That’s something we’ve got to overcome this year and start to change I feel we’ve gotthe base. We probably need to introduce three or four players over two years to change our fortunes around. The role model for everyone is Gloucestershire.”The question marks against the Middlesex team are matched by those against Emburey’s appointment. He was always a cricketer’s cricketer in his quarter-century as a rigorously accurate off-spin bowler and effectively unorthodox late- middle-order batsman. He loved playing the game, loved yarning about it, still does.He played 64 Tests for England, whom he captained twice, and is also 64th in the list of all-time wicket-takers with 1,608.
It was always assumed that he would coach, and when Northamptonshire approached him to be their player-coach, nobody was surprised. He helped with England too, and that was no less expected.But he was not an unbridled success. Three years into a fouryear contract, Northamptonshire released him in 1998. All of a sudden, to use a much-liked Emburey phrase, he was no longer flavour of the month. In his 49th year, he had signed to be player-coach for Berkshire in the 2001 season. At the end of the summer he and his family, wife Susy and two teenage daughters, were going to emigrate to Australia The Middlesex job intervened. He was not the first choice and he knows it, but attempts to enlist another overseas coach (not John Buchanan) failed.Superficially, Emburey may be seen as merely another sop to the old days.
His old spinning partner and best man, Phil Edmonds, is chairman at the club, the man who kept wicket to him for 11 years, Paul Downton, is on the committee.”I can’t speak for Gatt, but he might have been entrenched in his own style at the end of his career. Going from playing to coaching in one swoop is to enter a totally different way of thinking Northampton was a big learning curve for me. I didn’t do everything right but I certainly did a lot that was. The spinners there have come through, but that’s down to others as well It didn’t work.