational bits – to be used by club cricketers… if that doesn’t sound too arrogant.

You reveal you waited until you were 61 to see a psychoanalyst – and not just any psychoanalyst…

I’d always been frightened of it as there had always been a lot of demons in here [points to head] one way or the other. I also didn’t honestly know anyone I could sit down with… apart from Mike Brearley. I reluctantly agreed to see him. I am so pleased I did. It has changed a lot of things for me in a very nice way. When you get stuck, and you go into depression, he gave me a way of not being stuck. He did it in a cricket analogy sort of way – and it was like, ‘Why have I never thought of that?’ It works. I had something recently where there was absolutely no solution. So I thought, move on. It was that simple. We just talked round things.

Why is psychology so important in cricket?

If you are batting, and you play and miss, you’ve got to forget that. Because if it plays on your mind, it is going to overload you and you will make a mistake. You can see some players play and miss, and you know they are going to do something stupid. That is why they say, “building up the pressure”. If you forget it, there is no pressure. 

Can you transfer these coping mechanisms to life?

Yes. If something annoys you, just say, ‘It’s gone’. If you keep getting annoyed, everything builds up.

There are interesting sequences on the pressure of playing international cricket…

Mike Gatting had to wait 54 Test innings for his first hundred. It played on his mind. He averaged 50-odd in first-class cricket for Middlesex. But every time he went out to bat for England, he felt under more and more pressure. If somebody just said ‘Pretend it’s a county match’, he would have been fine. It escalates. It happened to a few players, including Mark Ramprakash and Neil Fairbrother. Neil was unique. He didn’t grow up with, ‘half-volley hit it, length ball block it’; he grew up with a premeditated ‘I am going to hit this one’… and his coordination was so fantastic that he could. He didn’t know how to bat in Tests.

Once we were setting a target for Lancashire, and we were doing all right. I said: “Just work it around, pick up ones and twos. Just wait for the bad balls.” He said, “What do you mean?” He would have been unbelievable in T20. He played an incredible shot, and then next ball he would block a similar delivery, and I could never work it out. But then I understood after we spoke. These days he would have a longer run with England. They had a simple decision to make – he was either in the team, or he was not. I think they would have stood by him. He played some incredible one-day innings. I honestly believe he could have been one of the best players in the world in all formats. He’d be a millionaire in the IPL now.

"The 1983 World Cup was a helluva tournament. You’d play. Get ----ed. Wake up. Drive to the ground. Early night. And so on. Every team thought it was a party"

What do you think of sledging?

I never had a problem with it. International sport is not an easy place to live. It’s difficult. The sledging was worse when I played because there were no stump mics back then. If you have Rodney Marsh standing up calling you a ---- every ball, it’s difficult. Geoff Lawson and I had played a lot of Lancashire 2nds together and we were quite close, good friends. I hadn’t seen him for a few years. The next time I saw him was in a Test match.

He kept nipping it away from me and I kept missing. He started sledging me, and it was unbelievable – the amount, and the language. I thought, ‘I’m sure you used to be my friend.’ I said, “Look Henry, you are going to have to bowl straighter at me for me to nick it – if you are going to keep moving it I’m never going to nick it!” I started patronising him a bit and it made it worse. At the end of the day’s play, the rule was, you leave it 20 minutes, and whichever side is fielding, you go into their dressing room. So as I was going in, I thought, ‘who the heck am I going to sit next to?’ And he shouted, “Foxy, over here, I’ve got your beer,” and it was so instant, I thought, ‘you idiot [to myself], on the field is on the field, off the field is off the field’ – but I had forgotten that. 

You have defended Cameron Bancroft in the book…

I reckon he was thrown under the bus. It was appalling. David Warner had always looked after the ball, and all of a sudden, Bancroft has it. “Give it to the kid.” Cameron was abandoned. It was the cowardice rather than the cheating that got me. The Australian cricket culture was, “Unless you are being aggressive, you are not being professional.” They thought that by effing and blinding they were doing a good job, but they had lost the plot really. You can’t even play a charity match in Australia as they just try to knock your head off. They have forgotten that actually it’s sport, and you do get beaten now and again. It’s OK to lose. They didn’t accept that, and it got so bad that they ended up using sandpaper. What? Everyone has always messed with the ball – picked it, scratched it, put shine on it, suncream on – forever, but you don’t take sandpaper out. If you cannot scuff a ball with your fingernails, you need sandpaper, you are not very good!

You pick out John Morris (Derbyshire, Durham, Notts) as someone who should have played more for England…

Just look at how they handled his career. England were having a terrible tour [Australia 1990/91]. They were getting beaten. So David Gower and Morris took the Tiger Moth up. They got publicly slaughtered by the management. What they should have said is, “Yeah we are having a tough time, but this is how strong the team spirit is, two of the lads have tried to lift the spirits with a bit of fun, we think it’s fine”, and then bollocked them in private. But don’t hang them out to dry publicly. I remember when Andrew Strauss took over [as managing director of England cricket]. He was told he had to re-sack Kevin Pietersen. They had already dropped him. When I got dropped by England they didn’t ring me every week and say I had been dropped again. So why do it to Kevin Pietersen? Just the way they have done things sometimes is preposterous. 

Your opinion on how T20 will develop will upset traditionalists…

I think there is every chance that people will sit down at 18 and decide with their parents if they are going to sign a red-ball or white-ball contract. There will be two different squads, and it will be like rugby league and rugby union. Even when I was at university there were lots of young men who just didn’t want to invest in how to bat for four hours. There was not as much desire there to learn your craft – they just wanted to go in and smash it. And you can understand it. If you are good at going in and smashing 70 off 30 balls, you will earn a lucrative contract. Bat for four hours, you might get picked for a Test match. The attraction of the money in the limited-overs stuff is outweighing a lot of people’s desire to play Test cricket. I was chatting to Geoff Miller, and he said, “One day all our Test careers will just be statistics that nobody understands.”

What do you think of The Hundred?

Can anyone make sense of it? What’s that about? Just play a T20 and tell them they have to get it in this timeframe. We used to have to bowl at 18.5 overs an hour. There is no reason why they cannot do that. You’d get your T20 in two and half hours. There is no point reinventing the wheel when the wheel you have got goes round and round. Let’s pretend it does attract a new audience of young kids. They will say, “What’s this?” They won’t understand it because they are used to T20. “Why are they bowling five-ball overs in blocks of 10?” Every kid since 2003 has been playing T20, starting at 6pm in midweek. I just don’t get it. 

The super over

Person you’d most like to meet?

On the proviso that I could understand him, Albert Einstein. Some of the concepts he came up with are so mindbogglingly difficult. It has been said of quantum mechanics, “If someone says they understand them, they obviously don’t.”

Have you had a life-changing experience?

That car accident [at 21] when I broke my neck and it ultimately ended my Test career. I came back from India and found I had two crushed vertebrae in my neck, sending pins and needles down me. By the time I got it sorted [years later], the England captain had changed, the selectors had changed. And that was the end of it.

Favourite film

Blade Runner. The original. I just loved the atmosphere, the world [director] Ridley Scott created. I liked the one with the narration, not the director’s cut.

This article was published in the June 2019 edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game

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