Cricket XXXX Cricket (9 page)

The fact that the pair of them spend their travelling time with their Walkmans clapped uncommunicatively on their heads, the one of them obliged to down innumerable tinnies of Fosters in an effort to dispel his fear of flying, and the other unlikely to recognise Thicknesse even if he were to walk around clad in nothing but plastic laminated copies of
The Evening Standard
, rendered the Botham dictate somewhat superfluous. Nevertheless, certain members of Botham’s vicariously aggrieved cohorts went so far as to suggest that captain Mike Gatting should be enjoined to stop playing cards with said sacrilegious correspondent. Neither must anyone have a drink with him in the bar . . . or share their sandwiches with him . . . or play him at conkers . . . or let him look at their hamster . . .

This was my first visit to Brisbane, but Queensland’s reputation had preceded it. When I first arrived in Australia, opinion polls had been suggesting that the state’s incumbent premier, Nationalist Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, was no longer the leader whom the majority of Queenslanders wanted. Sir Johannes has held the reins of power in this state for almost twenty years, and the opinion polls were sort of right. Sixty-one per cent of the electorate did
not
support the continued leadership of this arch-conservative (for want of a more right-wing expression) politician. Thanks, however, to a gerrymander system that would disgrace most regimes with vague pretensions of democracy, Sir Joh was returned to office with an overall majority, on the basis of a mere thirty-nine per cent of the vote. The politics here are frankly scandalous, and what is worse is that everybody knows it. Any reform of this patently unjust and rather selective electoral system would have to be effected at federal level, however, and Queensland represents a can of constitutional worms that the increasingly less popular Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, is unwilling to open.

He could well have done so many things, Labour Prime Minister Hawke, when first he ascended to power in 1983. A poll taken at the time indicated that more Australians believed in Bob Hawke than believed in God. There would be no point, of course, conducting a similar poll on Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom as the two deities have become virtually indivisible, but certainly Hawke, at that juncture, could have moved political mountains. He could easily, for example, have enacted legislation to settle the vexed issue of Aboriginal land rights, a shameful running sore that continues to scar Australian society and history, and a problem long overdue in its resolution. He could, in all probability, have addressed the canker of the Queensland gerrymander, and so very much more. A charismatic character in the inalienably Aussie mould, Hawke had the reputation for being a hard-drinking, sports-loving ladies’ man. His official biographer, Blanche d’Alpuget, does well to encapsulate the carefree charm and the winning ways of the man who once was indisputably Australia’s all-time most popular politician.

It is most distressing, therefore, for most people concerned, that Mr Hawke has consigned his wayward roué days to the history and biography books, and with them the essence of his charm and charisma. Cartoonists, political analysts, lobby columnists and gossip diarists are distraught at Bob’s new holier-than-thou image. No booze, no smokes, on the golf course at some ungodly hour in the morning, as fit as a fiddle, and by all accounts as interesting in inverse proportion. It is therefore with impunity that Sir Joh, not a man to brook external interference, especially not from foreign powers such as Canberra, continues his fiercely independent premiership on the basis of thirty-nine per cent of the vote. In a state such as this, wrote Matthew Engel of the
Guardian
, you might be forgiven for assuming that the team who got fewest runs would win the Test match.

What a glaring lacuna! Four chapters on, and this is the first mention of my favourite cricket correspondent, Matthew Engel. We had, in fact, met up in Melbourne, the evening prior to the Melbourne Cup, where I had subjected the poor boy to the Edmonds’ patented remedy for the foolproof cure of jet lag. This remedy involves the indiscriminate ingestion of lots and lots of the old bubbly stuff, and any residual jet lag is forgotten in the onset of the most intergalactic hangover. It is predicated on the ancient train-in-the-tunnel theory, the theory on which acupuncture is based. On the single track railway line, for instance, only one train can go through the tunnel at any one time. Similarly with the nervous system: nerves can only deal with one message at a time, and therefore a small pinprick may deflect a patient’s attention away from a far more excruciating pain. If this all sounds like the most unutterable balderdash to you, you could be right. But I had somehow to convince old Engel that the next bottle would definitely dispel his jet lag. He had just arrived from America, where he was apparently hoping to return to watch the Superbowl in three weeks. I do not know whether it was his speech or my hearing which was by this stage slurred, but for some hours I laboured under the impression that he had every intention of returning to watch a soup bowl for three weeks. Three weeks watching a soup bowl . . . my mind wandered in and out of the bubbles of our eminently potable Great Western
méthode champenoise
tipple – no wonder
Grauniad
readers have the reputation for being alternative.

