Matt Prior has an impressive and unusual CV. He’s just 25 years old and has
already won two county championship titles and a C&G Trophy with Sussex,
has breezed into Test cricket as the first England wicketkeeper to score a
century in his first match, and just helped the national team get back to
winning ways after one of the darkest winters in memory. In all his career,
only two of his hundreds have been made in losing causes. This is the CV of
someone who doesn’t do failure.
It is easy to overlook in a sport like cricket, where individual glory can be
an adequate substitute for collective success, that winning is really what
the whole exercise is about. But it is not something that Prior overlooks.
Prior is in it to win it.
“I’ve always been brought up to win,” he said yesterday as he watched his
Sussex teammates play Lancashire at Hove. “That’s the reason I play. My
mentality is that if you haven’t got a chance of winning, why bother. I
don’t like coming second. I’ve been fortunate that the teams I've played in
have been successful teams that have won things but hopefully I’ve had
something to do with it. When I first came to Sussex we were pretty low in
most competitions but in my first season [in 2001] we won the second
division championship and two years later won the title. I remember Mark
Robinson telling me when we won the second division that some people went 20
years without winning anything, and feeling sorry for them because to me the
whole point of playing was to win.”
His competitiveness was probably given an extra edge by him playing a lot of
football in his youth. Indeed, it was his original intention to become a
professional footballer, not a professional cricketer, but then he won a
sports scholarship to Brighton College and the college's winter sport was
hockey not football and gradually the dream of winning a contract with
Brighton and Hove Albion faded. So, like Alec Stewart and Graham Thorpe
before him, he took a footballer’s mentality onto the cricket pitch, and
prospered.
“Football was my first love and you get a toughness from playing a game like
that,” he said. “I started off wide on the left and finished as a central
midfielder. I enjoyed being in the thick of the action, though I don’t
remember getting in any spats as such. I was too young for that.
“My love for cricket expanded as my interest in football died. I couldn’t play
for my representative teams as I was at a private school, so I didn’t have
much choice really, and I had got the sports scholarship largely because I
was considered to be pretty good at cricket.
“I never enjoyed studying. I used to sit in class wondering how it was going
to be relevant to the rest of my life. I remember a careers adviser laughing
when I told her I wanted to be a professional cricketer but I’d got into a
Sussex squad and thought I'd got a chance. I left the room even more sure
that was what I wanted to do.”
That was one snapshot of a young man on his singleminded march to the top.
Another came a couple of years later when he played his first game for
Sussex. He was just 19 and found himself up against a pumped-up Andy Bichel
in no mood to be put away for a couple of boundaries by an upstart
schoolboy. So Bichel ran past Prior in his follow through, dug him in the
ribs and gave him a few words of discouragement. But to Bichel’s surprise,
Prior gave as good as he got.
“Who the hell is this kid?” everyone asked themselves. But Bichel,
liking what he saw, came over to Prior after the game, shook his hand and
said: “Mate, keep playing like that and you won’t go far wrong.” It was a
seminal moment for Prior. “I’ve never forgotten that. It was so intense out
on the pitch but as soon as it was over, that was it. I really enjoyed that.”
The other element in Prior’s hard-nosed competitiveness, he believes, is his
upbringing in South Africa. He lived in Johannesburg until he was 11, when
his parents decided to move to England – his father was English, his mother
South African – for the sake of their only child's education.
“The South African mentality is a very competitive one,” he said. “We were
always taught to play to win at school. When I came to England the attitude
was much more about the taking part counting. That wasn’t what I was used
to. But I’ve remained very competitive, whatever it has been, whether it’s a
game of touch rugby or a game of squash with a mate.”
Perhaps this same outlook has much to do with Prior responding so well to the
few setbacks he has experienced. Rather than complain, or resign himself to
failure, he has redoubled his efforts and come back stronger. Back in 2003,
when Sussex won the first of their championships, he was dropped in
mid-season as wicketkeeper and played only as a batsman, Tim Ambrose being
handed the gloves in his place. His rejoinder was emphatic: a century in his
first game against Warwickshire. Two more hundreds followed later in the
season and by the following summer the gloves had been thrown back his way.
Similarly, last year, he was dropped from the England one-day team after an
extended run in the side as a specialist opening batsman (Geraint Jones was
still clinging onto the gloves at that stage). It was a blow, and it took
him several weeks to come to terms with, but he opted not to rue his
misfortune but set himself to improve. “You have to be positive in those
situations. I think that’s something I’ve been pretty good at. You get to a
point where have to make choices. You have hit a low patch. You can either
be angry and whinge or take it on chin and see where you can improve.
There's something missing in your game that they want. What is it? You’ve
almost got to take your game apart and build it up again.
“You’ve got to use your bad times as experience. You need the low points to
make you stronger and they make the good times mean more too. When I hit the
gap on 99 and got to my hundred at Lord’s, there was a lot of emotion coming
out from all the work I’d put in.
“When I was left out [in 2006] it was disappointing and it hurt. All sorts of
things floated through my mind. I feared my opportunity had gone, that I’d
never play international cricket again. It took me a while to get my head
round it.”
The amazing thing was that Prior set himself the goal of getting back into the
England side for the first Test of this summer, which is exactly what he
did. “Obviously I couldn’t help how guys like Chris Read and Geraint Jones
did, and I desperately wanted England to do well in Australia, so all I
could do was make sure that if an opportunity was there then I was the
person they'd turn to, that I’d be fit and ready.
“My goal was never the CB Series or the World Cup but the Lord’s Test, so when
I heard they'd gone for Paul Nixon, I just thought, ‘Okay’. Again, he’d got
something they liked. What was it? One thing he was, was a fresh face and a
very positive bloke with a lot of energy. I think I’ve got that too” After
scoring 222 runs in two Tests, Prior looks set for a long run but he is
determined to take each game as it comes, to use a football cliché, and
steadfastly regards himself as only as good as his next match. But he could
have the capacity, if his batting progresses, to bat higher still, certainly
in one-day cricket, where, without wishing to tempt fate, he could yet
become England’s best answer yet to Adam Gilchrist.
“I believe I could be a top-order batsman. I’ve come on leaps and bounds in
the last year and if the opportunity comes up again I’m sure I’d be far more
successful. I always got starts [opening for England] and then would get out
for 20 or 30 playing a shot I didn’t have to play. Batting seven is where
I’ve batted most, and where I’ve learned to bat with the tail, and when to dominate
or sit in, but my average batting at five in first-class cricket is 68.”
He says his best hundred was a century against Yorkshire early last year on a
seaming pitch at Leeds against Jason Gillespie and Matthew Hoggard, closely
followed by one on an England A tour in Colombo, against an array of
spinners on a turning pitch in crippling humidity. Two contrasting innings
by a highly versatile cricketer.
Having started with back-to-back Tests, it has only been in the past few days
that he has had a chance to take stock of his remarkable arrival on the Test
match scene. “It was only last week when I was driving back from Leeds that
I phoned my dad and said, ‘Dad, do you realise I got a hundred at Lord’s.’
Up until then, I hadn’t let myself think about it.
“I felt comfortable as soon as I walked through Long Room at Lord’s, as soon
as I stepped onto the pitch I knew I was ready. I’m just really enjoying the
big stage. The changing-room is a fantastic place to be. There was a lot of
very happy players in there last week. It’s been a very good start all
round.”
