Dan Douthwaite's Odyssey: An unrealistic dream come true

ELIZABETH BOTCHERBY: Two years on from a red-letter match, the Glamorgan allrounder is making county cricket look easy. But, beneath the euphoria is a journey of academy struggles, tough decisions and missed opportunities he will never forget

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On April 5, 2019, Dan Douthwaite sat nervously in the away changing room at Sophia Gardens, knowing the next three days of cricket were of paramount importance for his future.

Not for the first time, he was courting interest from several counties. Talks were held, contracts offered, but nothing was signed because, just as Penelope resisted her suitors in the hope of reuniting with her husband in Homer’s epic poem, Douthwaite was holding out for his own Odysseus: Glamorgan.

He longed to extend his stay in Cardiff having fallen for the city during his three-year degree and as he prepared to face his dream employers in a first-class fixture, the significance of the match was all too apparent. Penelope’s waiting game, unravelling her shroud every night to delay selecting a new husband, wasn’t an option; if he wanted to play for Glamorgan, he had to follow the lessons of Athena and go out in search of his destiny. Or, in cricketing terms, take the match to Glamorgan with bat and ball.

"There were a few chats with a few counties, but I didn’t want to lay my cards on the table," Douthwaite recalls. "I was happy in Cardiff and I wanted to stay, so I was hoping something  would come from Glamorgan. I was hopeful I would go into the game against Glamorgan and hit some runs and see what they had to say."

Ten days prior, in his first-class debut against Somerset, Douthwaite top-scored for Cardiff MCCU with 42 runs and picked up the wickets of Lewis Gregory and Craig Overton. Five days later, he took to the field against Sussex, removing Phil Salt and Stiaan van Zyl with the ball, before striking his maiden first-class century – an unbeaten 100 from 107 balls, a knock which remains a career-best.

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Dan Douthwaite demonstrating his prowess with the bat against Northants

Fast forward two years and Douthwaite is back at Sophia Gardens: older, wiser, and a little bit sunburnt after spending a warm spring day in the field. It’s late March, Glamorgan are playing Cardiff MCCU – or, to use their new acronym, Cardiff UCCE – but this time, he isn’t in the away changing room. Sophia Gardens is his home and has been since April 23, 2019: seven red-ball appearances in his first season, ever-present in his second; 31 wickets, 458 runs, and two half-centuries under his belt.

He got his big performance: "The way it panned out, bar not reaching a hundred, was a dream," he laughs: 95 runs, the wickets of Marnus Labuschagne, dismissed for 11, and Glamorgan captain Chris Cooke, and 18 days later, his dream contract.

However, to focus solely on this 24-month period is a gross oversimplification of Douthwaite’s struggle to the top, a journey which shaped him as a player and a person, and one which he, too, is quick to keep at the forefront of his thoughts.

"Everything has moved so quickly in these two years, but I don’t want to forget that I didn’t have that classic route from academy to seconds to getting signed, I went the long way round," he says. "Everything has happened quickly from my last year of uni onwards, but I don’t want to look away from the fact that everything else has been a tough ask at times."

He highlights his time in Surrey’s second team, playing alongside the likes of Sam Curran, Amar Virdi, Ollie Pope, and Will Jacks, as the first trial which threatened to end a dream which began, as with so many of us of a certain age, by wildly swinging a kwik cricket bat in primary school PE lessons to recreate the strokes he’d seen Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff play in the 2005 Ashes.

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"When I was 18 or 19, playing second team for Surrey, I was maybe deluded," he admits. "Looking back, I was nowhere near good enough to warrant being signed."

After discussing his future with his family, Douthwaite opted to leave Surrey behind and try his luck in Wales, combining playing opportunities and top-class coaching at Cardiff MCCU with a degree in sports management from Cardiff Met.

