Cricket XXXX Cricket (3 page)

No, there has been little yet of the ex-Miss Barbados variety of copy for the press to get hot in the word-processor over. There have been a few up-country matches, one in Bundaberg against a Queensland Country XI where the odd bottle of the notorious local rum was dutifully downed, one in Lawes against SE Queensland Country, and another against a South Australia XI at Wudinna which was rather more colourful. The tiny plane chartered for the flight from Adelaide hit a storm, and pavement pizzas of the ongoing variety were in fairly generalised production throughout the England camp. The manager, Peter Lush, was even fined by the team’s social committee for succumbing like the rest. At the back of the plane, not entirely unamused by their faint-hearted Pommie teammates’ gastroenterological turmoil, sat the non-pukers, Zambian Edmonds and South African Allan Lamb – iron constitutions, these colonials.

It would be hard work not to like Allan Lamb, and he certainly rates as one of most people’s favourite tourists. I have never met anyone with quite as much energy, merriment and good-humoured mischief in him.

At the very beginning of the tour, five of the team – John Emburey, Ian Botham, David Gower, Phil and Allan Lamb – took a seaplane excursion off the coast of Queensland. Thus confined, there was not a lot anybody could do when ‘Beefy’ Botham took the controls, other than stare hopefully at the aquatic environment and say a few earnest prayers. Starboard, they noticed a pelican, following them with interest. Suddenly the bird started to hover, its beady eye focused meaningfully. Finally, with an unerring sense of direction, it swooped on its unsuspecting prey, engulfing the unfortunate creature in its capacious mouth. ‘Henri!’ shouted Lamby to my husband. ‘Looks like Frances has arrived!’

Lamby and David Gower seem closer than ever on this trip. In bygone days, Botham and former England captain, ‘una tantum’ assistant manager, Bob Willis comprised the Gang of Four. Willis, after England’s last disastrous tour to the West Indies, is no longer administratively with us, whilst Botham seems to be keeping very much to himself and his Australian promotions agent. This leaves the Allan and David duo together, as tour veterans of many years’ standing.

David, whom Lamb has nicknamed ‘Shaggy’, a not entirely inappropriate sobriquet, designed to convey the deep-pile carpet effect of David’s unruly, blond curls, seems lost. It is received wisdom that I have all the maternal instincts of a funnel-web spider, but I do have an extremely soft spot for David.

Last year had been such a traumatic year for him. An only child, whose father died many years ago, it came as a body-blow when his mother died weeks before the England team set off to the West Indies. That uncompromisingly dreadful tour ensued, and David, as captain, was inevitably first in the media firing line when it came to handing out the brickbats: no team discipline; want of application; lack of leadership; failure to implement anything even vaguely analogous to a strategy; and so on. He took it all with that indefatigable good humour and charm which uninformed pundits often perceive as indifference. It must be difficult for captains in adversity to know quite how to react to the cricket world’s vultures in the face of unremitting criticism. Some, such as ex-Australian captain, Kim Hughes, break down and cry. Some, such as current Australian captain, Allan Border, become uncommunicative, refuse to field press questions, threaten to resign and earn the nickname ‘Grumpy’. Throughout the press onslaught David remained his own laid-back, superficially insouciant self. However, absence of overt, aggressive histrionics drove the bloodlusters even wilder. Any layperson, picking up a British newspaper during that period, would have been forgiven for believing that David had done something rather ill-defined, but nevertheless deeply reprehensible. What in truth he had done was to lose to the best team on earth in its own Caribbean backyard. No one else, in the circumstances, could have done a better job. The noose however was already around his neck, and he was given but a short-term, probationary home captaincy against the Indians the following summer.

The rest is history. Chairman of Selectors, Peter May, who has done for the art of communication what Benson and Hedges have done for world health, summarily dismissed David after the First Test defeat at Lord’s. It is not, as the old adage runs, what you do, it’s the way that you do it, and the many people who have grown to admire and respect David will never forgive the ungracious ineptitude with which he was given the push.

Vice-captain Mike Gatting was duly appointed captain in his place. Mike, who had had his nose broken by Malcolm Marshall in the first One Day International in Jamaica had returned to the West Indies to play in only one Test match, the last.
His
reputation therefore, if not his good looks, had managed to survive the Caribbean experience intact.