‘Good night, Matthew,’ I said finally, in a garbled valediction, the verbal equivalent of a normal page of
Grauniad
typesetting. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at the Cup.’ See him tomorrow at the Cup! There would only be Engel and 86,999 others.

Here we all are then, three weeks later, on the eve of the First Test, in the land of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the man who has done for political enlightenment what Colonel Gaddafi has done for international air safety. We were accommodated in the Brisbane Crest hotel, a friendly enough establishment, where the famous Queensland shellfish is as good as any in the world. The tour has been fairly low-key so far, unlike the last ‘Bloody Tour’. No sex, drugs or rock ’n’ roll allegations. In fact, the only incident so far has been created by members of the press themselves, which is precisely why you have never read about it.

Law and order, as with all right-wing governments, is a big issue in Queensland. Before we venture any further, it is perhaps worthwhile at this point defining our political terms. Party labels applied in one country do not necessarily imply the philosophies, traditions and beliefs of an homonymous party in another. In Australia, Labour is more or less like our old-style Labour (i.e., without the lunatic fringe, militant tendency, effulgent red Trotskyite, equal-rights-for-gay-whales, power-to-the-one-parent-handicapped-lesbian-AIDS-victim curlicues). Liberal, in Australia as in the Federal Republic of Germany, is right-wing conservative (with a big C or a small c depending on the individual). And Nationalist (as in Sir Joh) is so far to the right that it is almost off the Australian continental shelf and away into the Pacific. Quite apart from these wretched Aussies confounding us poor Poms with their gratuitously misleading political nomenclature, the wags befuddle us even further by cracking jokes about Labour’s Bob Hawke turning out to be Australia’s most Liberal Prime Minister. Honestly! Centuries-old sacrosanct socio-political categorisations should not be bandied around like this.

But to return to the law-and-order issue, Phil and I, both stultified by the relentless tedium of the generalised good behaviour on this tour, were delighted to return to the hotel one evening to see a gaggle of pressmen in conclave with the hotel management. It may well be that gaggle is not the most apposite collective noun for pressmen. Gaggle implies geese, and geese implies audible noise, and that is arguably
not
the characteristic most evinced by the press corps. Their mission is to listen to and watch others, not to constitute the focus of attention themselves. This is an attribute I have not yet managed to assimilate, and it has been remarked that the decibel level in the press box increases exponentially when the one female correspondent, F. E. Edmonds, is in the vicinity. For want of a better word and a Roget’s Thesaurus, however, this gaggle of pressmen seemed to be involved in extremely animated conversation with some inordinately irate members of the hotel’s management. Smelling a good story, I immediately produced my Filofax and my Must de Cartier fountain pen. Don’t imagine for a moment that we women can’t be as competent super-sleuths as the men. Unfortunately, the Filofax was full of good shopping addresses in Sydney, Christmas card lists, and conversion charts to translate European shoe and clothes sizes into the correct Australian calibration, and the Must de Cartier fountain pen, on the other hand, staunchly refused to flow, and it looks like Melbourne will be the first place to provide replacement refills for the desiccated, burgundy-coloured ink cartridge. Do you suppose this ever happens to Woodcock or Wooldridge?

Unchronicled though it was, this story might well have ended in tears, if not in far worse, had it not been for the fortuitous intervention of the
Mail
’s Peter Smith et al. Peter is very much the
pater familias
of the British press corps on tour, and looks after us all in a tirelessly good-humoured and avuncular fashion. Transport arrangements to and from the airport, collection and delivery of baggage, accreditation and invitations are all taken care of by the unrufflable Smith, who somehow also manages to find time to ghost Geoff Boycott’s column and Mike Gatting’s latest epic. On the Australian side, Mike Coward of the
Sydney Morning Herald
plays a similar lead role in the Cricket Media Association, and it would be difficult sufficiently to express my gratitude for the many kindnesses these two doyens of the art have bestowed on me, the one female correspondent on this tour. Anticipating, perhaps not entirely unjustifiably, an avalanche of male chauvinism, and a fair dose of inbred misogyny in Australian cricketing press circles, I could not have been more agreeably surprised. Oh, there have been one or two incidents, but in truth the overwhelming majority of correspondents have been helpful and accommodating. I like to believe that this is for reasons of my own ineffably charming self, but Phil, more objective, maintains it is merely because they know that I am liable to dig the vitriol-tipped stiletto in as deep as any when aggravated.

