Liam Livingstone: Lancashire's man of multiple ambitions

NICK FRIEND: With each and every lusty blow in a winter full of them, Livingstone's reputation as a T20 gun for hire continued to swell. Only, his cravings go further than that; he is determined to add to a previous Test call-up back in early 2018

In the wider context of recent months, Liam Livingstone’s withdrawal from an Indian Premier League deal with Rajasthan Royals can only truly register as something of a distant footnote in an empty summer. An intriguing personal decision quickly became a moot point: whichever call he had made, there would have been no cricket to play.

It has meant there has been no opportunity to churn out the early-season runs nor demonstrate the level of application he was keen to present.

Reputations are never easily earned but, once in place, they can take some shifting. The Lancashire batsman knows what it looks like: a winter that began in South Africa at the Mzansi Super League was followed by a maiden stint in Australia’s Big Bash and then a spell in the Pakistan Super League.

He made a splash in each: his hitting spread like wildfire, so much so that when he arrived at Peshawar Zalmi, Kamran Akmal and Shoaib Malik greeted him with comments about his strokeplay in Cape Town and Perth.

His brute power cleared stadium roofs in both Port Elizabeth and Geelong, the associated crowd gasps replicated by massive social media engagement. Rather than the runs themselves, it was the manner of Livingstone's ball-striking which stood him out. That, and his domineering swagger – the pose of a satisfied golfer on the tee, admiring a howitzer straight down the fairway.

One seamer on the county circuit told The Cricketer that running up to bowl to Livingstone felt not dissimilar to facing up to Kevin Pietersen. “He has a similar flair when he walks at you,” he added.

At times over the winter, when his strokes didn’t quite come off, you wondered whether his success might come with greater consistency were he to ease off on occasion. After all, there are no extra prizes for hitting pigeons or floodlights.

“You don’t realise the coverage that it gets until you sit back and you see different things on YouTube with a million views,” Livingstone says of new-found viral fame. “The Big Bash is obviously a well watched competition all around the world, which is why I’d always wanted to play in it.

“Things like hitting balls out of stadiums, they blow up a bit bigger than you think. You’re oblivious to all of it at the time though; you’re in the zone and you’re playing cricket. It’s only six runs – that’s all it is, but it is obviously cool to see the reaction around the world when you finish the game.”

^{Livingstone made his mark on the Big Bash}

With each of those lusty blows, that reputation has increased. It was only in 2015 that he made a 138-ball 350 in a club game for Nantwich, news of which went nationwide. In October, he was a first-round pick in The Hundred draft for Birmingham Phoenix – a surprise to many, but a sign of his ever-growing standing on the T20 circuit. And so, the decision to opt out of this year’s IPL was significant – a move to readdress the balance. Because, for all that his swashbuckling batting has painted him as a limited-over basher, Livingstone still harbours red-ball ambitions.

“I guess people are going to frame you as a T20 cricketer if you spend your winter playing T20 cricket,” he knows, “but I also have to make sure that I’m playing enough red-ball cricket to show people I can play first-class cricket.

“If you look at my stats, I still average 42 in first-class cricket. There aren’t many English batters who do that. Ultimately, I know myself that I’m in and around it. Whether the selectors have the same view, I don’t know. There isn’t a whole load of people who average in the 40s in first-class cricket in England.”

Livingstone is nothing if not candid. The Test arena remains the goal; his Rajasthan rejection – “absolutely not” an easy decision, he insists – acts as hard evidence of a dream with more than empty words behind it.

“I wanted to go back to Rajasthan, they wanted me back,” he adds. “But I just felt that I had to try to give myself the best opportunity to play Test cricket, and that was by playing red-ball cricket at the start of the year. I think there are opportunities to play Test cricket at the moment. The people that did the best in the first seven Championship games would have probably put themselves at the top of the order to be next into that team.

“That was the reason I gave up the IPL for this year. Hopefully, there will be opportunities to go back to the IPL over the next few years, but opportunities to play Test cricket don’t come around that often. I feel like I’ve got the ability to play it. I just need to back that up with weight of runs.”

Describe this shot in one word...

We'll start: BONKERS #BBL09 pic.twitter.com/TZLxpnJbTT

— KFC Big Bash League (@BBL) December 23, 2019

It feels like a surprisingly little-known fact that he has already once been part of an England Test squad, having been included for the two-Test tour of New Zealand in 2018 on the back of a comprehensive Ashes defeat. He made 88 in his only innings of the trip in a two-day warm-up match in Hamilton.

“I think people forget that I’ve done that,” he admits. “People now are just like: ‘You’re playing around the T20 world, you’re on the T20 circuit. When are you going to give up red-ball cricket?’

“I don’t think people realise that I actually average 42, which not many people do. It’s not like I’m just saying that I want to play Test cricket with nothing behind it. I still feel like I’ve got the game to do that. Hopefully, when cricket starts again, I can concentrate on that as well.”

He has been named in England’s 55-man training squad ahead of whatever comes of this unusual summer, though he is speaking well before it was announced. Among the batch of fully-fledged internationals and emerging youngsters involved in the enlarged group, his inclusion is interesting. The vast majority of those selected have either represented England in the last 12 months or were part of the Lions squad that won in Australia over the winter. Livingstone is one of four who fit in neither category – along with Jamie Overton, Reece Topley and Tom Helm.

It is reward for his work on the franchise circuit, as well as for Lancashire in 2019 – he averaged 46.07 in the club’s promotion from the County Championship’s second tier. England like him and his approach; he made his international debut in two T20Is against South Africa just a year on from his first-class bow.

By his own acknowledgement, it was a difficult beginning. Is he a different player now? “One hundred per cent,” he interjects almost before the question can be completed. The speed of the reply is a marker of how far he knows he has come and how new he was to it all when he was first handed his opportunity.

“I was a child back then,” he says. “My England call-up actually probably came at the worst time possible – I’d changed my technique at the time and I don’t even remember half the stuff that happened that week.

“It was obviously disappointing for the me with the way that it went, but it was also a great learning curve that showed me that I had to grow up pretty quickly. I think I’ve done that.

“I don’t think it was a true reflection of me as a player or as a person. I just think it came at the wrong time. And that can happen in professional sport. I’m sure if the opportunity came around again, it would be totally different – as they have been in every competition since.

^{Livingstone represented Peshawar Zalmi in the Pakistan Super League}

“I felt like if I’d got my opportunity in Test cricket on that New Zealand tour, then that would have been a whole lot different to my T20 debut for England as well.”

He recalls a message he received recently from a friend, pointing him in the direction of the T20 Player Index, an ever-changing, global ranking ladder of the world’s top players in the game’s shortest format. It is by no means gospel, but a gauge of sorts. He sits 22nd on the list at the moment, sandwiched behind Jofra Archer and ahead of Krunal Pandya.

It was a reminder, he explains, of where he has reached in a short space of time. “I’m still only in my fifth year as a professional cricketer,” he points out.

“I would see myself as a senior player at Lancashire now. I’m 26. I guess the rise when it happened came quicker than I thought it would, but once you’ve scored a few runs in first team cricket, you do feel like you belong there and you can perform at that level.

“I’ve got a lot of time to learn and to get better as a player. Hopefully, that keeps happening over the next few years. I think everybody is still learning – whenever Jimmy Anderson is around, he’s still learning. If he’s still doing it, then I’m sure the rest of us are going to be learning right the way through our careers.

“I suppose the day you stop learning is probably the day it’s time to give up.”

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