No Boundaries (2 page)

To say that Al likes a drink is like saying Ian Botham relished beating the Australians. He once said to me, ‘Ronnie, remember the glass is always half full,’ but I don’t think he could possibly know that because I’ve never seen him drink a half. There have been mornings, and remember I get to the studio along with the milkman at about a quarter to five – Al comes in about five to … well, let’s leave it at five to – when I could swear he has come straight from whichever bar he was regaling with his stories. Yet he is still switched on to the latest news and ready to ask all the right questions of the guests. Once that studio light goes on to indicate we are live, he is the consummate professional. He was a hell of a striker in his day, especially in his time at Ipswich, but I would venture to suggest that he is an even better broadcaster.

He has a wicked sense of humour and loves to take the mickey out of me. It was Al who gave me the nickname Vernon because he said I sound like Vernon Kay, who was also born in Bolton. He never misses the chance to tease me about my busted relationship with Nasser Hussain, or try to put me on the spot about some other member of the cricket fraternity that he knows I’ve fallen out with just as I’m bending over backwards to be fair to them.

Mind you, I’m not the only one who has to field his spiky probes. I remember England manager Duncan Fletcher coming into the studio to plug his autobiography and, after the usual pleasantries and some questions about the book, Alan said, ‘Duncan, something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Why didn’t you pick Ronnie more often?’

To his credit, Duncan didn’t blink and assured Al that I had been close on a lot of occasions. Close but no cigar.

One of my favourite moments with Alan came during the sparring that goes on between him and Mike Parry just before the handover at ten o’clock. All through our programme that day we’d been playing snatches of our favourite music from films and Alan had been threatening the audience with what he claimed was my number-one choice, which he wouldn’t even reveal to me. Mike Parry said that one of the main items on his show was to be whether or not funerals should be more cheerful, a celebration of the dead person’s life rather than mourning for their passing. Al cut across him and said, ‘Mike, got to interrupt because we have to play Ronnie’s favourite film track. I think it’s perfect for a happy funeral,’ and as he faded up the sound I heard the kids from
The Sound of Music
sing: ‘So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye.’

Brilliant! And typical of the man who has helped make my
transition from cricketer to broadcaster such a positive experience. Sometimes, when I look across the desk at him at six in the morning, it’s hard to realise he is the same person I used to watch run out for Manchester United when I was just 15 years old. It’s at moments like that I reflect on what an incredible journey I’ve enjoyed. 

I
f ever a kid was destined to become a cricketer it was me. From 26 October 1971, when I weighed in at 8lb 6oz, I was surrounded by the sights, sounds and smells of the game. Mum and Dad took me home to our house in the mining town of Atherton in Lancashire but, by the time I really became aware of what was going on around me, they had bought a house in Bolton, on the boundary at Heaton Cricket Club. From then until I left home in 1994, I slept in a bedroom with a window overlooking the pitch and, as a child, the outfield became my playground.

My dad, Jimmy Irani, came to England from his home in Bombay, where his grandfather had settled to avoid persecution in his native land, then known as Persia. Dad claims that, when he arrived here in 1961 to play cricket, he only intended to stay six months but he got captured by a pretty 16-year-old Lancashire lass named Anne Main and has been here ever since.

I guess my great-grandfather was the first in our line to be called Irani, which means of Iran. I don’t know if it was a slur
in 19th-century India but there have often been comments about it since, especially in the last few years as the political scene in that part of the world has made the headlines. I think Dad suffered some abuse when he first came to England in what was a much more racist time than now, but he was helped by the fact that even then cricket was a multi-racial sport, so he was soon accepted because he was a good player and no one noticed his name any more.

It never really bothered me, though there was an incident when I was about eight involving my first playground girlfriend that sticks in my mind. She was cute and we used to play in the same group and I seem to remember I once snatched a tentative kiss. But one morning she came up to me and said, ‘I told my mum my boyfriend was Ronnie Irani and she said, “Why are you going out with a Paki?”’ It was the first time I’d realised my name was unusual for a lad from Bolton and suddenly all the other kids were teasing me. I was hurt and confused. It only lasted a few days but, at an age when you desperately want to fit in, it was embarrassing and was definitely part of my toughening-up process.

