Andy Flower is to Zimbabwe cricket what Don Bradman was to Australia. He is the country’s greatest batsman by a distance, averaging 51.54 in a decade-long career that encompassed regular and heavy defeats, as well as the burden of wicket-keeping

I had an idyllic upbringing. The family moved from South Africa to Harare, or Salisbury as it was known then, when I was 10, just at the end of the war of liberation. That was a fascinating time for a little boy into guns and the army and that sort of stuff. Dad was sports-mad, and when he came home from work we five kids would play something with him every night – touch rugby, tennis, cricket. It was very much a family thing – I had no real role models because we didn’t get any live cricket coverage in Rhodesia – and I only really thought about taking it up seriously at the age of 20, when I got an offer to play in the Birmingham League. I was a trainee accountant at the time and it sounded a lot better than sitting in an office.

I think it held me back in that you don’t get exposed to the same coaching knowledge that you do in other countries, but in another way I actually got more opportunities. I played for Young Zimbabwe against West Indies A – Eldine Baptiste and Co – when I was just 17, and who knows whether I’d have got that chance in any other country. Also, when we got Test status in 1992 I was already 24. I felt like I’d done my apprenticeship with the odd first-class tour here and there, and I even scored a century on my World Cup debut against Sri Lanka. It was on a tiny ground in New Plymouth in New Zealand, but from the outset I thought, this international cricket isn’t as hard as people are making out. I don’t mean that to sound flippant or to devalue it, but I just felt there and then that I’d be OK.

That’s my most memorable game without a doubt. I got 156, my brother Grant got 201 not out, and then we took an array of amazing catches to dismiss them twice. It was just a really special time and meant a hell of a lot to Zimbabwe cricket, even though we went on to lose the series. The match has been sullied slightly by talk of match-fixing, but there wasn’t anything that made me suspicious. I felt suspicious in other games, but not in that one.

In those years we won a one-day series in New Zealand, a Test series in Pakistan and even challenged hard at the 1999 World Cup – they were really good days. Things could have been so different if we could have kept the likes of Neil Johnson and Murray Goodwin. I would just be finishing my international career about now. It’s a real pity we were split up, especially because we didn’t manage to integrate some of the young black players and pass on the things we’d learnt through a lot of hard work. I coached Tatenda Taibu at junior school, Stuart Matsikenyeri and Hamilton Masakadza as well. They are lovely blokes and I’ve known them since they were knee-high. It would have been a really good example to the country, with black and white working together, but sadly it wasn’t to be. These guys are now having to start again, reinvent the wheel if you like, which is bloody hard.

We had some decent spinners in Zimbabwe. When I first started John Traicos was our main man and he was one of the most accurate off-spinners I’ve ever come across. We’d practise into the dark of the night and it was a brilliant grounding. He was a wily old fox and always used to bang on about picking length, and knowing my scoring areas, and how I was moving around the crease. And I also got to watch and copy how Dave Houghton played. From him I learnt how to maneuver the ball and how to get your body into position for sweeping, reverse sweeping, hitting over the top and so on. He was always talking about shifting the momentum against the spinner, never letting him settle.