If you can't beat them, join them: why more English players should go abroad

"Jeez mate, you's must be a pretty ordinary player if you can't get in that Pommie side. I hope you're better than the Pom we had last year, 'cos he was shithouse."

Those are just two of the comments that tend to greet a young English cricketer when he arrives in Australia. Admittedly, they are not the most welcoming of utterances and quite often they do not even come from your opponents on a Saturday afternoon. No, this can be the greeting you get from your team-mates when you turn up to club practice for the first time on a Tuesday or Thursday evening. The remarks are normally tongue-in-cheek but, as with many things in Australia, South Africa and even New Zealand, they are said for a reason, and there is always a little bit of something behind them.

In the Eighties and early Nineties visits to these countries by English cricketers used to be a regular occurrence. The occasional Test player Graeme Hick, Ian Botham, and Vic Marks played Sheffield Shield cricket in Australia; a few more Matthew Maynard, Paul Allott, Neil Mallender and Hick again appeared in first-class cricket in New Zealand, and for several years, especially before the abolition of apartheid, many played in South Africa's Currie Cup.

But the majority of the migrant English professionals did not travel overseas to play first-class; their destination was a district side in the suburbs of Sydney, Auckland or Cape Town. In the first week of October flights to these destinations would contain dozens of young aspiring cricketers hoping one day to follow in the footsteps of those named above. In the last month of the season a deal would have been arranged with a club side, which normally consisted of a paid air fare, accommodation and a job. If you were really lucky you would get a car too on my first visit to Sydney my "sponsored car" was a mini moke, a small jeep-like vehicle with a collapsible roof. It was good when the sun shone; hell when it rained.

Stephen Harmison, Liam Plunkett and Andrew Strauss, who announced on Wednesday that he will play for the New Zealand state side Northern Districts in the new year prior to England's tour of the country, will have each travelled abroad this winter in an attempt to improve as cricketers but, sadly, they are now in a minority.

There are myriad reasons why fewer professional cricketers now go abroad during the off-season and I believe it is having a detrimental affect on their development. Some are out of the player's control. In South Africa, for example, there are fewer openings. A decade ago first-class teams and clubs in, say, Cape Town would happily pay for an English pro to come over and play for them. Now, and quite rightly, this money is being used to develop young local talent.

There is some money in Australian Grade cricket, a level considered to be the true roots of the country's strength. But most clubs would rather spend money luring a proven and ambitious local player to their club than on a county cricketer who may treat the visit as a holiday, which several, sadly, have done.

The length of county contracts has had an affect, too. Twenty years ago players were on six-month contracts between April and September, and at the end of each season they would wave goodbye to the club and go their own separate way. If you remained in England you were expected to turn up for the occasional winter net in January, February or March. If you went abroad you were only required to turn up fit and healthy for pre-season training on 1 April.

Now most counties have their players on seven-month contracts March being the extra month. Some even secure their devotion for 12 months. But overseas teams do not want a player who turns up for part of a season, they want commitment and they want them there throughout.

In the new "highly professional" era directors of cricket control what a player does during the winter and few are prepared to let a member of their staff disappear without trace for six months. To justify their existence many coaches and directors of cricket create winter programmes, where they organise weekly sessions with players working on certain aspects of their game in a dusty indoor school batting against a bowling machine.

Salaries for county cricketers have risen dramatically in the past eight or 10 years too, and players can now afford to sit on their backside doing very little during the winter if they want. In the past it was more fun running up debt in the antipodes than at home. Quite a few pay for themselves to visit Perth, Western Australia, for a month or two after Christmas, where a couple of coaches have set up little camps with excellent facilities. A few counties take several of their players to specially organised training camps in India for two or three weeks, where batsmen can learn how to play spin and slow bowlers to bowl it.

The England and Wales Cricket Board engage many of the country's best young cricketers too, inviting them to spend several weeks at the National Performance Centre at Loughborough. Here they will work with the best coaches in England where their techniques will be analysed closely. Nutritionists, physiotherapists, biomechanics, physiologists and psychologists will advise them cricket is certainly doing its bit for the service industry. While there they will learn a lot but, for me, not as much as going abroad and spending six months playing tough cricket on your own in a foreign country.

I look back on my winters in Wellington and Sydney with great fondness. I arrived in each destination on my own, not knowing anyone at the club I was about to play. My job with each side was simple to win games of cricket for them. I was a professional, they were amateurs. That is why they were paying for me to come over and that is what I was expected to do.

The regard for English cricketers, particularly in Australia, is not very high and the first thing you have to do is win the respect of those you play with. It is achieved through the way you train and the way you play on the field. If you are a shirker they will let you know. Aussies take great joy in calling you a "Pommie soft cock". You learn to organise your life, make friends, cook and wash. Before I went away at 18 my mother performed most of those tasks for me.

Strauss tells a story of his first day at nets with Mosman in Sydney, Australia. Phil Alley, a 6ft 8in fast bowler who played several seasons for New South Wales, was bowling at him on a bouncy pitch and he was having a bit of a nightmare against him. Suddenly the president of the club, the man who had signed Strauss up, appeared next to him on the other side of the net. He said: "Look Pom, every person in the club is here looking at you mate; now don't fuck it up."

The experience of being away is at times hard but you grow up quickly. You have to, but you return a tougher, more determined and independent person. You learn to deal with real life situations both on and off a cricket field, not just talk about hypothetical situations, as many do, in an indoor school before returning to a dormitory where your meals are laid on for you.

If the ECB and county clubs are deliberately preventing their young players from gaining these experiences they are doing them a disservice. Each should form associations with major clubs in the southern hemisphere and place players there for six months. Contributions to air fares, accommodation, cars and the organisation of a job on arrival should be made but the player must play an entire season, even if it means he misses the first couple of weeks of pre-season training. Then, at the end of the stint abroad, they should get a full and honest appraisal of how the player has handled himself both on and off the pitch.

Captains and coaches need players who know how to react when things are not going according to plan in the middle, not players who look to the dressing-room for advice or inspiration. England will have a better chance of producing such players if they allow them to spread their wings and learn by their own mistakes.