Ian Bell: wants to bat at three
Our friends at All Out Cricket, magazine interviewed Ian Bell before he flew out to New Zealand. Here is what England's diminutive batsman had to say about the tour, his form and the England captaincy.
After just 13 first-class matches the teenage Bell is called up as cover for the 2001/02 senior tour of New Zealand, and although he doesn’t play, the talk is all about when, not if, he’ll be an England batsman. So begins the trail of scrutiny that has followed his career. For the next two seasons he averages under 28 in county cricket. Had the blue-eyed boy of English cricket let the pressure get to him?
“I probably did a little bit,” he says. “Certainly early on I was perhaps trying too hard. I was desperate to play and people were saying this and that, and that I was underachieving, trying too hard.” Around this time Bell learnt the lesson that smashing up dressing rooms didn’t make him score any more runs after all. “Sometimes the best thing to do is to just get away from it. What I did through the winter [of 2003/04] was to get away from English cricket and do something on my own.” The boy took himself off to Perth for an old-school winter playing grade cricket.
He came back tougher, and in 2004 the big runs finally came. “I scored a double hundred, 260, and then I just rattled off five or six on the bounce,” he recalls without front. Bell makes his international debut that summer in the last Test against West Indies. Bell’s 70 on a quick one at the Oval gets us far too excited and five minutes later, as we do, we’re hyping the ‘Brummie Bradman’.
What happens next is that Bell, earmarked for the Ashes, inexplicably doesn’t get picked for the 2004/05 tour of South Africa.
That summer everyone was tuned to the cricket. This meant performances were magnified, and in Bell’s case, a 23-year-old taking guard at Lord’s in just his fourth Test, his struggles against Warne and McGrath were taken out of context.
“Playing my fourth Test match against Australia, it wasn’t easy to go out and play my shots against those guys.” Bell says. “It took me a bit of time to settle down at that level and to believe I belonged and was good enough to be there.
“It is a hard game. You can be on the winning side and if your stats don’t match up, certainly with the press they can still question you. There are certain other sports where if you win as a team it’s great, but in cricket there is an individual side. Of course the whole [aim] is to win for the team, but you can be isolated stats-wise.”
“You want people to say good things [about you] but unfortunately with life that’s never going to be the case, you can’t have that all the time. You have to be pretty thick-skinned.”
Ian Bell has had to grow up fast. This March he will play his 34th Test, a good number for a man not yet 26. Perceived wisdom holds that a batsman reaches his peak for the five or six years after his mid-twenties, and a look at the figures suggests the dictum stands for Bell. But his ten half-centuries scattered around the big scores tell the more intriguing story, because they hint at two crucial points at the crux of the Bell conundrum.
Click here for part two of this interview
The full interview can be read in this month's copy of ALL Out Cricket magazine
Discuss the tour of New Zealand.
14 February 2008
