Interview - Graeme Hick

Graeme Hick has scored more than 37,000 runs in first-class cricket, made 126 centuries over 20 years, and has broken more records than there's space to list. He's 38 years old, has a batting average this season of just under 70 and, on Saturday, will play in the C&G Cup final for Worcestershire at Lord's. Yet still his fans and detractors alike are only interested in asking one question - how do you explain your astonishing failure, Graeme Hick?

It's been a strange career and Hick is the first to admit it. He is probably the most successful county cricketer of modern times. No wonder so many people are itching to know why he didn't cut it at international level - his first-class average of 53.5 slumps to 31.32 for those 65 Tests.

He has enjoyed many highs and some terrible lows. When we meet, black clouds hover menacingly over Worcestershire's New Road ground, but he's looking in great nick - tanned, huge and confident. Having made a patient 20 in the hour's play before the rain came, he brings out a massive banquette for us to sit on. I ask him what he fancies talking about. "Not much," he says with a giggle. "Nothing changes, eh?" He's never been much of a talker.

I have been obsessed with Hicky for almost 20 years. Soon after he burst on to the scene in 1984, becoming the youngest player ever to score 2,000 runs in a season in 1986, it was obvious he was going to be the saviour of British cricket. The only drawback was that we had to wait seven years for the Zimbabwean to qualify for England. I wasn't cricket mad but I was Hicky mad.

The more he failed at Test level, the more desperate I became for him to succeed. I think it probably became a sickness. At the height of his failure (although at the time I was in denial about that) I wrote to him, repeatedly, for interviews. He was feeling tender and turned me down, time and again. Eventually I just turned up at Worcestershire, asked for his autograph and told him who I was. I've never seen anyone look so alarmed at the mention of my name. Then again, I suppose I may have crossed the fine boundary between journalist and stalker.

Two years later, in 2002, he granted me an interview for Wisden magazine. I was surprised by how shy and open he was. He told me that the hardest thing he had ever had to admit in his professional life was that he had failed at Test level. His sports psychologist said he should face his fears and disappointments, so he had had to admit the failure to somebody close to him. In the end, he said, he told his best friend while churning inside, convinced it was the world's greatest confession. He splurged it all out but, when he had finished, his friend just continued waffling on as if he had not heard him.

In the same interview, 11 months before England's unhappy World Cup campaign in South Africa, Hick argued that even if he was not worth a place in the Test squad, he should be in the one-day team where he had (almost) fulfilled his potential as batsman, bowler and extraordinary slip catcher. He was not picked.

But now, 2 years on, he seems so much more relaxed. He says how much he is enjoying his cricket, that he is still working on his technique, striving to improve, returning to basics to stop himself falling over so much.

He also says it has been a great year for English cricket. Nothing has given him more pleasure than the success of the Test team in general, and Freddie Flintoff in particular. He does not want to compare him to Botham but cannot resist. "I think he has the same sort of character in the dressing room. They just walk in the door and the dressing room can lift."

This is something he has thought about a lot. Hick is painfully aware of how quiet he was in the England dressing room. "I'm quite a sensitive introvert. I'm not somebody who goes to talk to people easily, and maybe I didn't . . ." He trails off in typical fashion. "Maybe if I'd been a little more arrogant and just gone out there and done whatever, and been a bit more thick-skinned, it might have been different."

The surprising thing, I suggest, is that so many people mistook that shyness for arrogance and believed you simply did not care. He nods. "Unfortunately, when you're a quiet person and not that many people know you apart from your very close friends, everyone just forms an opinion. Saying I didn't care was probably as far from the truth as you can get."

One of the myriad theories bandied around was that Hick had been found out by the short ball - that he had played too much county cricket, allowed too many flaws to creep into his technique, and could not raise his game at Test level. He is not convinced. "I'm not saying I played the short ball as Viv Richards might have done, but I've got runs at some stage pretty much against most bowlers who have been around, so I don't believe that was the actual cause."

