Get Her Off the Pitch! (23 page)

It is the last over of the match, then. Six balls left in this semi-final. Nine runs required. The contents of our brains are starting to dribble out of our noses. I am pressing wads of tissue to all the orifices of my head. Fleming bowls to Klusener, and he smashes it as if he were playing baseball. It's a four.
A four!
All one can do is whimper, watch it fly, absorb the cheering, and keep trusting the Kleenex. The second ball is bowled and Klusener drives it hard and long to the boundary for
another four
. Oh my God, oh my God. The scores are now tied, and the South Africans require one run to win. They have four deliveries to
do it from. But they have no more wickets, you see. There's the rub. No. More. Wickets. And it is
still
not possible to extrapolate from these figures the outcome of the game. Requiring one run from four balls, Klusener mis-hits the third delivery of the over and decides not to run. It is at this point that we notice, with alarm, that Donald, at the other end, has been anticipating a run, and has therefore ‘backed up' (i.e. jumped the gun) by a considerable distance. Oh no. On realising his mistake, he scrambles back to safety with bat outstretched, and is saved only when the rolled ball misses the base of the stumps. Laughing hysterically with relief, one reflects on what a dick-head Donald must feel at this moment. Imagine getting run out in these circumstances, Allan, with the scores dead level. How would you ever forgive yourself?

And now we are down to the last three balls of the match. Fleming bowls to Klusener, who whacks it - and runs. This is it! This is it! Klusener is running for the match! But for some reason, Donald is going backwards again. Why on earth isn't he running? What is he playing at? This is a fucking nightmare. Run, mate! Fucking run! As Klusener reaches his end of the pitch, Donald visibly realises, Oh hang on, where did he come from? Better make a start. He is like that Great Dane I saw at the dog agility championship making up his mind to attempt the slalom through the bendy poles. ‘Yep, all right, I'll do that.' But he's much too late. Having already dropped his bat, he abandons it and moves off, but by the time he's covered a quarter of the distance, the Australians have already run him out and are celebrating their astonishing hair's-breadth escape from defeat with their backs turned firmly towards
this lonely, stranded, batless figure dressed in green. No one can believe what they've just witnessed. Débâ;cle is the only word for it. It might have been a famous victory; instead it is a débâ;cle of horrifying proportions. Klusener has left the field already. At the end of his run, he just kept on walking. It is the most desperately ghastly ending to a World Cup match ever.

It is cricket, though. That's what they all say. It is, quintessentially, cricket.

As you can tell from reading between the lines of the above, I know nothing whatever about cricket. And this is one of my bigger regrets. During the thrilling 2005 Ashes series in England, I actually pined to be back in the press box - an emotion that really took me by surprise. I felt seriously envious. My friend Gideon Haigh - talented and prolific cricket writer from Melbourne - was here to cover the series for the
Guardian
, so was on the spot for every delivery, and I couldn't quite cope with the idea that I wasn't there too. He would tell me who he'd been sitting next to, and I'd snivel, lamely, ‘I know him.' In the end, I consoled myself at home in front of the telly by sending nuisance texts to Gideon at moments of high tension. He would be concentrating on unfolding events, tirelessly tapping out his blog with one hand, making notes of scores with the other, and he'd get a text from me that said, ‘What about Pietersen then?' In the introduction to his bestselling
Ashes 2005
, Gideon thanks me for letting him use my flat in London and says generously that I ‘lived every ball' of the series. He knew this to be true, because his phone went
‘beep-beep, beep-beep' every bloody ten minutes when he was trying to do some work.

I could imagine Gideon being exemplary in the press box. He would be in his element as I never was. In most cricket press boxes, I had no idea how to behave. They are very much smaller and quieter places than footie ones, which makes them more sociable, but at the same time made me more self-conscious. There is less representation from the tabloids, which also has an effect. At the risk of oversimplifying (and getting it entirely wrong), cricket writers are generally quite tall, very amusing, a bit Aspergers, and well informed on highbrow topics such as art and music. They are also utterly pampered, compared with the writers covering rougher sports - being allowed to sit under cover, behind plate glass, and being supplied with regular trays of food. I was at a match sponsored by Benson & Hedges once, and someone came in and gaily tossed free packets of fags to all corners of the press box. This wasn't even a surprise: one bloke said, ‘They were a bit late with the Bensons today,' as he stuffed a few packs into his briefcase. But, congenial as all this ought to have been, I didn't relax at the cricket and have chats about Mahler with these tall and amusing men, for the simple reason that I couldn't: sadly, I needed to concentrate much harder than everyone else just to follow the game. In fact I panicked if anyone tall and amusing started telling me a joke or something, because it might mean I'd miss some subtle development on the pitch, such as a wicket falling, or a legendary diving catch at deep backward square leg, or England being all out (again) for 76.

