No Boundaries Read Online Free

head beyond the far end of the sofa, and my first paternal pieces of advice were ‘Never throw your wicket away cheaply’ and ‘Bowl to your field’. I also remember him saying, ‘Cricketers are like cowboys in a gunfight – they only get one chance. If you make a mistake in football, you can come back. In baseball, it’s three strikes and you are out. But in cricket, when the finger goes up, that’s it. It’s a one-ball game.’
    Jimmy Irani is not one of those ‘the game is the thing’ people. He likes to win and he started to bring over professionals to boost Daisy Hill’s chances. It worked – they won five championships and had several near-misses while he was in charge. These guys used to become part of the family and some of my first cricket coaching came from SonnyRamadhin, the great West Indies spin bowler from the era of Worrell, Walcott and Weekes. Dad would tell me to stand very still by the sight-screen and watch Sonny bowl. ‘See if you can spot which way the ball will spin as it leaves his hand.’ Dad always wanted me to be a spinner but, as I grew up, I realised it is a skill that is all-consuming and I enjoyed batting, so didn’t want to spend all my time mastering the black arts later perfected by the likes of Shane Warne and Phil Tufnell. I also didn’t like the idea of being swiped all over the pitch, even though Dad assured me I would pick up a lot of wickets from miss-hits.
    Javed Miandad, the Pakistani superstar, was only a teenager when he spent a season in Bolton but he became my idol. That year he scored more than a thousand runs and took over a hundred wickets despite missing the last six games. He lived with us and not only made sure I held the bat correctly, he also buttoned up my blazer and sent me off looking neat and tidy on my first day at school. I worshipped him and from then on I used to comb through the Cricketer magazine or the Benson & Hedges Yearbook to find out how he’d done. Even when he went on to become one of the greatest ever batsmen and a Pakistan legend, he never forgot my family. I remember when I toured Pakistan with England A, he sought me out and invited me to spend the evening with him and his family.
    I’m not sure what Dad would have said if I’d done a Billy Elliott and said I wanted to become a ballet dancer but fortunately the situation never arose because I was sport mad from the start. Every night, I’d race home from school, grab a sandwich that Mum would have ready for me, then dash back out to play with my mates. Whether it was in the genes or all that gilt-edged coaching, I seemed to take to mostsports quite easily and I was lucky because I was always taller and stronger than most kids of my age. That probably had something to do with Mum’s home cooking and the fact that Dad’s ‘day job’ was in the meat business, which meant we would often have steak for breakfast.
    I went to kick-boxing classes, played basketball for the north of England, and had tennis coaching with a guy who reckoned I was like a young Roscoe Tanner because I could hit the ball hard at eight years old. But my two passions were cricket and football. Funnily enough, once I was old enough to start playing in teams, which was around the age of six, football was the sport Dad and I shared most, simply because in the summer we would be playing cricket in different matches.
    Football was the main sport at my senior school, Smithills Comprehensive. We had some inspirational teachers in Gary Dickinson, former sprinter Steve Caldwell and Stuart Bowman. It wasn’t a job for them: they had real enthusiasm for their sport and loved passing that on to the kids in their charge. They could be tough – if you messed them about they would hang you up on the coat pegs and leave you dangling. They demanded high standards and wouldn’t allow us to drop below our best. Steve Caldwell introduced the idea of warming up before football matches. We would line up on the halfway line in our