Three months after a dream finale to his Test career, the England legend talks to Robert Crampton about highs, lows and adjusting to life outside the game.
We’re in the conservatory of a hotel in Wimbledon, close to where Stuart Broad has lived since moving down to southwest London from his native Nottingham two years ago. Three months on from his fairytale finale at the Oval (a six with his last shot and a wicket with his last ball in Test cricket, which has never been done before in 146 years of international cricket, and what’s more the wicket sealed a victory against the Australians), Broad still looks in good nick, no excess on his 6ft 6in frame.
“Actually, I’ve lost about 4kg,” he confides. “All muscle, I reckon. I’m eating a lot less. I don’t want to be that sportsman who, if you saw me in a pub in three years, it’d be, ‘Bloody hell! What’s happened to you?’ "
I interviewed Broad once before, 13 years ago, when he was 24 and a relative rookie, 37 Tests into his career. Now, he’s 37, with 167 Test caps (fifth in the all-time list) and 604 wickets (fifth again) to his name. Back then, at Lord’s, his agent sitting in, England and Wales Cricket Board suits flitting and fussing about, he had not been very forthcoming. Today — no minders, relaxed, legendary status long-since assured — he’s chatty, candid, self-deprecating, great company in fact. Quite the opposite of what Australian fans, who once greeted him with T-shirts declaring “Stuart Broad is a shit bloke”, would have us believe.
Is he enjoying retirement? “Yeah, but that word bugs me. That assumption that you finish doing sport then do bugger all is all wrong. I’m always trying to learn something else, whether that’s punditry or being a better dad.” In which regard, “it’s been a chaotic week” with Annabella, his daughter, 11 months. “She’s started nursery and picked up a couple of bugs. Poor Mollie, she was on the Breakfast Show on Radio 1 this morning having been up since two with a screaming daughter with a temperature.” Was he up in the small hours too? “Yeah, we do it together, have done since she was born.” Mollie is Mollie King, his fiancée, formerly a member of the girl group the Saturdays, now a BBC radio presenter. “The Ashes took me away for six weeks,” Broad admits, “but now, the majority of nights I’m at home.”
It took him a while, he says, to adjust to London. After two years, with former team-mates Ollie Pope, Zak Crawley, Eoin Morgan, Jos Buttler and Sam Billings all fairly close by in Clapham, he has built a social network. And now, three months in, he’s still getting used to not playing cricket for a living. Rather like career soldiers leaving the services, professional sportsmen are habituated to an all-encompassing support structure. When it’s removed, some can struggle. Broad, it is safe to say, with his business interests (he co-owns a pub) and a new career in punditry beckoning, will not be a casualty. Yet still, he admits the transition to civvy street is tricky.
“As a sportsman, you’re told when to train, when to be on the bus, when to eat. Your flights are booked. Your hotel is booked. You’re just cruising along, really. The moment you finish, all that structure has gone. I was paid to go to the gym, basically. Now, finding an hour to go is not that easy. I’m going to have to get that back.” Then again, not playing opens up leisure opportunities not previously available. “I was never able to play five-a-side football because of the injury risk. Now I can.” He will also learn to ski, alongside his daughter. “Mollie was a GB skier, whereas I’ve never been. I had a dream of spending my first Christmas out of the game on the slopes. That’ll have to wait until Annabella is old enough.”
Besides routine, two other benefits of the sporting life — and what most athletes say they most enjoy about their job — will have to be replaced too: camaraderie and competition. Broad is a keen golfer (seven handicap), as are his great mates Jimmy Anderson (two handicap) and Alastair Cook (15 handicap). “We keep saying we’ll get together at Woburn, where Cooky lives, play a round of golf and have dinner in a pub and celebrate our careers.” They haven’t managed to find a date yet. Talk of the devil, at that moment, Broad’s mobile vibrates: “Sir Alastair Cook” says the display. “Ah, there you go. I’ll call him back.”
