Book Review : Grizzly: My Life and Times in Cricket by Chris Adams

Forget Kevin Pietersen, this was the book that I had eagerly awaited since hearing of its forthcoming publication, some time back. Chris Adams is, after all, a Derbyshire legend, the Whitwell lad who should have been the cornerstone of our batting for years.

Yet it all went sour for him at Derbyshire, as it did for so many others at that time, of course. For supporters of the county, the first part of the book will be the most interesting and is something I will return to, but this book is excellent value throughout and doesn't disappoint in any way.

Bruce Talbot has done a fine job in the ghost writing and the book moves along at great pace, like the best of action thrillers. It pulls no punches, just like Adams at the crease. It is patently clear why he was such a good captain, leading his Sussex side from the front and into the most successful county side of the 2000s with aggressive batting, innovative captaincy and the not inconsiderable weapon of Mushtaq Ahmed as the spearhead of a potent attack.

His international career never took off and he was guilty of squandering a few starts, albeit against a strong South African attack. Luck plays a part in careers and a debut against a lesser side may have seen him flourish, yet England's loss was Sussex's gain and Adams led them to a period of unprecedented success.

His move to coaching was predictable and his early success at Surrey came as no surprise. Yet in the space of twelve months the club was in turmoil, suffering the death of Tom Maynard and the consequential and inevitable disarray as players and management struggled to cope with the loss of such a precocious talent. Ultimately Adams lost his job, but remains a coach with unfinished business at a shrewd county prepared to give him the opportunity.

That could have been at Derbyshire, as he explains being in the frame for the current role held by Graeme Welch. It is not hard to see his return to the county game at some point in the future, when his experiences, good and bad, will doubtless have steeled him and prepared him for a fresh challenge.

So what are his thoughts on those years at Derbyshire? He had 'difficult times' with Kim Barnett, who he describes as a man of few words but as a fantastic batsman. It was a troubled dressing room with strong characters, one in which Barnett and John Morris had a 'strained' relationship and in which the 'outspoken' views of Dominic Cork failed to help.

He admired Mohammad Azharuddin, struggled with Daryl Cullinan, who took his cricket very seriously and suffered from an especially juvenile prank, but really hit it off with Dean Jones and Les Stillman. The latter is credited with transforming his batting, but the abrasive style of Jones saw him at odds with most of the dressing room. While they almost delivered a second county championship to Derbyshire in 1996, the 'brutal honesty' of Jones did not sit well with other team members and Adams felt increasingly marginalised.

There's also a vivid account of the 1993 Benson and Hedges Cup Final and the lunchtime row with Wasim Akram over the latter's earlier beamer. The lead up to this is well explained, the bowler's later assertion that Adams threatened him with 'a butter knife' being denied and coming across as ever so slightly laughable. Yet it galvanised Derbyshire and Kim Barnett's assertion that they should 'leave Mike Atherton out there to chew up a lot of balls' later turned the game.

All of which makes for a quite terrific read. The only minus mark I could put against it is a sloppy mis-spelling of Guy 'Willett' (sic), the then Derbyshire chairman and former club captain. It doesn't detract from a book that should be high on the Christmas list of any Derbyshire, Sussex or Surrey fan, however.

Or indeed for any cricket enthusiast, tired of anodyne autobiographies that add little to what is already known about the subject from assorted media. Full marks to Pitch Publishing for another excellent read and for a book in which the typeface is excellent and the overall production of a very high standard.

Get it in your Christmas stocking.

You won't be disappointed.

Grizzly: My Life and Times in Cricket is written by Chris Adams with Bruce Talbot and published by Pitch Publishing, It is available from all good book shops and is currently available in hard back from Amazon, priced £15.90

The A-Z of Derbyshire Cricket - A is for Adams: Chris Adams

The original idea for the A-Z of Derbyshire cricket came from Nathan Fern, then of the Derbyshire CCC marketing team. I presented my thoughts on the best candidates for each letter of the alphabet once he had done so and it generated a lot of interest.

That was three years ago and I've had several e mails asking if I could highlight the posts from earlier, as the readership is now considerably higher than it was at that time. So here they are in - somewhat unsurprisingly - alphabetical order. They are presented in the way in which they first appeared, but are now captured by labels for future reference and with the same header. Hopefully that will make them more accessible and I'd like to think that they will create talking points and generate comments over the long winter.

It could all have been done by web poll, but I'm wary of the merit of such polls as they give unfair weighting to the opinion of young people, who are generally (but not always) more technically competent and confident. You may disagree with me, but the comments boxes allow your opinions to be heard and I look forward to them.

As an example, I recently saw a web poll that declared Garry Barlow was the greatest-ever songwriter and Take That the greatest-ever group. I’m not so sure that you could discount Lennon and McCartney for the former, not to mention Gershwin, Berlin or Rodgers and Hammerstein. Are Take That better than the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones? Is Barlow a writer of greater, lasting material than Jimmy Page and Robert Plant in Led Zeppelin? Not so sure...

Comparing players from different generations is impossible, as the game has evolved dramatically. WG Grace would probably not make 200 runs in a season today, but was a giant of his era and crucial in the development of the game. Was Wally Hammond better than Peter May, or was Dennis Lillee better than Harold Larwood or Tom Richardson?

Nathan’s first choice at A was the worthy Albert Alderman, opening batsman in the Championship side of 1936. For me, the selection was the antithesis of voting for modern players and was perhaps a vote for an old-timer for nostalgic reasons, especially coming, as it did, in a year when we celebrated our 140th anniversary.

