The former No.1-ranked Test batter in the world looks back on his career, sharing the crease with the maestro and the challenges of overseeing cricket in the West Indies. Interview by Phil Walker
SON OF JAMAICA
I grew up in a small town on the north coast of Jamaica, a place called Port Maria. Back then, it was six months football, six months cricket. My dad’s side of the family were cricket mad and Dad played a bit. There was a concrete strip in the backyard and we had kids on the road my age, so we played together.
I started playing competitively in primary school. That section of Jamaica has a very strong history and culture of age-group cricket at school level, so I started playing in front of pretty big crowds when I was a kid because the whole town would come and watch us play in school competitions.
THE FIRST TRIP TO SABINA PARK
My dad took me to watch West Indies-India, that famous Test match when the Indians put up the white flag, and said they’d had enough of Holding, Wayne Daniel and Andy Roberts. I’ll always remember Michael Holding bowling because he was a real hero. That everlastingly long run-up.
In those days, the dressing rooms were the same as the club dressing rooms and we used to sit above them in the club stand in the Kingston Cricket Club pavilion and I remember the first time seeing Clive Lloyd and Kallicharran live in living colour. It was ‘75, so I must have only been seven or eight at the time. It was brilliant.
THE KANHAI INFLUENCE
Up to about the age of 15, my dad was a big influence. After that, it was our national coach for many years, the great Rohan Kanhai, who took over both our senior and junior teams in Jamaica in about 1984. He remained my only coach right through my career because when I made it into international cricket, he had become the international coach back in ’92.
For most of my career, he was the one. He had a really massive influence on how things went for me.
AN EARLY START
I think getting started at 17 was a big impetus for me. I looked at a mentor of mine who was Jeffrey Dujon – he started his first-class career as a teenager as well. That made me believe it was possible. Once I got my first first-class hundred under my belt, it started to dawn on me that this could really be a possibility here.
Relatively speaking, domestic cricket was stronger then than it is now. The standards were higher. More internationals came home and played, it was really competitive. So, as a kid to play against the likes of Marshall, Garner, Viv and Richie Richardson, it was a real eye-opener. When I got into international cricket I was quite comfortable with what was happening around me, which I guess is an indication that you’re coming out of a decent system.
A natural leader: Adams captained West Indies in 15 Test matches
PICTURES: Alamy
WAITING HIS TURN
I’d played eight years of first-class cricket before I got to Test cricket. So, I think I was pretty well prepared, but I was also very hungry. My first eight or nine Tests, I only played as a replacement if Carl Hooper was injured. It’s a harsh thing to say, but God bless Carl for getting injured in those early days.
There have been cases around the world of people who’ve had to wait a long time for opportunities and then when you get them you really value it. Brian Lara had to wait 28 Tests between his first and second. He carried the towel for 28 Test matches! So where does somebody find the drive to score 300, 400, 500? I think it’s when you wait for something that you want for so long. I think of people like Mike Hussey who scored heaps of runs when they finally got an opportunity. That’s how I understand the start to my Test career.
A JUICY DEBUT TEST
I didn’t sleep. I was rooming with Courtney Walsh and he put me in the living room because he couldn’t take it. You spend your whole life dreaming about playing at that level and then finally it comes, but after four days I was distraught because I thought to myself, “Can you imagine this historic Test, West Indies v South Africa for the first time, my first Test, and we’re going to lose.”
So we got to the ground on the final day with South Africa needing about 80 to win with eight wickets in hand and Brian’s saying: “Jimmy, we just need one wicket.” And I’m like, “No, Brian, we need eight.”
The morning starts and, if I remember correctly, Lara started it all with a brilliant one handed catch diving to his left off Courtney to get Kepler Wessels out.
And he comes in like, “Right, lads, we’re in it here”. And he knew!
So, this is what really happened: Brian normally comes home from a day’s play, goes to sleep, wakes up at midnight and then hits the road. So at 12am, he’s gone into this pub and sees the whole South Africa team, minus Kepler and Peter Kirsten, the not out batsmen, and they’re celebrating a Test win, so Brian plies them with rum until five o’clock in the morning – all of them are absolutely legless. Hansie Cronje, all them, they were absolutely loaded, they couldn’t function. I was fielding at bat-pad and could smell the alcohol. Once we got Kepler, Courtney and Curtly did the rest!
