Willey aims higher for club and country

On August 11 last year, David Willey stood up to speak on the Northamptonshire team bus. For weeks rumours had been circulating that he would move to Yorkshire. Willey wanted his team-mates to know before the news was released.

"He said 'I'm leaving and going to Yorkshire but I'm going to win the T20 for Northants. I love Northants'," recalls Steven Crook. "He was really really determined - not just for himself and the squad but the people of Northants. He wanted to leave a parting gift before he left."

A few hours after Willey spoke, Northants arrived in Hove, to prepare for their Twenty20 quarter-final against Sussex. The next day, before the game began, Willey "had that look in his eyes and you could tell he was really up for it," Crook says. "It's the big stage, he eats that stuff for breakfast."

On this day, Willey would eat Sussex's bowling for his dinner. Ten of the 41 deliveries he received were bludgeoned for six: it was among the most remarkable exhibitions of hitting ever seen in an English domestic ground. Willey was dismissed for a round hundred, and Northants waltzed to victory.

Before T20 Finals Day, Willey's departure was made official. In the semi-final, venomous left-arm swing combined with the sheer force of Willey's personality to dismiss Varun Chopra, William Porterfield and Ian Bell within eight balls, and so set up Northants' triumph over the holders, Birmingham Bears.

Only the final was left. Willey bowled four parsimonious overs, snared Jos Buttler and Ashwell Prince and hit a rapid 24, but there was to be no storybook ending. "There was nobody more gutted than David Willey that day," Crook says.

These few weeks were Willey in excelsis: a cricketer who hurls all of himself into every delivery. Sometimes, his combativeness reflects antagonism towards his opponents. On T20 Finals Day in 2013, Willey launched into an undignified verbal battle with Jade Dernbach. The histrionics only sharpened Willey's focus: he looted 20 from one Dernbach over, then followed it up with a hat-trick in Northants' victory. "I don't particularly like the bloke," Willey declared after the final. "He made an idiot of himself out there."

To Crook, who changed next to him at Northants for several years, the day remains the embodiment of Willey as a cricketer and as a man. "That's him. There's no filter. He says what he feels… He's just got something - this ability to change games, whether that's because he's angry or whatever it is. He's just got this determination that he wants to win and wants to do well."

Northants will be reminded of those traits at Headingley on Friday evening as Willey strives to overturn his old team-mates and keep Yorkshire in with a chance of claiming a place alongside his old county in the NatWest Blast quarter-finals.

England fans have seen plenty of these traits in recent months. Wiley's emergence has been completely in sync with England's reinvigoration in white ball cricket, which doesn't feel like coincidence.

In Malahide last May, Willey made his debut. "I said to myself 'I don't know how long this is going to last, so whatever I do I want to enjoy it," he says. "I don't want to look back and say I put too much pressure on myself and therefore didn't enjoy it." He has been as good as his word, a beneficiary of the relaxed dressing room established by Trevor Bayliss and Eoin Morgan.

"The thing I've noticed is you come in and are told to do exactly what you do at your county, which is good, and are given the freedom to play the cricket that you want. We've got a group of aggressive, positive cricketers and they all try to play in the same way."

That much has been evident not just in ODI cricket but during England's World Twenty20 campaign. Willey swung the new ball with venom and was named in the ICC's team of the tournament, reaffirming the impression of a man with a penchant for the big stage.

"It was a great experience: it's what you dream about as a kid playing in a tournament like that."

Though the team was distraught after the agony of the final, Willey takes a longer view. "At the end of the day it's only a game of cricket. It was a fairly successful tournament if you look at the bigger picture: it was a young squad, the first competition together as a new squad, so I don't think we can be too disappointed."

His status as a valued member of England's limited-overs side will bring many opportunities abroad: he expects to return to Perth Scorchers for the Big Bash this winter, and would like to play in the IPL one day.

But there is a palpable tension between these ambitions and a desire to play Test cricket, which drove his decision to leave his boyhood club for the county champions. "I want to be one of the best. It's just pushing me to improve my game, and hopefully I can become one of the main figures in the side here," he says. "There's nowhere to hide here which is what I like, so that's been great."

The coming months are shaping up to be decisive in Willey's aspirations to be a Test cricketer. He is 26, an age that still leaves him time to improve but, should he make little progress in the next two years, life as virtually a full-time limited-overs player, following the path trailblazed by Eoin Morgan, might come to be more alluring.

If Willey is to follow his father, Peter, into Test cricket, he will have to wrestle with a problem familiar to the T20 age: how can he improve in first-class cricket while he plays so little of it? Since his England debut last May, Willey has only played six first-class matches - the result of injury last season, his limited-overs commitments for England, and the WT20 delaying the start of his Yorkshire career.

While Bayliss has floated the idea that ODI cricket could be a shop window for the Test side, Willey takes a more old-fashioned view, reckoning there is "too much of a contrast between the formats" for limited-overs performances to be a pathway to Test cricket.

"There's plenty for me to work on. It's a long way off and there's a lot of work to be done - I'm aware of that, and I'm not deluded about where I'm at as a red-ball cricketer. But if I haven't got Test ambitions, what's the point in me playing four-day cricket?"

Jason Gillespie, who lured Willey to Yorkshire, does not consider these ambitions outlandish. Willey could offer England a left-arm option they have lacked in Test cricket since Ryan Sidebottom's last appearance, at the start of 2010.

"There's real potential there. There's a spot available for someone who can bowl on the other side of the wicket at good pace," Gillespie says. "It's well within his grasp. What I've seen is someone who has a brilliant attitude to all of his cricket - batting, bowling, fielding and fitness work. I see a real desire to be better and a determination to be the best cricketer he can be."

Willey reckons that he needs to bowl "a bit quicker, with more control" to have a realistic chance of playing Tests. Gillespie takes the view that accuracy is the more important of the two to harness. "He bowls low to mid 80s. If you're consistently swinging the ball and nailing your line and length, you will cause trouble. I don't think pace is the be all and end all. I'd be just as interested in seeing David be really ruthless with that line and length and accuracy."

A first-class batting average of 27.69 attests to a multi-faceted cricketer. So it seems curious that he only batted once in England's ODI series with Sri Lanka, and was demoted below Liam Plunkett in the order, just as he has been for Yorkshire in first-class cricket.

"As an old team-mate said to me, I'm a bowler that gives it a bit of a slog and scores a few runs. I'm not too disappointed with how low I'm batting," he says. "I'm probably a bowler who can bat a bit but I'd like to make myself into a genuine allrounder. The more involved I am with games the more enjoyable it is for me - and at the end of the day that's what you play cricket for, to enjoy it and contribute in all three aspects."

Gillespie disputes Willey's self-assessment, seeing in him a man who could bat at No. 7 or 8 in Test cricket. "He's got the game. I see more than someone who just biffs the ball. He's got a very decent technique but he can put the good ball away for a boundary. There's nothing more demoralising for an international bowler: you bowl your best ball and it goes to the boundary. David has the potential to be that person."

Whether Willey will be able to straddle the competing demands of the modern age and nurture his red-ball game while remaining a crucial component for England in limited-overs cricket is unclear. But Willey will give everything of himself in trying. "I just try and play every game as if it's going to be my last," he says. He knows no other way.