Cricket XXXX Cricket (17 page)

‘It’s Simply Magic’ – David Gower in his magnificent first-innings century knock.

‘Careless Hands’ – fluffed chances by Boon, Border, Ritchie et al., during England’s first innings.

‘King Command’ – England manager, Peter Lush.

‘Jester Boy’ – Allan Lamb complete with duck’s bill.

‘Astonishment’ – general sensation in hitherto excoriating British press corps.

‘Lord Cognac’ – Phil Edmonds, whose celebrated connections with HINE keep the team’s spirits up.

‘Bonnie Skipper’ – Mike ‘pass me the cheese and pickle sandwiches’ Gatting.

‘Super Force’ / ‘Star Rogue’ – controversial hard-hitter Ian Botham.

‘Little Napoleon’ – assistant manager and disciplinarian Micky Stewart, also known as ‘Sieg Heil’.

‘Two Thousand Extra’ – Man of the Match award worth $2,000, which went to English opening batsman Chris Broad.

‘Fiery Black’ – Barbados-born Gladstone Small.

‘General Alert’ – situation in the Australian Cricket Board.

‘Another Dustbin’ – present resting place of Australian selectors’ current policy.

It would be difficult to claim, in all honesty, that the trotting was cosmically interesting. The company, on the contrary, genuinely was. I have never been money-literate and was intrigued to hear how naughty boys in the City, and indeed all over the world, ‘ramp’ shares. They all get together over the international blower in the morning and decide that they will move into a particular share. Because so many people are then buying that share, the market perceives an interest, and your average punter will therefore move in too, further hiking the price. Eventually the boys get out fast at an enormous paper profit, and the schmucks like you and me are left with shares which plummet overnight. In Perth alone, for example, millions of dollars have been made overnight ramping shares. The stock is usually highly speculative, and as the saying goes in Western Australia, ‘many a good share has been ruined by drilling the mine’. It is all a question of confidence, expectation and a goodly amount of the average punter’s wholesome greed. It’s comforting to know that there’s a quicker way of making a quid than interminable hours at the tripe-writer.

A most welcome surprise awaited us on our return to the hotel. During a radio interview with Philip Satchell, on the ABC in Adelaide, the conversation had inevitably turned to Australian wines and the ersatz champagnes or sparkling white wines produced here which, on the whole, are remarkably potable and extremely reasonable brews.

Robert Mayne, the group public relations manager of Thomas Hardy and Sons, famed South Australian wine-makers, had therefore sent me a bottle of Hardy’s Classique Cuvée of excellent 1981 vintage, and invited me down to Reynella when we arrived in Adelaide for the Third Test. I drank the bottle of bubbly with All-Sport photographer, Adrian Murrell, and we both agreed over our Chinese meal that it was decidedly superior to any non-vintage French stuff. Poor Adrian. He had been so bored during the last day’s play at the WACA that he had fallen asleep and missed every dismissal. And this is a man who earns his living taking photographs of cricket! Perhaps that more than anything bore eloquent testimony to the tedium which that Second Test in Perth had generated.

The England team is back in form again. Men who would kill to play in a Test match are often suddenly laid low when it comes to playing a state match in front of the proverbial two men and a dog, or, with deference to our Australian hosts at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, two men and a dingo.

Our beloved Scottish physiotherapist Lawrie ‘MacDuff’ Brown currently has his hands full with Test stars unavailable to play in the Sir Robert Menzies Memorial match. Pace-man Graham Dilley is out with fluid on the right knee. All-rounder Phillip DeFreitas is out with a jarred knee. Ian ‘Living Legend’ Botham is out with a seriously strained muscle in his left side. And off-spinner John Emburey is out with the complaint hitherto unchronicled in
Gray’s Anatomy
of a Melbourne-based wife and two children.

This leaves England with a somewhat depleted attack of three specialist bowlers: Neil ‘Ever Enthusiastic’ Foster; Gladstone ‘Out to prove himself’ Small; and Phil ‘I’ve got two cracked fingers, but there is nobody else left, is there?’ Edmonds.

