Rob Key (2020) – ‘Oi, Key’: Tales of a Journeyman Cricketer, Barnsley: White Owl Books

Note: During the writing of Young Lions Sometimes Roar, a few non-90s players also came to mind – usually while I was watching county cricket in the cold – and, true to form, I ended up seeking out their autobiographies.

If you’ve bought my book already (and thank you so much if you have), you’ll know that there are a few chapters set in the present-ish day.

I’ve chosen one player – and one book – to represent each one of those chapters.

April 2022: the county cricket season starts again, with England having returned home from a heavy Ashes defeat, via a demoralising away loss in the West Indies, before which an exhausted-looking Joe Root repeatedly fielded questions about something called a ‘red-ball reset’.(1)

The only reset that the media and public truly recognise in the wake of defeat to Australia is one that involves everyone in positions of responsibility resigning or being sacked, while journalists prepare to embark upon a series of excitable previews telling us all ‘what we can expect’ from the new people in charge.

Now that the same cycle has repeated itself, it seems odd to recall that Rob Key was at that point the subject of such fevered whisperings, to the extent that his autobiography was scoured for clues as to his ideas on the game and the future direction of travel under his leadership.

It’s probably for the best that no-one thought to conduct a similar exercise more recently, during the circular and self-defeating debate about a drinking culture in the England dressing room, after which Key attempted to calm the situation by insisting, somewhat unconvincingly, that players consuming anything more than ‘a glass of wine with dinner’ was ‘ridiculous’, as the first chapter of the book is pretty much all about cricket players getting drunk.(2)

Oi, Key is structured much more like a loose collection of thoughts on the domestic and international game than a traditional autobiography, completely eschewing the established chronological structure tracking a progression from promising youth to exhausted veteran, via various county and international highlights.

Like all other autobiographies, however, it keeps its focus on exactly what the author wants to discuss, and in this case it appears that Key is reluctant to take centre stage. His own achievements are downplayed, right down to the slightly disingenuous subtitle describing him – an England U19 World Cup winner, holder of 15 Test caps, one-club man and county captain – as a ‘journeyman’.(3)

He is philosophical on the end of his England Test career in the 00s, when he was only 25: coach Duncan Fletcher was wary of Key’s friendship with Andrew Flintoff and Steve Harmison, and considered them both more crucial to England’s success. When Key failed to make an unarguable case for his retention, with well-qualified middle-order rivals gathering, he was quietly dropped, never to return.

As the media and public became entranced by the pre-Ashes debate in 2005 over Pietersen vs. Thorpe, the international careers of Key and Mark Butcher, both last seen on the successful winter tour of South Africa, came to an end. Key’s conversation with chairman of selectors David Graveney on the matter is relayed thus:

‘“You’re the man in possession,” he told me.

“Brilliant,” I thought. “That’s it, I’m in.”

“But you’re not anymore.”’

In truth, Key’s time to make his mark was a little earlier, as the promising youngster first chosen to replace an injured Marcus Trescothick in the summer of 2002 and then taken on the Ashes tour in 2002/3.

After showing some potential, he was dropped from the team the following year after early-season failures against Zimbabwe as England shuffled their batting pack, with Yorkshire’s Anthony McGrath and Kent team-mate Ed Smith chosen ahead of him for the marquee series against South Africa.(4)

As Key describes it here, the possibility of a recall recedes into the distance – bar a surprise call-up for the 2009 T20 World Cup – while his energy is sapped by the requirements of the county grind and the Kent captaincy. He reflects that, with age, batting somehow became less and less straightforward, regretting the loss of ‘that naivety, that innocence of youth.’

Key continues: ‘The way I finished batting was so different to where I started. If someone saw me at 18, it would be incomprehensible to them how complicated my game had become by the end of my career.’

Unsurprisingly, Key is dubious about the technical impact of coaches, especially at the highest level, as well as the merits of management speak and team bonding exercises. The origins of his England setup as MD – not overcomplicating the game, favouring attacking cricket – are easy to find here, although for those with short memories there is a reminder that not too long before the era of McCullum and Stokes, Trevor Bayliss had also favoured a similar philosophy.

At the time of writing, Key was working as a commentator for Sky. The final chapter, devoted to just how great their coverage is and what good blokes all his fellow ex-players and pundits are, features rather too much of the slightly off-putting mateyness that permeates other parts of the book, with some of these same ‘good blokes’ also earning separate chapters of their own.

Being a pundit for Sky is hardly an easy gig, but it’s easier than putting your neck on the block by being the person actually in charge of changing things for the better. The likes of Atherton and Hussain – both articulate and incisive broadcasters – have shown little inclination to cross back over to the other side, perhaps because ex-England captains feel like they’ve already done their time answering questions and dodging brickbats.

With a playing career slightly unfulfilled at the highest level, Key maybe felt he had more to give. His elevation to the MD role came as something of a surprise, with doubts expressed over his qualifications and experience, although being better equipped on this front did not stop some of his predecessors – Ashley Giles and Paul Downton among them – from being derided as unexciting ‘company men’ and stooges of the wider ECB.

As Key put it at the time, ‘Nasser, Atherton, myself – we’d sit around and you’ve got your view on what English cricket should do. When the chance came, I thought, now actually I have some skin in the game. Come on then, what’s the solution to these things? Now I’ve got that chance to see.’

It’s a difficult ask, particularly when the grand title of ‘managing director’ suggests the possibility of far-reaching powers but actually stretches only as far as being able to appoint suitable captains, coaches and selectors to usher the assortment of quite good players that England have, and have always had, along a conveyor belt towards their full potential.

Shortly after his appointment, I sat in a deserted and cavernous Headingley stadium to observe a drizzly encounter between Yorkshire and Warwickshire and recalled Key’s observations on the basic oddness of county cricket, and its relationship with the Test game, eagerly cribbed and quoted from this book at the time:

‘Four-day cricket as a business is completely bankrupt. It makes no money and costs a hell of a lot to put on… County cricket exists only because of the money from Test cricket, the England Test team only because of the Championship conveyor belt. They are the ultimate odd couple: worlds apart, but unable to get divorced because they are so utterly reliant on each other.’

Regardless of whether Key succeeds or fails in his current role – and, given that he is still in post at the time of writing, there is time for things to go either way (5) – questions about how to tackle these trickier issues that lurk below the very top level of the game are likely to remain unanswered.

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Notes:

(1) No-one associated with the team ever uttered this phrase, yet it somehow quickly became a media talking point. Both Root and chief executive Tom Harrison did call for a strategic rebalancing of white ball and red ball priorities in the county game in the wake of the Ashes defeat, although how exactly this would be reflected in the performances of the England Test team only two months later is unclear.

(2) You may argue that times have changed, of course. Equally, you might also argue that this issue had very little to do with England losing the Ashes.

(3) Key is being self-deprecating here, but this is surely a term that, correctly used, describes a player who falls short of international honours and is instead able to eke out a reasonable career at domestic level, usually for a wide variety of clubs.

(4) Smith is mentioned in passing, but there is no mention of his unhappy departure from Kent, or the incident leading to it, when Key and Andrew Symonds were reported to have refused Smith’s instructions as captain during a match against Worcestershire in 2004.

(5) I appreciate that this might not be the popular position, and at one point during the summer it seemed as if the BBC Sport website might respond to the volume of negative comments regarding Key by holding a poll to determine whether the online hordes would prefer him to be sacked, incarcerated or put before a firing squad. Some weeks later I found one newspaper had described Key as ‘justifiably maligned’ – my first experience of the phrase, and very reflective of our times, as it suggests someone deservedly in receipt of unfair criticism.

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