Ian Bell: A timeless classic

NICK FRIEND – EXCLUSIVE: Professional sport rarely does guarantees, but Bell’s ageless grace is an exception – in full flow, a sight to behold. He talks about batting just as you'd imagine he might, oozing all the class present in his cover drive

In a game of fine margins, there has always been a glorious certainty to Ian Bell: the stately tranquility at the crease, the textbook high elbow, such elegance from so little pretension. Few have the ability to elevate the cover drive – a stroke already so feted – to new heights.

But even the timeless must age, and Bell turned 38 last week. The last man standing of the 25 who featured in the Ashes series of 2005 and a reassuring constant in the English summer, there will come a day when highlight reels – overflowing with class – are all that will remain of one of England’s purest ever talents. Only, he suggests, not yet.

He played his most recent first-class match nearly 600 days ago, troubled by injury ever since, and enters whatever becomes of this nominal season in the final year of his contract at Warwickshire, the only county he has ever known. He feels fitter than he has done for some time – toe and knee problems have allowed for a focus on gym work – and refreshed by a season away from the grind of the circuit. The fire still burns bright and a desire exists to continue beyond 2020.

“I hope and I still believe that I’ve got some really good cricket in me,” Bell says, “and physically I feel in a really good place – I’ve got a year or two after this season to add on.

“But we don’t know – I can only hope that is the case. I’m desperate to do it. I still feel that there’s a lot of cricket I can play, having spent the last year out.”

In a situation of normality, none of this would be a problem. A veteran of 158 first-class appearances for his hometown club – the first of which came in the last millennium, Bell and Warwickshire are intertwined, both part and immensely proud of one another. Any doubt around the future, therefore, comes centred around these unprecedented times: quite what becomes of this campaign – and the economic outlook thereafter – remains to be seen.

“You never know financially where all the clubs are going to be,” Bell admits. “I don’t know – I think all cards are on the table. I suppose that is what a lot of people are saying about a lot of things; we’re in uncharted waters in terms of we don’t know what the future looks like. I’m just hoping that there definitely would be something over the next year or two.

“The older you get now – certainly for me now, you try to take every game as if it’s your last because it very much could be.

“I had an unfortunate injury and a surgery and now it looks like it could be a year and a half for me without playing any cricket, which is hard when you know you’re getting a bit older. You just want to get out and play, don’t you? You’re a long time retired, so you want to take every moment that you can to get out there and enjoy it. There’s nothing like playing really, so I want to go on as long as I can. Hopefully, that will be the case.”

It is a view that will be shared by watchers of the game worldwide. Not many in the modern era have provided such unostentatious pleasure – professional sport rarely does guarantees, but Bell’s grace is an exception.

To cast an eye over social media on the afternoon of his birthday was to scour through a joyous myriad of languid, cathartic brushstrokes – the most soothing kind of viral content. Every next clip was almost a replica of the last: moreish drives against Australia, India, Pakistan and more, each evoking the same wistful purrs.

^{All the same... but different - few have made the cover drive sing quite like Bell}

There was a time at international level when Bell was taken by some almost as a luxury – a scorer of pretty runs. And yet, across all formats only Alastair Cook, Joe Root and Kevin Pietersen have recorded more for England.

“I suppose I was always quite lucky,” he reflects. “It was just always there technically. Sometimes, what I had to fight for was people saying that I scored nice runs but needed to get some ugly runs.

“That was the only thing that sometimes I had to battle with. My technique probably hasn’t really changed dramatically since I was a teenager through to where I am now. Generally, if I play a drive, it’s tended to look quite nice.”

In the post-Bell era – and perhaps even during his England career, to be compared to the Warwickshire man has become something of a rite of passage among the next generation of middle order stroke-makers. To be mentioned in the same breath has come to represent an acknowledgement of a sound technique and the possession of a traditional perfection. Ollie Pope is the latest: a fine player and fluent through the off-side – the Bell calling card.

It leads to a question: what is it like to be lionised like this, so closely associated to a single shot, especially one as aesthetically regal as the cover drive?

He laughs. You get the sense that he is flattered both by the line of questioning and the esteem he is held in. It is a reminder that even in an era of innovation – “my son wants to ramp the ball over his shoulder”, there still exists a market for gorgeous simplicity. For, it was that on which he based himself.

“When you look back,” he reminisces of his days on the international stage, “when you hit a nice shot and there’s that pause in the crowd, they are the things that, without a shadow, you do miss.

