Watch Out

In the heady days when England was still coming to terms with re-owning the Ashes, Tufnell was asked to record a message for a dinner back in Australia attended by Ponting and his team. It was unflattering and vaguely irreverent, and Ponting did not respond well. Almost without exception, the Australian press rounded on their team and told them to stop being so precious.

“I like to think they’ve taken to me as one of their own a bit,” Tufnell says. “The way I approach my cricket and my life, have a beer and a fag, have a bit of a laugh, yet still tried my hardest. There’s a touch of the larrikin in me. The banter I got on the boundary was all good fun and I gave a bit back and no one’s given me a right-hander.

“Sometimes people said I wasn’t taking my cricket seriously, but I did, very seriously. You can’t play 40-odd times for your country without doing something right, can you? If you lost a game, you got down and upset about it, but some of the guys could lock themselves in their room, get too churned up. There is another life to cricket, but the trouble is that when you’re on tour, it doesn’t seem like it. O kay, I’ve done stupid things in my life, but I was always sorry.”

The proof of his native intelligence has come since he hung up his boots. Not for him the fading light of the ex-cricketer. He has re-invented himself as a media star, the professional cheeky chappy, an image of genius because it relies solely on Tufnell being himself. Among his duties this year was officiating at the opening ceremony for Birmingham’s newest office development, an unlikely occasion for a devotee of informality. “They gave us a few quid, I went down there and had a little chat with the boys, bit of banter. I turn up and tell a few tales. I’m not bad at it.”

Less well known was his ability for eating grubs on reality television, a gift doubtless learnt at his London public school (at least before he was expelled), which has largely obscured his first career as a cricketer. In an account of his recent conviction for property fraud in the Western Morning News, Wayne Larkins, the former England batsman, was described as the man “who once played alongside I’m A Celebrity winner Phil Tufnell”, which prompts Tufnell to raise his arms in triumph. “Did they? Not Ian Botham, Allan Lamb or Graham Gooch? Blimey, I should’ve eaten them bugs years ago. Sod getting your head knocked off for a living.

“I do have to remind people sometimes that I did use to play a bit. An old dear came up to me in the street the other day and asked if I was the bloke who ate the bugs. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘and I bowled out Viv Richards’. She hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. I’m just an old cricketer, really, who’s lucky enough to have done a few other things. Be yourself, that’s what it is, because people spot fakes very quickly, particularly in a cricket dressing room.”

Tufnell’s latest offering is a DVD, an assortment of clips, good, bad and ugly, from recent Ashes series, in which Ashley Giles’s drop of Ponting in Adelaide will surely feature if the producers contemplate a sequel. The thought of Panesar or Tufnell under the same catch merely prompts a further shudder, although, knowing his luck, Tufnell would have stopped on the boundary to sign an autograph or hurl back a bit of abuse and therefore found himself in the ideal position to take it.

Maybe a touch of the Tufnell spirit would lift England in these dark days. He would certainly be happy, if asked, to instil in Panesar some of the spinner’s craft that he will never admit to mastering himself.

“It’s a feel, I suppose, which comes with experience,” he explains. “When a batsman’s going to come at you or when he’s going to lap you. It didn’t always work, but it’s that sixth sense. Monty’s still very young, still learning his trade, but he’s got all the natural attributes, good solid action, good flight, good dip, good pace. He can put it on the spot from the first ball. It’s just the little bit of craft, the field placing, making them play in different areas. He will come back from Australia such a better cricketer.”

To learn a sense of theatre, he adds, the England left-armer need only watch Shane Warne, whose first ball in England, legend has it, was greeted by an inimitable cry from the dressing room: “Gawd, fellas, look at this geezer.” And they’re still looking, still trying to fathom it out. Tufnell too was good at the dramatic gesture, the smirk and the scuff. His advice to this battered England team now has a familiar theme to it.

“Go out there and enjoy every minute, keep smiling, show them what you can do and what you’re made of,” he says. And just when you note a glimpse of pomposity, he adds the punchline. “Oh, and bowling six balls on the same spot on off stump. That would help.” Having the last word was always Tufnell’s real talent.

Tuffers’ Ashes — Greats, Geezers and Gaffes is available on DVD, £17.99