1471142299 (N) by Graeme Fowler

Author:Graeme Fowler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781471142338
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

END OF AN ERA

Bob Bennett, Lancashire chairman, was an ambitious man. I think he had designs on being the England manager, and wanted to be seen as a strong man in cricket. There’d been an incident when Wasim Akram had got frustrated during a game and started ranting in his native tongue. It was highly unusual for Wasim to do this, but the upshot was he was reported for it and fined something like £3,000, a lot of money considering this was the first time he’d ever done anything.

Wasim couldn’t understand it. ‘Foxy,’ he said, ‘if I was shouting at a batsman, I’d shout in English. If you’re having a go at somebody, you don’t do it in a language they don’t understand. I was shouting at myself in pure frustration.’ It was all over the papers. We appealed on his behalf, but that was that.

At the time, a guy was writing a book about Wasim and Waqar and he came to my house in Manchester to interview me. He was there for three hours. I mentioned this, about how I thought Bob Bennett wanted to be seen as strong because he wanted to be the England manager, and as we finished I said: ‘You can edit this any way you want, but out of courtesy, before you publish it, I want to see it.’ Anyway, somehow, instead of the draft coming to me, it went to Old Trafford. I’d never seen it, but Bob Bennett clearly had. We were about to start a game at Lord’s against Middlesex when the dressing-room attendant came in to say there was a phone call for me. It was Bob, and he wasn’t happy about what he’d seen. I pleaded my case.

‘I had this bloke sat in my house for hours,’ I told Bob. ‘I don’t know what he’s written because if I had I wouldn’t have allowed it to be sent.’

It was clear to me that Bob wasn’t happy with my explanation and I was hitting the panic button. I rang up the author and got hold of a draft and the stuff about Bob Bennett wanting to be seen to be strong was all it said. But obviously it seemed he didn’t like it, so I told the author to take that bit out, and he did. It was never published, but I was put on a charge of gross misconduct.

I was given a letter, and had to go to see the committee. I was talking to one of my mates about it, and he knew a solicitor who had just represented Jackie Collins against a tabloid newspaper and won. This bloke looked at what had happened with me. He was a cricket fan, liked the way I played, and offered to represent me for nothing. We went into the meeting and within two minutes he’d got the charge reduced from gross misconduct to just misconduct, which mattered because with gross misconduct you can be sacked. In the end, they fined me £1,000, but said I wasn’t allowed to tell the press how much the penalty was.

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