“You could judge yourself on how good the cover drive was when you heard those noises. They are the things that you do miss when you don’t have that opportunity anymore.

“When you don’t play for England anymore, I think it does take a while to get over. I think it’s quite a tough thing to match – I’m not saying you take it for granted, but the buzz you get and the things you go through whether you have a good or bad day, those emotions and that feeling of adrenaline you don’t necessarily get anymore.

“It takes a while to adjust back away from playing international cricket and to realise how lucky you’ve been to play there for a period of time.

🏏 7,727 Test runs
🏏 22 Test tons
🏏 A cover drive that brings a tear to the eye

Happy birthday, @Ian_Bell 👍pic.twitter.com/TfMA5Y7hIe

— The Cricketer (@TheCricketerMag) April 11, 2020

“It’s flattering when people remember you as a top player. It is nice when people tell you that they enjoyed watching you play. You are doing it because it’s a spectator sport and it’s an entertainment business.

“Yes, it’s about winning and losing – especially when you’re with England – but when you do hear people say: ‘I enjoyed watching you play,’ it gives you a lot of satisfaction because you want people to enjoy watching you. You hope that you did entertain some people in that period of time when you were playing at your best.

“I suppose it’s a double-edged sword. Being a nice, attractive player comes with two things: one, people remember nice shots. But also, when you nick off and it looks quite lethargic, it doesn’t look like you’re trying as hard as you could have done.

“Someone like David Gower had that label sometimes as well, whereas players who maybe don’t look as nice on the eye but are grafting all the time, it looks like they’re trying harder.”

Bell credits his long-time coach Neal Abberley, the former Warwickshire batsman, with helping him to forge a game that worked – “I didn’t set out when I was young to make it look nice,” he adds with a chuckle.

He speaks with both modesty and a rare insight on the art of batting – 13,331 England runs act as sound evidence. A winter spent as batting coach for Jon Lewis’ England Under-19 side, however, has opened his eyes further. It was easier 20 years ago to learn as he learnt, he reckons. The explosion of the white-ball world since has toughened the task for young batsmen setting out.

By the time T20 came into existence, Bell had played 35 matches in List A cricket and a further 38 first-class games. For the youngsters of today, life is “more complicated” – not many would be given the chance to bed themselves in as he did. He would go on to score 5,416 ODI runs – only Eoin Morgan and Root have made more, but long before then he had been able to hone and settle into his methods.

“You’re trying to find that balance of working on your technique and all these things, but there are two different goals and two very different games,” he explains.

“For me, it was very much about learning the top of off-stump, learning forward and back – the real basics of a technique. Obviously as you grow up, it’s then learning to score off the back foot because in the professional game that’s what you have to do. It was how I was brought up.

“But it was probably easier then than it is now to constantly work on one thing because there is so much more to go out and achieve in different formats.”

^{Bell still hopes to carry on playing beyond what becomes of this campaign}

By extension, he is uncomfortable with the notion that he ever made batting look easy. “It might have looked like that, but it didn’t feel like it,” he laughs. It is one of sport’s flawed clichés, his mind rewinding to the copious repetitions: “When you see a nice cover drive, you don’t really remember the thousands and thousands that you’ve done to build yourself up for a cover drive in a Test match.”

It is one of the principal points that Bell focused on in his time with England’s batsmen, both during the Under-19 World Cup in South Africa and the tri-series with West Indies and Sri Lanka that acted as its precursor – he talks of “trying to emulate the level that would be needed for England” and “educating them for when they go back to their own counties and have to fend for themselves”.

Quite simply, imagine – as a teenager – having Ian Bell as your batting coach: 22 Test centuries, five Ashes wins, a man whose game you sought to replicate in the garden. Of his 1,467 England fours, how many would have been caressed off the middle of an open blade?

When he first toured as an England Under-19 player in 1999, Mike Gatting was the team’s manager. He recalls how intimidating it could be as a youngster in the presence of a childhood hero. Sam Young, the oldest player in the 2020 squad, was four years of age when Bell made his Test debut in 2004.

“Before we even got stuck into the batting and talking about how we were going to play, I wanted to make sure that there was no barrier,” he says. “I’d like to think that’s how I go about myself anyway, but I understand that it can be daunting.”

He admits that he initially feared whether the weight of his name might work against him when he applied for the role. That said, there was no special favouritism laid on as he sought to dip his toes into the coaching universe; he navigated his way through his first job interview and then picked the brains of his backroom colleagues.