I never had the chance to get to know Dad’s family. His mother died young, shortly after he arrived in England, which I know knocked him back because, in those days when plane travel was out of reach of ordinary people, he wasn’t able to get home to see her before she passed or to attend the funeral. He talked to me about her, about how strong she was, and I wish I’d met her. His father visited us in England. I don’t remember him, although there is a picture of him holding me as a baby and I still have a gold rattle that he gave me with ‘Prince Ronnie’ engraved on it. I knew Mum’s family well – her mother and grandmother were still alive when I was young and there were my aunties Janet and Glad and
uncles Johnny, Phil and Ian. It was a tight-knit family and into sport in a big way.

To say Dad loves his cricket is a bit like saying Alex Ferguson likes to win football matches. He played every year until a heart-valve operation forced him to quit in 1999, aged 64. He was captain of Daisy Hill Cricket Club for 12 years and every Saturday and Sunday our family would go to matches, Dad playing, Mum helping with the teas and me just soaking it all up like a sponge. Most of my early memories are of running around the outfield during breaks in play, messing around on the swings and slides or being in pavilions, surrounded by men dressed in white. As soon as I was big enough, I would prepare Dad’s cricket bag, whiten his boots and rub linseed oil into his bat. It was a labour of love – and also earned me 50p.

I had a toy bat almost as soon as I could walk and Dad would ‘bowl’ a spongy ball to me in the living room while he watched
Coronation Street
. My first six was back over his 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 Sonny
Ramadhin, 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 most
sports 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 reversible kit – red for home, white away – and he’d have us stretching, running shuttles and doing star jumps. The opposition used to stand on the sidelines taking the piss but, if we dared look over at them, Steve would bark at us to concentrate. We hated it at first because we felt daft but then we found that we would come flying out of the blocks and often have games won before the other kids had got into it.

There were some good players in that team – Kenny Hampson and Glen Foster at the back, Jason Nash, who is now back at the school as a PE teacher and head of year, and little midfielder Sean Atkinson who could dribble for fun and who Dad loved to watch. I played up front, a Norman Whiteside figure, and had some success. The highlight was probably the day I scored seven in a game on my way to more than 40 in a season.

I went to watch my first league match when I was about seven. Dad had several season tickets at Manchester United and decided I was now old enough to be introduced to the glory that is Old Trafford. This might come as a big surprise to those sceptics from the blue side of Manchester, but there were and are a lot of Man United fans living in Lancashire. It became a regular routine – play football on Saturday morning, grab a quick shower, dash home for a bite to eat while watching
Saint & Greavsie
or Bob Wilson on
Football
Focus
and then pile into Dad’s red van with four or five other fans in the back and head off to the match. We’d park near some warehouses, not far from the ground. Dad always tried to get a good spot to make a quick getaway after the game but, as he would never dream of leaving before the final whistle, it was usually pointless and we ended up in a traffic jam. On the short walk to the ground, we’d stop at Vincent’s Italian Ice Cream van to pick up a 99 and then meet up with Dad’s friend Kevin Thomas and his family under the Munich clock.

Even though these were not the glamour days at the Theatre of Dreams, I was still wide-eyed. Despite having Lou Macari, Gordon McQueen, Bryan Robson, Ray Wilkins and a young Mark Hughes, United were a workmanlike side who enjoyed a few good cup runs. Mostly the old boys around me
talked fondly of the Busby Babes, the tragedy of Munich and the golden era of Charlton, Law and Best. Dad would also tell me about the great players he had seen at Burnley in the 1960s and, if I looked away when Ian St John or Jimmy Greaves were on TV, he’d say, ‘Listen to these guys, Ronnie. They were great, great footballers and they know what they are talking about.’ One of the biggest thrills for Dad when I played for Essex was finding out that Jimmy is a big cricket fan, and they often sat together, watching matches at Chelmsford. Greavsie’s son Danny ran the Essex shop for a while, and my wife Lorraine would help him out some days.

