FROM THE ARCHIVE: Glamorgan win the 1997 County Championship

In October 2010, Simon Lister spoke to Steve Watkin, Steve James, Matthew Maynard and Adrian Dale to recall Glamorgan's last Championship triumph

In 1997, Glamorgan, under the leadership of future England coach Duncan Fletcher, edged out Kent by just four points to secure their third and most recent title. In 2010, Simon Lister interviewed the class of '97 for the magazine.

Steve Watkin (Glamorgan bowler)

Most of us had played together since we were 15 or 16. So in 1997, I'd been playing cricket with the likes of Steve James, Adrian Dale and Tony Cottey for 17 years.

Steve James (Glamorgan opener)

We were a bunch of mates who played cricket together.

Richard Thomas (reporter for the South Wales Evening Post)

They were of a very similar age, born or brought up in Wales, and many of them grew up together.

James

You can overstate the team-spirit thing but the crucial point was that there were a lot of good cricketers in that side who were at the peak of their game.

Matthew Maynard (Glamorgan captain)

I guess we had a number of players who weren't quite good enough for England, or who didn't have the opportunity to play enough games for England and by 1997, we'd still stayed together.

But a couple of things were missing. The previous season Glamorgan had been the side with the fewest bowling points in the Championship. The captain knew they needed someone fresh and by the late autumn he had his man.

James

I was in a pub near the ground called the Beverley Hotel. Matthew came in and told me and Adrian Dale that he'd just signed Waqar Younis. You should have seen our faces when we heard that news.

Thomas

Waqar showed them that cricket wasn't all about winning the odd game and having a good time, but was also about silverware on the table.

Adrian Dale (Glamorgan all-rounder)

Waqar was the X-factor. Steve Watkin and Robert Croft were reliable wicket-takers but Waqar could take more than 50 wickets for us. Not only that but, when he bowled well, he could bowl sides out.

James

We all thought, "flippin 'eck, this could be something special."

Watkin

After a couple of games, the crowd were changing "Waqar is a Welshman." He enjoyed that and he enjoyed Cardiff because it was away from London. He'd come from Surrey and I think he liked being in a smaller city.

Waqar was not the only arrival. Glamorgan had got themselves a new coach too. His name was Duncan Fletcher

Maynard

I watched Glamorgan play South Africa A in 1996. I watched their preparation and the after-hours work they did and I was incredibly impressed. 

Watkin

I'll be honest, I'd never heard of him.

Dale

He as a breath of fresh air because Glamorgan's coaching policy had become a little bit incestuous; the best players from one era became the coaches in the next so it was lovely to get some fresh impetus. 

Thomas

He was all right with the media. Not a man of big laughs but he was OK. You could tell that the squad absolutely loved him.

James

Even the pre-season fielding exercises were at a totally different level from what we'd been used to. 

Dale

His relationship with Matthew [Maynard] was fantastic. Matt was a bit of mosquito, always buzzing around. Some of his ideas were great and some weren't! Fletcher had the guile to promote the good ones and get him to drop the less successful ones.

Maynard

He made us laugh. He relaxed players. It was a very professional atmosphere based on hard work and reward but we had a good laugh, too.

^{Duncan Feltcher's work at Glamorgan caught the eye of England, who hired him in 1999}

James

He had a good sense of humour and he enjoyed our fines meetings. He'd punish people for things like 'public displays of affection.' He was not the character the public got to see later on.

Much of the laughter came when the side warmed up with a bit of touch-rugby. It was not a game Waqar Younis had been exposed to as a boy.

James

He was rubbish. He really was rubbish. It caused much amusement. If he caught the ball he just ran straight and didn't get the idea of touchlines. He just ran for miles. Hilarious.

Watkin

I wouldn't say he was troubled by the intricacies of the game but he had pace. We kept him out on the wing.

Dale 

But he took it all in good humour; he was a really good lad.

The mood was good but the early games brought only frustration. Rain was everywhere and likely wins against Warwickshire and Yorkshire were washed away. Kent were beaten but it was not until the end of May that Glamorgan's strong batting line-up were able to show their gifts. Hugh Morris and Steve James put on 229 for the first wicket against Durham as Glamorgan made their biggest total in first-class cricket.

Dale

Steve was one of those guys who actually turned himself from an average journeyman county cricketer into a player at a much higher level. And he did it through hard work. He became a home banker. Maynard and Hugh Morris were like that too.

Thomas

Accumulation was his thing. More often than not he got runs which gave Glamorgan a great base on which they could build an innings. 

Maynard 

He scored huge runs for us at a good rate because he had the ability to play with a one-day tempo. He made easy singles into twos. Scampered everything. 

That win put Glamorgan top of the table. Bring on Middlesex at Sophia Gardens.

James

Funny to think that this season of all seasons we got bowled out for 31. When it happened, I thought, "If ever Fletcher's going to blow his top, it'll happen now."

Maynard

The reaction to that loss was very important. It was a bizarre, bizarre innings. We didn't play and miss. Everything hit. We were even chucking about it on the balcony at the time.

James

Duncan was brilliant. We had a Sunday League game against Middlesex the next day and he just said, "I know you're better than that. Go out and prove it." And we won.

Watkin

He told us: "It's just one of those things, lads. Let's go and have a game of football." And after that we hammered a few sides.

They certainly did. Lancashire were bowled out for 51, Sussex were bowled out for 54 and 67. Waqar in particular was almost unplayable.

Thomas

Waqar got one hat-trick up at Liverpool and should have had two.

Maynard

He had Neil Fairbrother plumb lbw for the second one but it wasn't given. He was getting the ball to go round corners.

