Not one to be stared down

No ghostwriter haunts this account of a cricketing life, so obviously written by the man who played the way he did: stubborn, scornful of frills and too intelligent to be dull; a man (a boy) who could stick up for himself. At 19, in 1987, while still at Cambridge, he was already playing for Lancashire, causing resentment. Someone daubed FEC on his locker, which did not mean ‘Future England Captain’ (the E stood for ‘educated’). In only his third match for the county he put some wet clothes in the pavilion dryer and Paul Allott, a senior player, took them out and threw in his own. Atherton took out Allott’s and replaced his. It will stand for an image of his whole career: no one was ever going to stare him down. Later that day Allott and Fowler asked him out for a drink (‘it was almost an order’) and drove him to a distant pub.