Was Alderman better than Chris Adams? I didn’t see him, but my Dad did and reckons he was ‘workmanlike, but nowt brilliant.’ While his solid batting in 1936 contributed to the success that summer (as Denis Smith was woefully out of touch) he experienced many fallow seasons. He was a sticker, like Alan Hill and Steve Stubbings in more recent times and was probably worth a few runs more than his average suggests. Nathan pointed out that they were runs made on the uncovered wickets of the time and there were some truly great bowlers around in the 1930s, perhaps more than is the case today. By extension, there were some quite ordinary ones too, of a lesser standard than the average today. Alderman averaged 25 from over 500 first-class innings, largely at the top of the order.

Chris Adams’ form in 1996 could have won us the Championship and it was sad to see a player with so much talent ultimately flower elsewhere, as the highly successful skipper at Sussex. He played some fine innings for us though, learning a great deal from Dean Jones. He averaged just under 39 in first-class cricket and a run more in the one-day game, as well as an impressive 30 in T20. A very good player indeed, was Chris Adams.

Selecting Alderman also means that you overlook the claims of the brilliant Mohammad Azharuddin, who played some majestic innings for the county in an albeit brief stay. I would suggest that he played three of the best ten innings I’ve seen by a Derbyshire player, with his double century at Queens Park against Durham on a spinning track a quite sublime piece of batting.

It all comes down to preference. Alderman’s long service, Adams’ few seasons or Azharuddin’s year and a half? After a little thought, and aided by the way that the Indian genius (not a word I use lightly) left under something of a cloud, I’ll plump for Chris Adams. Perhaps if we’d noted his credentials and aptitude for captaincy a little earlier, the recent histories of Derbyshire and Sussex may have been considerably different.

In closing, a suggestion for what may prove the problem letters of X and Z.

For the former, I could give a few dozen examples of X-certificate batting over the years.

Z? No names, but there have been a few batsmen who have enabled spectators to catch up on their sleep.

Zzzzzzzz….

Adams Family not especially happy

Like many of you, I keep an eye on the successes and failures of former Derbyshire players. To be fair, there have not been too many over the years who have gone elsewhere to match or surpass their achievements at the County Ground. Kim Barnett did at Gloucestershire, proving a major factor in their successful one-day period and Peter Bowler played with distinction for Somerset over several seasons. Ian Blackwell has also done well at Somerset and now Durham, but there have been plenty for who the grass was of a more insipid hue on the other side of the fence.

Players like Rob Weston, Matt Cassar, Adrian Rollins, Devon Malcolm, Ant Botha, Harold Rhodes, Mike Hendrick and Geoff Miller all had less success on leaving the club, though granted one or two of the above were in the twilight of their careers when they did so. Mind you, we have signed a few in our time with varying degrees of success. There's probably a book "Old Lags of Derbyshire Cricket" in there, with names such as Fred Trueman, Clive Inman, Ron Headley, Steve Titchard, Colin Wells, Rob Bailey, Phil Weston and Tim Munton all coming to us after their best days were behind them.

Perhaps the greatest feats of those who left the county were achieved by Chris Adams, who moved to Sussex and the captaincy in the fall out over Dean Jones departure from the club. Adams was a fine, aggressive batsman and a brilliant fielder, yet no one at Derbyshire saw him as captaincy material. Maybe Sussex didn't either, but struck it lucky when they dangled the carrot in front of him to aid a move to the South coast.

Adams turned a side of perennial under-achievers into champions, then did it again. He was aided by some good players, including, in Mushtaq Ahmed, the best overseas county bowler of the past twenty years. If Kirtley and Lewry got a couple of early wickets, Adams could pretty much bring on Mushtaq to bowl at one end for the rest of the innings, something he did with control and considerable guile.

Such a statement is unfair, as Adams backed his bowlers with clever field settings and an aggressive style of play, often prepared to sacrifice his own average for the team cause when quick runs were required. He moved up and down the order to suit the circumstances and always looked in control of affairs on the pitch. For me, he and Kent's Rob Key have been the two best county skippers I've seen in recent years, both setting intelligent fields and knowing how to get the best out of their bowlers.

He was set to leave Sussex in 2006 to take up a Director of Cricket role on a four-year deal at Yorkshire, then quickly realised he had made a mistake and resigned the post, saying that he did not feel able to deal with such a role at that stage. He had two further years at Sussex before bowing out to become the supremo of Surrey cricket.

There he has had more than his fair share of problems, ridding the club of a number of under-performing senior professionals and investing in youth. It was a bold policy, but the appointment of Rory Hamilton-Brown as skipper was always going to be contentious. Rumours persist of dressing room unrest and the club's struggles on the pitch have continued for a second successive season. With their feisty opening bowler Andre Nel suspended for throwing the ball at an opponent, the team find themselves unable to score enough runs or take enough wickets, hardly a recipe for success.

Adams is not the first to experience the difficulties in the switch from on to off-field leader. Eddie Barlow never had success at Gloucestershire when he was unable to change playing fortunes himself, while fine players like Graham Gooch, John Emburey and Clive Rice had only limited success once their own inspirational deeds were no longer part of the magical formula.

Adams may yet turn Surrey around but needs to be given time. This summer may mark the last of Mark Ramprakash's career and replacing him will be a huge task. With young players it has to be a long term plan, but the question remains as to whether Adams bosses will allow that time or demand more immediate results.

The parallel at Derbyshire, of course, would be in John Morris releasing Wayne Madsen, Garry Park and Tim Groenewald and playing Paul Borrington, Dan Redfern and Atif Sheikh in every game. It might be deemed a laudable, brave move in some quarters but carries an element of risk in the short to medium term. Whether Adams has the security he needs for such a bold gesture is something we'll find out in the next few months. The fact that the crowd booed them off the other night does not bode well and Adams will need all of his skills to ride out a gathering storm at the Oval.