For the moment, he’s got a book out, Broadly Speaking, which he’s promoting. He did some punditry work for Sky in the summer and will do more next year. Analysis and golf, however, he knows will not satisfy the flamboyantly competitive urge which, even at the elite level, distinguished him from most team-mates. How will he satiate that desire to compete?
“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s an unanswered question. I watched a good Brian O’Driscoll [the Irish rugby union legend who retired in 2014] documentary on moving away from sport, which rang true. He said he’d spent a few years trying to replicate the highs of sport. Then the realisation came that you can’t. You have to find other things that suit.
“I have noticed,” he continues, “that those that go on their own terms seem to transition better. I had a big fear of blowing a hamstring somewhere and never being seen again. I felt great; I was bowling well. I could have played on for two, three, four years. In five years I might sit back and go, ‘Why didn’t I just play on?’ But at least I won’t go, ‘It was taken from me.’ "
He is still smarting over the last time it was taken from him, albeit temporarily, when he and Anderson were dropped for the West Indies tour in 2022. “That pissed me off, yes. I was performing quite well, so missing out, I was furious. There was a lack of accountability in the decision. Andrew Strauss had taken over as interim managing director and even when he told me I was being dropped he said, ‘I’m not gonna do this job for long.’ So it was a statement dropping. It was, ‘I’m gonna drop these two. I’m gonna look good if we win. If we lose, I’m not in the job, so I’ll move on.’ That’s what annoyed me.”
There’s a fun passage in his book as he recalls the series of aggrieved phone calls with Anderson the night they were dropped. It’s very relatable: you can picture the scene, two old workmates winding each other up about the shortcomings of the boss class. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he chuckles. “But also, Jimmy’s mum was calling my mum! My mum has watched cricket for 15 years with the Roots, the Cooks, the Andersons. There’s a deep connection. Looking back, me and Jimmy getting left out probably rejuvenated our careers. If we’d gone and been part of a loss, it would have been easy to say, ‘These guys are done,’ and move on a 40-year-old and a 36-year-old [as they then were].” As it was, a new managing director, Robert Key, recalled Broad (and Anderson) for his swansong this summer, a series in which he took 22 wickets, overtaking Ian Botham to become the leading English wicket taker in Ashes history.
“That doesn’t mean I’m a better bowler than Beefy,” he is keen to emphasise. “It just shows I’ve had great longevity.” Indeed so. For a fast bowler to play 100 Tests is rare. Botham managed 102, and he wasn’t that fast towards the end. Broad’s fêted predecessors Andrew Flintoff and Darren Gough racked up 79 and 58 respectively before the peculiarly harsh demands of sprinting in, rotating your arm, bending your back and then slamming to a stop took their toll. For Broad to have bowled so well in his 167th Test was phenomenal.
“Here, look at this,” he says, scrolling through his phone for a video clip taken in the dressing room just after victory in Broad’s final Test. “Jimmy sent me this a couple of weeks afterwards. I’d forgotten I did this. This is me at the Oval…” The footage shows Broad unceremoniously dumping a pair of cricket boots in a bin. “It felt symbolic. Typically, they were bloodied.” Don’t your feet get used to the impact? “Nah, not really. You’re running 90 per cent of your top pace, then you slam a handbrake on your front foot. It’s inevitable.” His mum gave him a hard time when she saw the clip. “She said, ‘Why did you throw your boots in the bin?’ "
Broad was always keen on a bit of theatrics. He took on the role of geeing up the England fans and winding up the opposition fans, especially if they were Australian. Taking an astounding eight wickets (for 15 runs conceded) at his home ground of Trent Bridge in 2015, his hands- clapped-over-his-mouth celebration of a Ben Stokes catch became iconic. As did his pioneering of the “celebrappeal” (claiming a wicket without waiting for the umpire’s verdict), much frowned upon by purists. He saved his best amateur dramatics, however, for the final day of the Ashes Test at Lord’s this summer.
