Cricket XXXX Cricket (2 page)

Yes, cricket is a microcosm in which life in all its aspects is played out under the media microscope. In my first cricket diary,
Another Bloody Tour
, I witnessed the fall-out of a failing England team imploding in the West Indies. Now, as you read
Cricket XXXX Cricket
, I hope that you feel the fun, the focus and the massively good fellowship that informed a resurrected England team in Oz. Triumph vs Disaster? I have yet to meet the cricketer who could treat them both the same.

Frances Edmonds

London, 2015

Never ever believe anything you read in the newspapers. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. On occasion I write for them.

Take conference interpreting, for example. That certainly is not all it is cracked up to be. It is not all duty-free Hermès scarves and Chanel No. 5; jet-setting around the world making boring, banal, superficial and ill-informed politicians sound riveting, innovative, outstanding and brill . . . or, indeed, from time to time, vice versa.

No. Sometimes you come across the real thing, the people who
really
know what they are talking about, the experts. And inevitably, when you do, they are talking about something incomprehensibly esoteric such as plasma physics, and when they are, it is in exotic locations such as a laboratory in Culham, not a million miles away from such exciting railway stations as Didcot.

Not that nuclear fusion is not a fascinating topic, on the contrary. And not that the relative merits of ion cyclotron resonance heating, lower hybrid resonance heating, electron cyclotron resonance heating, Alfvén-wave heating, turbulent heating and adiabatic heating are not subjects worthy of protracted ponder on a cold, misty October afternoon. Dear me, no.

It may, perhaps, have had more to do with the cumulative effect of a pharmaceutical conference in Portsmouth the week prior, epitomised in awfulness by a Spaniard with a cleft palate, semi-intelligible in five European Community languages, telling us all about benzodiazepine in his own highly individualistic brand of French. That, and the conference a fortnight before in Milan, an unspeakable meeting on pre-impregnated gas-pressure assisted cables, dominated by an unstoppable flow of manic Italians – that was probably what did it.

My thoughts turned to the workers on the other side of the world: to the old man, stretched out on a beach on the Gold Coast, exhausted after a heavy thirty minutes turning his arm over in the nets.

I rang my travel agent in London, and booked myself a seat on the next flight to Australia.

I must admit to being somewhat miffed. No, not somewhat. That is far too pusillanimous an adverb to convey my current state of displeasure. Extremely.

You have all, no doubt, heard the story of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. Of course you have. Even people educated in Queensland have heard the story of the Emperor’s new clothes. Well, my arrival in Australia has been totally upstaged by a better one than that: two television and three radio interviews cancelled – and all because of the saga of ‘The Ex-Prime Minister’s Old Trousers’.

Former Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm (‘Rectitude’
used
to be my middle name) Fraser has been very busy on the after-dinner speaking circuit since his elevation to Chairman of the Eminent Persons’ Group. The EPG is an eclectic selection of sometime somebodies and current busybodies, mandated by Commonwealth leaders to report on the South African problem in general and apartheid in particular. Australia, with its erstwhile whites-only immigration policy and a healthy track record in wiping out its own indigenous Aboriginal population, was the obvious country to field a chairperson for such an egregious body. Malcolm was back, if not centre-stage, then at least in the wings of international diplomacy.

It was therefore a trifle unfortunate, after one such speaking assignment in Memphis, Tennessee, that Mr Fraser should somehow lose his trousers, his wallet and his diplomatic passport during a nocturnal sojourn at the Admiral Benbow Motel. The Admiral Benbow Motel, according to Memphis Tennessee Tourist Board Officials more inured to dealing with Elvis Presley groupies wetting their pants rather than ex-Prime Ministers losing them, is a perfectly – almost totally – respectable hotel. Not quite the sort of establishment in which you would expect an eminent person to lay his weary wallet and diplomatic passport, but the right side of kosher at least. What does seem extremely odd about the place is that it would not appear to provide telephones in the bedrooms. Why on earth, otherwise, would the debagged ex-premier arrive
in eminenta persona
at the reception desk to report the loss, with only a towel to swathe his lower regions – hardly a step designed to ward off unwelcome publicity from the probing eyes of the world’s media? Another mystery is why Mr Fraser would sign himself into the good Admiral’s residence as one ‘Joan Jones’. ‘We thought Joan was the Australian way of spelling John,’ obfuscated the motel’s receptionist nicely. With such a thorough grasp of international diplomacy, maybe
she
should be chairing the Eminent Persons’ Group.

