Zak Crawley can write his own story by facing the Australian fast bowling during the Ashes this summer – but his dad already has an eye-catching tale to tell.
Crawley will open the batting for England’s Test team during the home Ashes series as Ben Stokes ’ side look to put their new ‘Bazball’ style to use in the most famous competition in cricket. While the tall 25-year-old batter is known for his flashing stroke play at the top of the order, his father Terry had a very different reputation.
Terry Crawley was a legend in the City of London during the 1990s. After starting out as a carpet fitter earning around £100-a-week in Bermondsey, Terry turned his hand to financial trading with a firm called Tullett & Tokyo on the London Futures Exchange.
He later set up his own firm, Crawley Futures, in 1988 where he became known as 'Terry the Till', due to his talent for generating cash, and hit the headlines in 1997 with his 'Rugs to Riches' story. Terry was renowned for “dominating the pit” according to a rival trader, who spoke to Financial News at the time.
The Independent reported in 1999 that he was reputed to have earned himself a whopping £23million in a single year. He pulled in £8m in the ‘normal’ year of 1996 as a Liffe trader and was once included in the Sunday Times list rich.
Back then he was behind only musicians Elton John, Sting, Eric Clapton and Phil Collins as the fifth highest-paid person in the UK. The report from Financial News in 1999 notes Crawley, who was then 36 years old, had paid himself just £2.8m in 1998 – a cut of £2.4m on the previous year and £5.4m less than his 1996 bumper pay packet.
Zak was born in February 1998 and grew up in leafy Kent, where the family had a plush home near Sevenoaks and attended New Beacon and Tonbridge private schools. His dad, who still runs Crawley Futures, was key to his development as a cricketer.
England’s managing director of cricket, Rob Key, was Crawley's mentor since he was a teenager. He told Sky Sports : "You need your parents to just play with you as a kid, to take you down to the nets.
"It's not about what the kids are sacrificing; they're having fun. You have to sacrifice as a parent and Zak's parents have done a hell of a lot of that.
"I can only really talk about what Zak's dad is like and what his mum is like, and they're not pushy parents.
"They just try and give him every opportunity they can. Wherever there was a game, they'd take him to it. If he ever wants to go hit some balls, they'd do that with him."
Terry also played a hands-on role with his son during the Covid lockdown. "Dad would give me a few throw-downs to make sure I could feel bat on ball and I worked on my fitness," Zak once told The Times. "But I also started to think about the game a lot. My dad thinks about it a lot too so I bounced ideas around with him.
"I felt like I had a good plan about how I would go about things when cricket restarted. I loved talking to him about how I should be as a sportsman, how I should behave."