THE ZENITH
The India tour [of 1994] was probably the highest point. I’d had a good home series against England and then India followed on from that. I was just in the zone. There’s just a calmness.
I knew I was going to score loads. Don’t ask me why! Everything just slowed down on that tour, and I knew it. Then when you come out of that zone, you spend the rest of your career trying to find it.
BURNOUT
From ’92 to the ’95 England tour it was non-stop; 36 months non-stop. I didn’t know what was wrong with me at the time, which made me very frustrated for a few years. I became pretty angry because I had this frustration of knowing something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I couldn’t get through a five-Test series.
It wasn’t until years later when the science came out, I found out I just had a classic case of burnout. It came to a head on that England tour, 1995. Maybe if someone had been there to spot the science behind it earlier, and I’m not saying it would’ve meant more runs, but it would’ve certainly meant a fresher mind.
In hindsight, just being able to know that what I went through was normal has made it a lot easier to accept. I now know that I didn’t plan stuff out as well as I should have. That cycle of play, practice, rest? In those three years, I totally squeezed out the rest section. I just kept going and it caught up with me mentally.
THE ACCIDENT
[In a match against Somerset, Adams’ cheekbone was broken by a bouncer from Andre van Troost.] Listen, I’ve been injured many times. I’ve been hit many times. The only issue was the state my mind was in. I remember Somerset had a medium pacer called Jason Kerr. It was the weirdest thing. He was bowling to me in the first innings, I nearly shit myself.
And no disrespect to him, but he was the kind of pace where you wouldn’t even wear a helmet in those days. And I remember going to Courtney that night and telling h im, “Listen, he could have hit me at any time he wanted to”. It was so hard to explain, but my mind was just blank. There was nothing there. You see, normally the bowler will turn at the top of his mark and as a batter you lock in, your mind focuses. Mine was just blank. The ‘on’ button hadn’t even been pressed.
I felt like a sitting duck. And in the second innings, when the accident actually happened, I remember sitting on the balcony waiting to bat and I’ve never felt so afraid in my life. Genuinely. Because that was when it started to hit me that this is getting dangerous here. It was a weird one, mate. It was a time we were in, and there just wasn’t that information out there at the time.
ENERGISED BY YOUTH
I really enjoy being around young people, so the back-end of my career, when the likes of Chris Gayle, Wavell Hinds, Ramnaresh Sarwan were coming through, gave me a lot of energy. I enjoyed what they brought to the team at the time. A really talented group of young lads who went on to have good careers. I really enjoyed that period for that reason.
COACHING KENT
It was a really great experience with a good bunch of lads. It was a good journey in those five years because when I got there, the club was a pay cheque away from going under. The captain Rob Key, Jamie Clifford [the CEO], the chairman Graham Johnson – we had to really work close together to get through. It was really tough but we managed.
In my last year we finished second in Division Two but didn’t get the promotion we deserved because that year they decided to have one team up and two go down. I spent five years there and feel like I left the place a little bit better than when I arrived. I learned a hell of a lot.
DIRECTOR OF WEST INDIES CRICKET
We put together a high-performance unit at head office – analytics, player development, coach education and sports science and medicine. And that process took a while because you’re talking about recruiting and recruiting within a heavily politicised system.
So what should take six months to recruit takes you two years, sometimes even longer. Around about when Covid started, we assembled this team in house. Part of the plan was to restart the academy, which we did two years ago. The academy on paper wasn’t the best out there, the academy was outcast staff that the territories themselves didn’t want.
These lads are just out of under-19 cricket, but we think they’re very talented. They should be in somebody’s system. We gave the territories tangible evidence of what you can do with young players if you give them support. I think that fills me with more satisfaction than anything else that would’ve happened in that six-year period.
Assembling that team, fighting to get the academy started and then having tangible proof at the end that with this level of support, if provided territory by territory, we’d have tangible evidence at the front end, which is our international team. That in a nutshell is what pleases me most.
On the staff: he is overseeing West Indies’ batters on the 2024 tour of England.
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