Longing to belong

Paul Collingwood talks about his England experiences with the same wide-eyed excitement a club cricketer might show if, in some faraway parallel universe, he ever got the call from David Graveney. It is not that he cannot believe he is an international cricketer because, after much soul-searching, he most certainly can. It is just that the journey there has been so tortuous, so full of ifs and buts, that he has been programmed not to take anything for granted.

It is early April in the foyer of the team hotel in Guwahati in north-east India, where England have arrived to play the fifth one-day international, a match that never takes place because of a premature monsoon. It is four months on from Collingwood's Eureka! moment as an England cricketer: an innings of 96 against Pakistan in the third Test at Lahore. That was followed by 80 in the second innings, then an unbeaten 134 in the first Test against India at Nagpur in March. But, asked whether he now feels an integral part of the Test side, he shakes his head: "No, not yet. Not at all. But I've made the job harder for the selectors. As long as I do that, I'm happy I've shown people what I can do. Most of all, though, I've shown myself that I'm good enough at this level."

The concepts of self-examination and its inevitable corollary, self-doubt, crop up time and again. Self-doubt might be thought a rare emotion in a middle order that includes Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff, but it is there all right, the Indian elephant in the room. When Collingwood struggled on his international debut in England's disastrous summer of 2001, he doubted himself. When he seemed forever stuck on the periphery of the Test team, especially on tour when all he did was mix the cordial, he doubted himself. And when he was dropped after the first Test at Multan in November, he doubted himself more than ever. "I got pretty down about it," he says. "I was very honest with the people I spoke to after that. I actually thought it was my last chance."

Collingwood's previous three Tests had all come in backs-to-the-wall efforts: Galle and Kandy in 2003-04, and The Oval 2005, the game that enthralled the nation and won Collingwood an MBE. Now, at Multan, he was walking to the crease with England 198 for 2 in reply to Pakistan's 274. The pressure was off and so, paradoxically, it was on. In the first innings he touched a Shabbir Ahmed outswinger to depart for 10; in the second he missed a straight one: lbw b Mohammad Sami 3. After eight Test knocks he was averaging less than 15. His importance to the one-day side was no consolation.

"That was the one opportunity where I thought, a flat deck, no circumstances outside my own game that will affect what I'm going to do in this Test match. In Sri Lanka you've got to come up against Muralitharan on your debut when you're still finding your feet. The Oval, obviously, I was absolutely cacking myself like everybody else was. But not to score any runs at Multan, where I could play my natural game, was absolutely devastating."

Collingwood spoke to Michael Vaughan after the match and told him he just needed to get a start, to find what he repeatedly calls his "rhythm". A fit-again Vaughan replaced him for the second Test at Faisalabad but, when Andrew Strauss flew home before the third to attend the birth of his child, Collingwood got another chance. And the rhythm came almost straightaway. After playing out three dot balls from Shoaib Akhtar and two from Shoaib Malik, Collingwood eased Malik for three quick offside boundaries (leg-side shoveller, indeed!) and after 13 deliveries found himself on 17. The flying start allowed him to throttle back. Only one more four followed in the next 21 overs, before he hit Rana Naved for three boundaries in five balls. The rhythm was quick, slow, quick. There was no looking back.

"I think I needed that one innings to get us going," he says in his north-eastern twang. "Once I got that, I knew I would get the right rhythm in Test cricket. Until I got that first score, I didn't really know what the right rhythm was to play at. It was the first time I realised to myself, `I'm good enough to be here'. To come up against Shoaib and Sami and Rana and Danish, who are all world-class bowlers, to know that I'd scored runs against them, that was the real innings that said, `right, I can do it'."

No matter that he fell four short of a hundred, hooking Shoaib Akhtar to fine leg. The belief that he belonged had arrived and he talks about his century in Nagpur as if it had merely been a matter of time. Yet others had already believed for him. After the fourth ODI in India Collingwood had been enjoying a nostalgic chuckle with Andrew Flintoff about the moment in 2001, when Steve Waugh, captain of the touring Australians, delved beneath the statistics - four innings, 20 runs - to praise Collingwood's ticker. Cynics detected the classic Australian one-card trick of talking up a less-than-crucial member of the opposition. "Freddie said, `Well, that worked; it got you back in the side'," says Collingwood with a laugh.

He was taken on the one-day tour of Zimbabwe that winter and made 36, 77 and 56 not out. "After the four games I wondered. Well, I had massive doubts about my own ability, whether I was good enough. It was a baptism of fire. I realised at the time I'm nowhere near international cricket. It wasn't just the Aussies giving us a load of stick. It was watching Shahid Afridi hit sixes over backward point against the old ball and I'm thinking, `No way am I ever going to be able to do that'. It was hard to take.

