Sign of a visionary

profile; David Lloyd

IT IS NOT easy to get lost these days, at least not in the existential sense, when you play cricket for Lancashire. Large three-foot-long signs, depicting solitary words accompanied by a single red rose, fairly litter the walls of the players' dressing-room. Words such as Effort, Skill, Class, Aggression, Vision and Commitment are all there; benign pointers constantly urging players to remember what their season is about. Follow the trail backwards though, and it will lead you directly to David Lloyd, Lancashire's innovative cricket coach.

"Players aren't as conservative as they used to be, and are dead keen to learn more by using new techniques," Lloyd said by way of cagey explanation. It doesn't stop there. In addition to the signs, he has also brought in the services of a sprint coach, a psychologist (Wasim Akram's wife, Huma), had a volleyball net installed (to improve shoulder mobility), and is employing an American eyesight specialist, Ken West. Quite a coup for someone just into their third season as coach.

If it weren't for the compelling evidence so far - four players selected for the England squad, victory in the B & H Cup final last weekend, and high hopes in the other main competitions - such methods would have been dismissed by cricketing traditionalists as faddish mumbo jumbo, imported from abroad.

"Having been through it a bit myself as a player," Lloyd said, "What I don't want them to do is just turn up at nine o'clock in the morning, then spend the rest of the day thinking about going home, as if it were a tedious job. I want them to be competitive, but happy, and I think we've got that at Old Trafford."

This is no mean feat. Several talented players such as Ian Austin, Steve Titchard, Nick Speak and Lloyd's own son Graham, are by no means guaranteed regular first-class cricket. Among competitive spirits this can breed discontent, though dejection has been eased by capping the players concerned and paying them well. No team can hope to achieve what Lancashire want from their season by creating an internecine environment.

Much of the credit can be taken by Lloyd senior, now 48, with his easy communication skills and off-beat humour, though Test calls and the odd injury have also served to appease ambitious squad members. "I've told them that they won't play all the time, but that when they do their contributions will be vital."

Humour and gentle persuasion can work well in all-male environments, but "Bumble", as Lloyd is known in cricketing circles (one of his team- mates thought him the spitting image of Michael Bentine's TV characters, Bumbly One, Two and Three), is far more complex, and he has been known to apply the whip as well.

What cannot be denied, is that he is a naturally funny man, whose large nose somehow adds to the comic effect - he had to have a special visor made when he decided to wear glasses to bat. However, he can also be intense, particularly over cricket, and has been known to rant over the relative insignificance of batsmen missing a quick single.

Once, as a player, following a semi-final defeat in the NatWest Trophy against Northamptonshire, Lloyd had been forced to bowl the last over. After four byes had secured Northamptonshire a match Lancashire should have walked, he sat picking grass out of the pitch for 10 minutes before returning to the dressing-room. Once there, he didn't utter a single word, but sat drinking bottled beer under a table, before smashing the empties against the wall. A week later, he was entertaining Ray East and John Lever, teasing their Essex team-mates on a daily basis with the likes of exploding tea spoons, garlic sweets and foaming sugar.

David Lloyd was born in Accrington on 18 March 1948. His father, an operating theatre technician in the local hospital, did not play cricket. The young Lloyd picked it up in the playground of the local primary school, where the occasional competitive match was organised well. Later at technical college, where even fewer games failed to quell the appetite, he turned to his local club, Accrington CC, to further his cricketing education.

Luckily, Jack Simmons, a longstanding servant to Lancashire cricket, had already taken the same route, so a role model existed, and both Accrington's professionals of the period, Wes Hall and Bobby Simpson, took a shine to him and helped advance his game.

When he was eventually spotted at a Lancashire Schools trial at Old Trafford, he was a slow left-arm chinaman bowler, but after joining the county staff at 16, he was soon converted to orthodox left-arm spin. The journey to work, he recalled, took nearly two hours and involved catching three buses. It was 1965.

The journey to opening batsman, however, took a while longer, and owed much to the eccentric Lancashire coach Charlie Hallows, himself a left- hander, who'd long shown faith in his young protege. Hallows spotted Lloyd's potential and his methods gave the young man a sound grounding, particularly against spin, to score enough county runs to warrant Test selection by the time he was 26.

The ecstasy and agonies of playing for England came and went in just nine Test matches in a single bittersweet year. In only his second Test in 1974, he experienced the triumph of an unbeaten double century against India, before being sent to open the innings in Australia, against Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, on hard, fast, bouncy pitches. "They completely bombed us," Lloyd said, recalling the cathartic experience. "The pitches were greased lightning, but true. We got hammered. We didn't have anything to bomb them back with." Such exasperation uncannily mirrored England's recent ordeal against the West Indies at Edgbaston.

In another unlikely bout of deja vu, Raymond Illingworth hadscathingly dubbed the 1974-75 touring party, "Fred Karno's Circus", for the selectors had neglected John Snow, the hero of Illingworth's successful Ashes campaign four years earlier. Boycott had also mysteriously withdrawn at the eleventh hour. Non-playing Yorkshiremen were hogging the headlines even then.

It was the first non-stop battering of mind and body and few returned to Blighty unscarred. Lloyd, though badly injuring his neck while fielding, which speeded his retirement from the first-class game in 1983, was also struck a debilitating blow in the box. In those days, such protectors were made of brittle pink plastic and had not been tested to the kind of impact Lillee and Thomson were generating against soft pommie flesh. "The thing disintegrated, and they had to carry me off in the same position as I'd collapsed in," Lloyd recalled in typical deadpan voice. "I couldn't move as I was in absolute agony." Despite the painful memories, the story survives as a staple part of his brilliant after-dinner speaking routine.

Since his playing days Lloyd has not been idle, having taken up, and mastered, first-class umpiring and broadcasting, and he regularly features as a member of the BBC's Test Match Special team. He was also instrumental in developing the ever popular Kwik Cricket during the 1980s, when he worked for the TCCB.

Though he wasn't to know it at the time, that Ashes winter also heralded the end of Lloyd's international career. "One of the real disappointments when I look back," he said, "was knowing that I was only good enough when I was at the very peak of my game. If it fell by just 1 per cent below that level, I wasn't quite up to it. That was the really frustrating thing."

Not so his ability to teach others. Graeme Fowler remembers when he was just starting out as a tyro opener himself: "Bumble was great. He was so passionate about the game. He had all these crazy theories about cricket. He once told me that as an opening bat my job was to get the ball soft so the glamour boys in the middle-order could smash it about. To do that, he suggested I look around for the nearest bit of concrete outside the boundary and try to hit the ball there as often as possible." There was always a sensible centre lurking within that wacky carapace.

Another Lancashire player, Frank Hayes, who has known Lloyd since they were in the Under-11s together, believes the fanaticism has been tempered for the better, and he has at last found his vocation. "Bumble's experiences since playing have given him the common touch with all kinds of personalities. Youngsters, senior pros and committee men can all identify with him. In this day and age that is a precious commodity."