Ian Bell was recalled as captain for that drawn series decider at the Riverside, having spent the summer playing in Warwickshire’s first team. He had an air of superiority about him, and an old-school style of captaincy. Hand signals would represent your summons to have a bowl, and he would rarely call you by your name. It was almost a throwback to the gentlemen and players era. Even then he was a veteran – I earned three caps, he earned caps over three years – and international star in the waiting.

There were others like Belly, too, among our group – players who were ahead of their time as teenagers, and touted nationally as the next big things before they had played a senior match – such as the Durham duo Gary Pratt, whose claim to fame was to run Ricky Ponting out in the 2005 Ashes, and Nicky Peng. Matt Prior and I often reminisce about those days. There would be thirty to forty players gathered at a national trial day for the England Under-17 or England Under-18 teams and this select trio would be the targets for pointing fingers, knowing nods and general chat.

‘That’s Ian Bell over there,’ you’d hear lads say, in a tone you suspected young Australians spoke about Don Bradman three-quarters of a century earlier.

‘He’s quite a player that Nicky Peng, ain’t he?’ another would pipe up.

Some players naturally develop quicker than others, and Matt and I were playing catch-up, although we were good enough to be selected for the England Under-17 B team that played a match down at a Siberian Abergavenny in 1999.

It was the first time I saw what has subsequently become Matt’s odd obsession. He has always been particular about his appearance on the field, and so when the brand new England caps were handed out by the coaching staff, he took it upon himself to ensure each one was perfectly presented. Such is his devotion to him and his team looking smart, that you can still find him sitting in the corner of the dressing room during quiet periods of international matches, bending the peaks so that they are all unquestionably the perfect shape. The curvature has to be precise and he is so anal about this when a new player is called up that he requests to complete the moulding process before they wear it outdoors.

In comparison to some of my peers, I had limited experience, and was therefore thankful for the support of Martin and Chapple as well as senior men like Warren Hegg and Neil Fairbrother during my breakthrough into senior cricket with Lancashire. When I made a decent start to the 2002 season in the second team – including best figures to date of 8 for 54 in the first innings of a draw against Northamptonshire at Crosby – my reward was a County Championship debut against Surrey at Old Trafford on the final day of May.

The first of my four wickets was Ian Ward, caught behind, and they also included Mark Ramprakash, lbw to a yorker first ball in the second innings. Unlike the previous September for my one-day bow in Derby, I was shitting myself in the build-up to this one. There were no nerves against Derbyshire because it was the equivalent of a token appearance. There was nothing to play for, it was a dead rubber and whatever happened there was slightly irrelevant. It was not as if I was performing to retain my place. It was the final game of the season, there was a winter ahead of me in the knowledge that I had made the staff for 2002, so I didn’t get so worked up about it.

This was different, though. This was a serious opportunity to impress and as something of a perfectionist I put pressure on myself. Like I say, if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly. That’s my motto.

I clearly did enough against quality opposition to earn further chances, and although I played only one Championship game before July, I was a regular at the back end of the 2002 season. One of my first games was a televised Roses match in which I got a five-wicket haul in the first innings, and two more plus the runout of Matthew Elliott in the second. We lost the game but from a personal point of view it was memorable. So was the season as a whole, and made especially so by a gesture from Warren Hegg at the very end.

It was the final day of the final match, against Somerset at Taunton, and we had the home team nine wickets down. Hegg, who was captain, knew I had forty-nine first-class victims for the year and made a point of bringing me back on for one final spell. It was a really nice gesture, a touch of class. Thankfully I completed my half-century, and the team’s victory, by prising out last man Simon Francis.

There were mentors aplenty for me in that team, in fact, and I will always be grateful to those team-mates who looked after me during my first season. Martin and Chapple would always be available to talk to about bowling, while Neil Fairbrother, at first slip, and Heggy, behind the stumps, were never short of advice. More often than not it was to stop trying to swing the ball, a skill I had been working on with Mike Watkinson over the past twelve months, just get it down the other end as fast as I could. They didn’t want me to overcomplicate stuff and just told me: ‘Bowl as quick as you can, forget everything else.’ I had that youthful elasticity shared by a lot of young fast bowlers when they break on to the scene, and although I was developing my outswinger, their attitude was very much to simplify things during matches. If the ball shaped away then great, if it didn’t then I had enough pace to pose batsmen serious problems.

4

England Calling

Even though I was now a fully fledged county cricketer, it had been such a whirlwind start to my career at Lancashire that I had barely stopped for breath, or certainly to stop and think about my debut season – which amounted to a baker’s dozen of first-class matches – when I was called on to the England academy programme that winter.

Mike Watkinson, Lancashire’s cricket manager, presented me with a letter from Lord’s informing me of my selection. I was naturally apprehensive about the trip to Adelaide as I had not previously been away from home for such a long time nor travelled so far but the presence of my team-mate Kyle Hogg proved something of a relief and I went on to thoroughly enjoy the experience.