I can live with it if I never play for England again ... at least I’ll see my kids grow up
Tim Bresnan barely saw his first son for a year because of Test calls — now with a third child on the way he’s happy to focus on Yorkshire title bid
TIM BRESNAN is a cricketer with no lust for fame — but talk to him about glory and he becomes a completely different animal.
Uncomplicated and eternally under-rated, without his price less knack of rising to challenges, it is possible different county champions would have been taking the field to face the MCC in Abu Dhabi this lunchtime.
Middlesex’s dramatic final-evening victory over Yorkshire at Lord’s last September evokes memories of Toby Roland-Jones’s title-clinching hattrick.
Yet Bresnan’s defiant, unbeaten, first-innings 142 kept Yorkshire in t he game, meaning that on the final afternoon there was a mutual desire for a positive result — when a draw would have resulted in Somerset being champions.
In at 32 for three, he knew at the close of the second day, when he had reached 72 in a score of 235 for six, that only 350 and a fourth batting point would do. Pressure? What pressure? ‘I didn’t feel any extra expectation,’ he recalls. ‘I just wanted to get to 350.’
The challenge was not only the physical one posed by bowlers Roland-Jones and Steven Finn. It also came from opinions voiced in the commentary box that he was batting too high in the order.
Bresnan says: ‘I remember people on Sky saying, “It’s too high for Bres at five”. I was like, “F*** you. Five’s too high?” It might have gone wholly wrong, they might have been proved right, but that was a real good chance t o show them.’ There you have Bresnan’s 15-year professional career in a snapshot.
To give him a target is to engage his interest. He later played the lead hand, top scoring with 55, as Yorkshire just failed to chase down the 240 needed in 40 overs.
A recent episode with Andrew Gale — now his county coach as well as brother-in-law — in his local pub highlights his competitive edge.
Bresnan says: ‘We were four or five pints deep and he was getting into me about mental stuff. I was like, “Mate, I can do whatever I want to do”. I told him, “I will beat you at the yo-yo [fitness] test. Just give me three weeks to prepare”.
‘He reminded me I’d never done it before and I replied, “Yeah, but the test has never been to beat you!” In pre-season sprints, if you give me 30 seconds to get across the line, I hit it on the nose every time. There’s no point doing any more. That’s not the test, is it?’
His career record reveals a remarkable ability to get over that line. He tasted victory in each of his first 13 Test matches, won Ashes series home and away and was a member of t he World Twenty20-winning XI in the Caribbean seven years ago — England’s only global tournament triumph in five decades of trying. Domestically, County Championships in 2014 and 2015 were followed by success with Perth Scorchers Big Bash team this winter. Bresnan appeared destined for big things when, in 2001 at the age of 16, he became Yorkshire’s youngest debutant for 20 years. From the off, his contributions, primarily as a burly seamer, were consistent. Graduation from England Under19 to the England Lions programme was smooth. A handful of limitedover international caps followed in 2006, yet it was only when he railed against the system in the winter of 2008-09 that he got his big break. He recalls: ‘I’d had enough of being dragged to Loughborough Monday to Friday every winter, getting out of bed at 6am in the freezing cold to do a spinning session or karate.
‘I just thought, “This ain’t for me, I hate life right now”. I didn’t see any way forward. No way of me going up to the full team.
‘[Coach] Dave Parsons rang me up and said, “Do you want to come to New Zealand with the Lions?” I’d done back-to-back summers/win- ters for six or seven years. I was getting flogged. If you want the clinical term, I was burnt out. What more did I have to prove? Nothing. So that influenced my answer. I said, “No, mate. I’m all right”.
‘He told me he would ring and ask me again in a few weeks’ time.
‘When it came to it, I stood my ground. Again, I was like, “Nah”. He said, “Do you know what? With that attitude, I am taking the offer back. We’ve got loads of bowlers”.
‘Fair enough. I had a winter off cricket. It rejuvenated me. I did a pre-season with Yorkshire, along- side a load of blokes I grew up with, and I had a load of fun. “This is how I am going to play from now on”, I thought. And I did. I played the first Test that next summer.’
The last of his 142 England caps across all formats came two years ago next month. He is now 32 and is still producing domestic statistics to merit consideration. So is international cricket done for him?
‘Who knows?’ he says. ‘If I really wanted to set my mind to it . . . but it probably is. I am at a different stage of my life, not just career. I have two — soon to be three [wife Hannah is expecting a girl in midsummer] — young kids at home and I didn’t see my eldest, Max, for the first year of his life.
‘ One year in my international career I spent 10 nights in my own bed. It was relentless. And that included stealing nights between Cardiff and Durham, driving up on the night, rather than the next morning, stuff like that.
‘Now I get five months with the kids, and I am at home with them more in the summer.’ So what motivates Bresnan now? ‘ The Championship, a one- day trophy, T20. I just want to win stuff. I loved winning the Big Bash with Perth. I would love to do the IPL one year, too, if the club let me.’
He feels like a genuine all-rounder
again following a third elbow operation last October. He starred for Perth with the ball, taking nine wickets in five matches, with an impressive economy of 7.26. He had almost forgotten what it was like to bowl without discomfort.
‘ Last summer, I was s**** ing blood from all the painkillers and anti-inflammatories I was taking.’
After averaging three cortisones a year in recent times, he is now having post-surgery injections of Ostenil to lubricate the joint — ‘it’s like putting WD40 on your door’ — and is feeling the benefits. ‘It’s not hurting and my action feels pretty rhythmical and solid,’ he says.
‘I have not felt like the bowler I once was since that first elbow op, if I am being honest. I used to be able to hit 90mph. I bowled 140kph, 142s consistently in that 2010-11 Ashes series and then had surgery. After that I struggled to hit 135.’
This summer Bresnan will have the added responsibility of being Gary Ballance’s vice-captain in a new era at Headingley. After five years under Australian coach Jason Gillespie, Yorkshire have made Gale the Championship’s youngest coach. ‘He’s not doing a lot different to what he did as captain, and that means we have maintained that continuity,’ says Bresnan.
‘I am sure he won’t mind me saying we won’t miss his runs — because he hardly got any. But he’s a very good leader. It comes very naturally to him.
‘Last season, we were a little bit like Leicester. Some sort of accountability has to be taken by the team.
‘It was the same playing group, the same management group, so what went wrong? We set a standard and failed in 2016 because we didn’t win the Championship.’
So who does he see as obvious title challengers in 2017?
‘Warwickshire will be strong if they can all keep fit. Middlesex didn’t look like they could at the start of last season but they found a way to get results, and they were worthy winners.’