‘I NEARLY QUIT CRICKET AT 28’
Graham Napier opens up in retirement...
There is a pause for thought before Graham Napier speaks. “It feels weird if I’m honest,” he tells The Cricket Paper. It’s an understandable sentiment given that the former Essex all-rounder is enjoying his first pre-season free spring in almost 20 years. Having called time on his career at the end of last season, Napier is instead preparing for his first season at the Royal Hospital School in Suffolk. It’s quite some departure for a man who readily admits that he had no desire to be coach until the latter end of his time at Chelmsford. “It has been hard,” he says. “At the turn of the year, when you’ve got players coming back from spending time in Australia and New Zealand, it hits you that you’re not part of it anymore. “It has been quite a lot to take in and not being in that team environment and training with guys that you’ve spent a large proportion of your life with takes a lot of getting used to. “Luckily for me, I’m building a new team here and that has been my pre-season focus. It’s impossible to say if I would have struggled if I hadn’t walked straight into another job, but still being in the cricket environment and working towards the start of another season has made things slightly easier. “If I was in an office working nine to five, then that would have been a lot more difficult.” Napier likens a cricketers’ departure from the county scene to that of a serviceman leaving the army – with the parallels clear to see. “You’re used to having a pretty regimented way of life, particularly when the season is well underway,” he says. “You’re used to being told where to be and when to be there. Now I’m the one telling the pupils here the same thing. Luckily for me they’re listening!” With the IPL season about to begin, Napier can be forgiven for being more than slightly wistful. He was part of the second and third editions of the tournament, despite playing just a single match for the Mumbai Indians across his two-year stint. Picked up just months after contemplating a career change at the age of 28, Napier’s big-hitting became the stuff of legend in Twenty20 cricket. His 152 off just 58 balls against Sussex in the summer of 2008 – then the second highest score in the history of T20 cricket – remains one of the most remarkable in the shortest format.
Napier is on record as saying that he was considering a career change just weeks before that knock, with the police or fire service the most likely destination for one of Colchester’s favourite sons. After that innings, and his IPL signing, though, those plans went out of the window – with coaching dropping a few more rungs down any potential post-career ladder.
“I carried a lot of drinks in the IPL, but I enjoyed it thoroughly,” he says. “It’s great to see so many of the England guys going out there and, just generally, it’s an amazing tournament. For some of them it will be the first time they will have been treated almost like footballers. There are a billion people all adoring cricket and you’re suddenly playing a role in that.
“From a coaching point of view, though, I was probably one of these
“You are used to having a pretty regimented way of life, particularly when the season is underway – being told to do this and do that ”
cricketers who didn’t really enjoy it at all. That’s genuine. I spent so much time on the field that the last thing I wanted to think about was coaching. It wasn’t until the latter years of my career that I started wondering what I would be doing when I had finished playing that a friend asked me to coach his son one winter to help him be able to join a men’s senior team, so he could basically play with his son.”
That task opened Napier’s eyes to the impact a coach can have on a player and encouraged him that an avenue he would previously never have countenanced offered him the opportunity to continue working in a sport he had graced since he made his Essex debut way back in 1997.
The Royal Hospital School in Holbrook, near Ipswich, are the beneficiaries of Napier’s newfound passion and his regularly tweeted coaching sessions suggest that he’s having an impact.
“Whether it’s a year seven kid who has never played cricket before hitting the stumps for the first time in his life to a first-teamer working on fine technical points, the rewards are enormous, I’ve loved it,” he says. “I keep telling the kids to do the basics and do them well.”
That’s something that Napier did so successfully during his own career – with a few unorthodox T20 blows thrown in.