Raised in South Africa, developed in Durham: Brydon Carse is England’s new Ashes weapon

On a breakout Test tour of Pakistan, Brydon Carse showed pace and heart with the ball, and a glimpse of class with the bat. In the first Test in New Zealand, he became the first English seamer to take 10 wickets overseas for 16 years, and was named man of the match.

At 29, having taken a roundabout route to the top, Carse is on the threshold of becoming one of England’s most important all-format cricketers.

For Carse, England have two of their most reliable production lines to thank. He was born in Cape Town and raised in Gqeberha, formerly Port Elizabeth, where on the wall of his childhood bedroom there is a picture of the young Carse alongside an array of South African cricket legends: Shaun Pollock, Allan Donald, Herschelle Gibbs and so on. But he is also an England fast bowler developed at Durham and, having first moved over as a teenager, a proud son of the North East.

Carse was 18 and fresh out of PE’s Pearson High School when, in the summer of 2014, he played for Burnmoor Cricket Club, three miles east of Chester-le-Street.

The link was twofold. Burnmoor had had plenty of South African overseas players, including former Proteas all-rounder Andrew Hall, and they had acted as unofficial scouts for the club, recommending Carse, who had played for Eastern Province’s age-group teams. The other was that Carse’s Rhodesian father, James, had played as a tearaway quick both for Northamptonshire and in South Africa’s Currie Cup with Geoff Cook, the key figure in Durham’s rise as a first-class county. James let Cook know that Brydon was coming over.

Carse lived with Burnmoor’s captain, Alec Linsley, who remembers him being “very wet behind the ears” with “no life skills whatsoever”.

“When he got here, he looked about nine years old, such a baby-faced lad,” says Linsley. “He looked like a baby giraffe. Tall, with very little coordination and long arms and legs! About nine stone wet through.”

“Not bad” is Linsley’s assessment of his lodger. “Clean and tidy-ish,” he adds: “He would eat out a lot, or eat with us, because he’d never made any food for himself, and never filled a car with petrol.” The pair quickly became close. “Me and my wife Karen adopted him like a son,” he says with a laugh. “It was that kind of relationship. He’d annoy the hell out of me but also had a great heart and was very well brought up.”

Father was menacing pace bowler for Northants

Carse was steeped in cricket. He would spend Saturdays watching his father, and played from the age of five. James still messages after every day’s play, “encouraging me, sometimes giving me criticism”, Carse joked a few years ago. Brydon’s mother watches everything, too – but rather less analytically. “I watch with my fingers crossed and one hand on the bible,” she laughed, when visited by her son and an SA20 video team in 2023. “That’s my ritual.”

Carse Snr was a menacing fast bowler, considered one of the quickest in the world, who played one season for Northants in 1983 and 60 first-class games in all at a time when opportunities on the global stage were slim for Zimbabweans. He was a sharp bowler with a sharp tongue. Cook has fond memories of him: “He was a big character, not shy and retiring. The Zimbabweans enjoyed themselves in those days. His bowling was a bit wild, and very quick. He was never as good a batsman as Brydon, but he would own up to that.”

Boarding at Pearson, Carse’s cricket kicked on, and the school’s team have thrived since his time there. His coach, Charl van der Merwe, remembers a young man “very serious about the game”.

“He always asked questions,” adds Van der Merwe. “If he got out, he would always be looking for answers about how we could not get out that way next time. He always wanted to know what he was doing wrong.”

Carse also played hockey for the first team and rugby for the seconds. School itself was mainly conducted in English, but there were lessons in Afrikaans, too. “He spoke Afrikaans a little bit, he wasn’t very good at it,” jokes Van der Merwe.

When he arrived at Burnmoor, Carse was more a batsman than a bowler, because he left school “much smaller than he is now”, according to Van der Merwe. Linsley remembers: “We signed him as a batter but he was growing so quickly that he finished his first season as a bowler who batted, not a batsman who bowled”. He did well enough to be invited back for a second season.

“I was wicketkeeper and we had a few heated arguments,” says Linsley. “He was like a line of washing coming in. He’d bowl an absolute pearler and then the next one would be miles down the leg side. I’m a little bit older, slower and more rotund, so I much prefer the bowlers to bowl it in my area. However he was quite sharp, and in the second year he got even sharper. But his control was wayward because he was trying to bowl as quick as he could. He had a great season for such a young lad, took wickets and scored runs, was integral to us overachieving, which is why we got him to come back.”

