It was a bit of a party piece. I could do a mean Gus Fraser as a teenager while my impression of Dominic Cork was so convincing that I imitated him throughout a twenty-over contest for Burnley Under-18s and barely went for a run. Phil DeFreitas, being a Lancashire player, was another one of my favourite bowlers to mimic, and I also used to bowl properly useful left-arm spin.

Yes, that’s right: properly useful left-arm spin. In fact, I still do bowl left-arm spin, and really fancy myself at it. Now it won’t have escaped your notice that I am a right-arm pace bowler but one of the things I have always been good at is visualizing other sports men’s movements and then re-enacting them, and I have bowled left-arm tweakers since my early teens. It was a talent that developed from the days when we played on the drive. All my mates were right-handed batsmen and because I couldn’t bowl leg-spin to save my life, I had to find another way of getting the ball to go away from the bat. So I practised and practised left-arm stuff.

Every now and again when there aren’t too many prying eyes around, I bowl it in the nets while on tour with England. I don’t do it very often because it is frowned upon – some people think I am taking the piss – but I got Ian Bell out in one of my early exhibitions, in Durban, and genuinely believe with regular practice I could bowl left-arm spin in a first-class match. It feels so natural.

When Australia coach John Buchanan claimed in the aftermath of their 2001 Ashes victory that the next target in cricket was for individuals to become multi-skilled and push the boundaries of possibility by learning to bat and bowl with both hands, his claims were dismissed as something emanating from cloud cuckoo land but in the decade since we have seen the emergence of switch-hitting, while David Warner arrived on the scene laying claim to be the first ambidextrous batsman. Anyone who has seen him switch-hit will take his claim seriously. He is better equipped left-handed but can strike it pretty well the other way around, too. Now if batsmen are allowed to jump into a different stance as they take strike, why shouldn’t bowlers be allowed to revert from right-arm over seam to left-arm round spin indiscriminately?

Because rules is rules and the laws of the game don’t allow it, is the answer. But I reckon it is because people have yet to challenge it. In this instance, unfamiliarity breeds contempt, and why shouldn’t cricketers switching from one to the other be a thing of the future? Samit Patel bowls left-arm spin but throws right-handed, so why not be able to bowl both ways? I don’t think it’s so strange (although for some reason I do get freaked out by the number of right-arm fast bowlers, like Darren Gough and Glen Chapple, who write left-handed).

Imitating others is something I have been good at throughout my life. For example, I have never had a golf lesson but I have got a really good swing, picked up exclusively from watching golfers on TV as a kid. Oh, and there is something about it that I find perfectly normal but others might consider unusual or even freaky. I bat left-handed, or at least try to, but when it comes to golf I am a right-hander. It stems from the fact that almost all those golfers on telly were right-handed, so naturally when I first swung a club I did it that way.

Nowadays, whenever Monty Panesar is around the England setup, I watch what he does, store an image in my head where his arms and legs go in relation to each other, and how he releases the ball, then try to copy that in a way that feels most natural to me. There is a lot of downtime on tours and people get bored, so you end up doing stuff like this to occupy yourself. Oh, and I am by no means the only one to have tried this kind of thing. Peter Martin used to bowl left-arm spin in the nets – he just wasn’t as good as me, that’s all!

What Martin and Chapple were good at, however, was guiding me as a young bowler when I made my first-team breakthrough in 2002. Both Kyle Hogg and I were handed contracts on the staff off the back of Lancashire Under-19s’ successful 2000 season when we were beaten finalists in the inter-county 100-over competition. By that point, I was established in the Lancashire second XI, having made my debut in an innings win over Hampshire at Old Trafford in 1999, shortly after my first appearance at any level for the club. In the penultimate Lancashire twos match of 2001, I took 8 for 90, including my first five-wicket haul, a performance that earned me a first-team debut in the final match of the Norwich Union League at Derby that September. Bad weather reduced it to a twenty-five-over-per-side contest. Michael Di Venuto gave me some tap and I finished with 1 for 33 from my four overs – Steve Stubbings dismissed lbw, my maiden senior scalp.

This rise through the ranks at Lancashire coincided with my first international recognition. On the back of my second-team displays, I was selected for the England Under-19 team and claimed seven wickets on my debut, albeit in defeat to West Indies at Grace Road. Although we lost that series 1-0, there were some prominent players for the future in that side. Matt Prior, Monty Panesar and James Tredwell all featured and a 16-year-old called Tim Bresnan was twelfth man and my room-mate for the final match in three that series.