Richard Gleeson: ‘Now I’m in this position, I don’t take it for granted’

On the first day of July Richard Gleeson was in his kitchen with his wife, Laura, when his phone pinged, a message from a number he did not recognise.

“It was Matthew Mott, saying I’ll call you in two minutes,” he remembers. “I just said to my wife: ‘I think I’m about to get picked for England.’ There was never a moment before that when I contemplated it.” Minutes later Gleeson was speaking to England’s new white-ball coach.

“Everything seemed to stop for a second, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck and I felt: ‘Oh shit, this is actually happening,’” he says. “Then when he said: ‘You’re in for the T20s,’ I was just like: ‘Thanks.’ I didn’t know what to say. It was totally unexpected.”

Gleeson is 34, and since turning 20 has spent as long playing in the Minor Counties and doing community coaching as he has as a professional. Though there had been a Lions call-up in 2018, before this summer not only was he barely on England’s radar, he was hardly even on his county’s. In the circumstances it is no surprise that he recounts the story of his first full international call-up with a sense of wonder.

“We didn’t have much of a celebration. I think my wife had a gin and tonic,” he says. “We waited until last Sunday night, after the South Africa series finished. The kids were in bed, we were in the hotel, we had five minutes peace and we had an espresso martini each to salute it and celebrate.” The week after that phone call he ripped out India’s top order at Edgbaston, taking the wickets of Rohit Sharma, Rishabh Pant and Virat Kohli on debut. This was actually happening, all right.

Just four months earlier Gleeson had been dealing with completely different pressures. In the last two summers, as he struggled to recover from