Back to the future

It is time for a bit of springautumn cleaning and a last chance to dust down those cricket features that got bumped out of the paper by some football competition in Germany. Today, meet Howard, England's long-serving scorer who picks the next generation of Ashes winners. Tomorrow, the youngest first-class umpire.

DARREN GOUGH had just scored a fifty against Australia and the first thing he did on leaving the field was to run to the scorer's hut to ask Howard Clayton for the evidence of his feat to wave under his coach's nose. Gough was only 19 but the amiable cockiness that is so well known in the Essex bowler and ballroom dancer today was already well-developed, Clayton recalls.

Clayton has been the scorer for England Under-19 since 1990 and has kept the books in 82 international matches. He has seen a whole generation of cricketers live out their lifespan from the pupa stage to retirement and believes that the present under-19 crop is the least experienced squad in terms of first-class cricket he has seen, which makes their close-fought series with a strong India side [which ended 1-0 last month] all the more worthy of praise.

Experience tends to give you a level head and while writers have been predicting all the wickets that Adil Rashid will take for England and the runs that Varun Chopra will score, Clayton urges caution over the star members of the Under-19 side. Rashid and Chopra certainly have potential but they could as easily turn out to be another Adrian Golding and Matthew Dowman as the next Monty Panesar and Marcus Trescothick.

"On average, it's about two players per Under-19 side who go on to play for England - or 22.65 per cent," he said with the precision you would expect of a scorer, "but it is too early to say which of this side will make the grade."

If this team is short on experience - only Chopra, of Essex, has played regularly for his county - the 1996 vintage was the strongest Clayton has seen. It included Andrew Flintoff, Matthew Hoggard, Owais Shah and Usman Afzaal and was pitted against a Zimbabwe side that was so weak that England put out a second-string team for the final Test. "It was a closer game, but we still won," Clayton said.

Clayton, 54, has used the experience of his day job as a teacher in Leeds - "French, German and Russian rather than mathematics as many would assume" - to help him to match players' names to their faces. "As head of year, I tried to make sure I knew all 240 pupils within three weeks, so learning eleven players is nothing," he said.

Some, of course, stand out more easily than others, such as Gough, who opened the bowling for England with Dominic Cork in Clayton's first match in charge of the coloured pens in the winter of 1989/90. Clayton used to run a winter coaching course for the Yorkshire Cricket Association and three of his students were Gough, Paul Grayson and Jeremy Batty, brother of Gareth, who had been picked for the Young England tour of Australia.

Clayton found out from Gough that no one was being sent to score on the tour, so he got in touch with Tim Lamb, then the cricket secretary of the TCCB, and asked if he could come along during the school holidays. "He said yes, as long as I paid my own way," Clayton said.

From there, he was asked to score during the summer and a 17-year relationship was born. Even when Clayton was struggling with failing kidneys in 1995, he didn't give up the job. "I used to carry the dialysis machine with me, dialyse at lunch, after play and before play." He had a transplant five years later.

In the past year, two recent Under-19 players have been given full England colours. Alastair Cook was captaining the junior side two years ago and is now the established England No 3, while Monty Panesar has acquired hero status almost as quickly.

Clayton marks Cook out as one of the batsmen who has most impressed him. "It's about the temperament, not just the talent," he said. "They have all got talent otherwise they wouldn't be playing, but it's what is up here that matters and Cooky was a very polite and mature young man and that shows in his play. If he gets out for four, he knows what he has to do to correct it, he doesn't go and mope."

Trescothick, Ian Bell and Michael Vaughan all stood out, but the best Clayton has seen was John Crawley, who had a mediocre Test career. "Majid Khan was in charge of the Pakistanis when Crawley was England Under-19 captain and he picked him out as one to watch, for his back-foot play particularly," Clayton said. "I always thought he'd have played more Test cricket than he did."

Yet ability at Under-19 level is no guarantee of future success. The highest innings Clayton scored was Dowman's 267 at Hove in 1993, but Dowman left the game after a couple of unfulfilling seasons. Another disappointment was Justin Bishop, the left-arm fast bowler who Clayton says had the best run-up of anybody and who took seven for 41 against West Indies Under-19 in 2001.

"He looked as if he had the world at his feet, but somehow everything went awry," Clayton said. Bishop was released by Essex at the end of last season.

Who knows which members of the present team will become Test stars? Sometimes it is not always the cockiest who succeed. Clayton was struck by the attitude of a teenaged Trescothick, who in 1994 was teased by his team-mates for wearing his England cap and blazer after matches had finished. "He told them: 'It might be the closest I get to playing for England,' " Clayton said. If only other players showed such pride and dedication.