Non-conformist Pat Brown on his roundabout route to England’s T20 squad
Exclusive interview: The 21-year-old was preparing for a career in the City while his teammates were in training
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Your support makes all the difference.Such is the baffling array of varieties purveyed by Pat Brown that if he hadn’t made it as a cricketer he could well have got himself a job with Heinz. Which is apt given that until recently he could easily have been working in the real world rather than the one occupied by the elite cricketer.
Brown is a rarity in the world of modern sport in more ways than one, having coming through a distinctly non-traditional route. Most cricketers have been picked up by their mid-teens and fast-tracked into county academies before making the step-up to first class cricket. Brown, though, was spotted by Worcestershire’s coaches at a competition for young fast bowlers – their interest offering the England new boy a chance that he thought had passed him by.
If he makes his England debut against New Zealand at Christchurch’s Hagley Oval in the early hours of Friday morning, it will represent a remarkably rapid change of fortunes for a bowler who has turned the slower ball and off-cutter into something approaching an art form. It will also postpone a career in the city for a few more years.
“I wanted to get my degree for a back-up for life after cricket – I would be lying if I said that I enjoyed my studies but I also accepted that sometimes sport doesn’t work out the way you want it to,” he says.
“It was quite hard at times, when I would be in lectures and the other boys were out there playing. But the studying did help my cricket, I think it took a bit of a focus off it and meant that I could just enjoy it that little bit more.
“I wanted to see how far I could get. To be honest, for the first couple of years I just tried to enjoy my cricket as much as possible because I didn’t know when it was going to stop. I wasn’t sure if it was all just going to come to an end.”
Luckily for Brown, who has shone for Worcestershire at successive T20 Finals Days, things have worked out pretty well so far.
In many ways he’s the prototype cricketer for the short format age. In fact, so cleverly does he vary his pace and angle of attack, that most observers would be hard-pushed to identify Brown’s ‘usual’ operating pace.
The speed gun could sometimes be forgiven for giving up the ghost – as countless batsmen have done over the past two seasons.
Only Ravi Bopara could claim to have got the better of the Peterborough-born 21-year-old at Finals Day back in September, although his heroic efforts weren’t quite enough to deliver back-to-back titles for the Pears.
With a T20 World Cup on the horizon, though, he knows that a decent tour of New Zealand in the absence of so many of England’s big-name players, could thrust him into his country’s long-term thoughts. That said, bowling at the death in T20 cricket could sometimes be enough to have him pining for the lecture theatre.
“It’s definitely not so enjoyable sometimes,” he says. “It’s my job in the team to bowl in the powerplay and then at the back end of the innings when the batsmen are flying.
“I’m there trying to claw it back at the death in the 17th or 19th over or the 18th or 20th – I don’t get the easiest overs when they’re trying to knock it around at six or seven (an over). But that’s part of the enjoyment for me – I love that competitive battle.
“I have got up to 88 miles per hour and although I’m probably not up to 90 at the moment, I can consistently hit 86 to 88.
“If I’m honest, I don’t think I’ve had ample opportunities (in the County Championship) although I’m not deluding myself that I’ve done that well when I have been given the chance. When I did first play I was young and inexperienced. I probably wasn’t good enough to bowl six balls in the same place.”
For the moment, Brown can bide his time in four-day cricket, having established himself as one of the country’s outstanding exponents of T20 concealment.
“I reckon it took about a year and a half before my knuckle-ball was really good,” he says. “They take quite a long time. In 2018 my knuckle-ball was my probably my best ball but I’ve been working on off-cutter for the past year. At Finals Day I was probably bowling 80 per cent cutters, 10 per cent knuckle-ball and 10 per cent quicker balls.
“It has taken a long time to work on them and hopefully I’m at a stage where I know enough about myself that when they’re not coming out well then I’m not panicking. That just happens. I know that I can put it right. I also know I’ve got the sort of character that likes being in those different positions at the end of an innings.”
England will hope the man with the magic arm will find his feet as quickly in the international arena - and that his studious approach pays off.
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