Broad came out to bat, with his captain Ben Stokes, following the controversial dismissal of Jonny Bairstow, adjudged run out even though most observers believed play was finished for that particular over. While technically within the laws, the Australian appeal was widely judged to flout the vaunted “spirit of cricket”. Members in the Long Room went ballistic. At the time, you will remember, it was big news, even threatening a diplomatic rift. Prime Ministers Rishi Sunak and Anthony Albanese saw fit to comment.
Into the maelstrom, his side still with an outside chance of winning, strolled England’s No 8, enthusiastically embracing the pantomime villain role he had long enjoyed performing against the old enemy. At the end of each over, for the whole of what became a lengthy innings, Broad would ostentatiously ground his bat, for ages, loudly asking the fielders if he was now safe to leave his crease. It was classic English schoolboy humour. Watching, I absolutely loved it, and tell him so.
“Oh, it was pathetic,” he says. “I felt so embarrassed. That night I sat at home with Mollie going, ‘What was I doing?’ "
No, I reassure him, it was precisely what was called for. “Yeah, Stokesy said, ‘Keep doing your thing because you’re rattling them here.’ I lost it for a bit.” A microphone picked up Broad telling Alex Carey, the wicketkeeper who had effected the sneaky run-out, “That’s all you’ll be remembered for.” “Yeah, that was a bit mean,” Broad admits. “I was so furious. I’d walked past Jonny and he was snorting like a bull. That had revved me up.”
He had a long history with the Australians. “My old man [Chris, ex-pro, 25 Tests for England in the Eighties] did well out there, so my name was known. Right from the first series I played, 2009 in England, their fans would sing Aerosmith’s Dude (Looks Like a Lady), relentlessly, because I had long blond hair. Then there was the ‘not walking’ thing.”
That refers to a 2013 game, again at Trent Bridge, when Broad was (palpably, obviously, blatantly) caught, but the umpire didn’t give him out, and he didn’t do the decent thing (hardly any batsman does) and walk off. The Aussie coach Darren Lehmann went on the radio and called on the cricketing public down under “to send Stuart Broad back home in tears” the next time England toured. “I’d be fielding and middle-aged men were shouting vile abuse. It was unique.” Now, he detects “a hint of respect from down that way. Although they might put me right on that.”
On the subject of abuse, Broad considers himself fortunate to have started his career before the advent of social media. “If as a youngster I had a crap day, I’d have to buy a paper and go, ‘Oh, Michael Atherton’s said I’ve had a crap day.’ I’d have to seek it out. Or, Sunday night, my grandad would say, ‘Bob Willis said you bowled badly.’ Oh did he? Cheers, Grandad. Now, it’s bang, 1,000 tweets saying you’re shit. What’s that doing for your mental health? It’s terrible.
“Jimmy and I have been fortunate to play in the perfect era,” he goes on. “We made sacrifices, but we were able to enjoy a beer, a glass of red, a steak, to celebrate our successes. While also having access to the best medical science, nutrition, training routines. In my dad’s era, you grabbed your Walkman andwent for a run.” And then had eight pints? “Yeah.” Ten years from now, he thinks, the wine and the steak will be off the menu entirely. And Test cricket will find it hard to compete with the lure of year-round limited-overs franchise leagues offering big money.
“My ambition was to pull on shirts and for the badge to mean something to me, which meant Test cricket. That’s what I grew up with. But if I was 20 now, would I target franchise cricket? More money and less work? Definitely.” As it is, at 37, he’s not even sure he will play again, in any format, even on the beach. “I’m not sure I want to. I hit my last ball batting for six and got a wicket with my last ball bowling. That’s hard to beat. I sort of think, ‘Why would I do it again?’ "
Stuart Broad: Broadly Speaking is out now.
Written by: Robert Crampton
© The Times of London
