Follow UsRavi Bopara is no stranger to franchise cricket, but there was a time when he was considered one of the best First-Class and List-A cricketers in England and a solid batting all-rounder for the team.
The now-40-year-old made his debut as a 22-year-old in 2007 against Sri Lanka. Before making his debut in Tests, he made his first-class debut as a 17-year-old in 2002 and between 2002 and 2007, he amassed 3252 runs at an average of 40 with six hundreds and 12 fifties.
Most of Bopara’s runs came at numbers three and four, which made the selectors notice the talent in him and give him a call-up. What worked in his favour back then was also the fact that he could bowl, as he had picked up 59 wickets in an equal number of matches, including a five-wicket haul.
The biggest Test for Bopara came in the 2009 Ashes at home. He was tasked to bat at three. After getting out for 1 and 35 in the first two innings of the opening Test at Cardiff, Bopara, an Essex legend himself, who was awed by Andy Flower in his early days at the club, had to bear one of the worst days of Flower, who was coaching England during that home Ashes.
Explaining that fateful meeting with Flower, who is now Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) coach, Bopara, quoted by Indian Express as saying in The Guardian, said, “After that first innings at Cardiff, when I got out to the slower ball off Johnson, I had to go see Andy in his hotel room. I was like, ‘Yeah, no worries’.”
“Got back to his room and he just let me have it. Like, ‘What the f**k are you doing? Do you know who’s batting No 3 for Australia? Ricky Ponting! And he’s just got 150!’ You know, stuff like that. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll get a hundred in the second innings.’ And Bopara said, ‘You’d f****g better, because we’ll end up losing this Test because of you’,” he added.
After that conversation, Bopara claims he was not the same batter any more. He said, “I know he didn’t mean that. It was his way of getting me going. But on reflection, I went into my shell. I shat myself, thinking, ‘I don’t think he rates me. He must think I’m shit’. And after that, I was just nowhere for the rest of the series. I was so nervous about batting, and I just felt like eyes were staring at me.”
After that innings, Bopara’s scores in that series read- 27, 18, 23, 0 and 1. Later on, when he even got a chance to play Tests against India and South Africa, he was unable to even cross the fifty-run mark. It was the same Bopara who had scored back-to-back three Test tons against West Indies in 2009.