What a tragedy. What a waste. Most of the matches I attended were big enough to have commentary on the
radio, so that put the tin lid firmly even on listening to other people's conversation. From start of play, I sat studiously with my earphones in, and with a trusty, dog-eared diagram of fielding positions open in front of me. And I listened very carefully, matching the description to the reality, checking that it all made sense. This isn't what radio commentaries of cricket matches are for, of course: they are meant to supply the pictures for people who can't be present for some reason - the ideal listener would be a lonely lighthouse-keeper in the Azores, his ear pressed gratefully to the patrician tones emanating from the tinny speaker while grey waves crash against the rocks below (‘Shoaib Akhtar runs up, he bowls, and good heavens, I don't know about you, Johnners, but I've never seen nostrils like it!'). Listening to this stuff when the game is actually spread out right in front of you is a bit strange, especially when you're aware that the broadcasters are upstairs in the same building, probably less than ten feet away, observing precisely the same view. But I loved it. When the commentator said Tendulkar had cut the ball to Twose at deep square leg, I could look at where the ball was going, then consult the diagram, then hold the diagram up the other way, then check it was indeed Twose who was occupying deep square leg, and then think, ‘Right. Got that. Phew.' I performed this lame sequence of actions for every ball of the match - and I mean that. I did it for every ball. I felt it was important just to keep track, you see. I knew that keeping track of cricket was the very limit of what I was capable of doing.

* * *

When I gave up sports writing, it was partly because I was ready to face facts: I was never going to get any better at this. With cricket, I would always have to consult that diagram of fielding positions, and lean on
Test Match Special
. Looking at the disposition of the fielders (three chaps close together at one o'clock, two o'clock and three o'clock; one chap on his own over there at a quarter past seven), I wouldn't have the first idea how a captain might have chosen it - to suit either the style of a bowler or even the orientation of the batsman. On a simpler level, I watched umpteen men explain spin bowling, but it still looked like witchcraft. I have just opened my (signed) copy of
Shane Warne: My Own Story
(1997) and discovered that every page has underlinings and little comments, showing my frustration at still not understanding how spin bowling was done. Next to the words, ‘I bowled a maiden first up and gathered some confidence. They were landing where I wanted them to land,' I have written in pencil, ‘I want him to describe
bowling
.' Next to his words, ‘I tried a flipper to Richie and it just came out of the hand perfectly,' I have written, ‘Oh good.
HOW?
' But it's not all criticism, you will be relieved to hear. When Warney explains that young blokes on the team should ‘earn their way up the autograph bat' - i.e. not sign at the top when they haven't played as much as the others - I have written a thoughtful ‘interesting'.

But the main reason I could never feel comfortable about cricket is that there is clearly no substitute for a lifetime of enthusiasm. It can't be faked or mugged up, no matter how many times you pick up C.L.R. James or Neville Cardus, or struggle to find humour in Siegfried
Sassoon's famous description of the Flower Show Match. This stuff has to go deep, you see. And for me, it doesn't. When they open me up after death, they will find no Test scores carved on my heart - and they won't find any stored in my brain either. I have no personal memories of Don Bradman or Fred Trueman, or even (really) Ian Botham, except as a fairly controversial
TV
personality doing ads for Shredded Wheat. On my first trip to Headingley in 1997, chaps filled me in on the famous events of 1981 and it was honestly the first time I'd heard of them. No wonder I was more comfortable with football. With football, a sense of history is so unimportant as to be virtually meaningless. No one seriously sits around comparing the achievements of (say) Alan Shearer and Jackie Milburn; or Fernando Torres and Kenny Dalglish. They can usually tell you how long it's been since they won the league, or the Cup, but that's different. That's about showing off how much they've suffered. ‘Eighteen years, mate! Can you imagine? Eighteen bloody years!'

