The making of Graeme Swann
Interview: David Tossell
I checked my watch again. It was 45 minutes past our planned meeting time when a black four-by-four at last swung into the forecourt of Nottingham station and a tinted window lowered to reveal a sheepish-looking Graeme Swann.
“Sorry, I’m late,” he offered, turning down the volume on the CD player. “Get in. I’m afraid time-keeping is not my strong point, as you may have noticed.”
At least the interview we’d planned for the book I was writing was going ahead this time. A couple of weeks earlier I’d been sitting in the Trent Bridge foyer after Nottinghamshire’s morning training session while a helpful receptionist tried to track down the county’s elusive off-spinner. My mobile rang. “I’m so sorry,” began a familiar voice. “I have got a virus and was sent home early – and completely forgot you were coming.”
Scatter-brained and disorganised, Swann ought to infuriate the hell out of you. A decade ago, as a raw 20-year-old on his first full England tour, he managed to do just that to coach Duncan Fletcher by missing the team bus to the Test match at Centurion. But, as writers and broadcasters have been discovering during the remarkable last 12 months of his life, it only takes a few minutes in his company to become charmed and captivated.
The style of his bowling might be considered old-fashioned – a finger spinner taking 54 Test wickets in a calendar year, for heaven’s sake! – but there is nothing orthodox about Swann when he sits in front of a microphone. In a year in which he rose from journeyman county bowler to No 3 in the ICC rankings, his quirky humour and earthy honesty have made him the English press pack’s go-to guy.
And it’s not just something he has belatedly cultivated with an eye on a post-cricket career on the reality TV circuit. As early as 1998, Wisden was saying, “The 19-year-old Swann was a refreshing presence, exuding breezy confidence while others around him appeared careworn.”
That teenage enthusiasm remains largely intact, although he is pleased that maturity has erased the less desirable elements of his embryonic personality. “I think the cockiness and strut I used to have has gone out of my game now,” he explains. “You get fed up with getting shouted at and abused. You realise that to play with a smile on your face and enjoy it is better than having a fight every game in the shower room. I am a happier cricketer now. It is easy to be happy when you are doing well but every game I play I pretend is my last.”
With a father, Ray, who played for Bedfordshire and Northumberland and an older brother, Alec, who would play nine years of first-class cricket for Northamptonshire and Lancashire, Swann was almost literally delivered into the game. “I was born at the end of March and in the second week of April I was at Old Northamptonians, where my dad played. He was easily the best player and got his name in the newspaper all the time. We used to get free chips at the fish shop because they thought he was famous.”
Having progressed through county and regional age-group cricket, Swann played for Northamptonshire’s second XI just after his 16th birthday and by 1997 had earned a one-day outing for the first team. That summer also saw him make his England Under-19 debut against Zimbabwe, scoring an unbeaten 156. A few days earlier he had scored 142 for England Under-18s against the same tourists at Sleaford.
“The thing I remember most is that my A-level results were that week. I got in a fight the night before they came out and woke up with a huge black eye and fat lip. I can’t remember why that happened. I think a couple of us walked into the wrong pub and got a good shoeing. I remember being on the phone to my mum in the morning, having been about 80 not out, with an ice pack to my face and finding out I had passed my A-levels despite having done no work whatsoever.”
His success, on the field rather than in the exam room, earned Swann a trip to South Africa, a country that has featured large in his career. Not only did he finish 2009 by winning consecutive Man-of-the-Match awards in the Centurion and Durban Tests, it was during that first visit in early 1998 that he experienced his first taste of England success. Along with the likes of Owais Shah and Rob Key he was part of the only male England team ever to win an ICC global trophy when they carried off the Under-19 World Cup.
The excitement of beating New Zealand in the final in Johannesburg, where current Northants opener Stephen Peters scored a century, is still evident in the breathless manner of Swann’s recollections. “We didn’t bowl particularly well and 240 in those days was considered a tough target, but Steve smacked it everywhere. That was the best I played all trip. Second ball I faced was a long hop and I pulled it for six – off the mark in a World Cup final with a six! I got 20-odd in about 13 balls and the next minute we were scampering a leg bye and I was picking up a stump. I have got a great picture of me in mid-air punching and screaming. I have got a red face because it was so hot; just a sun hat on, no helmet. I get goose bumps just talking about it.
“I played Yorkshire in my second or third game that year and Darren Gough bounced me and said: ‘You haven’t got a f***ing sun hat on now, have you?’ It was the first time I realised that anyone else in cricket might have watched us out there.”
The famous Swann cockiness, however, was not going to let him back down from any challenges as a young professional. “It was only when Craig White bowled me a bouncer at about 95 miles an hour after I had a go at him that I thought, ‘This is a mug’s game.’”
