In this episode we speak with Ireland wicketkeeper-batsman Niall O’Brien - and it's an episode with a difference. All the other players we’ve spoken with were hopeful of long Test careers when they made their debuts but Niall is a bit different.

A left-hander who played county cricket with Kent, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire for well over a decade, Niall first played for Ireland at under-17 level in 1999 and at that stage the idea of Test cricket for the country was not even a distant dream.

However, a succession of impressive performances in ICC limited-over events and in the ICC Intercontinental Cup, the global first-class competition for international sides below Test status, pressed Ireland’s case, and in 2018 they finally got the chance to play a match in the longest form of the game, against Pakistan at Malahide.

Niall’s professional career was very much in its final throes by then, but the prospect of playing in that match helped drive him on and he finally got his reward, becoming a member of the first playing eleven to take the field for his country in Test cricket.

Niall not only talks extensively about the match in question in this podcast, a match that featured a brilliant hundred by his brother Kevin, but he puts it into the context of his career and Ireland’s journey from nowhere to the very top table of the sport.

This episode sees us speaking with opening batsman Andy Lloyd.

Andy had an excellent first-class career, latterly as Warwickshire captain, and scored more than 17,000 first-class runs, but perhaps he's best known for his one Test appearance, against the mighty West Indies side of 1984, and how it ended prematurely for him because of a horrendous incident after just half an hour's play.

The story of that incident takes up a great deal of this podcast, as you'd expect, but over the course of the episode Andy also puts his Test call-up into context and discusses how he rebuilt his career at first-class level, all the while knowing he could never play for England again. It's a tale that is, at stages, sad, poignant and redemptive - and it's always fascinating!

In this episode we catch up with former Essex and Hampshire all-rounder John Stephenson.

John’s career included over 22,000 runs and more than 600 wickets in professional cricket and he captained Hampshire for two seasons in 1996 and 1997. But here we’re concerned with his Test appearance, which came against the mighty Australia side of 1989, the one under Allan Border’s leadership that steamrolled England that summer.

John, who was opening the batting with some success for Essex alongside Graham Gooch at the time, was called up for the final Test of the six-match series at The Oval with England already 4-0 down in the series and his story reveals just a little of the chaos in the national set-up in the face of that mauling.

Let’s take up the story…