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I mean everyone's always spoken about fast bowlers and especially myself as a strike bowler, but I look at myself as somebody who could hold down the runs, you know, over 200 games, I've taken a lot of wickets but I've got a pretty decent economy rate.
As an athlete there are times in your career where, during a game, any decision you make seems to be the right one. The bowler bowls where you want, you don't have to think and you are so 'in the zone' that you are not aware of anything else around you.
It is important as a bowler that you always need to have a presence. If you lose that you lose quite a bit, a big part of your armoury. It comes naturally with me, and at times it is a huge advantage. I don't want to lose it. I want to keep getting wickets.
I love the individual sport stuff but the experiences I've had with some great people over 12 or 15 years are what makes is special. That individual thing: me versus the bowler is great but you get that team feeling as well and that's why it suits me so well.
I was a bowler - left arm, smash it down as fast as I could. I did a lot of work with Damian D'Oliveira, and I probably had a chance of doing that for a living. But when I reached 16, I knew I couldn't carry on playing both football and cricket, and I was already in the Shrewsbury squad.
T20 is such a format that finishes quickly, and you only have four overs. If there are three bad balls in one over, you will go for runs, and your whole analysis suffers. The team is on back foot because of three balls. So each and every ball becomes very important. It makes the bowler think.
My father was a coal hewer from Goldthorpe, a coal-mining village in South Yorkshire. He played for the Yorkshire second team as an opening fast bowler - to me he was a gorgeously heroic man. He helped form a union and closed down the Barnsley seam because it was seeping gas, and saved many, many lives.
From a spinner's perspective, in India it was never easy for me to judge where to stand: how far forward, how far back, because on Indian wickets the ball does not carry as much as abroad. That is true of slip fielding in general. I wouldn't say only for spinner - even for a fast bowler, that holds true.
One of the great joys of being a slip fielder who takes a catch is you are able to contribute to the bowler's success. Yes, you are putting yourself in the firing line if you stuff it up, but you must want to be in that position to make a difference, and recognise sometimes that you might make mistakes. There are no easy catches in the slips.
