Ian Bell: My England pain
AFTER WINNING THE ASHES FIVE TIMES AND HITTING THOUSANDS OF RUNS IAN BELL ADMITS…
IAN BELL is back in the familiar surroundings of the Edgbaston dressing room in his final week as a professional cricketer. As he sits and speaks to Sportsmail, his Warwickshire team-mates are setting off for a Twenty20 Blast game in Bristol without him, while he has just finished a physio session on an injured groin.
If Bell had wondered whether he had done the right thing in announcing his retirement a fortnight ago, days like this dismiss those doubts.
‘Physically, I don’t think I would have got through next season,’ admits the 38-year-old, who only signed a new one-year deal in July.
‘Just to sit on a contract for another season would have been the wrong thing for the club. I wanted to finish on my terms, not just drift out of the game.’
Bell certainly finished on his terms in his final four-day match last week, hitting his best scores since 2018 in a Bob Willis Trophy match in Cardiff — 50 in the first innings and 90 in the second, when Glamorgan gave him a guard of honour to the crease.
Now he hopes he will be fit enough for one final fling at Edgbaston tomorrow, when the Birmingham Bears host Northants in their final T20 Blast group fixture of this shortened season.
‘It would be nice to walk off at Edgbaston for one more time,’ says Bell. ‘It has been a good journey there.’
It sure has. Bell made his Warwickshire debut as a 17-yearold in 1999 and has been at the county ever since.
But it is Bell’s England exploits that have meant his retirement has been met by a feeling of nostalgia, as he is the last England or Australia player from the iconic 2005 Ashes series to hang up his spikes.
‘It is an end of an era,’ admits Bell, who then reflects on that crazy cricketing summer when he was thrust into the spotlight at the age of 23, scoring only 171 runs in a series which England won to claim the Ashes for the first time in 18 years.
‘I’m proud to have been a part of some special cricket that the country will always remember,’ he says.
‘But looking back, I wasn’t quite ready mentally for that challenge at the time. It made me realise that if I wanted to play 100 Tests, I was going to have to improve.
‘That was the biggest education I ever had on a cricket field.’
It is a common misconception that Bell was sledged out of that series by Shane Warne. In fact, the Aussie leg- spinner only branded Bell ‘ the Shermanator’ — a reference to the geeky character in the film American Pie — during the Adelaide Test of Australia’s 2006-07 Ashes whitewash.
‘In 2005 I was probably in and out before he could say anything,’ laughs Bell.
‘In 06-07, I started to play better and maybe that’s what it came from. I don’t think it was as big as many people made out but it gathered momentum and was a great thing for the media.
‘I wouldn’t say it affected me. I never tried to take myself too seriously and if you can’t laugh at yourself sometimes, I don’t think international cricket is the place to be.’
It turned out to be the place to be for Bell. He played 118 Test matches for England and hit 22 Test centuries, a tally only surpassed by Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen.
The Coventry-born batsman was also part of five Ashes-winning squads and was man of the series in 2013. Such statistics stick Bell right up there on the list of alltime England greats. Yet there are still some who think he underachieved.
‘I remember going away with England Under 19s at 16 and Dayle Hadlee (Richard’s brother), who was New Zealand Under 19s coach at the time, said I was the best 16-year-old he had seen,’ he says.
‘ That puts a slightly different perspective on things and to play 100 Test matches was probably then expected by a lot of people. Some people probably think I should have averaged 50 and maybe there are people who thought I didn’t live up to what they expected. ‘It’s a strange feeling because all I know is that I gave absolutely everything that I could do for that England cap.’ Another blessing and a curse for Bell was his beautiful batting style. ‘ With England players who have looked nice on the eye, like David Gower, there is always that time where people go, “They are not trying as hard, that was a lazy way to get out”,’ he says. ‘At times in my career, it definitely did frustrate me that people thought that was the case because I was always scrapping away. But now the compliment I take more than anything is that a lot of people have said they absolutely loved watching me play.’
ENGLAND fans have not seen Bell’s classic cover drive since 2015, when he was dropped after a series against Pakistan in the UAE and then never recalled.
If he could change one thing about his career, he says it would be to take up the offer from Andrew Strauss, then England’s director of cricket, to sit out that tour because he was ‘mentally burnt out’.
‘If I was to have that again, I’d have taken the six months off,’ says Bell. ‘That’s not to guarantee I would have got back in the side, I might have played the next summer and not scored any runs and been left out anyway.
‘But what I understand now was
what being mentally burnt out means.’
Bell also says he struggled to adapt to life after England — and it was not helped with how it was handled.
‘I never felt the door was shut but as time went by, it felt weird,’ he reveals. ‘I remember talking to the chairman of the selectors Jimmy Whitaker — that wasn’t an amazing conversation. I like Jimmy a lot, but I didn’t really get a full answer of where I was.
‘I was still centrally contracted but the dialogue wasn’t as much as maybe I thought it could have been and, for a little bit of time, I was a bit p***** off. Then going into the following summer the communication had died down a lot and I felt they had probably moved on.
‘The hardest thing I ever felt was not being an England cricketer any more. You are living the dream, the highs you get from winning and scoring runs are incredible, and when you don’t have that any more it’s a very strange feeling. I actually struggled with it for 12 months because it is the best time of your life and all of a sudden you are not doing it. It was a strange feeling. It felt like as soon as you were done, you were done.
‘That would be the first thing in my mind — as soon as someone comes out of that environment, I’d definitely be texting a player to see if they need anything.’
If that last comment sounds like it is coming from a coach, that is because that is Bell’s future. He had a taste of it as a batting coach for the England Under 19s last winter, where he was encouraged by an enthusiasm for the longest form of the game.
He says: ‘I expected the youngsters to be talking about T20 cricket but I walked away this winter thinking, “Wow, this generation still see Test cricket as the pinnacle”. That was really pleasing for me.’
Despite being a self- confessed ‘purist’ himself, Bell hopes to learn his coaching trade by working with some of the game’s top names in T20 franchise leagues around the world and has options this winter.
But Bell is also keen to shadow coaches outside of cricket. ‘I am open to learning from different sports,’ he says. ‘I would love to go into England with (rugby head coach) Eddie Jones and watch what he does. He has coached in so many different countries and cultures, with so many different players. I like his straight talking. I’d love to see that environment.
‘I am pretty ambitious with my coaching and I want to be the best coach that I can be. I’d love to be in the England set-up. That is a goal of mine. I want to be back in there at the right time.’
With players who have looked nice on the eye there is always that time where people go, ‘They are not trying as hard’