Jonny Bairstow Quotes

I think ‘chuffed to bits’ is a very Yorkshire way of describing my feelings for my friend and county team-mate Joe Root on his promotion to England captain.

I’m a bit taller too because I’ve got Mum’s legs and Dad was a bit more squat and well-built than me. My brother Andrew is a bit more like Dad.

In my head I’m talking all the time.

I’ve learnt a lot about Dad from going around the world and listening to other people. Whether I’ve been in Australia, the Caribbean, Leeds, Scarborough or London there’s always someone who’s got a story about him.

Get picked for an Ashes Test at Lord’s and you know you’re going to meet the Queen. She arrived before the start of our game against Australia in 2013 and we lined up for inspection like the household cavalry on Horse Guards Parade.

If you can’t motivate yourself to get up and play in front of 30,000-40,000 people, then you’re not in the right job.

The less you worry about things the more you just do it naturally.

As a young kid you stay up late to watch the Ashes, getting told off for not being in bed, and dream of making a hundred against Australia.

Every young cricketer from our county dreams of playing for Yorkshire and going on to represent England.

Mum never made an excuse, even when she had cancer and had a lot on her plate. You have to have huge admiration for the way she brought us up.

You look at the challenges that have been put in front of me as a cricketer over a period of time. There have been quite a few. I’d like to think I’ve come through most of them.

Everything goes out of the window when you start an Ashes series. It’s about grabbing the moment.

My dad was an only child. His father raised him all but alone after his mother abandoned the two of them. He was only three years old.

Well, I grew up in a certain way, through the experiences that I had, so I don’t know how I would have turned out had things been different.

The 20th anniversary of my dad David’s death coincided with my 50th Test cap and for it to be my mum Janet’s birthday, too, made it an emotional few days. It was not an easy week, being the Pink Test and my mum having had breast cancer twice.

People don’t actually see what’s gone on behind the scenes – the hard work, when you’re doing your rehab, when you’re sleeping on an ice machine – and yet they have an opinion on it.

I’ve learnt – and this pleases me – that my dad’s cricketing life and my own will always be intertwined, even though I will finish far behind the number of appearances he made for Yorkshire and also his length of service at Headingley.

You know when you’ve hit a good shot. I use a bat that weighs two pounds and nine ounces, and it makes a reassuringly solid sound when I connect properly. The ball pings off the middle.

A hundred for England is special and there’s a lot of emotion and a lot of hard work involved in getting back on the field. No one sees the hard work and all the time with the ice machines in rehab.

I was a fortnight away from my 16th birthday when the fabled 2005 Ashes series ended. My hero-worship throughout it belonged to Ian Bell – though I don’t think I’ve ever made that abundantly clear to him.

No one saw me cry over my dad’s death for almost nine years. I hid what I felt, bottling up my emotions so tightly that almost nothing leaked out.

But having gone through two bouts of breast cancer and all the operations and treatments it’s fair to say mum’s a special human being – especially as she had to deal with the tragedy and heartache that went with Dad’s death.

When I came into the Yorkshire academy I was christened Bluey almost immediately.

We’re a special family and it’s just that Dad’s life was taken away from us far too early. Everywhere you go around the world he had an effect on people – in the Caribbean, Australia, South Africa or England. I’ve never heard a bad word said about him.

Most people believe their family is special. I know mine is.

You think of what might have been different if dad had been around, or how I might have turned out as a person. You just don’t know. I might not even be playing cricket.

I do enjoy fielding in the deep and I enjoy engaging with the crowd.

I played fly-half in rugby, so I could influence the game, and midfield in hockey too. So it is part of my sporting DNA to want to be in the game at all times, to affect what is going on. That’s down to genetics and being ginger, I reckon. We’re special specimens.

It’s all well and good when it’s going good and people have an opinion on how well you’re playing, but it’s the hidden things they don’t see.

My dad is never far from my thoughts. A place, a game, an incident somewhere or an unexpected word from someone can trigger a memory, which then triggers another, and suddenly I’m thinking about him, if only for a minute or two.

It’s important to have a smile with spectators but it’s not always possible.

I don’t like intensely complicated coaching. I prefer to work things out by myself. A gentle hint is all I need, otherwise it’s like finishing a crossword after someone has given me the answers.

As a youngster, you take a lot of things to heart, so you have to learn to trust yourself.

In an Ashes series you have to adapt quickly to the conditions and your rivals. If you don’t, you get found out.

If someone who doesn’t know anything about wicketkeeping finds a reason to criticise, you have to sift it out. It’s about working out how to deal with the criticism while improving your game.

Look how successful Eddie Jones was, then all of a sudden a training camp is wrong and it’s his fault. The same with Stuart Lancaster.

I was only ever briefly angry with my dad for leaving us. It happened shortly after his death, when things were at their darkest and the grief in me was raw and at its worst.

When you’re going through difficult times, like I was after the 2013-14 Ashes, you start thinking about different bits. Rugby is a huge passion of mine, a lot of my friends play.

If your game is to take everything on then you have to stick with that and if it’s your game to get out of the way of the short ball then that’s what you do.

I’ve been through practices during which I’ve felt as though medieval torture would have been easier.

But put it this way: if I have a bad day keeping, I know I can put it right with the bat, and vice versa. When it all comes together, happy days.

When my dad died, I was eight. Becky was seven. My mum had cancer, the first of two bouts that she’s fought and beaten.

You’re able to learn different things from different coaches and different players.

When I came into the England team I was always being asked whether I ‘really’ wanted to be a wicketkeeper. It was as though no one had noticed the work I’d already put in to make myself one.