STEVE HARMISON last night asked Nasser Hussain to bow to Geordie sentiment and let him make Riverside history.

Harmison, the only North-East player in the England squad, is desperate to bowl the first ball in a Durham Test match.

The Ashington Express wants to be leading the England pace attack at 10.45am tomorrow rather than preparing to watch his teammates bat against Zimbabwe.

And when the countdown clock on the ground clicks to zero, indicating that the region's long wait for Test cricket has ended, Harmison would be the proudest man in Durham if he had the new ball in his hand.

He said: "I hope we're bowling first. I wouldn't beg for it, but I really fancy bowling the first ball.

"I'd like us to bowl first for one selfish reason: I want to be out there first thing on Thursday morning.

"People always say there's a day round the corner when you'll get five or six wickets in an innings. I hope it's here on Thursday afternoon.

"I have a lot of pride in the club. It's my home club and when I walk out there I'll probably know 80 per cent of the people in the crowd.

"If I do well, there might be a few Durham members thinking, 'Why doesn't he do it for Durham?'

"I don't know why that is; I give everything I've got for Durham and I don't try any harder for England.

"This is the club that gave me my start in my cricketing career, and to play a Test here is fantastic.

"The ground looks fabulous; really nice with all the temporary stands. It looks a new and modern ground, and it has all the attributes to be a very good Test ground."

Harmison knows as much as anyone in the England team about the slings and arrows of outrageous cricketing fortune.

He was mocked for bowling seven wides in a row in the opening tour game in Australia last winter, coupled with an attack of the yips in the Perth Test.

But he has shown commendable character to emerge a stronger person, and yesterday he credited Australian bowling guru Troy Cooley with putting him back on the straight and narrow.

Cooley, who had a distinctly moderate first-class record with Tasmania, is England's bowling coach after being lured from the famed Australian Academy.

And Harmison said: "Troy is brilliant. I worked with him at the Academy and last winter, when things weren't going well during the one-dayers, I saw him again and asked him a few things.

"He worked on everything in my action being in a straight line and more compact, and it's worked for me. He had a big part in the change in my action.

"Troy is somebody who, if he wasn't England's bowling coach, I'd be ringing him to ask for his advice if he'd seen me on TV.

"When I first met him, I thought I could trust him, and I knew he was telling me the right things. I was very pleased when he got the England job.

"He works more on the mental side than the physical side of the game, and his encouragement and approach is very good."

Harmison will win his seventh cap this week, yet remarkably will have more Test experience than the other England seam bowlers combined.

His knowledge of Chester-le-Street conditions could prove crucial and he warned his fellow pacemen to expect a fairly benign wicket.

He added: "In the last two or three years it's been a decent cricket wicket here. It does a bit early on, but it flattens out.

"Three or four years ago, it could have done anything. But there's no real pace in it now, and I imagine there will be some runs scored.

"It's getting slower and slower. Now you've got to work hard for your wickets, which is good for cricket. We've got to learn to bowl on flat wickets."

After a mentally tortuous few months Down Under last winter, Harmison is at home on his Riverside patch, some 12,000 miles from his purgatory in Australia when he got the 'yips' and fell apart in numerous one-day internationals.

A well-documented sufferer from homesickness, he was not helped when his second daughter was born in the middle of the tour - Abbie was a few months old before saw her.

But he has released the mental manacles with the help of his teammates and a desire to succeed at the top level.

''I have never hid behind the fact that I have problems travelling but I am only going 40 miles so I should be all right,'' he joked.

''When things haven't gone well for you you feel everything is against you and you do get pretty low.

''But I managed to keep my head up and go on for the rest of the lads - I was in the World Cup squad and they didn't need to see glum faces, they needed people up for it and who would give the best for the team.''

He added: ''My statistics on the tour were not as good as what they should have been. Nine wickets at an average of 50 is not a good tour but for a first tour, in Australia, and with the way it started I was pretty pleased,'' he added.

''At the end of October if I had been asked I would have come back but I made a good job of kicking myself when I was down.

''When I picked myself up I felt my character and strength inside came out.

''In Test matches I don't think I have embarrassed myself, in fact when I was hop-skip-and-jumping in my run up at Perth I was actually bowling about 5mph quicker.

''It was one of those things you go through as a fast bowler, sometimes you get that in front of 10 people but it happened to me in front of 30,000.

"When I looked around for support you might have expected to see 10 English blokes laughing but they were always behind me, I never once felt on my own out there.''