‘The medium pace of captain Mike Gatting will be used in support, along with occasional off-spin from Surrey’s Jack Richards,’ came the official management explanation. Richards, who must have bowled all of at least a dozen overs in first-class cricket, was no doubt relieved to learn that he was not expected simultaneously to keep wicket as well. Given the paucity of the willing and able, the sidelined glove man, constantly cheerful Bruce French, was to be given his first chance behind the stumps in weeks.

Frankly, the whole business was such a shambles, it could have been an amalgam of
Emergency Ward 10
and
Fawlty Towers
, with manager Peter Lush doing a very good Basil in his obfuscations to the press about what had happened, what was happening and,
a fortiori
, what was about to happen.

Our present sojourn is the recently renovated Menzies at Rialto Hotel, and according to the blurb, the Rialto next door is the tallest structure in the southern hemisphere. Not a lot of people know that. ‘What is the tallest building in the Southern hemisphere?’ they will Trivially Pursue you one day at the WI coffee morning. ‘The Rialto building in Melbourne,’ you will respond, with the speed of an IBM number-cruncher.

The edifice is based on a laudable architectural concept. The old facade and turrets have been carefully preserved, and a dozen floors of iron balustraded bedroom corridors look down on to a communal cobbled courtyard. The effect is very much that of the HM prison depicted in the ever popular Ronnie Barker television series,
Porridge.
Wags ever mindful of alleged torrid nights in the Caribbean were not slow to suggest that the hotel had been selected on purpose, so that disciplinarian Micky ‘Warden Mackay’ Stewart could lock the lads in at night.

For once, locking the team in at night was not the problem. Getting them up in the morning, however, apparently was. This was to be the day when not only were early spectators at the Sir Robert Menzies Memorial Match confronted with a half-strength England side, but worse, their captain Mike Gatting failed to turn up at all.

It would, of course, be heartening to relate that the press box was electric with a sense of righteous outrage. The atmosphere in the press box was certainly electric, but more with the unconnected word-processor wires of those multifarious correspondents who would rock in around lunchtime. The only righteous outrage was being demonstrated quite vociferously by yours truly (whom yet another obstructive little minion was trying to debar from her rightful position in the press box), and by the half-dozen journos who had actually made it in time for the start of play.

One of the team, and few they were who were not either physically on the field or pretending to be paraplegic until they attacked the golf course later that day, was despatched to locate the captain, who was assumed to be in his cabin and a thousand miles away. His telephone was, unfortunately, off the hook, and the emissary failed to rouse him with ear-piercing rings on the door bell, and elephantine thumps on the door. It was all quite a mystery to many of us. Apart from anything, nobody had ever imagined that Gatt could manage to exist for more than two consecutive hours without solid food. Ever imaginative, however, members of the press corps came up with the answer. He must have found a way of eating without waking up.

Now, whatever David Gower’s faults and failings as captain in the West Indies, it is nevertheless a matter of fact that even he realised state matches were not optional. Practice nets, yes. But state matches, never. Exactly what the press and P. B. H. May would have organised for old Fender had he missed the start of a game defies contemplation. Crucifixion would not have been out of the question. I also remember when Phil was once five minutes late, not for the start of play at Middlesex, but five minutes late before the appointed time to be at the ground, which was an hour and a half before the start of play. In fact, Phil was not even late at all. He had turned up early, and then gone to leave some tickets at the gate. Middlesex captain Gatting and vice-captain John Emburey both saw to it that Phil was to be banned from the match, and from the two subsequent ones. This was all a few weeks before the England team for India was due to be selected, and with Phil trying to live down a reputation as an awkward tourist. In fact I actually took Gatt to task over the incident last year in Trinidad, and he countered that at that time Phil had not been giving him the support he needed. That, quite frankly, was an interesting analysis. Perhaps the person who had given Gatt the hardest time in his embryonic captaincy had been John Emburey, relieved of the job that would have been his, had he not cleared off on a rebel South African tour the day after he attended a Middlesex Committee meeting, yet failed to mention the fact. The truth of the matter was that that particular season only one bowler had been getting any wickets for Middlesex, and it was PHE. And it was also, ironically, PHE who on this occasion argued strenuously against the calls for harsh censure of Gatt.

