Our strengthmeant I didn’t play that often but winning cups made up for it
Ialways dreamed of playing professional cricket. My schoolteachers used to say I’d get cricket into every answer I gave and it was very frustrating for them, but it was always on my mind.
I was cricket-mad from such a young age. My earliest memories are being down at South Shields CC, watching my dad on a Saturday afternoon with my brothers, Matthew and Paul.
Dad was my first coach in a way. The opportunity to play was always there and my family were always involved. My mum would even throw balls for me in the garden!
I played junior cricket initially with Northumberland and it helped because Durham started to show an interest when I was 16 and that was the first time I ever thought it could happen.
Every other Saturday I was playing for the Durham academy and then I got into the England U19s. I was offered a professional contract a year after leaving school in 2001.
Around that time Paul Collingwood was starting to get picked for England and Jonathan Lewis was captain so we had a young side. I think the average age was about 21! It was a steep learning curve because we did not have a lot of success in those early years but it was We could sense there was something special building and we added top players like Michael Di Venuto and Shiv Chanderpaul, too. On the flip side for me, that strength meant I did not always play much, but being in and around a successful team and winning back-toback County Championships in 2008 and 2009 was brilliant. We were the best county for the best part of four years and it was fairytale stuff because the county only broke through in 1992 and we were bottom of Division Two for so long. I felt I was pigeon-holed a bit as a one-day player and I thought I should have got more four-day opportunities. I’d always finish a season strongly but not get the nod the following spring and I look back on that with some regret because there were three years when I was in top form and did not always play. There was an option to leave but Durham were very successful. I made the right choice to stay because winning trophies was more important than playing loads and not winning nothing. Towards the end there were a couple of seasons where I was not sure if I was going to be retained. I could have played for a lot longer, I was still top of the fitness tests, but the uncertainty made it hard. In 2015, though, Durham gave me a contract two weeks after the end of the season. That winter an opportunity came up at Durham School. The security of it was very appealing and it was too good an opportunity to turn down. Luckily it turned into a full-time job opportunity at Bow School as head of boys’ games. I think if I was still being picked then it would have been much harder to retire this winter, but my role was part-time towards the end so it was an easy decision to make.