As for his own philosophies, it is tempting to visualise a line-up of Bell clones, easy on the eye and a treat to watch.

“I would never sit here and tell people that they have to bat like I did,” he retorts. “They don’t have to. The one thing that I quite enjoy when I talk about batting is that there are so many different ways of doing it.

“When we look at Steve Smith, he basically shows you that every player is different and that every player has their own strengths. They have to find their own way. I don’t think coaches can sit there and say: ‘You have to do this.’ That wouldn’t be right.

“What I’d like to think I did over the winter was understand the player’s strength and try to help them become the best version of themselves. And that goes for their technique – I think Smith, since he started to really believe that his technique is right, has gone to areas that other players haven’t got to. That’s part of it – it’s trying to find out that it’s okay to be a little bit different and trying to find that way. But I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone they had to bat like this or say it had to be done this way.”

His enjoyment of the job and the buzz he took from it have given him some peace of mind ahead of the eventual inevitability of retirement. No one carries on forever – not even those who, like Bell, go about their work as if ageless.

He acknowledges as well that his role as a senior player has altered in recent years with Warwickshire. He would drive Henry Brookes around when the young fast bowler first arrived on the county scene, while he speaks with an almost giddy nostalgia at the memory of watching Dom Sibley work his way towards an England call-up. “When you see their excitement, it does re-energise you,” he says.

“Without a shadow, it makes me feel old. But part of that is quite refreshing; you need that as an older player – to have that sense of: ‘Okay, I’m going to help these guys, I’m going to find ways of helping them.’

“I think it rubs off on you as well – it brings that excitement back when it’s not all about your performance anymore. As a senior player and a coach, you’re trying to help these guys become better. That becomes part of your challenge, as well as scoring your runs.”

^{Bell worked as England Under-19's batting coach over the winter}

To a degree, coaching represents an extension of what he has seen in the last few seasons at county level – the sense of father figure increased.

England reached the final of the tri-series on “poor and underprepared” surfaces, where Bell’s expertise against spin came to the fore. Their World Cup hopes initially died a “brutal” death in a last-gasp group stage defeat against Australia, before finishing ninth overall by winning the Plate competition.

“You’re never going to get that feeling you get from being a player,” he suggests with an experienced wisdom, “but I loved watching these guys doing well. As a coach, it’s not about you – it’s about helping other people.

“I think when you’re a player, you’re trying to be the best player you can be and you’re trying to get into that England team or whatever your goal may be – you want to be the best you can be. You have to be quite selfish at times, you have to be very resilient and driven.

“But as a coach, it’s not about you anymore. You’ve got all these different characters who have different strengths and weaknesses, so you start seeing things through a slightly different lens rather than just being that driven individual. You are looking after other people.

“I think that’s what all the best players I played with were – they had a selfishness inside them about their own game, but also they were so driven. I think as a coach, it’s about adapting to different individuals and different people to help them become better. Those were the things that I learnt and enjoyed and found fascinating really.”

For now, however, Bell is looking towards a playing future – whenever that may be; Edgbaston is currently in use as a drive-through coronavirus test centre for NHS workers.

Looking back to the final throes of his England days, he wonders whether he might have been able to prolong his international career. Andrew Strauss, then in his director of cricket guise, had offered Bell the winter off after winning the 2015 Ashes.

“I decided against it because I didn’t want it to look like the easy option, I didn’t want it to look like I was just taking a backward step,” he reflects. Instead, his last Test came in Sharjah at the end of a series defeat against Pakistan that November.

“When I look back now, what I do know is that mentally I was probably burnt out and run down. I probably should have stepped back for a winter and then who knows what would have happened after that?

“But I don’t have any regrets on the decision because I think I did it for the right reasons. I look back at 287 games for England, 118 Test matches. I gave absolutely everything I could to the shirt, to the team, to English cricket. And at that point, I was pretty frazzled.

“Whether I should have taken the advice of having a winter off is one thing that I sometimes think about. But I can live with that. I can live with knowing that I did everything I could for English cricket.

“I try to keep it as simple as possible and know that, at the end of the day, I still feel like I’ve got some more cricket to play for Warwickshire and hopefully that will happen.”

Hopefully, indeed. When that time does come, the game – and the highlight reels – will be poorer for it.

^{Under-19 World Cup images courtesy of Getty Sport/ICC}

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