They don't make them quite like David Capel anymore

JAMES COYNE recalls how David Capel coached Northants with his customary grit and passion through a tough period in the mid-2000s. The club legend died on September 2 at the age of 57

I first rang up David Capel in spring 2007, as I was writing a piece for this magazine’s ‘Rising Stars’ column on Alex Wakely, then a young batsman at Bedford School, in the Northamptonshire Academy and the England Under-19s. The piece is still kicking around the internet somewhere.

I went through to his answerphone and assumed that was that. But the next morning Capel rang me back, even though he was preparing Northants for a game starting at 11am.

Cricket people are pretty good at this sort of thing compared to… well, football (let’s be honest). But still: I was a 21-year-old with no journalistic track record, and yet Capel still took the trouble to spend 15 minutes on the phone with me.

I found myself over the next few years frequently calling him up, in my role on the Press Association team which ran the editorial side of the ECB website.

Back then Northants did not have a social media operation to speak of, and there have never exactly been endless layers of staff between the executive and the players. Good for a journalist, as it means easy access to the key people in a club. But Capel sure had a lot on his plate.

More often than not he would be rushed off his feet, a little stressed, perhaps even suspicious when I asked him for the latest team news. But he always engaged with the questions I asked, and I think he always called back. I can’t pretend to have known him well, but I think I glimpsed some measure of the man.

Not long into the job, I wangled a trip to the 2008 Northants pre-season press day while visiting my parents in Bedford. Wantage Road was hardly the first port of call for cricket journalists at the time.

Back then it was frequently bracketed alongside Derby and Leicester in the county pro Q&As in The Wisden Cricketer as the three grounds they least liked visiting. All three grounds have improved considerably in the 13 years I’ve been working in cricket journalism, though the atmosphere around the press box at Northampton is still, dare I say it, on the spartan side.

^{David Capel passed away on September 2 at the age of 57}

Northants were at the time embarking on a policy of engaging plenty of South African players, mainly under the Kolpak loophole. When Northants and Leicestershire took the field at Grace Road in May with 11 players between them not qualified to play for England, there was something of an outcry. Warwickshire’s Ashley Giles labelled counties like Northants as “lazy” for pursuing Kolpak players.

Ultimately, though, they and others were doing only what was allowed by a loophole in EU law giving them access to an underpaid market.

And it was a consequence – albeit probably an unintended one – of two-divisional cricket, where smaller counties appeared marooned in the second tier, their best players picked up by other counties. It was a way to stay competitive on a thin budget.

As for Northants’ young players, the story of allrounder Mark Nelson, recently highlighted by Andy Bull in The Guardian, shows that they were not getting too many chances in the 1st XI. How could he, with experienced ex-internationals Nicky Boje, Andrew Hall, Johan van der Wath and Johann Louw in his way.

Capel could have a reputation for being a little defensive at times, and I glimpsed some of this as he stuck up for his recruitment policy.

“I thought [our Kolpak signings] could ensure we had winning ways and leave a good legacy at the same time. They could be the difference between our top young players playing county cricket, and playing for England. We felt as a club we needed to sign Kolpak players not only for us now, but for cricketers in the future, in the fullness of time.”

Looking back now, I think he was a man under some pressure on the issue. It probably didn’t help that so many were active in the Indian Cricket League, which the ECB took a dislike to on the basis that it was an unsanctioned event operating outside the auspices of the BCCI, who had just launched their rival IPL.

There was some relief in the wider game, I think, when Northants lost the 2009 Twenty20 Cup semi-final to Sussex and therefore did not qualify for the Champions League, as the ICL links of some players might have been an issue.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of those years, it was all a far cry from Capel’s playing days. Northants almost won the County Championship in 1995, when the Northamptonian Matthew Engel memorably described Allan Lamb as “strutting round the county grounds like Napoleon”.

Leicestershire did win the Championship in 1996 and 1998, Glamorgan in 1997 and Derbyshire finished second in 1996. Northants regularly reached one-day finals, but tended to lose to Lancashire (though did beat Leicestershire in the 1992 NatWest).

^{Capel made 12,202 first-class runs}

Even so, Capel came oh-so-close in 2009 and 2011 to coaching Northants to promotion, only to be caught at the last hurdle. It was always Championship cricket which seemed to fire Capel up, and – that appearance on 2009 finals day aside – the Steelbacks (or ‘the Steelboks’, as some wags cruelly labelled them) made little headway in limited-overs competitions.

A lacklustre start in 2012 cost Capel his job midway through the season. It was sad that a man yoked to Wantage Road for three decades and more could be sacked, but he didn’t stay alienated from the place for long, and went on to do important work with England Women.

He could reflect proudly on his role in the success enjoyed under his replacement David Ripley, as both came into the head coach position after heading the academy – in Capel’s case after a player rebellion led to the ousting of Kepler Wessels in 2006.

Since Capel left the landscape has changed. It has reached the stage where homegrown players are being thrust into county first-teams with rapidity: witness the flurry of debutants in this year’s Bob Willis Trophy, by Northants as much as anyone. There’s all kind of reasons for this – some altruistic, some borne of financial expediency, some a result of the T20 revolution.

Ask a young cricketer about Capel’s work with them, and they speak with fondness. Tom Brett, one of the local players who might claim he didn’t get enough of a go in the Kolpak era, is now 1st XI coach at Bedford School.

He tweeted: “Capes was really supportive and caring when I came back from Perth with the yips. He provided everything I needed to recover and later gave me my debut. I remember he took me for a lap during the game as he wanted an ice cream or to keep me relaxed. RIP Capes.”

It’s not a cliché to say that no one put in more wearing a Northants shirt. When Capel and Kevin Curran were on song, Northants could go toe to toe with anyone. It’s so cruel that two such combative all-round cricketers could both die relatively young.

I can still picture Capel at the top of his mark, quite a tall and slim man, grimacing with intent and pounding through his run-up. He wasn’t express pace, but he was a skilful bowler who could both swing the ball away and slant it in to bowl full – no wonder he was picked for tours of Pakistan, the West Indies and Australia?

^{The allrounder played 38 times for England}

It wasn’t just the fact he was an allrounder filling in during Ian Botham’s many absences in the late 1980s, though that mullet and those blond highlights probably did little to discourage the comparison.

But he had guts: Capel entered on Test debut at Headingley in 1987 with England 31 for 5 against Imran Khan and Wasim Akram, and struck a half-century.

That winter he was the deep square-leg fielder unwittingly moved by Mike Gatting just before the close at Faisalabad, leading to the famous ruction between the England captain and Shakoor Rana captured forever by Graham Morris.

In the third Test at Karachi, he came within two runs of a Test century, even though, as Scyld Berry put it, he read the great leg-spinner Abdul Qadir “as readily as Linear B… and after 374 minutes was no more certain about Qadir’s intentions” when he was bowled by the umpteenth googly.

And he was the unsung hero of probably England’s greatest Test win overseas between 1986/87 and 1998: against all-conquering West Indies in the opening Test of the 1989/90 series at Sabina Park.

Capel removed Richie Richardson and Carlisle Best to put England firmly on top. Heady days there were for Northants, with Wayne Larkins and Rob Bailey also in the England batting line-up. As chance would have it, this was Sky’s first series covering England overseas, so future generations will be able to see it forever.

I don’t doubt that Tom Harrison, the ECB chief executive, who is from Capel’s part of the world, got it right when he said that he was “a complex and private man on the surface, and a kind and gentle one to those who knew him well”.

He and others are better qualified to judge than me, but it certainly seemed from a distance that they don’t quite make them like David Capel anymore.

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