Hartley, from the Nursery End…
We join the England spinner at his family’s garden centre to talk greenhouses, India and learning from Lyon at Lancs
It is 8am on Easter Monday and tom Hartley has his kit on. Not for the practice session that Lancashire planned in readiness for the County Championship season starting this Friday — the wet weather scuppered that — but for a shift at his other job.
His sweater bears the name Hartley’s rather than Hartley, and England’s most prolific bowler of the winter has put in several hours around the three-acre, family-run nursery on Merseyside by the time Mail Sport catches up with him.
Cricket remains on the agenda later in the day, but the deliveries will be sent down in the homemade net constructed in the middle of one of the greenhouses a dozen years ago by his father Bill, a European champion athlete of the 1970s, rather than at Old trafford.
Hartley, 24, made his own mark on the British sporting landscape earlier this year with one of the most memorable debuts in test history, spinning India to a firsttest defeat with a brilliant seven for 62 in Hyderabad, and finished what would become a chastening tour for Ben Stokes’s England team with 22 wickets.
Not that one of county cricket’s most earthed individuals — pun intended — expects to feature in the test side this summer, or even Lancashire’s in the opening weeks of Division One action given the presence of Jack Leach on the international scene and the winter signing of Australian Nathan Lyon respectively.
‘It’s tough bowling in England, especially in April,’ Hartley says. ‘I’m still young. What happened in India was great, but you’ve got to park that a bit and not just expect to be picked again.
‘there are people, especially Leachy, who are better than me. As much as it’d be nice to play, I know how much I need to learn before I can really push on.’
Hartley’s pragmatic approach to a sport in which he didn’t make a senior breakthrough until the age of 21 is revealed in his plans for the opening weeks of the summer. If he is unable to convince Lancashire to pick him as an all- rounder batting at seven, he will stick around to be mentored by Lyon, a finger spinner with 530 test wickets, rather than seek a loan move. ‘He is someone I’m going to be watching a lot and from what our coach Dale Benkenstein has told me, he’s got quite a few tricks up his sleeve,’ Hartley adds. ‘Hopefully he can let me see them and maybe talk to me a bit. If I play, great, but if I don’t then there’s someone I can learn a lot from. ‘ It’s the same for me with cricket, generally. If it works out, it works out. If it doesn’t, I’ll come and work in the greenhouses. I love the opportunities cricket brings and travelling, but as much as I enjoy that, I enjoy working here, too.’ Since the briefest of debriefs from England coach Brendon McCullum following his maiden England winter — ‘the only thing Baz really said was he would have taken that at the start of the trip and I just agreed with him’ — the left- arm spinner has thrust himself back into home life, tapping into the 73-year-old Bill’s lifetime of knowledge in readiness for when he inherits a business that is in its sixth generation of Hartleys.
‘My dad knows everything there is to know, but he keeps it all in his head, so I’ve been trying to get it out of him and you only learn by doing,’ he explains. ‘Some plants don’t like a lot of water, some plants do, some like a lot of sun, some don’t.’
Hartley Snr, an ex- Commonwealth Games hurdler and relay runner, accelerated his son’s cricketing journey when — shortly after reading Matthew Syed’s book Bounce, chronicling how 24-7 accessible facilities contributed to multiple world champion tennis table players emerging from a couple of streets in Reading — he set about constructing the concrete floor of the net housed a couple of hundred yards from the family home’s front door.
Some of Hartley’s happiest memories are of batting and bowling among the bedding plants with his team-mates from local club Ormskirk.
It coincided with Lancashire overlooking him for an academy place, a decision that made him more robust.
Along with a lot of love from Stokes, it was a characteristic that enabled him to bounce back from Yashasvi Jaiswal pummelling a couple of sixes in his first over in test cricket.
‘I also have a bit of a white-ball background, so being hit is just something you take on the chin,’ Hartley reflects.
that limited- overs nous has made him an outsider for this June’s twenty20 World Cup.
typically unassuming, as an uncapped player he does not expect a call. But having dealt with the pressure of bowling England to a test victory when the heat was on, he is unlikely to be fazed by whatever assignments are thrown his way.
‘Even though it got a bit nervy when they needed 50-odd to win with three wickets left, I always thought we’d win,’ Hartley says. ‘We’ve all been in these situations God knows how many times before, whether it’s Ormskirk on a Saturday or test cricket. It’s just the stakes are a bit higher.
‘You’ve just got to take people’s names out of it. Forget that Rohit Sharma is at the other end or that Ben Stokes is walking you into the field. the moment you get caught up with their aura, you’re in trouble.’