"But luckily I got that next chance in Zimbabwe. Whether it was because of Steve Waugh making a few comments I don't know. I think he'd obviously seen something, whether it was me being silly enough to try to hook Brett Lee a couple of times for one round the corner or something as simple as that. Maybe it was. We'll never know. But it did give us a little bit of confidence."

Collingwood contributed an unbeaten 71 to the one-day win at Cuttack in January 2002, then went 16 innings without reaching 40. Confidence wobbled once more. Then came Perth, and a VB Series group game against Sri Lanka. England slid to 122 for 6 in temperatures of up to 40 C but Collingwood assessed the situation to perfection, doing away with big hits, pushing single after single down the ground and providing early justification for Danish Kaneria's recent judgement that he is England's best player of spin. He made 100, Craig White hit 48 and England reached 258 for 9. Sri Lanka crumbled to 163. It was the kind of innings Graham Thorpe might have played in his prime: sensible, risk-free, unflappable.

Before that innings Collingwood had averaged 25 in one-day cricket. Since then he has averaged closer to 37, which is world-class. That innings at the WACA, full of "maturity and substance", said Wisden, proved to Collingwood that "you have to adapt your game wherever you go". It marked him out as the thinking-man's cricketer of England's middle-order but it also kick-started a process of pigeonholing that, until Lahore, had threatened to stunt his Test career. One-day specialist, nudger and nurdler (the Perth innings contained two sixes, four fours, five twos and 62 singles), crisis manager, legside addict (only 31 runs were scored on the off) - the praise was more than faint but riddled with caveats.

When this pigeonholing is pointed out to him Collingwood sounds like the comedian Catherine Tate. "Do I look bothered?" he says with a laugh. The answer is no, he does not. "People have a view on the way I've played and that's up to them. So long as I know myself what my strengths and weaknesses are and adapt that to whatever situation and score the runs, then I'll be happy."

In many ways - and here comes another stereotype - Collingwood is the archetypal 21st-century England cricketer, a player who, under the guidance of Duncan Fletcher, is learning to make the most of his talents. The 1980s and 90s brought us Allan Lamb (Test average: 36), Mike Gatting (35), Graeme Hick (31), Mark Ramprakash (27), and John Crawley (34). It is hard to argue that Collingwood is as naturally gifted as any of them but going into the new English season he was averaging over 40. And that is despite batting between Pietersen and Flintoff. Is he never tempted to go along for the ride? "When you watch these guys, you do wonder how the hell they do it," he says. "But you try not to get too carried away and stick to your own game.They do things that I'll never be able to do."

The ability to make honest assessments is one of Collingwood's strengths. It is easy to see why the management rate his dressing-room presence so highly. It seems like a good moment to ask him about the post-Ashes downer the team experienced in Pakistan. Did it really happen or was it one of those black-and-white media creations that reduces every aspect of life to a simple, easily understandable nugget? "You look at everything that went on that summer and I think the natural reaction was to come down from that," he says. "As much as we talked about wanting to stay up on that level, it's very hard really to keep the levels of intensity up - mentally more than anything else. You go out there with the right thought processes and you want to do well. But we missed out on that opportunity in Multan and that gave them a lot of confidence.

"When you've done something like the Ashes, it does something to the team. It gives us a bit of an aura, like we're maybe better than what we are or whatever, and Multan took it away from us. I think if you look at what the psychologists say, there had to be a downer after that Ashes series."

Perhaps Collingwood's on-off relationship with the Test team makes him better placed than some of his colleagues to recognise pitfalls when he sees them. It has also lent him an endearing sense of perspective. After the 12 players who helped win the Ashes were named in the New Year's Honours, The Times wondered whether Collingwood should have earned an MBE for playing one Test while Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool captain, got nothing for winning the Champions League. Did that bother him? "I didn't know about it until you told me," he says, laughing. And now he does know, it does not seem to bother him at all.

After all, there is too much to think about to let newspaper jibes ruffle him - the 2006-07 Ashes for one thing. Does Collingwood see himself batting at No. 5 at Brisbane in November? "I would love to be. It's a massive drive. To have that one Test match was something I've always dreamed of. But to get a full Ashes would be something really special."

The funny thing is, the idea of Collingwood walking out to bat at 50 for 3 on the first morning at the Gabba is quite reassuring. If Steve Waugh really did spot something in 2001, he might just have been a better judge of a player than anyone realised.