Meanwhile back in the dressing room, Mike Gatting had still failed to materialise, though there would be quite an amount of material when he did. It had fallen, therefore, to the oldest member of the team, Philippe-Henri, to give the pre-match pep-talk to this hardly more than demi-team.

‘No!’ interrupted someone at one juncture. ‘No, that won’t do. That’s a three-syllable word and Gatt doesn’t know any three-syllable words.’

‘Oh, yes he does,’ countered wicketkeeper-suddenly-elevated-to-relief-bowler Jack Richards, mindful of the skipper’s increasingly generous girth. ‘Ham-burg-er.’

Talking of food, I had lunch that day in one of those splendidly appointed function rooms at the MCG with the Lady Mayoress and her fundraising committee. Christmas and Christmas-related fundraising charities are in the air, although it seems odd to someone used to northern hemisphere conditions when Christmas precursors are being played out in thirty-degree temperatures. All over Australia, shopping malls are full of artificial, polystyrene-based snow, and Father Christmas sledges being drawn by white kangaroos, a geographical variation on the original theme. In Melbourne, however, there is an even more interesting departure from tradition. You’d better believe it! A
Mother
Christmas. And not just one. Several. I asked the Lady Mayoress what it could all mean, and she explained that the Women’s Equal Opportunities lobby had insisted on it. If you are going to have a father, they argued, then you have got to have a mother. This has now caused further ructions with the one-parent family-lobby, who obviously believe otherwise. The season of peace and goodwill towards all men is indeed fraught with tension.

The great lie-in was, if nothing else, an astounding tribute to the public relations skills of manager Peter Lush. (As good old Engel pointed out, rather an unfortunate surname for a team with England’s alleged drinking habits.) If only Lushy had been there to deal with the alleged broken beds in Barbados, I am perfectly persuaded that the hotel in question would have ended up paying Botham compensation for any discomfort or embarrassment caused. Within twenty-four hours the entire sleepy Gatting incident had been relegated to the jokes department, rather than being allowed to lead to calls for resignation. Gatting was not even fined by the management, a piece of excessive forbearance with the blue-eyed boy that most correspondents thought quite wrong. It looks as if winning even a single bloody Test match for England means carte blanche from now on.

Preparations are already under way for the Christmas Party we shall be celebrating on our return to Melbourne for the Fourth Test. Each member of the team has been issued with a letter of the alphabet, and must dress accordingly, taking the theme from that letter. This year, for the first time ever, wives, and not only wives but children and nannies also will be allowed to participate in the festivities. This is yet another indication of Lush’s unfailing common sense. Splitting couples up on Christmas Day has been a stupidly divisive ploy on previous tours, and has only led to much merry festal postprandial aggro.

Phil and I have been awarded the letter J. Inspired by the prison-like configuration of the Menzies, we thought we would go along as Jailbirds, and went accordingly to a fancy-dress shop to hire our convict outfits for the big event.

‘Don’t know why you bother,’ remarked Engel laconically. ‘With the letter J you could just put a towel around your waist, and go as Joan Jones’ (see p. 13).

I had lunch that week with my Heinemann moles, who were full of great
non sub-judice
anecdotes about the Ml5 trial, and with Somerset captain Peter Roebuck. ‘Prof’, as the latter is called at Somerset (after all, the dear boy did gain a First in Law at Cambridge), is not entirely disinterested in the proceedings himself. After the jolly Somerset County Cricket Club eviscerations, which ended in the dismissal of West Indians Viv Richards and Joel Garner, and the consequent resignation of Ian Botham, Peter’s recently published book,
It Sort of Clicks (Ian Botham talking to Peter Roebuck
) is destined to become a collectors’ item. Botham does not, it would appear, do too much talking to him now.

No matter. Peter’s talents are currently deployed on another book, this time a far more worthwhile pursuit than the old ghosted biography guff. Why any near genius should waste his time and literary efforts in making dumbos look bright, and thickos appear interesting, is beyond me anyway. This time Peter has drawn inspiration from a far more eminent source, the celebrated Australian poet Henry Lawson, and a piece from the anthology
The Land where Sport is Sacred
has provided his next title,
Heroes and Clods
(though I know his publisher prefers
Ashes to Ashes
).