Cricket XXXX Cricket (5 page)

Fashions at the Melbourne Cup are nothing if not eclectic. Alongside the ostentatiously expensive designer hats, suits and dresses, there were clearly a few little numbers that had been run up all too hurriedly at home on the Singer. Temperatures soared to thirty-five degrees, and an announcement was made that gentlemen would be permitted to remove their jackets in the members’ enclosure. Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser was there with his wife, Tamie, but declined the opportunity to mislay any further pieces of apparel. There were, though, a number of young men wearing dinner-jackets and no trousers. It was difficult to ascertain whether or not they were making a political point and, if so, which. Some chaps had the temerity to wander around in nappies, although given the per capita paucity of lavatories, this turned out to be one of the day’s more sensible ideas. Weaving in and out of the assembled rich was a modern-day Robin Hood, and his Merry-to-the-point-of-positively-stocious-Men. Fortunately for the assembled plutocrats, the Sherwood Forest socialist philosophy on the redistribution of wealth was not a part of their Melbourne Cup manifesto, and they left everyone more or less in peace.

Yes, it is a peculiarly democratic Australian day out. Plebeians and patricians rub shoulders together amicably. Gentlemen in morning suit attire sip vintage bubbly in the members’ car park, whilst slightly urbanised Crocodile Dundees glug tinnies of XXXX wherever the fancy takes them. Middle-aged matrons, displaying more than the odd dimple of cellulite waddle around, duck-style, in the simoom conditions, furtively downing snifters from a catholic range of ersatz Australian champagnes. Electric green crimplenes and incandescent fuchsia Trevira permapleats find themselves juxtaposed, unabashed, with haute couture Diors, Valentinos, Givenchys and Yves St Laurents. There is room at the Melbourne Cup, as there is in this great Australian nation, for just about everyone.

And indeed just about everyone is there. Everyone who is anyone, at least, and a few more besides who are absolutely no one. Conversation buzzes in the elite members’ enclosure. What are the current Mrs Robert Sangster and Mrs Rex Harrison wearing? Who is that splendid lady, a pencil-slim dream in black and white crêpe de Chine, a hat the shape of a mainsail, tacking indefatigably with the gossip columnists’ photographers, and positively slam-dunking the odd television camera crew? Yes, to see the world and by the world be seen – that is the name of the Melbourne socialite game. Reputations for drop-dead chic may be won or lost in the space of an hour. That indefinable
je ne sais quoi
, that ephemeral quality, style, is what the high priestesses at the altar of fashion are all aiming at. Some get there, and others don’t quite make it. Indeed, as old Blue Eyes Sinatra could tell you, ladies: before you ransack Figgins Diorama (Melbourne’s equivalent to London’s New Bond Street, Paris’s Avenue Montaigne, and Rome’s Via Condotti), ‘You’ve either got or you haven’t got style.’

On the other hand, there are of course plenty of folk around who would not know an Emmanuel from a C&A, a Piaget from a Swatch, or a vintage Krug from a Great Western
méthode champenoise
. These are the nicely balanced people quite simply out for a good time, and quietly settling down to the real business of getting seriously ratted.

It was an unforgettable day, and few of the 87,000 visitors and Victorians who clicked through the turnstiles at the Flemington racecourse would contradict me. The roses, the pride and joy of the Victorian Racing Club, imbued the intoxicating and intoxicated atmosphere with their heady perfume, and nodded wistfully in the wind as punters lost their shirts in a riot of equine folly. There was no shortage of Rollers, Jags and Mercs in the members’ car park, the forum where the true patricians congregate to mount modern-age bacchanalia with the aid of hamper-laden car boots, and to consult the favoured soothsayer on incontrovertible forecasts for the next race.

During an interview with television and radio personality Don Lane on Radio 2UE, I met the other Society Queen of Melbourne, ex-
Vogue
editor Sheila Scotter. Sheila is an honorary lady member of the Lord’s Taverners, a charitable organisation which helps deprived, under-privileged and handicapped children by raising funds for sporting facilities and opportunities. Sheila kindly invited me to lunch the next day and to the celebratory Boxing Day breakfast to be held in Melbourne by the Lord’s Taverners during the fourth Test. Little did I know that this was to herald quite a close working relationship between the Lord’s Taverners and Mrs Frances E . . .