James

We'd given up any hope of watching the British Lions play South Africa on the telly but Waqar bowled them out so quickly we were back in the hotel to see it.

Dale

Waqar always searched for swing and was prepared to get driven a lot when it wasn't going. I think he found it hard to get up for the one-day as well as the four-day cricket. So the milted overs went by the way a little but by God he gave everything to the Championship. From the start of the season to its end, good weather, bad weather, home and away, he ran in for us.

^{Steve James was the leading run-scorer in the Championship that year with 1,605}

The county won some and drew some. They even lost one but got back to the top of the table by late August. It was a happy team but then someone took it too far…

Watkin

Oh yes. Crofty. Dressing room tomfoolery. 

Dale

I think Duncan just saw the incident not just as a practical joke, but as a challenge to his authority.

Thomas

At Abergavenny against Northants, Robert Croft cut the toes off Fletcher's socks and there was much hilarity when he pulled them on and they went past his knees.

Dale

It was quite funny, I suppose.

James

We used to travel together and that night he didn't say a word all the way home, he was so angry. The next morning when I picked him up he still didn't say anything.

Maynard

He didn't react very well. It was a lack of respect. I think he thought he'd been humiliated. He was in his first year and, dead right, he felt let down by Crofty.

James 

I Honestly thought he was going to go home. He was a seriously angry man. I think he was upset because he thought the whole team were in on it. He thought something had changed in the relationship and the line had been crossed. 

Dale

I'm not sure how close they were afterwards. Crofty respected Fletcher as a coach and Fletcher respected Croft as a player, but as personalities, well, let's say they were very different. 

The crisis of Sockgate passed. With two games of the season left Glamorgan had every chance of winning the title, but Kent were leading the table. Maynard's side had to win both matches to have a hope. 

James

It was about this time that Adrian Dale kept walking around muttering this phrase in the dressing room: "Boys, boys, listen. Immortality in the principality." Did he tell you?

Dale

I'd forgotten all about that! I made it up. Dunno where it came from. All sports teams live in the shadow of their more successful predecessors and some of the coaching staff were still around from the 1969 side that had won the title. We looked at those guys, slightly tongue in cheek, as Welsh cricketing immortals, so I suppose that's what we wanted, too.

Maynard

A massive win for us was in the penultimate game against Essex. It got us back to the top of the table by a point. We won the toss on a bloody good deck, smacked it everywhere and then we bowled them out. 

The victory meant that maximum points at Somerset in the last game of the season would bring the title back across the Severn Bridge.

Dale

It was eerie. There was a real sense of calm around us. There was bad weather about and we had to win but there was a feeling in the team that nothing was going to stop us.

Glamorgan won the toss and bowled Somerset out on the first afternoon. But it was dark and wet and they needed to get on with it. Maynard played a captain's innings.

Dale

He was the best county player I ever played with. When he was on fire he was destructive and so it was in this innings. It was a beautiful wicket but what evened the contest up was the swing. 

Maynard 

You could hit the ball on the up because it was such a good pitch and yes, there was a little bit of swing. I wanted to maintain the positive intent that we'd shown all year. 

^{Waqar Younis picked up 68 Championship wickets in 1997, second only to Mike Smith's effort of 78.}

James

Best knock I saw Matthew play. Without a doubt. It was dark, Caddick was swinging it around corners and Matthew just kept hitting him through mid-on for four. It was an incredible innings. It was made all the better because there was so much riding on it. Some people may say that he didn't deal with pressure too well early in his career. But as he matured he played some seriously big innings. So to play like that when you know your side has to win to get the title, well, it was a special knock.

Maynard made 142. Hugh Morris, in his final game, made 165. Such was Maynard's skill that he did not score one single. "It was heady stuff," wrote Derek Pringle in the Daily Telegraph, "and few could fail to drink it in as Maynard, his bat like a particle accelerator, smashed the round red atom from one boundary board to the next."

Watkin

He scored so quickly it enabled us to get ahead of the game. Drives off the back and front foot. Good, honest cricket shots. 

Maynard's timely brilliance looked like bringing victory by an innings. As it was, James and Morris had to bat a second time – but not for long.

James 

We need 11 to win, I got nine not out but I should have been out twice. I was hit right in front to Caddick but it wasn't given and then I was dropped at first slip, a dolly. Caddick wanted to win the prize for the most wickets in the season, so he was charging in.

The final shot was played at 6.18 on the Saturday evening. 

James

I didn't even know. Hugh Morris, a left-hander, had got a single the ball before to Caddick at fine leg and Caddick hadn't moved across for me. So I tickled it round, thinking it was one, turned around at the far end and saw half of Wales running at us on the pitch because it had for four.

Cue Pandemonium.

James

I was carried off on someone's shoulders and then the bloke carrying me went down and I was engulfed and had my bat nicked and the stumps I was carrying. We had to put an appeal out in the local paper and the bat was eventually returned. 

On the Taunton balcony the team singers were warming up.

Thomas

I went up there to watch these elated players. I passed Crofty a microphone so he could sing Alouette to the crowd.

Maynard

Oh year. Crofty loves Alouette and he took centre stage. Perfect for him. The singing went on long into the night. 

James

Waqar Younis was in the pavilion wearing a Nelson Mandela mask for some reason. No idea why.

The local boys and the imports has made themselves into a powerful side. 

Dale

I think we captured the imagination of the Welsh public and, because they were local, a lot of players knew lots of the supporters. They were friends or friends of friends. We even played club cricket on Saturday when we could, so we mixed and mingled with club players and club people.

Thomas

They got everything right. They had a top-notch coach, a great overseas player and addressing room crammed with ambitious Welshmen.

This article originally featured in the October 2010 issue of The Cricketer. Click here to subscribe!