What was the best moment of your career? There were two Tests against Australia which we won, in 1968 at The Oval and in 1972 at Headingley. The match at The Oval is what people normally remember me by because we won with three minutes to spare. It was a very exciting Test match and levelled the series. There was a torrential thunderstorm around lunchtime and it looked as if there was no possible chance of play. Then the public started mopping up and lo and behold we got some play in for an hour and a quarter. We had to get five wickets. We struggled for a while, then got one wicket, and then wickets seemed to fall and I took the last four in half an hour. It was a dramatic Test match and an unusual one. They probably wouldn’t play at all today in those conditions. The Ashes is the ultimate in my view of Test cricket in that it is between the old enemies, England and Australia. I have had the great thrill of playing in quite a few Ashes series and getting over 100 Test wickets against Australia, so they hold great memories of course.

Who was the best captain you played under? Two people I particularly enjoyed playing under were Mike Brearley and Tony Greig. The thing I admired about Greig was that he was always in the thick of things; he never shirked his responsibilities. He was in there with both bat and ball; a great fighter. He was underrated as a player. Who was the best player you played against? You played against a mass of great players in those days. The great Gar-ry Sobers was to me the number one pick. I also had the disadvantage of bowling to him when I was very young. What was the best thing about being a cricketer in your era? I loved bowling and loved the game.

What was the worst thing about cricket in your era? The travel and the time away was quite a problem, when you are away for half the summer and for periods of three, four, if not five months during the winter. I missed seeing my children growing up.

What is the worst thing about cricket today? The system of cricket now is with Twenty20, powerplays and new cricket bats being introduced. I think to myself, what is happening to aid the spinner? The answer is absolutely nothing. Everything seems to centre these days on the ball disappearing out of the park and one of the greatest schools of all, slow bowling, is there to be hit. What I would like to see is a few more wickets in the country turn, and see the spinner come back into his own that way. Groundsmen are frightened if they see the ball turn and sides are dismissed by spinners. They are frightened that the pitch will get marked down, if you like, so they tend to start with a little more grass on the first day and if the odd one does turn a fraction on the fourth day then they are happy.

What was the best advice you were given as a player? As a spinner, for every wicket you bowl on, there is a pace to bowl. So there are times when pushing the ball through as quickly as possible would be the right thing to do and then another day flighting the ball and bowling generally slow would be best. With that variation of pace you find the ball may turn more when it is flighted than when it is pushed through and vice versa. My Kent coach Claude Lewis gave me that advice. He was a left-arm spinner himself and a dear friend.

AND NOW?

I am sales director for Club Turf Ltd. We specialise in artificial turf pitches and practice areas with all the associated ancillary products such as net cages. It keeps me involved at grass-roots level, at school level and at club level. It is a labour of love I have been doing for 21 years. My brother is the managing director of the company and I started about four years after I retired as a player. I am also the president of the MCC, serving from last October for one year. It is absolutely brilliant being president in an Ashes year. With the Twenty20 starting and the Ashes coming up, it is going to be a very busy June.