Teenager fitted in so well he developed ‘Mackem twang’

Carse threw himself wholeheartedly into life in the North East, making close friends (one of whom spent the winter of 2014-15 in South Africa with him), and working with Linsley’s father Ian, the heartbeat of Burnmoor, who looked after the ground.

“Overseas players come to play, but that’s just Saturday,” says Linsley. “The rest of the week he had to get stuck in, cutting hedges, trimming the lawns. In South Africa there would have been someone doing that for him! He’d ask ‘how do you use a grass cutter?’ Every day was a school day for him. Like most teenagers, he was a bit bone idle, as soon as the organ grinder was away he’d down tools, but he was a great help for my dad.

“He’d love going for a drink with the boys, and he fitted into the North-East life perfectly, apart from that he doesn’t like the cold, which is a problem. You would think he’s always been here. I remember going with him to get his first tattoo. He wanted to get a Liverpool tattoo. I asked why, and he said he’d always supported Liverpool. I said ‘you’re not in Merseyside now pal, you need to pick a team’. Fortunately he went red and white, the same as us. He loves following Sunderland, goes to as many games as he can. He’s got a little Mackem twang that he’s picked up over the years, too.”

Nevertheless, Carse goes to the Stadium of Light with “You’ll Never Walk Alone” tattooed on his left forearm.

Linsley recognised there was some fun to be had with his wide-eyed import in the tough school of club cricket in the North East.

“My wife was heavily pregnant when he first arrived,” he says. “He was so shocked by that, he thought it was amazing and kept staring at the bump because it was moving. We’d wind him up a treat. Every time she had the slightest twinge we’d say ‘here it comes!’ And when I left the house I’d say, ‘will you be OK to sort the baby out if she goes into labour?’ He’d be cowering, shouting ‘no!’

“There was also a very funny day when we played Crook away [in Durham]. It was chucking it down. He went in the shower and the silly billy left his towel in the changing room. Someone draped it over the balcony outside and he naively went to get it, so we locked him out. Absolutely chucking it down, and all he had was a soaking towel. That will live in my memory for ever.”

Carse’s two seasons at Burnmoor were formative on and off the field. It did not take long for Cook, arguably the best talent-spotter in the country, to invite him down to Durham, then on a tour to Bangalore, after which he joined the county’s academy. “The cricketing potential and the personal toughness and determination were immediately obvious,” says Cook. “His competitive spirit really shone through very quickly.” The excitement was around a raw, rangy bowler with a point of difference – sharp pace and bounce from a loose-limbed action.

Gambling ban and injuries slowed progress

Carse made his Championship debut for Durham in 2016, aged 20, but his early years as a professional were difficult, and riddled with injury. All players struggle with long periods of inactivity, but Carse seemed to do so more than most. Between 2017 and 2019 when injured and bored, he would place bets on cricket that would earn him a three-month ban last summer when on the verge of playing Test cricket. Those who played with him in the early days remember a supreme talent who was naive to the demands of first-class cricket, especially when it came to diet and recovery. He had the competitive spirit and skill, but not the mindset.

Carse had come to England simply hoping to play club cricket but, from early in his time with Durham, steps were taken by the player, his agent and the county to qualify him for England. Through James, he had a British passport and, by spending 230 days in the country, he qualified in 2019, ahead of schedule as he became an unexpected beneficiary of the rule change English cricket made to expedite the qualification of Jofra Archer. By the following February, after his best county season, Carse was playing for the Lions, with full one-day international recognition in 2021.

England have long held Carse in high regard, awarding him a two-year central contract before he had made his Test debut, and selecting him in every format as soon as his ban elapsed this summer. Now, he also has an Indian Premier League contract with Sunrisers Hyderabad – whose team he played for in South Africa’s SA20 – adding to the sense that his star is on the rise.

Carse remains close with the Linsley family, and Burnmoor more widely. Last summer, while banned, he was around the club more, and went on holiday with Linsley. “I hear from him when his chips are down,” says Linsley. “It’s my job to get him back up. There are no airs and graces, he is treated exactly the same as the rest of the boys, as he was when he was young.”