Allan Lamb is still furious about the Ashes, for two reasons.
First, England’s capitulation cost him money, because the tour group he took to Australia had to find alternative entertainment thanks to the early finishes. Second, he remains an England fan, 34 years after the last of his 79 Tests as a middle-order swashbuckler.
Having suffered bigger financial losses before, he can take that first disappointment on the chin. When he and Ian Botham lost a libel case in 1996 after accusing Imran Khan of calling them ‘racist, ill-educated and lacking in class’, Lamb had to cough up £250,000, wiping out the benefit money he had earned that summer with Northamptonshire, where he had spent all 18 seasons of his county career.
A few years earlier, he had been on the brink of leaving Jupiters Casino on Queensland’s Gold Coast with £80,000 in his pocket thanks to the blackjack skills of the business tycoon and World Series Cricket founder Kerry Packer. But Lamb’s group, which included David Gower, carried on gambling – and lost the lot.
Worse, Lamb was not out overnight in the first Ashes Test at the Gabba, where he was captain because Graham Gooch had injured his hand. Next morning, with news spreading of the casino jaunt and the storyline spiralling out of control (‘they said I’d left at 6am with a blonde’) he added only four before Terry Alderman trapped him lbw for 14.
It’s a typical Lamb tale, told with a mischievous glint and a chuckle as he sits back in his kitchen in Scaldwell, in the Northamptonshire countryside, a 20-minute drive from the county ground at Wantage Road.
Allan Lamb pulls no punches as he dissects England’s Ashes failures last winter
England slumped to yet another defeat Down Under – with two of the matches only lasting two days
Lamb pours champagne on his old partner in crime Sir Ian Botham
But there’s no getting away from the anger he can’t shake off – both because of England’s performance in Australia and the subsequent decision to stick with the managerial status quo.
‘It’s left me fairly disappointed, because there’s no accountability,’ he tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘If you fail with the England setup, you stay in your job. I’m told they’re trying to get involved more with county cricket this season, but it’s a bit late – the horse has bolted. If we had gone in to the Ashes with better preparation, we could have won. It was just a poor performance, and the ECB have done nothing about it.’
Who does he blame? ‘Oh, the chairman Richard Thompson and the CEO Richard Gould,’ he says. ‘Rob Key and Brendon McCullum are lovely guys, but my goodness, if I was running a business and I sent people away and they didn’t perform, that’s the end: you’ve got to find someone else.’
If the ECB had appointed a new managing director and head coach to replace Key and McCullum, Lamb would have gone for Alec Stewart (‘he doesn’t miss a trick’) and – more surprisingly, perhaps – Darren Lehmann, the former Australian coach now in charge at Northamptonshire, for whom Lamb scored more than 20,000 first-class runs at an average of 53 after moving to England from his native South Africa in the late 1970s.
Lehmann recently signed a two-year contract extension, taking him to the end of the 2029 summer, and has insisted he is done with international coaching. But Lamb is undeterred.
‘He’s hard but he’s helpful,’ he says. ‘He’s knowledgeable. He’s got a good record. His man-management is very good, and he lets you know exactly what he feels. He’s done an incredible job at Northants.’
Then there’s the Test team itself. Lamb is adamant that England should replace not only Zak Crawley but his opening partner Ben Duckett, after an Ashes tour in which he averaged 20 and made headlines because of the late-night video of him slurring his words during the now notorious trip to Noosa.
‘That was shocking,’ Lamb says. ‘An absolute disgrace. Listen, hands up: we all had a drink on tour, but we knew where the media were. You don’t go out in public. Where are the security? Duckett should never have been allowed to be walking around like that and getting interviewed. Total shambles.’
‘If we had gone in to the Ashes with better preparation, we could have won. It was just a poor performance, and the ECB have done nothing about it’
Lamb would have appointed Darren Lehmann (left) as England’s new head coach and Alec Stewart (right) as managing director to replace Brendon McCullum and Rob Key
He also would have dropped all of Zak Crawley (top left), Ben Duckett (bottom left) and Jamie Smith (right)
The story he tells next is a reminder of how much the spectre of social media has changed life for the touring cricketer.