My Heinemann minder Miss Bennetto and I ended up, exhausted, as guests in the Laurent Perrier marquee, in the midst of which the latest Rolls-Royce model was parked somewhat incongruously amongst a rage of potted hydrangeas, but by this stage who cared who was sponsoring what? In similar marquees all over Flemington, tables groaned with sizzling prawns, barbecued steaks, crayfish thermidor, multitudes of gaily presented salads, gamuts of French and Australian cheeses and symphonies of calories in variegated puddings.

The Melbourne Cup itself was the fifth race, and not due to start until 2.40 pm. Having always steadfastly maintained that the only way to watch a game of cricket is through the meniscus of a large gin and tonic, it seemed entirely appropriate to watch the first four races on the marquee’s monitors through the evanescent bubbles of our hosts’ extremely potable Grand Cuvee. Happy watching strategically placed monitors in the marquees, most people could not be moved.

Excitement mounting, some of us clambered up on top of an outside broadcasting van to watch the race. Stiletto heels wobbling, skirts in the air, titfers perilously anchored, and hair-dos long since dismantled, now carefree ladies, oblivious to style, hauled themselves up a very dicky ladder and stared.

It was all over in three minutes, the winner At Talaq, a six-year-old bay stallion, trained by sixty-two-year-old veteran Colin Hayes, and owned by Sheikh Hamdan Bin Rasheed Al Maktoum.

The Sheikh and his three brothers, heirs to Dubai’s oil wealth, are dominant figures in international racing. A few years ago they owned no more than a few horses, but now they can boast the world’s greatest racing team, based mainly in England. The whole business involves expenditure of about £10 million per annum. Even multimillionaire Robert Sangster, with an impressive one thousand horses in training, is very small horse-flesh potatoes compared to the Maktoum bros.

Sheikh Hamdan, who so hates publicity that he donated £1 million to Bob Geldof’s Live Aid fund with a solemn request to leave him out of the limelight, was unfortunately not in evidence at the winner’s ceremony, but watched the day’s entertainment via a satellite link-up to Dubai. The doyennes of Melbourne society were most distressed that the one person everybody
so
wanted to meet should be absent from the thrash. Indeed the exotic good looks and far from unhealthy bank balance of the Emirate Prince have caused quite a rapacious flutter in many an Oz-Sloane bosom. Aspiring gold- or even oil-diggers should beware, however. Islamic strictures allow the Muslim sheikh up to four wives and forty ‘acquaintances’; the name of the sheikh’s victorious stallion, At Talaq, means literally ‘I divorce thee’.

We wandered home, Carol and I, about 6 pm; shoes in hand and utterly banjaxed. I fell asleep on my hotel bed, obliterated by a combination of jet lag, windburn, and heatstroke. I woke up fourteen hours later, at eight the next morning. That day I was flying to the capital of Western Australia, Perth.

It is difficult for Europeans, inured to flying from one European capital to another in the space of an hour or two, to comprehend the vast expanse that is Australia. The flight from Melbourne to Perth covers over 2,500 km, and involves a three-hour time change. The itinerary of this cricket tour is a logistic nightmare, involving as it does over thirty such internal flights within the space of four months. There is a putative reason for this intercontinental tangle of criss-crossed flight paths – the Australian Cricket Board (ACB) maintains that it cannot guarantee two consecutive first-class pitches at any one venue. This means that instead of playing a state game, immediately followed by a Test match, England are obliged to play, for instance, Western Australia in Perth, and then fly 3,500 km to play the First Test match in Brisbane. The result is a peripatetic aberration of major proportions. Not only are twenty-odd days completely wasted actually travelling, but each flight means a time change, the inevitable hassle of packing, hanging around an airport, a new hotel bed and a disrupted sleeping pattern.