Martin Johnson of
The Independent
was also very aggravated. Truth to tell, he had been assaultingly aggravated and aggravatingly assaulted by three of the hotel’s law-and-order enforcement heavies. It had all started in the bar when Martin had been involved in a perfectly comprehensible misunderstanding with the assistant beverages manager. Despite the implications of such an onerous title, said assistant beverages manager could not manage to assist young Johnson in the acquisition of any beverage, especially not one of the hop-based variety. Words were exchanged, apparently the only transaction the assistant beverages manager was prepared to enter into with this new arrival to the English cricket press corps, and the next thing he knew,
The Independent
correspondent was being strangle-held/frog-marched out of the establishment in a manner which belied his autonomous status.

It was fortunate that a few bystanding England cricketers were around to witness proceedings, though proportionately unfortunate that they did not have access to a national daily newspaper to relate them. By the time these gorillas had dragged him of ‘can’t bat, can’t bowl and can’t field’ notoriety out of the hotel, it was alarmingly apparent that he in turn ‘could not talk, could not breathe and could not escape’. With the speed of an ‘England cricketer in cocaine-snorting scandal’ facsimile, a caucus of press musketeers was quickly mustered to release poor Johnson from the decidedly unslippery grip of these Queensland ‘banana benders’, and to remonstrate about the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, Civil Liberties, the Freedom of the Press in general, and of Martin Johnson in particular.

It is highly doubtful whether United Nations Declarations on anything have ever percolated quite as far east as Queensland. Certainly, even a cursory glance at the abominable sequence of legislation on Aborigines in this state might lead one to believe that human rights were equally as important as Mr Johnson’s rights to a well-earned pint at the end of a busy day. I subsequently made three vain attempts to speak to the manager about this needless overreaction; the first in my own name, the second purporting to come from Egon Ronay, and the third as a camouflaged emissary from
The Michelin Guide.
There was no explanation, but in a state such as Queensland, where a doubtfully benevolent but apparently autocratic premier such as Sir Joh holds sway, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and let the matter rest. Johnson, happy to relate, lived to tell the tale, but we had all learned a salutary lesson from the hotel, and after that few people ever shouted loudly for service. Too bad that Martin of all people had borne the brunt of this rather precipitately boorish behaviour. He is a young, bright, intelligent and dry-humoured addition to the tour, and it is easy to think of at least a dozen characters those goons could more rightfully have picked on. As it was the whole fiasco reminded me forcibly of the wild hyperbole so prevalent in the maddest over-the-top excesses of a Tom Sharpe novel.

Talking about OTT excesses, the premier himself, the doughty Sir Joh, is as close as makes no matter to a real-life Tom Sharpe character. Joh-ologists suggest that he has almost become a self-parody, imitating himself in a sort of vaudeville amalgam of cracked metaphors and off-the-cuff comedy. He talks in deprecating terms about his political opponents, the Labour party – ‘the old guard, the new guard, the mud guard’ – it is all fairly unsophisticated slapstick comedy stuff. He affects to forget who people are, when addressing or introducing them: ‘well, it doesn’t matter, does it? You know who you are yourselves.’ And, less appealing, he is totally dismissive of anyone who disagrees with him. He would not appear to be the sort of politician interested in rigorous debate or informed argument, but rather someone who is utterly convinced that he is right, and that anyone who dares to contradict him is a treacherous nincompoop. His highly controversial personality has spawned a flock of imitators, the leading exponent of whom is a conservatory-trained pianist and Jesuit seminarian, Gerry Connolly. Certainly, watching the real article at work during television interviews put me in mind of a variation on one of the many brilliant one-liners from the uncannily prophetic play
Pravda:
‘Mickey Mouse, you might be inclined to believe, wears a Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen watch.’