The choice of England vice-captain for the home series proved conclusively, to me at least, that certain cricketers’ peccadillos are far more easily forgiven than others. Graham Gooch, who having led a rebel tour to South Africa, spent much of his time in the West Indies feeling mortally aggrieved that a few black politicians should make a few moral points about ‘Judas money’, had finally to be persuaded forcibly to stay on the tour at all. Donald Carr, then secretary of the Test and County Cricket Board (TCCB), was obliged to fly out to Trinidad after the fourth Test to convince Graham to continue on to the final Test in Antigua. Who will ever know what was said or promised? Suffice it to say that the man who led a breakaway rebel tour to South Africa, the man who was not entirely sure whether or not he ever wanted to be on tour in the West Indies, the man who subsequently decided that he was not available to tour Australia, was nevertheless granted the honour of the vice-captaincy of England. David Gower, meanwhile, was left completely out in the cold.

And that is how things stand at the moment. David, who has three full tours of Australia to his name, who has more Test experience than the entire touring selection committee put together, has not even been made a selector. There is fairly generalised outrage in the roving press corps at this glaring, almost insulting omission. It is interesting, is it not, how a certain ineffable sense of fair play tends to triumph in the British media? Once a chap has been trampled on sufficiently, suddenly everybody decides it is high time to rehabilitate him. Erstwhile hatchet-job men are now realising what an extremely good and decent person David Gower is. Indeed, in the idle hours I spend counting how many clichés Bob Willis can fit into one sentence of his Channel 9 television Test match commentary, I often wonder how much better David would have fared as captain if he had had the current managerial support group. The combination of manager Peter Lush’s public relations background, his confidence in dealing with the press and (perhaps his greatest asset) his inalienable common sense, together with assistant manager Micky Stewart’s reputation as a no-nonsense disciplinarian, removes many extraneous pressures from a captain’s shoulders. The skipper is thus left free to devote himself to the job in hand: leading his men on the field. On overseas tours, nowadays, that it is more than sufficient. But enough of all that for the moment. Back to a favourite, and exponentially more interesting topic: MOI!

I am finding it very difficult to establish a regular sleeping pattern, since my circadian rhythms would appear to be seriously out of kilter. I assume this is what other folk advert to as jet-lagged. It does not help sharing a room with Philippe-Henri Edmonds, whose insomniac idiosyncrasies are legendary in the England cricket camp. Four players have been granted the privilege of a single room this tour: Mike Gatting, the captain; John Emburey, the vice-captain; David Gower, in appreciation of his seniority; and Phil Edmonds, by virtue of the fact that he is such an impossibly awkward blighter that nobody else will share with him. His relentless attempts to tune into the BBC’s World Service on the radio are positively Heath Robinsonian. Coils of wire, attached to extruded coat-hangers, wrapped around television aerials, affixed with drawing pins to the ceiling and festooned across the outside balcony make the Edmonds’ hotel love-nest appear more like an electricity generating station, or a nuclear fusion power plant, than a connubial boudoir. He is awake every morning at 5 am, and orders that Aussie/American favourite, steak and eggs. Being woken up at 5.15 by some fifteen-stone nutter watching breakfast TV and eating steak and eggs in bed beside you certainly adds a completely new dimension to the phenomenon of morning sickness.

Australian television is dominated to a large extent by commercial channels. The ABC (the Australian equivalent of our BBC) would appear to have a hard time competing with the Murdoch, Packer, Fairfax, Bond, and Holmes à Court media empires. The copious amount of advertising is most intrusive for a newcomer. Not only do the channels devote a lot of time and airspace to advertising products, but even more energy seems to be devoted to promoting themselves. Channel 9, Kerry Packer’s old outfit, which generally achieves the top ratings, is a case in point. Most of the evening news time is devoted to the message that the news is coming and that it will be absolutely spiffing when it arrives. Consumers, I believe, should be allowed to make such quality assessments for themselves, and not have them gratuitously foisted upon them. Perhaps the marketing whizz-kids are not sufficiently convinced of the value of their own product. Or maybe this is just the Aussie way. With luck Alan Bond’s buy-out of the Packer TV empire will change matters.