So what was it? "It was more the whole picture, the pressure and everything." Was he aware of the pressure building? "I didn't think much about it till that year [1991] started really, and from the start of that season I didn't bat well. On reflection, that was the only thing which was different that year."

Nobody's Test career was anticipated quite like Graeme Hick's. On the eve of his debut against West Indies in 1991, the journalist Brough Scott wrote: "The promise is so fresh and so infinite that there is also a touch of sadness about it." Hick scored six in both innings, and by August he had been dropped having scored 75 runs at 10.71. He was dropped in virtually every series he played after that. Hick's international career was woefully mismanaged.

I mention something the former England team manager Ray Illingworth said years ago - how when Mike Atherton told Hick he was dropped in 1995, "I saw him dashing out crying. It showed a softness." It seems such a callous and unsympathetic remark.

"I remember that instance very well, actually," Hick says, looking down at his huge lamb-chop fingers. "I'm not embarrassed by that. I'm not someone who holds emotion in very easily. I can watch my kids running at sports day and get tears in my eyes. It's just the way I am. For me, when that happened I was trying so hard to get everything right and get a good run in the side and then, you know, I got told on the morning of the game that I wasn't playing, and it was very disappointing."

Again, he says his tears do not embarrass him. "I'm proud of who I am, and that's just the way I'm made up. I suppose in a dressing room it's not something you want to do, but sometimes, you know . . ." He trails off.

At times the way Hick was managed seemed to verge on the vindictive. During the 1994-5 Ashes tour, when he was 98 not out and battling his way back into form against Australia in Sydney, Atherton declared, accusing him of scoring too slowly. Two years ago Hick told me "I regard Athers as a good friend, but I wouldn't have minded a good thump at him."

I ask him if Atherton ever apologised. No, he says, he doesn't want to go there; the past is the past.

But does he think there were people in the England set-up who actually wanted him to fail? "I don't know. I wouldn't like to answer that question if I felt it . . ."

Did he become phobic about playing for England? "No, not at all." He smiles. "I always enjoyed the game. Sometimes things didn't go well, but I always enjoyed being out there. In the end, it's sport, it's not life and death." He says his favourite innings for England was the 40 he scored in Karachi to help England clinch the series against Pakistan in December 2000.

When we last met, Hick said he was beginning to think about life after cricket, to mull over a few business ideas. He is still nowhere near making a decision. Yes, he's doing a coaching course and, yes, he knows he won't be going back to Zimbabwe (his parents live in Harare), but retirement does not even seem to be on his radar. When pressed, he admits he still has a few records in sight.

"I think I need two or three more hundreds to come up towards Hutton and Gooch, so it would be nice to get another couple this year."

No one playing cricket today is in sight of Hick's number of hundreds. Indeed, it has been suggested he may be the last player to score 100 hundreds because so much Test cricket is played these days. "Well, I think Ramprakash may be close," he says. "He's in his early 70s now." Which only goes to show how obsessed Hick is with records.

The rain turns into a storm. He rushes me out of the pavilion, through the changing room and into the physio's room. Look Graeme, I say, you know I'll end up calling for your recall to the England one-day team in this article. He grimaces. "Ah no, don't do that." Really, you don't want me to? "Ah, don't do that, nah." Why not? "It's past. It won't happen."

Does he think I'll look like a plonker if I say he should be back in the one-day team? "Well, I'll look at it and think, 'Ah shit, that plonker has written that.'" He grins. "So please don't. That's past now."

I ask Hick if he can now look at his career and celebrate his achievements, rather than dwell on his failures.

"The England question is easy to answer because clearly I've moved on from that," he says. "If you'd asked me the question four years ago I would have ummed-and-aahed a bit, but I'm pretty realistic. I know there's been a few disappointing times, but I look back and see what I've done and think, well, it's not all bad."

A lovely smile spreads across his face. "I mean, I got a letter from a chap a few days ago. His father had passed away, and he just thanked me on behalf of his father for all the pleasure I had given while his dad had been sitting as a Worcester member. And I think, well, you know, is life all bad? I must have done something."