BELL WILL TOLL AGAIN
Batting star has got over England ‘bereavement’
IAN BELL certainly looks the part. Then again, a man often described as the best technical batsman of his generation always did. These days, though, his attire does not extend beyond a club tracksuit.
As he fixes his gaze on the saturated outfield at Edgbaston, his mind wanders to what he wants to achieve over the next three years with Warwickshire. Even though Bell turns 36 this Wednesday, he does not intend to quit until 2020 at the earliest. So what lies ahead?
Foremost among his thoughts are the runs so conspicuous by their absence since he played the last of hi s 118 Test matches nearly two-and-a-half years ago. Any semblance of form in the past couple of domestic seasons might have earned Bell a call-up for his eighth Ashes series this past winter. But he averaged 33.9 in the 2016 County Championship, just 25.9 in 2017.
Those textbook cover drives, late cuts, wristy flicks and imperious pulls that made him among the most aesthetically pleasing players to watch have become increasingly fleeting features of his game. Only recently, however, has he been able to trace the source of the demise: after 11 years as an international, he was grieving a significant loss.
‘Letting go of England was harder than I thought, and took longer than I thought. It was still in my mind whether I wanted to play again. When you have been in the England side for a long time it is almost a sense of bereavement,’ he says.
‘But having a proper break this winter has allowed me to clear my thoughts and enjoy the adjustment of not being an England cricketer any more. There was so much going on mentally that it didn’t allow me to focus on what I could do, then go out and enjoy it. Hopefully I can now enjoy my cricket to the max.’
Tipped for greatness even before he was called up as an 18-year-old to act as batting cover on England’s 2001-02 tour of New Zealand, Bell was on a treadmill when, with speculation rife about his Test place, he struck twin half- centuries in a series-shaping victory over Australia on home turf in 2015. ‘I was not only fighting for runs, I was fighting myself. I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I should have been,’ he says. ‘You can’t fake international cricket. You can’t just be surviving. And by the end I felt burnt out of that level of intensity, of trying to get better all the time.
‘Since I was a kid all I wanted was to play 100 Tests. After I got there I didn’t adjust to something else. Alastair Cook has gone on to 150 — I should have moved my target too.
‘After that fifth Ashes Test in 2015 — the last game I played for England in England — I was thinking the last thing I wanted to do was get on the plane to Dubai to play against Pakistan. I’d been offered another central contract, and I went on that t our. I n hi ndsight I maybe should have asked for that winter off. I felt so burnt out from travelling and netting. This is even more evident after not picking a bat up for three months this winter. I can feel that energy. I want to practise and put myself out there again. It’s not something I necessarily felt the previous 12 months.’
Bell has not actually retired from international cricket. He was dumped after a six-Test score sequence of 53, 65*, 1, 10, 13, 63, 5*, 4, 46, 40 and 0. Ironically, that is the kind of level now keeping Mark Stoneman, James Vince and Dawid Malan in England’s top six ahead of the first Test against Pakistan at Lord’s starting on May 24.
Bell is at peace with the fact that, at his age, his time at the top level is almost certainly over. But if he can score runs like he used to, might he be England’s version of Chris Rogers for the 2019 Ashes?
‘You can never say never. It’s up to me to produce the goods,’ he says. ‘If I had done it over the past 12 to 18 months I probably would have had a call. It’s not in the front of my mind to score runs to get in the England side, it’s to score runs to win games for Warwickshire.’
He wants to atone for Warwickshire’s awful 2017 season which ended in relegation and him relinquishing the club captaincy.
‘I am a proud guy, I love being with this club and getting relegated was something I took personally,’ he says. ‘As captain I was gutted.’
Bell was also controversially stood down by the club’s director of sport, Ashley Giles, for a must-win Twenty20 contest at Lancashire last July. Without him, a youthful Birmingham Bears went all the way to the Blast final. It hurt. There was anger. But it does not linger.
‘That has given me an extra edge to prove that I can play all formats. I have always been a guy to react to being knocked down,’ he says.