I keep thinking of a friend I had twenty years ago, who used to complain about her cricket-loving husband. Apparently the only books she ever saw him reading were yellow-jacketed, quite thick, and had the word ‘Wisden' on them - and it annoyed her very much. She was in despair at his monomania and general dullness. ‘He even reads old
Wisden
s in bed!' she said. ‘He reads old
Wisden
s in the bath! He has old
Wisden
s in the car!' In those old days I was firmly on her side. I think I used to advise her to kill him. Nowadays, however, I feel nothing but sympathy and warmth for this poor, hounded chap. It wasn't his fault.
One of the attractions of cricket, surely, is that it requires a lot of thinking about afterwards. In fact it's a sport that largely takes place after it's finished, in the splendid and reassuring comfort of the inside of one's head.

In September 2000, I decided to stop sports writing for
The Times
. I phoned them up, I said I was sorry, and I jacked it in. There seemed to be no alternative. I felt I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and that if I had to argue with just one more man with just one more clipboard, I might start screaming and hitting - and then I'd end up in court, or in a mental hospital, or on a park bench with a bottle in a brown paper bag, and no job was worth that, not even one that other people would kill you for. But what on earth could have precipitated this sense of - well, precipice? I know what you're thinking. It was England's poor performance in Euro 2000. It was bloody Gary Neville. But no. Depressing though the Euro 2000 England campaign assuredly was, my reasons for quitting my job and burrowing under a duvet for the next two years were not connected with sport. The short explanation, which cannot be avoided, is that my sister died. I apologise for not mentioning this before. The right moment never seemed to come up. Kay, my only sister (indeed, my only sibling), was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer at the start of the rugby World Cup in 1999 (I was on a
bus coming home from a launch with the All Blacks when she told me on the phone), and she died less than a year later on the morning of Sunday September 24, 2000, on Day Nine of the Sydney Olympics. I can be so specific about what was concurrent in the world of sport because, the evening before, I had assured my boss that I would definitely be ok on that Sunday morning to file my usual 900 words about the bbc coverage of the weightlifting (or whatever) before setting off for the hospice.

‘What a shame you missed the Olympics,' one of the other sports writers said to me, rather tactlessly, a couple of months later, at the Christmas party. I had been accredited for Sydney, you see. I had been due to go. My sister had even ghoulishly promised not to die till I got back. But I had wrestled with the dilemma and finally decided it is a good thing to be at the deathbed of one's closest relative if you can manage it, even when there is the alternative of being on the opposite side of the planet watching fireworks. And so I cast the whole idea from my mind. Four years later, in 2004, I was invited to Melbourne for book promotion purposes, which meant that my publisher needed to apply for an Australian visa. ‘Well, that was a waste of time,' they reported back. ‘You've already got one. Why didn't you say?' I was at a loss to explain it. How did I have a visa? I had never been to Australia. I had never planned to go. For a week or two I entertained paranoid fantasies that someone had stolen my identity - and then I remembered the Olympics. Missing the fabulousness of Sydney 2000 had clearly not been a festering regret, then. Four years later, I had forgotten that it had ever been on the cards that I should go.

In any case, I didn't miss the Olympics in Sydney. I watched them with a great deal of grim emotional intensity at home. Other people may think they have a special raw, racking, sobbing connection to the sight of a coxless four from Great Britain taking the gold by the tiniest of margins, but let me tell them they don't have the first idea of the feelings it can evoke. Kay and I watched the games in the night together, when she couldn't face going to bed. In the early hours I would drive to my mother's to sleep; then I would wake up to the bbc coverage in the mornings. And so the Sydney Olympics framed the long days in the worst week of my life. I found solace in them, and I also hated them. I wanted them to stop and I also wanted them to go on for ever, because I didn't think Kay would survive them. Every morning I would start work to the accompaniment of Heather Small's anthemic song ‘Proud'

- ‘I step out of the ordinary; I can feel my soul ascending.' And I would cry and cry for my poor helpless sister with her oxygen cylinder and her gasping terror of death. And then I'd pull myself together, and set about suppressing all these distracting howling feelings - pegging them down and flattening them and burying them - in order to deliver lively stuff on deadline about (say) that plucky nonswimmer from Equatorial Guinea who took almost two minutes to complete 100 metres in effortful doggy-paddle and soon became immortalised as Eric the Eel.

