The cricketing education of Stuart Broad began in some ways exactly like yours or mine, and in other ways nothing like ours at all.There was the familiar: endless games in the back garden, begging family members to throw a ball at him, hitting a taped-up tennis ball against the bedroom wall so often that an enormous crack gradually opened up.Then there was the atypical, the sort of thing that only happens when your father is opening the batting for England."Courtney Walsh used to bowl at me on the outfield at Gloucestershire," he remembers. "Off one pace. But it still came from a frightening height."We are sitting in a hospitality box at Trent Bridge in the week preceding England's first Test of the summer against New Zealand, looking down on the grass beyond the boundary, where the knee-high Broad and Phil Robinson, son of another England opener, Tim, would set up a dustbin for a wicket and disrupt play by chasing wild slogs onto the outfield.Broad's earliest cricketing memory, somewhat amusingly, is his father Chris making him watch a VHS highlights tape of the 1986-87 Ashes, when his three centuries went a long way to winning England the series.Broad with dadPaternal pride aside, the young Broad would find, like many others over the next 18 years, that being English and a cricket fan was often an unpalatable mix."It actually hurts me a bit to admit it, but my cricketing heroes growing up were Australian," he says. "In the back garden I'd be Glenn McGrath or 'Warnie' (Shane Warne). I'd try to whack it like Matthew Hayden. They were so successful - they were winners."No matter. With big sister Gemma doing the backyard bowling when Courtney was otherwise engaged, and mother Carole ferrying him to nets and matches, Broad's journey to the top had begun.prodigies is that practice is what turns keen kids into winning adults. Broad, instead, took the alternative route.With his parents separated, it was Carole who acted as the most benign of coaches, setting up a deckchair at Egerton Park CC and immersing herself in a paperback while her son turned out for coach Lennie Hunter's under-11s.
Broad recalls: "It was fantastic getting in the car with her afterwards because it was never, 'Why did you play that shot?' or, 'You shouldn't have done that…' It was, 'Did you enjoy it?'"She was never a pushy parent, and I think that helped me. As a kid you have to work things out for yourself, not just get it from a textbook."An opening batsman, Chris Broad played 25 Tests for England between 1984 and 1989. He scored three centuries in as many Tests to help England win the Ashes in Australia in 1986-87, and finished his Test career with 1,661 runs at an average of 39.54.The young Broad was unrecognisable from the towering paceman of today. In his mid-teens, an opening batsman who occasionally bowled trundlers to a keeper standing up, he was short and plump."I never had the power to whack the ball off the square; it was always the big kids who were getting hundreds. What I did do was figure out different things about my game.
As a small kid, you have to find a way to survive."Having played a few games for Leicestershire under-16s, Broad found himself dropped "because I was rubbish". Back in Melton Mowbray with Egerton Park, determined just to have fun, he thrashed his first century.Over the next three weeks he would, totally unexpectedly, hit seven more. Less surprisingly, people noticed."Someone got injured for the county under-17s. I turned up and they told me I was opening the batting. 'Oh! OK, cool…'"By the end of the day I was 190-odd not out. The next day I was signed up to the Leicestershire academy. Suddenly I believed I could do it. I never looked back."Hormones also began to get stuck in. Approaching his 17th birthday, Broad stood just 5ft 6in tall. Over the next year he would grow almost a foot. "I just remember eating and sleeping. I went back to school after the holidays and kids were looking at me strangely - 'Who are you?'"The answer was no longer just an opening batsman. Towering over his classmates, he was suddenly an opening bowler too.
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