Australian marketing men recognise a good wheeze when they see one, and a Melbourne men’s underwear company is already advertising extra-durable, guaranteed against holes, executive underpants, just in case
you
ever get caught with
your
pants down. Whatever happened to good taste? At all events, the episode does not appear to have ruined the elder statesman’s hitherto unsullied reputation. On the contrary, informed pundits who believe that Malcolm’s stiff-and-starchy never-put-a-foot-wrong image won him little sympathy Down Under are now convinced that this rather louche little episode could herald a complete renaissance of his political career. Yes, folks, Cecil Parkinson would assuredly have been better off in Australia, and so, for that matter, am I. The end of October in England, when the clocks go back, and the nights close in at five o’clock, is the most depressing time of the year, and five months in the Antipodean sunshine seems no bad way to spend an English winter. I arrived in Adelaide on 31 October, three weeks after the England cricket team had left our green and pleasant land in an all-out effort to continue the glorious summer game in warmer climes, to retain the Ashes, and to break the spell of disasters which has dogged them since their disastrous tour of the West Indies in early 1986. A home season spent losing to the Indians and New Zealanders has done little to revive confidence, or restore morale, and all-rounder Ian Botham’s subsequent exclusion from the team on drugs offences was, perhaps excessively, sorely felt.

The British Airways inaugural flight from London to Adelaide was twenty-seven hours of complete relaxation. Unlike most people, I thoroughly enjoy long-haul flights. Responsibility for your own life is wrested from you for the duration, and all you can do is sit back and relax. One of the stewardesses on the London–Bangkok sector was the ex-wife of Geoff Howarth, former captain of New Zealand, but as a tribute to her sheer professionalism on a chock-a-block flight, she only managed to come and chat to me when the plane had actually landed. It was another of those sad tales of cricketing marriages, where long and enforced absences create a gradual and irretrievable breakdown. It is nevertheless the number of such marriages that survive that continue to surprise me, not the number that fail.

As the plane circled to land in Adelaide, rows upon rows of Formula One racing cars hove into view, like so many multicoloured Dinky toys, waiting to be freighted back to their respective workshops. The entire city, hitherto better known for its multiplicity of churches, was still in the throes of post-Grand Prix euphoria. With the few exceptions of people who objected to the inevitable traffic jams, the noise and the influx of the racing world’s ritzy razzamatazz, the majority of the good burghers of Adelaide had been immersed in the hopes of Britain’s Nigel Mansell and his bid for the world championship. Mansell had only to secure third place in the race, and the title would have been his. Tragically, his aspirations burst along with his left rear tyre, and he narrowly escaped with his life. Alain Prost carried off the championship. But in all honesty who cares? Alain Prost is not an Englishman.

The flight had been full as far as Sydney, but we who emerged at the final destination, ‘The City of Churches and Light’, were few. My copious amounts of baggage arrived almost immediately, thanks to the special ministrations of British Airways Special Services Executive, Francis de Souza. The cricket team had flown out heavily subsidised by British Airways, but the national flag-carrier’s well-tapped munificence embraces even sports less familiar, and the British challenge in the America’s Cup is also being generously sponsored by the self-confessed World’s Favourite Airline. Francis’ VIP attentions are reserved not merely for the superstars, but even extend to the vicarious extrusions of same, the wives, and I was unreservedly grateful for the ‘hand’ with my twenty kilos of excess baggage. Most of this comprised gear my husband, spin-bowler Phil, had failed to remember, items any professional cricketer could easily forget: cricket trousers, thigh pads, cricket shirts, England sweaters, spikes, helmet, an extra bat, chest pad, you know, all those relatively redundant peripherals to a four-month tour of Australia.

Hypnotising myself into a Bob Willis-like catatonic trance, watching other people’s luggage swirl around on the black rubber carousel, I noticed gossip columnist Auberon Waugh. His avuncular physiognomy belies his often gloriously malicious mind. He is the sort of elegantly satirical, brilliantly vituperative, unashamed misogynist, whose ‘tripe-writer’ ribbons mere part-time mickey-takers, such as myself, are unworthy to change.