When Kay died on the Sunday morning, I think my boss was the first person I called, to tell him I was sorry to let him down. A few days later, I asked if I could leave. I had no idea how I would make a living. In terms of remuneration, sports writing was the best job I'd ever
had: ditching my contract to stay at home and write radio scripts was madness. But there was no way I could go on, if only because the screaming and hitting scenario was not far-fetched at all. It had been a very stressful year, what with one thing and another, and I was already dangerously close to losing control. One of the bonuses of bereavement, I have learned, is that it makes you honest. It strips you of the lies you usually tell yourself, so you have no choice but to face facts. What I saw with great clarity at this critical time was that the press box at Stamford Bridge would be the wrong environment for me to grieve in, because it was the wrong place for me to be in, full stop. I was only there on sufferance. No one would miss me. Even after four years, friendly faces were few. And while I was in this mood for cards-on-the-table, the other points I made (to myself) at the time were:

You have a lot of other work to get on with;

This comfortless masculine lifestyle never suited you and it was sheer masochism to endure it for so long;

The sporting calendar is on a perpetual loop and will steal your life if you're not careful;

All this crying and sobbing will do no good at all to the cause of women sports writers if you do it in front of the blokes;

You have coarsened as a person because of this job;

You don't really believe sport is a subject worth devoting your life to; and, finally:

A joke's a joke.

My boss was extremely kind about all this. He had seen it coming. What I said earlier about sports editors having hearts of stone - perhaps I was hasty. But what argument could he possibly put up against grief? Here was an undeniable obstacle to business as usual. What use is a funny writer who has, overnight, stopped finding things amusing? What use is a football writer who thinks football is meaningless, that sport is meaningless, and that life itself doesn't have a lot of point in the long run, either? No, the truth was, I was no longer prepared to be a good sport - about football, or about anything that went with it. I didn't have the strength. For four years I had turned anything unpleasant into a joke at my own expense. I had suppressed my hatred for hooligans singing obscene songs. I had tried not to make a hysterical scene when, at important matches, my colleagues got tickets, while I was put on a waiting list. I had stopped my ears when blokes talked freely in my company about the sexual rapacity of the women they'd picked up the night before. I had even made entertaining copy out of the miserable fact that the only entertainment for the lone professional traveller involves lapdancing and blowjobs. I had tried not to blame anyone else for the fact that I often shook with fear as I set off in the dark for my car in some alien industrial wasteland. But enough was, finally, enough.

For obvious reasons, though, it was the life-and-death argument that was the most powerful. How can you waste your time on sport in a world that people die in? I kept remembering something that had happened during the football World Cup in France, when I'd dashed back to England to see my mum in hospital, after she'd been
involved in a bizarre accident. The paper had been terrific: organising tickets so I could get back on Eurostar and then fly back to France the following day, so that I didn't miss a match, and didn't miss a piece either (I was in the paper every day of the tournament). But I'll never forget how I felt when I got the news that my mum had been hurt. I had just got settled in my seat at a damp and dreary Parc des Princes in Paris, for an evening game between the usa and Germany, and I was already feeling pretty fragile - mainly because the journey to the stadium had been like something from a Coen Brothers movie. Against my better judgement (my
Times
colleague had thought it was a fine idea), I had agreed to accept a lift from an unknown fellow British journalist who promptly set off the wrong way round the Périphérique and then made matters worse by shouting things like, ‘We're going to be late! Where are we? I've never been to the Parc des Princes, have you? It's got to be this way, doesn't it? Do you know where it is? Oh my God, we're going to be late!'

It was one of the worst journeys of my life. It was pouring with rain. Kick-off time was indeed approaching. We were travelling in the opposite direction from our preferred destination, at considerable speed, and I was apparently in thrall to a psychopath. I kept wondering whether I would ever have sufficient nerve to open the door of a moving vehicle and hurl myself out. My colleague and I dared not look at each other - especially as I had made a strong case for taking the media bus, which was a mere ten-minute ride in the safe hands of a French person who knew the way. Passing motorcyclists thumped the side of the car because our driver was straddling lanes; at one
point, he swung off the Périphérique onto a slip-road and slewed the car to a halt, parking across two lanes in the smoking rain so he could jump out and ask directions from the bewildered, emergency-stopped Parisian motorists he had just attempted to kill. And on top of all this, while he was driving he took calls from London on his mobile about his job for the evening - which he fielded with a great show of professional competence (‘Five hundred by half time? All right, Kippo, leave it with me!'), after which he'd go to pieces. ‘They want 500 by half time. How do you do that? What are they talking about? How can you do 500 words when it hasn't finished yet?' And all we could do was yell, ‘Turn round! Turn round for pity's sake! We'll tell you everything you need to know if you'll just turn round''

