Warwickshire's Richard Gleeson out to make his mark

“Stuff always seems to happen to me at Edgbaston,” reflects the seamer, as he prepares to make his Bears T20 Blast debut at the venue tonight against Nottinghamshire.

The last time Gleeson played in Birmingham, he was out in the middle for one of the most controversial finishes in the history of cricket, part of the Lancashire team who lost out to Hampshire by a single run in the 2022 final.

A week previously, Edgbaston was where he made his international debut at the age of 34, dismissing Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and Rishabh Pant within his first eight balls. Rarely dull? You can say that again.

“I remember the England game like it was yesterday,” says Gleeson. “Walking out there, with absolutely no nerves for some strange reason.

“I was just enjoying the moment, enjoying the crowd, even though I took a little bit of abuse from the Indian fans at first.

“‘Who are you?’ they were shouting at me down at third man. Then I took the three wickets and they showed me a bit of love.”

Those two moments, a week apart two summers ago, are just two chapters in the remarkable career of a player who did not make his professional debut until the age of 27, but has made up for lost time by experiencing things he would never have dreamed.

The most recent of those came a month ago when Gleeson, fresh from a winter playing T20 competitions in Abu Dhabi, South Africa and Dubai, became the second oldest player to make a debut in the Indian Premier League, playing alongside Indian legend MS Dhoni for Chennai Super Kings.

“That was surreal,” he says. “I’d never been to India before, for anything. It was a lot hotter than I expected!

“I knew they loved cricket in India. I didn’t realise how much they loved MS Dhoni. He is a demi-God. Everywhere we went, people were in awe of him.”

It says everything about Gleeson’s down-to-earth nature and simple love for the game that, one week after rubbing shoulders with one of the sport’s all-time greats, he was back opening the bowling for Blackpool in the Lancashire League, just as he so often has both before and after his professional career flourished.

It also feels fitting he is finally going to play for Warwickshire. The Bears, more than a decade ago, were the first professional county to offer him a trial and two appearances for the second XI proved encouraging before fate lent a hand and Ashley Giles, the club’s then sporting director, moved to the ECB.

“It wasn’t to be at the time but hopefully now, things have come full circle,” says Gleeson, who would eventually make his first-class bow for Northamptonshire before a five-year stint with home county Lancashire.

“If you had said when I was 27, having not played a professional game of cricket. I would get to where I am now at 36. I don’t think I will really realise what I have achieved until the day I stop playing. I just take everything as it comes, enjoy it and try to learn quickly. I will try the best I can.”

Gleeson’s arrival at Warwickshire, instigated mostly by his long-standing relationship (and Lancashire League rivalry) with Bears skipper Alex Davies, came following his release from Lancashire at the end of last summer, after a wrist injury caused him to miss the entire Blast campaign.

There have been other moments when injury looked set to call time on his career and have left him no choice but to now operate as a specialist in the sport’s shortest format.

Yet Gleeson’s grounding – jobs in his amateur days included working as a maggot cleaner in a fishing and tackle shop – has inevitably given him a sense of perspective.

The past few years have included part-time work as a teacher at Myerscough College.

“I don’t look too much at the bigger picture,” says Gleeson. “I know I have things to fall back on if things don’t go right. It makes it that little bit easier.

“I was lucky when I came in to the pro game because there was no pressure on me. I had a job, I had a career. I was just playing cricket to see how I could go.”

His latest challenge is to try to help the Bears over the line in a competition which they have exited at the quarter-final stage for the past three seasons. The addition of Gleeson and fellow new-boy George Garton to a bowling attack already featuring Chris Woakes and Hassan Ali means expectations have rarely been higher.

“Always the aim is to win the trophy,” he says. “In T20 cricket it is not always that easy, because anyone can beat anyone on the day. Getting to the quarter-finals there is maybe more control over. There are many group games and you earn the right to get there. After that, you still maybe need a bit of luck.”