Cricket XXXX Cricket (14 page)

We arrived in Newcastle on a cold, miserable and rainy day. Imagine, if you will, Newcastle, England on a cold, miserable and rainy day. Got it? Well here you have Newcastle, New South Wales on a cold, miserable and rainy day. They manufacture steel here, lots of it. They have difficulties with production levels and they have aggro with unions. Yes, it is just the same as back home.

Our bedroom in the Settlers’ Motor Inn overlooked Newcastle beach, where, weather permitting, the international surfing festival would be taking place over the weekend. A few days prior, a youngster had been struck by a bolt of lightning (which flashed, so we were told, out of a clear blue sky), and survived to tell the tale. The incident constituted the main topic of conversation in the hotel’s dining room, where just about every waitress had been an eyewitness. ‘He died three times on the way to hospital,’ said one, wondering whether we wanted mangetout or salad; ‘third degree burns all over him,’ she added, pouring out the Cabernet Sauvignon. ‘Horrible it was, horrible.’ My rare, charcoal-grilled steak looked decidedly less appetising.

After their victory in the First Test, England were back to form, failing to score 200 runs against New South Wales in the first innings. Acting captain John Emburey was moved to attempt some stirring rhetoric in his early morning pre-match pep talk. The motivating effects of Embers’ earnest, morale boosting efforts were not immediately apparent. One ex-England captain lay prostrate on his back, eyes closed, obstinately oblivious to all around him. The non-verbal comments of another former England captain could be heard reverberating sonorously from the dressing room’s WC, and he added for good measure that any rah-rah sentiments he had ever harboured were long since down the pan.

Not content with the mediocrity of their first innings’ performance, England managed to get themselves bowled out for eighty-three in the second. The crowd had been promised a one-day game to compensate for the truncated state match, if a result could be achieved by a certain deadline. Both teams’ blatant time-wasting ensured that the NSW victory came after the witching hour, and supporters felt, quite rightly, that they had been conned.

Despite appalling storms and gales during the week, the Sabbath weather turned out to be a glorious 33°C, and the wind and waves ideal for the surfing carnival. The beach was packed from the early hours of the morning, with brightly coloured tents and flags festooning the shoreline.

The day began brilliantly, and got progressively better. An extraordinarily intrusive public announcements system relayed information of mindless banality. Every five minutes we were told it was a beautiful day. Looking up at the peerless blue sky, most of us had already figured that one out for ourselves. Then we were introduced to one of the competitors, a certain Mr Wesley Lane, who apparently hailed from the east coast of California. There is obviously a lot of good surf on the east coast of California. We were reminded in between every commercial break that we were having a great day. Again, I prefer to make such decisions for myself rather than have them foisted on me by some recycled disc jockey.

In fairness, however, it
was
a good day. The surfers were all physically perfect creatures, not a hint of excess adipose tissue, just muscles in places where lesser mortals don’t even have places. Their heaving torsos, honed to physical perfection thanks to years of self-sacrifice devoted to becoming total beach bums, palpitated against their rubber wetsuits. Flashes in contrasting colours running down their sides and legs further accentuated the tree-trunk thighs and the Grecian-urn-shaped legs. There were lots of sun-bleached locks in evidence, crowning extensive suntans.

The male surfers were not all that bad either, peripatetic Adonises well tried in catching waves and ‘hanging ten’ all over the world. The crowd went wild as Tom Curren of the United States and Australia’s Mark Occhilupo hit the water for the BHP Steel International final, to be contested between the two top seeds. Occhilupo, the local crowd’s favourite, emerged the victor, and Lolita-like surfing groupies wobbled dangerously in and indeed out of their bikinis as he took the podium to make his acceptance speech.

Dear me! Serious error! The pitch of his voice seemed to suggest a wetsuit perhaps two or three sizes too small, and the hard-earned macho image took a dreadful nosedive. The crowds dispersed, windburned, sunburned, some slightly sloshed, eskies (Oz for cold-box) empty. Yes, it had been a good day at the Surfest on Newcastle beach.