So I was rattled by this journey, and also by the usual teeth-grinding, shrugging-French-person waiting-list business. And then I got the call about my mum being in hospital, and suddenly everything else - especially the football - seemed bonkers. Luckily I was sitting next to the colleague who had shared the journey, and I felt he owed me something, so I told him what had happened. Having calmed down once I'd got my press ticket, you see, I had suddenly got a great deal more agitated again, and I felt I ought to explain why I kept standing up and sitting down again, and muttering and whimpering, when my attention ought to have been focused on the perfectly good World Cup match unfolding on real wet shiny grass just a few yards from where I was sitting. Jürgen Klinsmann was on excellent fairy-footed form, as it happens; the USA were gamely battling to compete; interestingly, there was a player
on the US team who'd been naturalised as an American citizen just a week before the tournament, apparently, and spoke no English. But it was impossible to concentrate on the supremacy of the German goal-making machine when I knew my mum was all on her own, in pain, in hospital, hundreds of miles away. ‘I shouldn't be here,' I moaned. ‘My mum's in hospital and I'm at
football
? How did this happen to me? I shouldn't be here. I ought to go. I feel torn in half by this. How can I be at
football
?'

So we had a little heart-to-heart, this chap and I. And what he said, kindly, was that he absolutely understood how I was feeling. He had been there and done it. Moreover, something similar had probably happened to everyone else in this press box at some time or another. But what he said didn't cheer me up at all. Some of the blokes here had been abroad when their children were born, he said. Some had been abroad when their parents had died. Some had been reporting the second round of the Frisbee championships in Timbuctoo when their wives had gone off with the bloke next door. I said this was one of the saddest things I'd ever heard. But he said no, it was just the price of being a sports writer. He himself had missed his father's death, and then he had missed the funeral as well, because it all coincided with a busy time in the athletics calendar in the Far East. But such was life, you see. What was the point of beating yourself up, he said, about something that couldn't be helped?

But it's a well-known fact that human beings are quite shallow really, and that a sense of true proportion can never
be maintained for longer than 90 seconds; thus, when you are depressed because a) your sister is terminally ill and b) against all that is holy, Gary Neville has been selected for England
again
, the two facts can loom equally large, and all you can do is observe this truth and accept it. The truth is that England, the football team (who are looking rather perky at the time of writing), had really started to get me down, to the point where I all but hated them. Everyone had warned me that watching England beat Holland 4-1 at Wembley from an airship on a balmy midsummer evening was not to be taken as a representative experience of supporting the national side. And, crikey, how right they were. Over the next four years I turned out for umpteen blizzardy qualifiers and friendlies as well as matches in the big tournaments, and I was for most of the time as miserable as sin. Having once walked in a Shearer Wonderland, I had now ceased to believe in that particular postal district; or only if it was a new name for one of the circles of everlasting torment. From being a neophyte Pollyanna, I was football disillusionment in human form. I had started off almost in love with David ‘Safe Hands' Seaman. Towards the end of my period of duty watching England, someone cruelly referred to him as ‘a piece of meat with eyes', and I not only laughed, I wished I'd thought of it first. As for Glenn Hoddle - well, to be honest, even now I can't hear his name mentioned without wanting to stab myself in the face with a pencil.

To be fair, I did see England play well a couple of times. People forget how fabulous they were at St Etienne against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup, for example. But by far the best performance I ever saw from them was a World
Cup qualifier in Rome against Italy in October 1997 - when England, miraculously, played like Italy and came away with a magnificent goalless draw. It was a night later famous for its tremendous pre-match tension, superlative midfield passing, reprehensible police violence, and Paul Ince running round with a bandage on his head so that (in Paul Gascoigne's famous description) he looked like a pint of Guinness. The two teams were battling for automatic qualification as winners of the group. England, at the top of the points table, required a draw, while Italy required a win. In advance of the match, no one was optimistic for England's chances. They remembered what had happened last time. In the previous qualifying match between the two countries, at Wembley, Hoddle had disastrously experimented with weedy Ian Walker in goal (ugh) and the lumbering Matt Le Tissier alongside Alan Shearer in attack, and Italy had won 1-0.