Had he been sent here to report, in his inimitably excoriating fashion, on the ‘Clashes for the Ashes’? I savoured the thought. Sadly not. The distinguished progeny of the author of
Brideshead Revisited, Scoop
and
Black Mischief
had been invited to Adelaide in his capacity as wine connoisseur extraordinaire. An indignant Australian senator was so incensed when Waugh failed sufficiently to differentiate between South Australian and Hunter Valley wines in his essays on the Australian grape, she invited him over to rectify any confusion. I should like to put it on record here and now (just in case the good senator is reading), that I too am rather hazy on the organoleptic nuances of said varieties, and would be perfectly delighted to have my confusion dispelled as well.

I was met at the airport by a correspondent from the local press, who inquired whether I would be joining the team on its forthcoming up-country match in Kalgoorlie. Kalgoorlie is celebrated throughout Australia for its gold mines, and for that apparently indispensable adjunct to towns where lonesome men get too rich, too quick: its brothels. Unfortunately, the logistics of taking in the forthcoming Melbourne Cup
and
making it up to this indubitably colourful fixture were too awkward to contemplate, and I had elected to go for the former.

‘I’d rather go to the Melbourne Cup,’ I explained to the baby hackette in a jet-lagged attempt at flippancy, ‘You get a better class of horse.’

This did not net me too many friends amongst the doyennes of Melbourne society, where it was widely and faithfully misreported as ‘a better class of whore’. If the press want you to be out-spoken, you can bet your bottom, devalued Australian dollar, you are
going
to be out-spoken.

I arrived at the new and commensurately sumptuous Adelaide Hilton. It was midday, and Phil was playing at the Oval in the state match against South Australia.

He had remembered.
There, in the bedroom, on top of the television, lovingly juxtaposed between a pile of
laundered
(at least we’re making progress) jock-straps and cricket socks, was a floral display. Nothing too ostentatious, mind you. No, indeed on reflexion about exactly the same size as the floral displays ubiquitously dotted throughout the entire hotel. And the same selection. ‘Happy Tenth Anniversary, darling’, it proclaimed, in suitably non-person-specific terms of endearment. It was signed ‘PH EDMONDS’.

I was appropriately overwhelmed, and reflected that even if Philippe-Henri had forgotten how to sign his name in anything other than autograph, room-service or credit-card fashion, at least he had remembered that it was ten years since the outbreak of inter-Edmonds hostilities. Ten years and one day to be exact. I had left England on 29 October, and arrived in Australia on 31 October. Somewhere in between a twenty-seven-hour international flight and an eight-hour time difference, 30 October, the actual day of the original mental aberration, had been lost, snaffled up by lines of longitude.

Well, the darling boy, whose memory is about as good as Kurt Waldheim’s when it comes to remembering emotional occasions which involve expenditure on small tokens of undying love and affection, had at least not forgotten this decadal notch on the yardstick of conjugal bliss. I have to admit that underneath this taut exterior of armadillo-feminism, I had been missing him.

‘And I’ve been missing you too,’ he admitted, in one of those intimate moments when, according to women’s magazines, men are supposed to tell you you’re wonderful, beautiful, adorable, desirable, etc. ‘There’s been nobody here to aggravate me.’

The tour so far has been fairly eventless. The management’s blanket ban on players writing, broadcasting or giving interviews to the press has resulted in fairly lacklustre, if occasionally critical, media coverage. Every member of the press corps shall henceforth be receiving exactly the same statement from the manager, Peter Lush, the assistant manager, Micky Stewart, or the captain, Mike Gatting. According to many of the hardened journos who have already decided to dispense with the press conferences, the ‘Gattysburg Addresses’ (as the captain’s desperately non-sensational, well-coached and relentlessly innocuous statements have been christened), are ‘basically tremendously wise’. There is a lot of ‘cricket-wise’, ‘batting-wise’, ‘bowling-wise’, ‘Ashes-wise’, ‘fielding-wise’, and ‘practice-wise’, together with a ‘tremendous’ amount of ‘basically’. Gatt, patently, has assimilated the art of saying much which means nothing; with such a thorough grasp of international diplomacy, maybe
he
should be chairing the Eminent Persons’ Group.