PakPassion.net: How would you rate yourself as a cricketer in terms of your achievements and where do you feel your career fell short?

Mike Gatting: I suppose I didn’t get into Test cricket as quickly as I would have liked to have done which was disappointing. Also I didn’t get a hundred for a long time in my Test career and I didn’t manage a series win against the West Indies. Apart from that, I think it was ok.

PPN: What do you feel was the high point of your international career?

Mike Gatting looking back at the rattled stumps that was hit by the ‘ball of the century’.

MG: The high point of my career came two or three years after I had started playing Test cricket when I made my first hundred, which was a special moment. After reaching the milestone of my first Test hundred I managed to get through two or three years of playing some really good cricket at Test level.

PPN: You’re famous in a strange sort of way for that Shane Warne delivery which has been labeled as the ‘ball of the century’. Do you think it was the ‘ball of century’ or did you just misread it?

MG: I didn’t misread it. I just didn’t realise it would spin that much. As a player, you know it’s going to spin a bit but that one just turned an enormous amount and managed to beat everything. There wasn’t a great deal I could do about it. You do get balls like that even from seamers where you think you’ve got it covered and it seams off the pitch and there’s nothing you can do about it. You just hope it doesn’t take the outside edge or hit the stumps.

PPN: Had you seen much of Shane Warne before that delivery? Did you have much of an opportunity along with your team mates to analyse his bowling before you faced him?

MG: No, not really, in fact not much at all. We had seen a bit of footage of him bowling in the West Indies and India. Other than that, it was my first time seeing him. It was our first sighting of Shane Warne.

PPN: I suppose in the modern era, you would have complete video analysis for any new bowler, which is something you didn’t have at that time for Shane Warne?

MG: Yes the trouble is though you can watch someone bowl all the time and it doesn’t matter. For example, you know Brett Lee bowls out swingers and you know Glenn McGrath seams the ball. But when Glenn McGrath seams the ball, you don’t know which way it’s going to go anyway and you can still miss it or knick it.

The same applies to Shane Warne, you can try looking at his run up, watch the ball or watch his hands to see which way the ball is spinning and you can have a look at as many videos as you like but, when the ball hits the pitch and does something extraordinary, then there isn’t a lot that you can do about it.

PPN: Was Shane Warne the best bowler you faced or were there better bowlers than him?

MG: Well, Shane was the most successful, but Abdul Qadir was a fine bowler too. Abdul was a very, very good bowler. He probably bowled a greater variety of deliveries than Shane did. Shane bowled a very good flipper and he bowled a googly which was difficult to pick. He also had a leggie and a top spinner in his armoury. Abdul Qadir however would bowl all sorts of different deliveries and they were sometimes hard to pick. He was another fine bowler. Obviously Shane was so successful and so consistent with the accuracy that you rarely got a bad ball to hit from him.

PPN: The infamous Malcolm Marshall bouncer. What are your memories of that delivery and what happened that day?
MG: Well, basically, it wasn’t a very good pitch as it was very uneven. Not too long after that, we actually had a Test match called off there, and rightly so. So this was a one-day match and the pitch was a bit up and down. I suppose, undulating was probably the right term for it. The ball basically reared off a length. It was a shortish ball which I was pulling but it got big very quickly because it hit one of the up slopes and those undulations. It came up rather quickly and also seamed back as well. Since it seamed back, I couldn’t get anything on it quick enough. I tried to get a glove on it, but it missed everything.

PPN: Was the Marshall bouncer the most potent fast bowling weapon that you faced during your career?

MG: ‘Maco’ bowled a really good bouncer. It wasn’t really a bouncer to be fair. It was a shortish ball that got really big. If he did bowl a bouncer, it was never over your head. He got pretty upset if it was over head height because it was a waste in his eyes. ‘Maco’ was one of the great bowlers ever. In my view, both Shane Warne and Malcolm Marshall in their respective categories were without a doubt the best bowlers I faced.

PPN: One infamous incident that you are well-known for is the Shakoor Rana controversy in Pakistan. What are your thoughts and recollections of that incident and looking back would you have done anything differently that day?

MG: I don’t know about doing anything differently. It’s not really good to argue with an umpire and you shouldn’t. I’ve never really had a problem with any other umpire in the world. It just happened to be him. I didn’t feel it was right for him to get that involved in the game. We had a discussion about it which wasn’t very good. It wasn’t questioning whether somebody was out or not. It was a question of why he was getting involved when perhaps there was no need to.

PPN: You were a fine player of spin bowling. Some of the modern-day batsmen tend to struggle against the best spinners in the world. What’s your basic advice to batsmen with regards to how to play spin bowling well particularly in Test cricket?

MG: Everybody plays spin differently. As for me, I just tried to play it with the bat. I tried to play it with the spin and tried to use my feet and make the bowler bowl where I wanted to, or go down the wicket and sweep. It’s really like a game of chess. You can only play like that against spin bowling because you don’t have enough time to do that against seam bowling.

PPN: Sounds like you have a fairly straightforward and basic technique against spin. Most batsmen tend to over-complicate things, don’t they?

MG: Yes I am not sure why either. For me, the ball is coming down reasonably slower and a lot of them use the pad as a first line of defense which is probably the wrong thing to do. Therefore, especially in this day and age of DRS, you should not use it [pad] at all. You should just use your bat and trust your judgment.

PPN: As somebody who was a Test captain and led his country very well, what are the most important assets and strengths that a good captain should have?

MG: I think good communication is a key ingredient. Apart from that, talking to your players, understanding them, trying to get them involved and making them feel a part of the dressing room is also important.

In my view, you have to make players have conversations and encourage them to have their say so they feel a part of a team is all up to the captain. It’s also up to the captain to make them feel as if they deserve to be there. In addition, working with different people and in different ways at the same time allowing communication and talking to people is the key as well as trying to get the right balance in the team.

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