‘Every time we went into a pub in Australia with Ian (Botham), they’d want to pick a fight: “Hey, Botham, you big fat slob”. And Beefy would get all riled up. One time at a bar in Bundaberg, the rum city in Queensland, he even knocked someone out.
‘I thought there was going to be a proper fight, so I jumped up on the bar counter, to try to calm things down. All of a sudden the other locals came over and started buying him pints and saying: “That guy deserved that.” I was like, “b***** hell, what’s going on?”’
But back to the Test team. Lamb would return the gloves to Ben Foakes – ‘the best keeper’ – and leave out Jamie Smith. And he is critical of Jofra Archer.
‘Mitchell Starc was hitting 92mph right away,’ he says. ‘Archer would begin a spell in the low-80s, and only then move up. If they’re going to use him in short spells, he’s got to hit the target straight away.’
And there’s despair at the performance of Harry Brook, who kept getting into a tangle against the short ball in Australia. Lamb himself, a shorter man than Brook, was a superb cutter and puller, scoring six of his 14 Test hundreds against the mighty West Indian quicks. But he can’t believe Brook kept trying to hit sixes on Australia’s vast grounds.
‘Harry Brook is an incredible player. He could be an absolute world-beater, just playing naturally and getting 150 in no time. But why does he throw it away? Unless you’re Viv Richards, you can’t hit it out of the ground in Australia. They bounce you and set people back. Taking that on is stupid cricket.’
Partly for that reason, Lamb doesn’t believe Brook should be England’s automatic next Test captain when Ben Stokes’s reign comes to an end: ‘You can’t have a captain playing like that.’
‘Every time we went into a pub in Australia with Ian (Botham), they’d want to pick a fight: “Hey, Botham, you big fat slob”. And Beefy would get all riled up’
‘Harry Brook is an incredible player. He could be an absolute world-beater, just playing naturally and getting 150 in no time. But why does he throw it away?’
Instead, he has a left-field suggestion: Sam Curran. It should be pointed out that Lamb is his godfather, as he is to his brothers, Tom and Ben.
Lamb was a county team-mate of their father, Kevin, who died at the age of 53 in 2012, and is close to the whole family. But he says his suggestion is not born of favouritism.
‘What they’ve said to Curran is that Stokes is holding him back, but if you bat in the top five, your time will come,’ Lamb says. ‘I think he’s very knowledgeable, and he reads the game well. And England need his left-arm variety in their attack.
‘I said to him: “Don’t slag off the selectors. Just keep playing and let your bat and ball do the talking”. Liam Livingstone shouting like he did was the wrong approach.’
There is a freedom to Lamb’s pronouncements that comes not only with age – he turns 72 in June – but from the perspective of personal circumstance. In 2021, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He is in the clear now, but has helped raise awareness of a disease that kills over 12,000 men in the UK each year.
Wantage Road has held testing clinics during the season, and Lamb says the first one potentially saved the lives of three men who were urged to pop in by their wives.
In the meantime, Lamb has also had to deal with the deteriorating health of his own wife, Lindsay, who is being supported by the family. ‘It’s tough,’ he says.
Lamb played 79 Tests and 122 ODIs for England, as well as for 18 seasons at Northamptonshire
In 2021, Lamb was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He is in the clear now, but has helped raise awareness of a disease that kills over 12,000 men in the UK each year
But the verve that brought him over 8,500 international runs remains intact, and he is planning to take another tour group to his native South Africa this winter for the third Test against England in Cape Town.
Before that, Lamb Associates, his sporting events and global travel business, will be laying on a trip to the Cape Winelands.
You can be sure he’ll be at the heart of it, loving every minute, laughing about England’s drinking even while he brandishes a Chenin Blanc, and sharing stories that belong to another time yet continue to capture the madness of life on the sporting road.