The very first surfers in the world, as it happened, were the Aborigines of Kahibah and Lake Macquarie, not far from Newcastle. They were members of the Awabakal tribe, who came to the area for their tribal sporting events, and combined surfing, swimming and canoe races with tree climbing and boomerang throwing. Few people realise that the first team of Australian cricketers to tour England (in 1868) was made up of Aborigines. They played five days a week for five months, with only eleven players on tour. Play started at 11 am and continued until at least 7 pm, with no afternoon tea break. Travel between matches was by horse-drawn carriage, on very rough roads, but even this punishing schedule could not diminish the team’s enthusiasm. The Aborigines had a reputation for bright cricket, and played just like modern West Indian teams. Their fielding particularly was remarkable, with one of the outstanding all-rounders, Mullagh, able to throw a ball over a hundred yards. Nicknames such as ‘Mosquito’ and ‘Twopenny’ solved English and indeed Australian scorers’ problems in spelling tribal names, and of the forty-seven matches played on that tour, the Aborigines won fourteen and drew nineteen. It’s surprising to relate how little has changed in terms of schedules since 1868!

On their return to Australia the Aborigines played three matches, the receipts of the last one ear-marked as recompense for their five-month slog overseas. Unfortunately the weather proved so hot that people failed to show up, and the team emerged poorly rewarded for their sporting achievements.

The men never played as a team again, although some did play for local clubs, and when Mullagh died in 1891, he had his bat and cricket stumps buried with him. In the circumstances, the current Australian selectors should start sending scouts out into the bush to look for a few talented Aborigine hopefuls, and integrate them into the green and gold uniform, just as the English have done with our naturally athletic West Indian-born players. The all-white Australian team certainly looks in need of a good injection of ethnic zip and zest.

Next stop Perth via a changeover at Sydney. This time we are staying at the Merlin hotel, a monumental piece of architecture, with the bedrooms and corridors all overlooking one vast atrium. The swimming pool here is a definite improvement on the Sheraton-Perth, where by some logistic aberration the pint-sized pond has been located in the shadow of the hotel. Manager Peter Lush has been tireless in putting his PR and marketing skills to good use on this trip, and has managed to negotiate far better rates for the team at the more luxurious Merlin than they were getting at the Sheraton.

Peter is a large, jovial and prematurely grey man. By the end of the tour he will no doubt be prematurely even greyer. His two greatest assets are a lot of common sense, an attribute not always overwhelmingly in evidence back home at HQ, and a fairly well-developed sense of humour. The day after our arrival, he asked me, tongue in cheek, whether I intended to watch the boys practising in the nets. Since assistant manager Micky Stewart is obliged to devote the entire gamut of his persuasive techniques to encourage the team to watch themselves practising in the nets, my supernumerary attendance seemed clearly above and beyond the call of duty. Besides, the siren song of the twelve-metre yachts was calling irresistibly from Fremantle: the French pavement cafes, the Italian pizzerias, the American bars, the British pubs and all those genuinely rippling biceps. As a real treat, our mate Spud Spedding invited us to go sailing with the trial horse,
White Crusader II
, affectionately known as Hippo.

The crews were at the time in a lay period, prior to the commencement of the elimination round for the semi-finals. The British crew were testing spinnakers and we followed initially in the twenty-knot breeze aboard the tender
James Capel –
guess who was sponsoring that little contribution to the British effort. It was an exhilarating experience, and provided some inkling of how the conditions would be when the notorious Fremantle Doctor arrived.

It is oh-so infra dig in Australia at the moment to maintain that watching twelve-metre yacht racing is about as interesting as watching grass grow or paint dry. However, for moribund matrons such as myself whose expectations of the Elysian Fields revolve around the possibility of staying in bed all day watching the cracks in the ceiling, this need not necessarily constitute derision. Such assertions, nevertheless, are completely unjustified. The more the knowledge of any sport, the more the enjoyment, and quite apart from any other consideration, the physical buzz of following a twelve-metre race must constitute one of the best spectator outings ever: cloudless blue skies, the open air, the sun beating down on a constantly oscillating grey-green-azure ocean, the wind in your hair, the spray in your face, the salt in your blood, a glass in your hand . . . there are few better sports to be viewed from the periphery.

