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Being dropped hurt but my passion for the Bears remains

I had been hoping to play for Warwickshire yesterday in the semi-final of the Friends Provident Trophy against Hampshire, so to be told I wasn’t wanted by my county was gutting, especially after the England and Wales Cricket Board had gone to the trouble of offering to fly me from the Test match in Chester-le-Street to Southampton in a helicopter.

That all sounds very glamorous but I’m well aware that no player has a divine right to walk back into his county team after he’s been away on international duty. I understand that a club might develop a settled side in your absence and the guys did really well to reach the semi-finals. I also know it’s not a question of Warwickshire saying I’m not good enough to play for them. But I would like to think that my England experience might have stood me in good stead. To be surplus to requirements on such a big day for the club was disappointing to say the least.

It’s hard to overstate what Warwickshire mean to me. They have been in my blood ever since my family took me to Lord’s in 1993 when I was 11 to watch them chase over 300 to beat Sussex in the NatWest Trophy final. And one of the proudest moments of my career was being named man of the match at the same venue in the last-ever Benson & Hedges Cup final, against Essex in 2002. Even though we’ve just been playing a Test match, I’d been thinking about yesterday’s game for a long time. I am a Bear through and through.

We play a lot of international cricket these days which limits time with our counties, but I can assure you that we don’t stop thinking about how our team is getting on. The Teletext is constantly on in the England dressing room, even when we’re batting, and the county scores are a great source of banter. I check Warwickshire’s progress as often as I can.

The truth is it isn’t always easy going back into a county dressing room straight after a Test match. You do have to tread a bit carefully because, while the county has been busy in pre-season setting goals and bonding as a unit and so on, you’ve been away at the World Cup in the Caribbean.

That’s why I would never go back in and start barking orders. England is a team we should all want to play for but I also love going back to Warwickshire and there’s no way I would tread on people’s toes. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m just not that kind of person.

I really hope that the club realise how passionate I am about them. I will always remember that Sussex game in 1993. I was sitting in the old Lord’s grandstand with my family, and the Sussex fans were loving it because they had made 320-odd and Warwickshire had lost a couple of early wickets.

But we ended up winning the game thanks to a hundred from Asif Din and some amazing hitting at the end from the captain, Dermot Reeve, and from that day on I knew I wanted to be a professional cricketer for Warwickshire.

Until then football had been my favourite sport, with cricket and rugby union next, but that result changed everything. It was a match that made teams realise you could chase big scores and win after all, and I wanted to be part of that.

I have played for Warwickshire ever since I was 10 and I couldn’t imagine turning out for another county. It would just feel wrong. To these young eyes in the mid-1990s, Warwickshire always looked as if they did things a bit differently. They would win matches they did not seem to have any right to win, and to lift all those trophies under the Reeve and Bob Woolmer partnership made them the team you wanted to be associated with.

They also had overseas stars like Brian Lara and Allan Donald, who is involved with the England team now, and I’ll never forget walking into the dressing room for my first-team debut at the age of 17 and rubbing shoulders with some of my heroes. For me it was a different world.

People often wonder whether it is possible to lack motivation playing county cricket immediately after an international. Maybe it is for others, but not for me. I wanted to play against Hampshire yesterday and settle some scores from the 2005 final. But I will be at Edgbaston tomorrow night for the Twenty20 match against Somerset and I’ll support us all the way.