Dermot Reeve with Patrick Murphy (1996) – Winning Ways, London: Boxtree

County cricket on TV in the 90s was mainly of the one-day variety, with the conclusion of the Natwest Trophy in early September often viewed as the showpiece cup fixture that brought the curtain down on the domestic season.

The 1993 final was my first real experience of Dermot Reeve, as I witnessed a scruffy, slightly idiosyncratic batsman guiding his team, Warwickshire, to chase down a hefty Sussex total and secure an unlikely victory.

Reeve had at that point played for England, including at the 1992 World Cup, but between this match and the following tournament in 1996, he earned precisely one further international cap – in 1994, at home to New Zealand.

During that time, his Warwickshire side dominated county cricket, winning three of the four major domestic competitions in 1994, including the Championship, before retaining their four-day crown and winning the Natwest Trophy the following year.

Although unquestionably the most successful county team of the mid-90s, recognition of their achievements, both from the media and fellow pros, seemed to come begrudgingly, putting Warwickshire’s success down to favourable home conditions or the contributions of their overseas players, especially the prolific form of Brian Lara – then the world’s best batsman – in 1994.

In Winning Ways, Reeve recalls debating the merits of his side with various England players, eventually earning backhanded compliments to the effect that the captain should take credit for moulding a team of average players into trophy winners.

It does county cricket few favours to argue that top Test cricketers found it insufficiently interesting or significant to rouse themselves to mount a sustained challenge for silverware in the way that Warwickshire did. Certainly, that seems to have been the case with Lara: although he enjoyed an extremely successful season with the bat, Reeve writes here that he found him a difficult player to captain and motivate.

Lara telling Reeve to ‘f*** off’ was one of the tales to earn headlines upon the release of Winning Ways: another was Reeve’s criticisms of the England management, including captain Mike Atherton, following the team’s disastrous showing in the 1996 World Cup, for which he earned a belated – and apparently begrudging – recall.

Despite the team’s terrible performances in beating only non-Test playing nations on the way to a quarter-final thrashing by Sri Lanka, and the fact that Reeve’s observations – that the team were confused about their methods and lacked detailed preparation, and that a jaded Atherton was not best suited to the ODI format – in retrospect seem quite reasonable, his comments were viewed in some quarters as controversial and a case of sour grapes. Atherton retained the captaincy for a further couple of years, while Reeve retired after struggling with a shoulder injury.

The World Cup was really the only time when the English game gave one-day cricket any serious attention, and home internationals in the mid-90s were otherwise seen as warm-ups for the Test series and a chance to blood one or two new players.

To be fair, England often had a reasonable record in these games, but they were insufficient preparation for a global tournament in foreign conditions. Few concessions were given to so-called one-day specialists, often derided as ‘bits and pieces’ cricketers who had nothing to offer the Test game and were left looking over their shoulder when results went against the team.

Reeve was mocked gently by Atherton in Opening Up for complicating the game with talk of sweeping and reverse-sweeping the spinners during the World Cup, but that is arguably what England should have been doing.

Of course, as Reeve writes here, there is little point in trying to whip out the reverse-sweep in a match without having practised it first, but even in doing that his players were fighting against the innate conservatism in the English game at the time: he notes, for example, the unwelcome intervention of chairman of cricket Dennis Amiss, who marched into the dressing room to tell Dominic Ostler not to play the shot.(1) Fortunately, Reeve had a willing ally in coach Bob Woolmer, and Amiss conceded the point when challenged.

In this and many other respects, Reeve’s words come from a much more modern and enlightened era than the one in which he found himself playing. Although widely despised by opponents (the chapter dedicated to this subject begins with an apparent threat of fisticuffs from Lancashire coach David Lloyd),(2) he writes convincingly about creating a positive environment in the dressing room, mindful of the cynicism he experienced earlier in his career at Sussex, where he was frequently belittled by overseas pro Imran Khan and told by batsman Alan Wells to forget about ever playing for England.(3)

There are echoes of the recently-dissolved England leadership group in discussions of Warwickshire’s mid-90s ethos: playing attacking cricket, supporting each other in the dressing room while avoiding bollockings, and taking pressure off the players.

From reading many contemporary accounts of the national team environment at the time, this was not reflected in the England setup. Even if Warwickshire were lucky, or a side of supposedly average players,(4) they obviously had something that the England team did not – and it seemed to work.

The only slight fly in the ointment comes during the later chapters of Winning Ways, when Reeve, having espoused the virtues behind his team’s success, seems quickly overcome by self-doubt and apparently worn down by internal politics.

There are hints that he is not necessarily the super-confident character that he often appeared, and an acknowledgment that much of captaincy requires the ability to bluff, but it seems hard to reconcile the Reeve who talks of building a successful team and a supportive dressing room with the man who worries about a lack of support at the club and being dropped from the side.

While Reeve mentions brief ‘new Botham’ comparisons in the early 90s, and collates a selection of their respective county stats over a few seasons, there were few suggestions that he would be England’s next great all-rounder. However, the feeling persists that he had something more to offer the international game; had he existed in a different era, he might even have been captain himself.

He distances himself from such suggestions here, acknowledging that his best days as a player were already behind him, and offering the name of Adam Hollioake – Atherton’s eventual ODI successor – as the one-day all-rounder the selectors should be considering instead.

--

Young Lions Sometimes Roar: Watching Bad Cricket (And Playing Cricket Badly) in the 90s by Ben Richards is out now.

Click here for more info or here to buy a copy.

Notes:

(1) Reeve: ‘[Amiss] said, “Dominic, I don’t like you playing that shot. I used to try to come down the wicket and play the off-spinner over extra cover.”’ 30 years later, this is still the kind of thing you hear when someone gets out to the reverse-sweep.

(2) Lloyd, as quoted here: ‘I don’t like you, Reeve. You get up my nose, and if you come anywhere near me, I’ll rearrange yours.’

(3) In the end, Reeve proved Wells wrong, earning three Test caps on the 1991/2 tour of New Zealand. Wells later made his only Test appearance against the West Indies at The Oval in 1995, making 0 and 3* before being unceremoniously dropped.

(4) Reeve, understandably, defends his team: ‘I could go on all day about the aspects of individual brilliance possessed by each player in that successful Warwickshire side… ‘average’ isn’t the word to use.’

More Profiles

© Ben Richards 2026

Young Lions Sometimes Roar