In those days, the average crowd at Old Trafford was around 28,000, so it was always a thrill when you listened to Stuart Hall on
Sports Report
on the way back from a game and heard him tell of 48,000 being ‘packed into the ground like red-and-white sardines’. Twice a season – against City and Liverpool – the crowd would be a 58,000 sell-out. These were always extra special occasions, particularly when we won.

As talkSPORT listeners will know, I’m still a Man U fan today, although I like to think that I’m not one-eyed and can appreciate other teams and great players whatever strip they wear. Even though Liverpool were ‘the enemy’, I still loved watching their great teams on
Match of the Day
and rather wished we had signed players like Kevin Keegan, Ian Rush and Kenny Dalglish. Things started to look up at Old Trafford after Alex Ferguson took over, although I can remember the time when the Stretford Enders were calling for him to be sacked. A good job they didn’t get their way! Dad used to watch the reserves as well and told me about a kid to look out for called Ryan Giggs. I saw Steve Bruce make his debut and Gary Pallister arrive and a string of great players
like Paul Ince and the incomparable Roy Keane help put the club on the right track. Meanwhile, the youth set-up was discovering talents like David Beckham, Paul Scholes and the Neville brothers, Gary and Phil, who I played cricket against at Greenmount CC.

But for me the most exciting entrance – it was so much more than a mere arrival – I’ve witnessed while watching United was the day a Frenchman strutted on to the Old Trafford stage, his collar turned up, his chest stuck out as though he owned the place. Eric Cantona had just won the championship with Leeds United and Fergie had snapped him up for a bargain million quid. His presence seemed to instil confidence and self-belief in all the others. He was the catalyst for the breathtaking run of success that followed. He made a great club a great team and so, when Lorraine and I bought a proud-looking Doberman in 1999, he had to have a red collar and was named Eric.

Dad and I hardly ever had the same opportunity to enjoy watching first-class cricket together because of our playing commitments. I can only remember going to see one Lancashire county match before I joined the ground staff and I only watched one Test match as a boy. That was at Old Trafford in 1980. Sonny Ramadhin got us a pair of tickets in the VIP section for England against the West Indies and I turned up clutching my sandwiches in my kung-fu bag. Those were the days of the great West Indian pacemen and I recall Michael Holding taking a run up that seemed to start about two rows in front of where I was sitting. The Windies also had some very talented batsmen, including Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards. England had a few good players too, like Mike Gatting, Geoffrey Boycott and Ian Botham, but the star of the show was a little guy named Malcolm Marshall, who was
quite new on the scene. He was only about 5ft 9in – tiny compared to his fellow quickies – but he steamed in, knocked over three quick wickets and caused an England collapse. I was massively impressed. Little did I realise that about 12 years later I would play against him. I only faced one ball, but at least I can say I batted against arguably the greatest fast bowler the world has ever seen.

The first West Indian paceman I ever faced was much more hostile. Franklin Stevenson came over to play for Greenmount in the Bolton League and he relished the uncovered wickets that at times made him almost unplayable. I was already in the Heaton first team and, at the age of 14, found myself watching this giant Barbadian charging towards me. Franklin was noted for his clever use of the slower ball, but I never saw any evidence of it that day. Fourteen or not, I was merely an obstacle to be removed and he tried to bounce the shit out of me from the first ball. I ducked and weaved and let a few fizz past my head. Several more whacked into my ribs and chest, but somehow I survived and gradually found a way of getting bat on ball and went on to score a half-century. We lost the game but such was the spirit at Heaton that the lads bought me a pint of bitter shandy to celebrate my achievement. It was a great feeling to be one of the boys when the rest of the boys were men, although, when I took my shirt off to go to bed that night, my body was blotched purple with bruises.