G Dean: Maddy ready to reap his reward for talent and dedication (19 May 1998)

Tuesday, May 19, 1998

Maddy ready to reap his reward for talent and dedication

By Geoffrey Dean

TAKE the dedication of Geoff Boycott, the compactness and technical excellence of Bill Athey and the obsession with physical fitness of Graham Gooch. Add in an affable, straightforward character who is squeaky clean and you have Darren Maddy, the form batsman in 50-over cricket this season.

Maddy's well-honed technique, cast-iron defence, shrewd shot selection and cool temperament make him the most likely candidate to open the batting in the first Test with Mike Atherton. But it is at No 5 that he will go in when he makes his expected senior England debut in the first one-day international on Thursday. If not, an England cap would make a nice 24th birthday present on Saturday.

Texaco selection came as a surprise to Maddy, who ruminated last week that he did not think the selectors saw him as a one-day player. But what he did not know was how impressed Gooch had been with his unbeaten B & H hundred against Lancashire last month when he survived difficult early conditions against Wasim Akram and Peter Martin to bat right through the innings.

"He was really top-class that day," commented Gooch, not one for over-eulogizing.

That performance undoubtedly swayed the selectors' thinking, though Maddy's brilliance and speed in the field as well as his useful medium pace would have counted in his favour. His one disappointment in the Caribbean after being called up for 12th man duties for the four one-day internationals there was that he never got on the field. But the value of being part of the set-up there was, he admits, considerable. It was fortunate that Leicestershire were on a pre-season tour to Barbados at the time.

Maddy, known to his team-mates as Dazza and once regarded as being a bit of a limited-over plodder, puts his one-day improvement down to dropping down the order in the Sunday League.

"I was a quite a technical player and it was just nice to let the shoulders go and hit through the ball a bit more. That's helped me when I've opened in the Bensons."

His hundred against Lancashire was followed by another big one against Minor Counties and 89 against Northamptonshire.

Maddy, who was coached in his teens in the indoor nets by Chris Lewis before he left for Notts, was barely 20 when he made his first-class debut - against Allan Donald and South Africa on one of the quickest wickets ever produced at Grace Road.

"I survived for a couple of hours and thought I played really well for my 24. They let me have a lot of short stuff, but I quite enjoy the challenge of facing it and I think get out of the way reasonably well."

His size is undoubtedly a help in this respect - he is 5ft 9in - as is his footwork which is quick and decisive. He loves to get forward to drive, but is strong off the back foot, being a good cutter and puller. His on-drive is perhaps his trademark shot.

Come the 1996 season, Dean Jones was already hailing Maddy as the best young batsman in England. He was overlooked for the A tour to Australia that year but, after being picked last winter, he began with a double hundred against Kenya and followed it with a century, a 99 and five other fifties in Sri Lanka.

What a total of almost 700 first-class runs fail to convey is that he began the A tour with a self-confessed susceptibility against spin, and came home an accomplished player of it.

Typically, Maddy milked every bit of advice from Gooch. "I get on well with Graham and had alot of chats with him in Sri Lanka. We've got a good understanding." Gooch forms the other half of a mutual admiration society. "Darren's a very good listener - he was what I call on receive on the A tour. He improved enormously."

Maddy puts much of that improvement down to better concentration. "Graham helped me a lot with the mental side, but I was also the fittest I've ever been over there." Now that the season is in full swing, he has cut down his near-masochistic training schedule, settling for a mere 350 sit-ups every other day. In Sri Lanka, he was averaging 500 a day with a staggering 1,100 his highest. Not to mention 100 press-ups.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)