A few of the tourists are none too wild about flying either. Peter Lush, Graham Dilley, and to a lesser extent, Mike Gatting, would certainly not be the first to enlist for the Red Devils. The arrangement also means that instead of a decent two-week stint anywhere, with a couple of well-earned free days for mental and physical recuperation, the majority of such potential rest-days are spent in the unremitting grind of travelling. Add to this a few, indisputably much appreciated by the locals, but nonetheless time-consuming up-country matches in places such as Kalgoorlie, Bundaberg, Lawes and Wudinna, and the result is an undeniably punishing schedule by anybody’s standards. Perhaps when correspondents berate the team for apparent lack of interest in practice matches, and indeed for the often patently casual approach manifested even in the state matches, they might do well to ask whether there is not quite simply just far too much cricket on this tour. On top of all that, after a five-match Test series for the Ashes interrupted by a one-day challenge, there is another apparently gratuitous if crowd-pullingly lucrative codicil of One Day Internationals to round off proceedings. England’s professional cricketers, perhaps more than most, suffer from a surfeit of cricket during the home summer season. What with seven days a week spent on the cricket field, and intervening periods devoted to dicing with death on the motorways, it is hardly surprising that men find it difficult to lift themselves for every game. Sports psychologists would probably argue that it is dangerous if players get into the habit of failing to give anything less than a hundred per cent at all times in terms of effort and commitment. Try telling that to sixteen perpetually semi-jet-lagged touring cricketers.

There is, in any event, a growing school of thought which believes that all this drivel about consecutive first-class wickets is so much bureaucratic nonsense; a school of thought which remains profoundly persuaded that whosoever at Lord’s agreed to this itinerary had clearly never clapped eyes on a map of Australia; or perhaps whose greedy, mercenary and blinkered gaze could see no further than the balance sheet.

In this year of ‘open secrecy’ in Australia and ‘could it possibly be true that the MI5 bugged Harold Wilson’s government?’ in England, it really is time the TCCB and MCC took a leaf out of the New Zealand RFU Council’s book and opened their meetings to the media.

Perth, the glorious capital of Western Australia, seemed to have developed substantially since my last visit there some four years ago. The ten-minute trip from the new airport to the Sheraton-Perth Hotel provided ample opportunity to assess the creeping urbanisation along the magnificent Swan River, that major of the city’s manifold attractions. High-rise office blocks and half-finished hotels now jostle for pre-eminence on the waterfront. Nothing too excessive, however. There is still no shortage of space for folk in Western Australia.

This is my third trip Down Under. The first, on the 1978–9 England tour, was not a particularly happy experience. Nothing to do with the country, which I thoroughly embraced for its unashamed sybaritic enjoyment of the good life. Apart from South Africa, I had never seen such a generally high quality of life and standard of living. The outdoor existence, the kids on the beach whose physiques bore eloquent testimony to an available abundance of fine agricultural produce, and a definite feeling of physical wellbeing all helped to promote my mental picture of Australia as a land of plenty. No, the problem had nothing to do with the landscape, but with the indelibly black blot on it: Phil.

During the Second Test, at Perth, Phil had a minor contretemps with his Middlesex and England captain, Mike Brearley. When I say a minor contretemps, it was an incident which in terms of fallout did as much for Phil’s cricketing career as the Americans did for Hiroshima. The entire episode has had more ink devoted to it than to the individual oscillations in weight of the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of York put together, so I shall spare you the tedious details. Suffice it to say that the two Cambridge graduates almost came to blows, had to be prised apart by Essex’s John Lever, and Phil did not play Test cricket again on that tour. In fact, things had reached such a ridiculously low communication ebb by the time I arrived that Brearley was refusing to speak to Phil. As an amateur psychologist, and psychotherapist, Mike no doubt had some profoundly good reason for maintaining this zero-interface situation. Trouble was, Phil could not see it. Neither could he see why Geoff ‘Dusty’ Miller of Derbyshire (now of Essex) should be given the nod ahead of him. He spent the entire tour positively burning with resentment.

How short is man’s memory. Essex pace-man Neil ‘Fozzie’ Foster feels, rightly or wrongly, that he has not been given a fair crack of the whip so far on this tour. He too would prefer to be in the thick of it, performing in the middle, rather than being saddled with a veritable superabundance of pointless free days. Not all tourists who fail to make the XI react like this. I remember on the 1978–9 tour, it was easily forgivable for believing that the very thought of a Test match might have set a certain pace bowler off into yet another majestic migraine. Not so Fozzie. He is young, he is enthusiastic and he wants to prove himself. Deprived of the opportunity he is naturally not displaying that cheerful, sunny disposition which so characterised him on his successful 1985 tour of India. Phil has started using his Essex nickname ‘Angry’ (as in Angry Young Man), patently forgetting that there were very few angrier young men than Philippe-Henri Edmonds on the 1978–9 Brearley tour of Australia.