Introduced to first-class cricket in 1998, Swann took 57 first-class wickets the following summer. Having been added to the England squad for the final Test against New Zealand at The Oval, he was then selected for the tour of South Africa, where a debut one-day international appearance at Bloemfontein was the only high point. He admits: “I remember very little about the tour apart from drinking a lot and playing very little cricket. We were staying in hotels with the Virgin Atlantic air crews and I was in the bar for ever, chasing women but not enjoying a second of it. I was not good enough to be playing, but obviously I thought I was. I had a few quid in the pocket so I was doing what anyone else would have done.”
Even after a move from Northants to Notts in 2004, brought about largely by his unstable relationship with coach Kepler Wessels, Swann learned to accept that his England chance had gone. Elevation to the one-day team in Sri Lanka in 2007 still prompted no thoughts of becoming a Test player. “Watching the Test team was like watching England play football. I was never going to play for them. I thought perhaps I could eke out a one-day career. I thought I could just get a bit of money for every tour I went on and pay the mortgage off by sitting on my arse. When we went to India at the end of 2008 it was such a massive bonus to play in those Test matches.”
And so began 2009, the year of the Swann: leading wicket taker in the West Indies; Man of the Match against the same opposition at Lord’s; Ashes hero with both bat and ball and taker of the decisive wicket. Then, just in case anyone – even Swann himself – feared it was all some kind of freakish golden summer, he started doing it all over again in South Africa, with five-wicket hauls in each of the first two Tests.
Swann is unable to offer a scientific explanation of why wickets have come in such numbers so far in his much-delayed Test career. In part, he feels it is a virtuous circle: the better he plays, the more relaxed he feels and the more his performance improves. “Now that many more long-term options have opened up to me, like working in the media, there is not so much pressure on me. That is a big difference. Technically, I have not made a conscious effort to change anything over the years, but as a spin bowler you do improve with age because it is a tough skill. You never have the yorker or the bouncer to revert to so you have to work on your variations and it takes years.”
Maturity and knowledge of his craft are also the key elements identified by David Graveney, chairman of selectors when the young Swann first toured for England. “You have to factor in the development of an individual. Suddenly he sees the light or a switch is hit and he realises the dedication and sacrifice you need to make the top level. That seems to have happened with Graeme.”
One constant, however, is Swann’s refusal to be intimidated in the heat of battle. In just a year’s worth of Tests, he has identified himself as someone incapable of taking a backward step; whether responding to an attacking batsman by tossing the ball higher, driving opposing bowlers down the ground or challenging his own captain to get exactly the field he wants.
Ironically those traits might have made people nervous about offering him a place in the international set-up earlier. His Under-19 coach, John Abrahams, explains: “He always had that arrogance, but not in a negative sense. People’s perception of him not being serious is wrong. Because someone plays with a smile it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care as much as someone dour and serious. Why shouldn’t you enjoy yourself? He has always used humour to hide his nerves a bit. He is a very funny guy who is very direct, loves to take the piss and won’t worry about upsetting you.”
What he calls a “fairytale” year as a Test player has turned Swann’s life upside down. Time, he has discovered, is rarely his own. His stag weekend in Stuttgart was slotted in during October, between trips to South Africa, and three months before his wedding to fiancée Sarah, prior to the Bangladesh tour. He has been writing for The Sun, become a star of Twitter and even seen his grandmother, Mina, featured in print. “That was quite sweet,” he smiles. “A guy who used to play cricket with my dad in Northumberland was working for the paper up there and knew my grandma still lived there. She was dead chuffed.
“Being involved with the Test team makes a massive difference. It is strange the places you get recognised. Around Trent Bridge and West Bridgford, where I live, there has always been recognition. Now you have schoolkids recognising you, whereas before it was mostly middle-aged blokes. It is nice when you turn up for events and people know who you are, instead of being disappointed when you are not Kevin Pietersen or Andrew Flintoff.”
England’s coach might once have reflected that it was nice if he turned up at all. Returning to the infamous contribution to his first South African tour, Swann says: “I got a call from the hotel manageress saying, ‘Do you want a taxi?’ I told her not to worry as I would get in the bus. She said: ‘It left 20 minutes ago.’ I don’t think it endeared me to Duncan Fletcher particularly, but I was not good enough to be there in the first place. I would have got smashed as a bowler and that probably would have been the end of me. It has made me a better cricketer to go the long way and get there in the end.”
Or, as he might have chosen to put it: better late than never.
David Tossell’s Following On: A Year with English Cricket’s Golden Boys, published by Know The Score Books is out in May 52010.
This feature first appeared in the February/March 2010 issue of SPIN magazine