The Aussie way of depicting history, incidentally, is possibly worth a mention. Not that I can blame the Australians for their somewhat distorted account of the infamous 1932–3 ‘Bodyline’ series; all chauvinists play with facts. The Hayes–Schultz film of that name however, is currently being screened as I write, and although I was not personally doing the rounds in the heyday of Bradman and Jardine, I am none the less prepared to take it on higher authority that the entire production bears as much relation to the truth of the matter as Marilyn Monroe’s death certificate. There is such a thing, of course, as dramatic licence, but in this case dramatic licence moves into the realms, if not on occasions of invention, then perilously close to fiction. On a purely physical level, for instance, the public sympathy odds are stacked heavily in Australia’s favour from the outset. Australian batsman Don Bradman is tall, dark, seraphically good-looking, with incandescent watery blue eyes and a fair monopoly on righteousness. In truth, Bradman was never more than of very average physical stature, and was to conventional film-star good looks what Robert Redford is to Test cricket. The English, on the other hand, are with few exceptions an irretrievably dastardly bunch. Jardine is depicted as a demonic obsessive, whose ears stick out at forty-five degrees to his head and wiggle satanically as he plots the ‘leg-theory’ downfall of ‘Bradmin’ and the entire Australian ‘crickit’ team. Apparently the real Jardine was an elegant patrician, and by no means the unequivocal bounder and cad he would appear to be in the film. None of this, however, is half as significant as the actual timing of the screening. Old resentments for things which happened over fifty years ago still run deep. Jardine’s restricted use of leg-theory, which compared to the relentlessly murderous assaults of Lillee and Thomson in their heyday was a positive picnic, continues, nevertheless, to be a controversy which epitomises the perennial and not always entirely friendly rivalries between the mother country and her former colony. As the 1986–7 ‘Clashes for the Ashes’ begin to warm up it is interesting that certain sectors of the Australian media see fit to remind us that when all is said and done, all Aussies are fine, bonza folk, and equally all Pommies are bastards. Come to think of it, one day that might make a good title for a book.

Two consecutive days is quite enough time to devote to any one man. Indeed the World Health Organisation would probably rule that anything more than a one-night per annum exposure level to the insomniac shenanigans of PHE could seriously damage your health. On the third morning after my arrival in Australia I therefore flew off to Melbourne, while the England team emplaned for Kalgoorlie, materialistic Mecca of gold-mines and whore-houses. That disciplinarian, Micky Stewart, would just have to find a way of keeping the boys out of the gold-mines. Phil and David Gower, however, elected to make the journey by overnight train. Beefy Botham had implied that he too would like to take the twenty-six-hour train trip, but the management decided otherwise. Twenty-six hours of the irrepressible Beefy in a confined space with gratis booze was not considered to be a terribly good idea.

On the flight from Adelaide to Melbourne I read
Thommo Declares
, the ghosted biography of Jeff Thompson, erstwhile pace bowler, and enfant terrible of Australian cricket. I am not too wild about the genre of ghosted biographies. To my lights only people who are dead should invoke the privilege of opting out of the hassle of recounting their own version of events. Unfortunately, with one or two remarkable exceptions (Peter Roebuck, Vic Marks, Mike Brearley, all Oxbridge men), most cricketers take the easy option, pick up the loot, and let some other poor bloke do the graft. Too often the results tend to be of fairly iridescent mediocrity, with oleaginous sycophancy as the major hallmark. Until such times, however, as cricketers develop the time, the inclination and sufficient words in their vocabulary to write their own stuff this is the type of sports book we shall tend to be saddled with.

Thommo’s book makes interesting if not consistently edifying reading. Frequent expletives have patently been deleted, but there is nonetheless an obvious effort by biographer John Byrell to promote an uncompromisingly macho image. The book pays joyous tribute to those quintessential Aussie values of playing cricket, swilling beer, swearing voraciously, and bonking oneself stupid. ‘Ian Botham’, says Thommo, ‘would make a great Aussie’. It is still not known whether Mr Botham will be taking legal action.