Over in the distance was Yanchep Sun City, one of Perth entrepreneur Alan Bond’s earliest ventures in real estate. Originally Bond’s ‘Home of the Twelves’, Alan’s successive crews were not upset when he moved his marina further into Fremantle. To the delight of local fishermen, not suitably conscious of the future honours to be bestowed upon the Bond syndicate, the glut of seaweed in the waters around Yanchep produced remarkable quantities of free iodine. Bond’s erstwhile challenger,
Southern Cross
, was unfortunately made of steel and the resultant chronic stress corrosion meant that one day the fancy steel rigging fell down on top of the crew. The indigenes were not unhappy when the Bondy fleet sailed for less unsympathetic waters, and left them to their lobster pots and fishing nets.

The Japanese have now moved into Yanchep in a big way, and are probably eating the seaweed and producing special reinforced iodine-resistant steel.

Twelve-metre racing is a relentless pursuit of excellence. It is based on interminable hours of sailing in all weather conditions, and the careful refining, honing and tuning of every possible variable. Sails are extremely expensive items, generally nowadays manufactured from Kevlar or Mylar, which if not quite as light as gossamer, are certainly just as strong if not stronger than steel. After several outings the sails become so stretched and deformed as to be rendered useless. From the tender, one of the shore crew took photographs of the configuration of the trial-horse’s spinnakers in various modes. These shots would subsequently be fed into computers to assess possible design improvements. At the end of a day’s sailing, the sheds around Freo harbour buzz with the industry of sailmakers putting heavily analysed nips and tucks into genoas, spinnakers and mainsails. No such thing as an educated guess, and a quick session on the Singer. Thousands of pieces of data, carefully collected and collated, will determine even the slightest alteration.

We met
White Crusader’s
skipper, Harold Cudmore, on the harbour, after a hard three hours’ sailing. He is a tall, wiry man, with thick curly auburn hair and aquiline features. He exudes a form of tireless, nervy energy which generates the impression that he is loath to waste a single minute of his time in pointless endeavour. He was probably doing calisthenics as he talked to us.

Cudmore enjoys one of the highest of international reputations as a twelve-metre skipper. He is Irish, from Cork, and little is known about the man except that even Aeneas in his gutsier moments, or Jason and his Argonauts, had little on Harold.

I had heard on various occasions, and
always
from people who had never met the man, that he is an arrogant and awkward blighter. Not that I have anything against arrogant and awkward blighters.

After all, I married one, but these are the sort of people who have never met Geoff Boycott, and will tell you exactly the same about him. Beware the received wisdom of hearsay, and the omniscient opinions of tabloid-informed twits!

Cudmore, in fact, could not have been more helpful, informative and charming. I mention his name in juxtaposition with that of Boycott, because there is an indefinable similarity between the two; perhaps it is the degree of concentration on the job to be done, which is often perceived by outsiders as stand-offish behaviour. Cudmore made it perfectly clear that he did not particularly want to talk to anybody until he had carried his sodden sails off board and back on shore. Only then was he ready for the fripperies of polite conversation. This, to my lights at least, is the focussed sense of purpose of a true professional.

He showed us around the yachts, and adverted to the couple of hundred million things a skipper must keep his eye on while racing. From behind the helm, patently there is rather more to it than watching grass grow.

Quite apart from the America’s Cup, the Second Test at Perth has had plenty of competition for spectators this week. The mere sprinkling of folk on Sunday, the third day at the WACA, suggested that there was much better entertainment to be had elsewhere. Sure enough, Pope John Paul II, whose indefatigable peregrinations have added a new dimension to the concept of
urbi et orbi
, was winding up his six-day whistle-stop tour of Australia along the road at the Belmont Park Race Course, and causing the usual commotion.

By that stage in proceedings, the Australian team looked in dire need of some minor miracle of divine intervention beyond even the Pope’s orchestration. The highlight of the English performance was, without doubt, a magnificent century by the gloriously ‘in-nick’ David Gower. (If,
on occasions
, this diary might
appear
totally, utterly and irretrievably biased in Fender’s favour, it is because this diary
is
totally, utterly and irretrievably biased in Fender’s favour.)