He knew this pathway didn’t guarantee a ticket to the big time. Of the 11 promising cricketers who took the field in his debut against Somerset, Oskar Kolk and Brad Evans now play first-class cricket sporadically for Eagles in Zimbabwe, a couple have played second XI or minor counties, but only Douthwaite and Glamorgan spinner Prem Sisodiya have made it to the top tier of the domestic game. But it was his only option to keep his dream alive.

"It is surreal to hear," Douthwaite admits. "When you listen to a stat like that you appreciate where you are and what you’re doing, and not to take any of it for granted. We’re all living our childhood dreams. You don’t stumble into professional cricket; everyone’s dreamed of it and worked incredibly hard for it so it’s a nice reminder of that."

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At first his gamble appeared to have instantly paid off. In the winter of his first year, Douthwaite regularly bowled in nets with Warwickshire and was included in their pre-season touring party before a double stress fracture wiped out his season. The following year, his hopes were dashed once again, a familiar foe rearing its ugly head again to derail a professional contract. However, rather than walk away discouraged, the latest setback lit a fire in Douthwaite.

"I don’t think until my second year when I started trialling properly with Warwickshire and then got offered a deal was I ever certain I could make a living out of cricket," he confesses. "It was an unrealistic dream, but when I put in some performances for the second team at Warwickshire and got offered a deal, it actually took me by surprise more than anything else.

"It didn’t work out there because I failed my medical with a stress fracture but that’s when it clicked that I could do something here, so I went into my last year of university with a lot of determination to try and make something out of my cricket."

And, when Glamorgan finally came calling following his impressive performance at Sophia Gardens, Douthwaite only ever had one answer.

"It was a fairly easy decision to say yes to," he says. "Being sheltered in Surrey for the first 18, 19 years of my life and then moving to Cardiff, I grew up very quickly. Cardiff became my home away from home so staying here was a big one for me.

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"But also, the opportunities that presented themselves at Glamorgan that I couldn’t necessarily get at other counties. I sat with Mark Wallace and he spoke about potentially being chucked straight into the deep end into the first team squad for the next game. That’s a big selling point; it’s not something I can really turn down."

Wallace was true to his word. On April 30, Douthwaite made his List A debut against Gloucestershire; three weeks later, his County Championship debut came away at Derbyshire. On both occasions he was unidentifiable from the stands as his kit was blank, the personalised shirts adorned with his now trademark 88 – selected by his mum, “because it rhymes with Douthwaite” – yet to arrive.

He wouldn’t be a mystery for long. By the end of the 2019, he was the club’s young player of the year after scoring 298 runs and taking 17 wickets at 36 in seven red-ball appearances. But, despite the tip from Wallace, the success of his first season still caught Douthwaite by surprise.

"I was under the assumption I’d be playing second team cricket when I wasn’t playing uni cricket and push for first team selection at some point in the summer," he says. "I was maybe a bit naïve and deluded not knowing what to expect but I was happy with the way my first season went.

"From signing, I think the next week I was in the first team squad and then didn’t get dropped until I got injured, so that was surreal. It moved at a serious pace. Only when I sit and look back on that first season do I realise how far I’ve come and how well I did that year."

He carried his good form into 2020. Although Glamorgan struggled, failing to win a red-ball fixture and missing out on the knockout stages of the T20 Blast by two points, Douthwaite enjoyed a fruitful year, scoring 160 runs while batting in the unfamiliar number six position and picking up a team-leading 14 wickets in five appearances.

"It was a weird one, going back halfway through the summer to play just T20 and four-day cricket," he says. "At times we played some really good cricket and there were some standout individual performances.

"I went up the pecking order a bit which didn’t feel right. There weren’t as many senior faces in the dressing room. It was a big learning curve and big for my development, you know, being in a slightly younger side, bowling move overs, batting at six which I don’t usually do in four-day cricket or opening in T20. There was a lot learned and I’m looking forward to taking the positives from last year.

"It didn’t quite go the way we wanted it to in the four-day comp and that’s something we’re trying to move forward from. But I think our T20 cricket was very exciting. We were a bit hit and miss if you look at the results, but when we were on, we played some exciting cricket and that’s the brand we want to go out this year and play.

