It was the England women’s captain, Charlotte Edwards, who pointed me in the direction of Leicestershire.
I was playing cricket for Godmanchester in Huntingdon and Charlotte was from a town just outside. We became friends and I coached her a bit.
She asked me if I wanted to go on a trial as she thought I was good enough to play county cricket.
So I went along to play a match for Leicestershire at Kent, who had a really strong side – Michael Carberry was playing, Martin Saggers, James Tredwell and Neil Dexter, too.
The first innings I didn’t get any runs, and then in the second I should have been out first ball to Saggers – it hit both my pads in front of the stumps. But I went on to make 90 off about 70 balls and was asked to keep coming back.
Cricket wasn’t my first sport when I was growing up in South Africa – it was always rugby until I was 15 or 16. But I got injured playing rugby and had to concentrate on my cricket from then on.
So cricket picked itself, even though I was playing to a provincial level in South Africa.
I didn’t really realise that I could make a living out of it, but I got a bit of a talking to by some of the senior players who said I should be making more out of my talent.
I then really concentrated on it, and moved over to England finally in 2004 to go to Leicestershire in their seconds.
To be honest, there were too many South Africans there in the end to really call it an English club! We were all good cricketers, but I’m not sure we were managed properly.
We were treated differently to the English players, and there was a lot of media talk about why there were so many Kolpaks and so on.
All of a sudden the club was concentrating on the wrong things instead of on the performances, and they didn’t really have too many youngsters coming through.
So instead of using the South Africans who were playing international cricket to teach the youngsters, the older guys got put to the side.
That was a bit sad because instead of helping out the younger players, guys like HD Ackerman and Boeta Dippenaar – not so much me as I was already English qualified – were dropped.
We never really kicked on. We always focused on the negatives rather than the positives in our performances for some reason.
I had a brilliant season, though, in 2010. Brad Hodge and Andrew McDonald deserve a lot of credit as they told me just to go out and play carefree cricket.
I was overthinking things, and McDonald told the coaches just to leave me alone. That’s why he is such a great coach; he’s a man-manager, and he said I knew how to sort my game out.
I scored a lot of runs that year, but when Hodge and McDonald left I was being told all the time, ‘do not do this’ or ‘do not play this shot’.
After a while it wears you down and that was the end of enjoying professional cricket.
I’ve found a love of the game again at Northumberland. We were always up against it to begin with, but Geoff Cook came along and he is a brilliant coach.
He is not a very technical person, but a man-manager, and he is getting the best out of people. We’ve set the standard and I hope we can kick on again next year.
This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper on Friday November 20, 2015
