‘The new Swann’ at 22, retired five years later: Adam Riley at peace with fall from prominence

Is Adam Riley the new Graeme Swann? That was the question posed by The Independent in 2014, following another impressive early-season performance by the promising Kent offspinner, fresh out of university and keeping England’s James Tredwell out of the county’s first team.

Riley’s promise was evident to anyone who had seen him bowl. A classical offspinner blessed with the height to get good bounce off most surfaces, he started 2014 as a final-year geography student at Loughborough University, and finished it with 57 first-class wickets, more than any spinner in England but Saeed Ajmal and Jeetan Patel. Unsurprisingly, greater recognition quickly followed: he was invited to bowl in the Lord’s nets ahead of a Test against India, and was sent on winter trips to Sri Lanka and South Africa by the ECB before representing the MCC in the Champion County game in the spring. It seemed a matter of when, and not if he would fill the void left by Swann’s premature retirement during the 2013-14 Ashes.

ARCHIVE: England mark time on Riley

But somewhere along the way, things went awry. From the start of the 2015 home summer until the end of his career, Riley would manage only 25 more first-class wickets, and quietly announced his retirement last year at the age of 27. He now works at Dulwich College, having been appointed as the school’s head of player development at the end of 2019.

“Kent told me they weren’t going to renew my contract,” Riley explains. “I had a bit of a cooling-off period, where I decided I wasn’t going to play any cricket and have a think about what I wanted to do next. I took the view that I’d run my race.”

The question, then, is how this happened: how, in the space of five years, did a young, hungry, talented bowler, who had taken bags of first-class wickets head from England’s spinner-in-waiting into early retirement?

“You can look at the footage, and it’s all obvious. I was never the same bowler after that winter,” Riley reflects. “At the time, I remember there being a big push for spinners to bowl a bit quicker. That’s what Swann was doing, that’s what Ajmal was doing, Muralitharan did that, Warne did that.

“I guess they were trying to find that ‘next Graeme Swann’. Swann was a world-class spinner – the best who’s played for England, certainly that I’ve been able to watch live – and he naturally bowled a very quick pace but still got shape on the ball. That’s what they were encouraging us to do.

“I probably took that too literally, and ended up focusing on trying to bowl quicker instead of getting shape on the ball.”

The parallels with a current England spinner are immediately apparent. Before the end of his first over on ODI debut on Tuesday, Matt Parkinson‘s bowling speed was being criticised by TV commentators: the suggestion was that while his loopy legbreaks worked at county level, he would need to speed up to have international success.

But Riley’s career serves as a cautionary tale. “The danger is that if you change one thing, and that becomes ingrained but isn’t the right thing, all of a sudden you’ve got to iron out two things that have become bad habits,” he says. “Then you can try something else technical, and actually that’s not right either.

“And it starts building up to a bit of a mess, really.”

Riley returned to Kent at the start of 2015 knowing that something had come wrong. After a handful of ineffective performances, he dropped out of the firing line and into the second team. He worked extensively with Min Patel behind the scenes but the pair “couldn’t seem to put our fingers on how to get me back to where I was”.

Fleeting first-team appearances brought occasional success, like a seven-wicket return in a victory against Derbyshire in 2018, but by the end of May last year, Kent had decided they had invested enough time and effort into resurrecting a career that seemed to be going nowhere.

“At some stages during that three or four-year period it became a mental thing as well, where I was struggling mentally. At one stage, I was being talked about as one of the best young prospects in England, and then I couldn’t do what I was doing. It was quite hard to get my head round.

“I see it in so many other players. They’ll have a fantastic year, and then if it starts to go wrong, they’ll think something’s got to change technically when actually sometimes it’s just a mindset thing.

“You think: what’s got you to that point? What’s got you that first-team place? What’s got you that professional contract? Sometimes you need to have a bit more faith in that.

“If I could rewind back to 2014, that’s what I’d do: I’d be more stubborn, and say, ‘you know what? I just got picked for England Lions on the back of taking 60 first-class wickets. Yes, to play international cricket I might need to bowl faster, but at the moment I’m 22, I’ve played 30 first-class games, and I’d quite like to stick with what I’m doing.’ But that comes with experience, and at the time I didn’t have that. Hindsight is a beautiful thing.”

While his release last summer was “not completely mutual – you never want to be told you’re not wanted”, Riley can reflect that compared to plenty of others, he was relatively fortunate in how his career ended. His Kent deal ran until the end of the season, and he was given notice that it would not be renewed four months before; often, players are not formally told until a matter of weeks before that a fresh contract will not be forthcoming.

“It gave me four months to work out what I wanted to do next – if they’d done that on August 31, then actually I’d have been in a worse head space than I am now. I’m in a good one – I’m happy that I’m back doing something I love, and I’ve fallen on my feet.”

Riley is glowing about the help he has had from the Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA) during his transition into retirement, in the knowledge that while he has managed to find a job quickly, there are countless stories of players struggling to cope with the precarious nature of professional sport.

“I know other people who were still scraping around every month to try and pay the bills 12 months down the line, and that’s scary. I had some rainy day money that would have got me through at least until Christmas, and it’s with stuff like that when what you hear earlier in your career from the PCA comes to the forefront.

“When you’re 21 and wet round the ears you just think ‘I’m going to be playing cricket for the next 15 years’ when the reality is that the average retirement age in professional cricket in 26. Granted, now is a good time to be getting into the game as a young player, with the salary cap going up and the extra competition [the Hundred] going on, but the same principle is going to apply.

Riley worked with Tom Jones, his local PCA personal development manager, who “walked me through what happens next, and gave me almost a bit of life counselling”. That included working out what sort of job he wanted, updating his CV, and simply being available at the end of the phone as he tried to work out where he stood.

“I read a lot of articles about players that feel like they lose their identity [after retirement]. All they’ve known is being a professional cricketer, and all they’ve been known as by their friends is ‘Adam, the guy who players cricket’. Suddenly, you’ve got to redesign yourself as ‘Adam, who sells insurance’ or whatever it is you go into.”

Riley started in his new role at Dulwich at the end of 2019, after his former Kent team-mate Geraint Jones passed his details onto Richard Coughtrie, the master in charge of cricket, and will combine his role with work with Kent U-15s. He enjoys the dressing room-style camaraderie of the PE department, and has his career in healthy perspective; he may not have been the next Graeme Swann, but that doesn’t keep him up at night.

“I’m at peace with it now – I don’t really look back and think ‘what if?’. It’s not a major event in the grand scheme of all the years of work I’ll have to do between now and when I retire, it’s just a little substory. But I get to say I’m one of the 0.01% of people that get to play professional cricket – and I had a good go at it.”

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