"It was a tough year for everyone but we’re very optimistic about this year and it’s something for us to build on."

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And despite 2021 looking like another tough year for Glamorgan – a reduced squad, the financial fallout of the pandemic, a tricky County Championship group including Lancashire, Yorkshire and Kent – there are several reasons to be cheerful in South Wales. The club is celebrating 100 years of first-class cricket , Labuschagne – who missed the 2020 season due to the pandemic – is back, and Douthwaite has committed his long-term future to the club, signing a three-year contract extension in March to cap off an excellent two years.

"It put a big smile on my face when I got offered that," he recalls. "It was pretty similar to when I got offered my first deal at the club – it was a no brainer! Cardiff is my second home now, well it’s close to being my first home if it’s another three years, and I’d like to stick around and do something special with this group of players. I think we’re promising silverware over the next few years for sure.

"And Marnus, that’s pretty exciting. In my first year there was a recurring theme that Marnus hit half of the team’s runs every game. If we get 200 or 250, with Marnus batting we’ll be setting teams 500! And he’s a great guy to have around the changing rooms. He’s cricket, cricket, cricket and it’s infectious."

Looking back on the past two years, Douthwaite has made adjusting to life as a professional sportsman look easy, seamlessly transitioning from promising university player to Glamorgan’s go-to allrounder, competing alongside and against the best players in the world and holding his own. But, despite his early success, he is brutally honest about the realities of being a cricketer and the opportunities he may never have had if he hadn’t made a tough decision.

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"The best thing I did was going to university, getting my degree, being part of the MCCU set-up and giving myself those few more years to develop. It paid off for me," he says. "I was getting all the perks of being a pro cricketer – one to one sessions, strength and conditioning, psychologists – and if it didn’t work out, I had a degree to fall back on.

"Unless you’re Joe Root or Ben Stokes, your career time is very limited. You’re not going to be a cricketer forever and you have to enter the real world, and the degree stands me in good stead for the future."

But he may be part of a dying breed. At the last count, around 23 per cent of county cricketers had passed through the MCCU programme, as it was most recently known, lured by the prospect of playing first-class cricket. However, university cricket has since had its funding reduced and its status downgraded – a move which, unsurprisingly, disappointed Douthwaite.

"I know a few guys on the scheme and I feel incredibly sad for them," he laments. "Those first-class games against the counties who more or less put out their full-strength side are the highlight of your season, sometimes your summer.

"With the status being gone, there’s not as many fixtures against the counties. I know Cardiff only have us and Derbyshire, and that’s them done and dusted. We’d always have three games against county first teams and that put me in the shop window, big time.

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"It’s very hard for someone to sign a deal if they hit a few runs in the second team or club cricket or minor counties, but it’s a massive eye-opener if a uni student can hit runs or take wickets against a county first team in a first-class game. I’m not convinced I’d be here playing for Glamorgan, doing what I’m doing now, if I’d not had that chance of playing against first teams and showing what I can do."

Douthwaite knows he is very fortunate. Fortunate to witness the 2005 Ashes which reignited a nation’s love of cricket, fortunate to have had the support and courage to follow a different path and safeguard his future, fortunate to have played first-class cricket before university sides lost their status.  

Would he have joined Curran, Virdi, Pope and Jacks in the first team had he stayed at Surrey? Would his career be better, or indeed worse, if a stress fracture hadn’t derailed his move to Warwickshire? Would Glamorgan have offered him a contract if he hadn’t dismissed Marnus and come within five runs of scoring back-to-back hundreds?

Douthwaite doesn’t know the answer to these questions, no one does. But, when asked to describe the past two years, he doesn’t skip a beat: "Undoubtedly the best two years of my life. It’s my unrealistic childhood dream that I’m living right now! There’s nowhere I’d rather be than playing my cricket at Sophia Gardens."

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