Goodbye KP, hello happiness
Nottinghamshire's coach Mick Newell is finding that climbing the table is easier when players are not treading on each others' toes. Lawrence Booth reports from a ground that is smiling again
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Even on an average day Trent Bridge can lift the spirits. But today the sun is out and Mick Newell, Nottinghamshire's director of cricket, needs no uplifting. His team are well placed in the Championship and there is a quiet yet perceptible buzz about the ground. You can almost sniff the industry.
Wind back two years and the only smell coming from the Nottinghamshire dressing room was one of bile. The club were in the throes of relegation and Kevin Pietersen was busy winning unpopularity contests. When his captain Jason Gallian threw his kit out of the dressing-room window, the Pietersen camp muttered grimly about unfair dismissal, even though he had not been sacked. Pietersen eventually stayed to see out the remaining year of his contract, averaged 53, helped Nottinghamshire win Division Two at a canter, then headed for Hampshire. He took with him his runs - and his edge.
"It's a more relaxed dressing room now," says Newell. "It's a happier place to be. Nobody's treading on anyone's toes." Does Newell miss him at all? "No," he says unequivocally, before clarifying his answer. "The only way we've missed him is in one-day cricket. But there's no point in wishing he doesn't do well because he will do well. I think he should have played in the Test matches against Bangladesh. He should be playing all the time. He's the best player we've had at this club, English-qualified or whatever."
When Newell talks about getting rid of the "difficult characters" he is also referring to Bilal Shafayat, who turned down a three-year contract for the prospect of regular first-team cricket with Northamptonshire. "A lot of these guys who are 19 or 20 years old, they want to be in the team all the time," he says. "That's good but you have to be realistic. Bilal was hardly banging on my door saying you must pick me. So we got other people in at the start of last year and started off well and there was no way in for him. Although, had he known KP was going to leave, I think he would have stayed."
The regrets, though, are beginning to fade. The new influx Newell mentions consisted of Mark Ealham, Ryan Sidebottom and Anurag Singh - "good blokes and good cricketers" - and he soon began planning for a change of captain. Nottinghamshire's 2nd XI coach Wayne Noon had befriended Stephen Fleming in the early 1990s at Northamptonshire, where Fleming was on a scholarship and Noon was a wicketkeeper. Newell duly took advantage of the contact, thus making Fleming the latest in a long line of New Zealanders - after Hadlee, Cairns, Astle and Vettori - to come to Trent Bridge.
There was just one problem: Fleming's coronation meant the dethroning of Gallian. "It was difficult with Jason at the time," says Newell. "I told him as soon as I could after the season had finished and after Fleming had signed. So Jason had six months to get used to it. I know initially it was a shock and he was upset but it certainly hasn't affected his four-day batting, which is as good as ever."
The decision to return Gallian to the ranks was made easier by Newell's conscious effort to distance himself more from the players. He felt he had become too "pally" with some during his time as coach of the 2nd XI, a closeness that did not sit comfortably with the inevitable need to hire and fire. He now regards himself as a manager rather than a coach and is more than happy to leave the tactics to Fleming. "I just sit and watch now without any panic, as might have happened in the past. I know he's doing the right thing." Newell also points out with a certain satisfaction that Fleming has scored Pietersen's runs, "if not more."
In part this is because Trent Bridge these days is synonymous with belters rather than the greentops exploited by Clive Rice and Richard Hadlee in 1987, the year Nottinghamshire last won the Championship. When Newell replaced the less democratically minded Rice as coach in June 2002 he was determined to leave behind the low-scoring thrillers and encourage his side to play proper four-day cricket on proper pitches.
"Ricey still wanted to play on sporty wickets but the game was a lottery," he says. "Anybody could beat anybody. But, if we play on the best pitches, I'd back us to win more games than not and also to get enough batting points to get into a strong position in the league."
The stats are instructive. In 2001 Notts averaged 290 in their first innings at Trent Bridge; in 2002 it had risen to 361, with all four totals of 400-plus made after Newell took over. The club struggled to adapt to Division One in 2003, when the average dropped to 254, but last summer the figure ballooned to 419 and the pitches were rated by umpires as the fourth-best on the circuit. Nottinghamshire's total of 66 batting points was the highest in the country, beating even the run-happy county champions Warwickshire.
This year, as the Championship stopped for Twenty20, Notts were 17.5 points behind the leaders Kent and with a game in hand. Not even the absence of Fleming on New Zealand's tour of Zimbabwe - he is due to leave on July 26 and will miss five Championship matches - can dispel the optimism. So in a city where the rugby team has receded in the age of professionalism, and where both Nottingham Forest and Notts County football clubs are in the doldrums, one would have thought the local paper would be falling over itself to fly the flag.
But the Nottingham Evening Post failed to replace their cricket correspondent when Chris Waters left to join the Yorkshire Post in 2004, and coverage is now farmed out among freelancers. "If Notts County sign a reserve goalkeeper it makes back-page headlines, so it's fairly clear where their priorities lie," says Newell. "The previous chief executive David Collier [now chief executive of the ECB] did send them a couple of letters but, if they choose not to send someone, that's their business."
For now, though, Newell is working hard to get the most out of a team which he believes will be together for another three years at most before senior players retire and such as Graeme Swann, Samit Patel, Chris Read and Sidebottom assume their responsibilities. But he refuses to get ahead of himself. "I'm very careful about this year because I think there are about six teams who can win it and probably only Kent who are saying that they're not going to go down."
The caution is understandable: Nottinghamshire have hinted at revival before, only to disappoint. But on a gloriously bright summer's afternoon anything seems possible.