Can Anyone Hear Me? (25 page)

After heavy overnight rain, play started on time. England were put in to bat and started confidently on a slow pitch, but then lost regular wickets rather carelessly, to be 147 for nine at the end of the day.

England's last wicket hung on for 40 minutes before Tufnell fell, leaving Crawley top scorer with 47 not out. All out for 156 – something of a debacle.

From that point, it was probably just as well for England that the match was disrupted by rain. After Zimbabwe had taken a first innings lead of 59, Alec Stewart responded with an undefeated century. England were only 140 ahead at the end of the fourth day, with three wickets down. They were probably safe, but in the event the weather took out the whole of the last day.

Not that all embarrassment was ended by that. Zimbabweans celebrated the New Year holiday with two one-day international wins over England, the second by a colossal 113 runs, for a three-nil whitewash.

England ran into Eddo Brandes in top form, swinging the ball and starting an irreversible slide to 118 all out with a
hat trick and finishing with five wickets, bowling his ten overs straight through.

The Zimbabweans and the crowd were ecstatic and the Barmy Army largely silent. Atherton, though, handled the press conference afterwards brilliantly, facing up to the inevitable assertion that his side had been humiliated by cricketing minnows, with great candour.

John
Arlott always used to say of cricketers that to have known only two bad ones in his years close to the game spoke very well of them as a breed. (Of course he would never let us know who the two were.)

Relationships with the players on my early tours, particularly in India and Pakistan, were much more casual and friendly than they have become later. I would reckon to count all those who toured with England on my first two trips to India as friends.

In between those two tours, I found that it was slightly different in Australia, because it was so much easier for them to go out and socialise or find other leisure occupations in a country where they quite often had friends. On the subcontinent, especially 30 years ago, press and players were more thrown together in a totally foreign environment. We almost always shared hotels, which happens less nowadays. The first few down to breakfast in the morning would join each other at a table, regardless of which side of the divide they came from. That would not happen now.

On my first tour, there were two or three occasions when I was given a lift on the team bus, because the press transport was going to be too late for my needs. And it was a given that any sightseeing expedition – such as they were – would be a joint
venture, as on the eve of the first one-day international in Ahmedabad.

The afternoon featured an excursion to a local mosque, which boasted ‘shaking towers'. The drive through the crowded, dusty streets of the city gave me my first real view of Indian life, with all manner of people, beasts and vehicles on the move and activity in every open-fronted business premises along the way.

The ‘shaking towers' had been the twin minarets of a small mosque. They had been reduced to one tower, though, with the other little more than a roof-high stump. The first players to rush up the remaining minaret revealed with disappointment that it didn't shake. This was a challenge to Ian Botham. ‘I'll make the bastard shake,' he declared, advancing on it.

Looking at the truncated stump of its twin, I wondered if our Beefy had been this way before.

Of course, both parties were much smaller in those days. A manager, a coach, a physiotherapist and maybe a scorer formed the back-up for the team, while, for instance, there were only two photographers among the press on my first tour. And the few separate Sunday newspapermen (and we were all men) who appeared, did so only fleetingly for the most accessible locations.

It was quite normal for me to be invited into the dressing room at the close of play to record an interview. That applied to both sides. Apart from anything else, in India it was often the
only place that was quiet enough and no player wanted to be mobbed outside the door.

The press were probably trusted more in small numbers and in more isolated locations, when they seemed keen only to report the cricket rather than rake up a scandal. But, on later tours, dressing rooms became generally a no-go area. Thereafter I did interview Graeme Hick on the massage table in St Vincent in 1994, after the tour manager, Mike Smith, had prepared the way with: ‘Hicky, you don't want to talk to the BBC, do you?' Fortunately Graeme Hick is a thoroughly nice man.

In India in the eighties, the press were usually included in the invitations to official functions, sometimes even going to them on the team bus. One such was in Hyderabad.

The Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh held a reception in the evening for the two teams and the visiting press, though our host did not appear until the two lots of players had been sitting in semi-circles, facing each other for half an hour. They were presented to the great man, each received a large brass plaque and then we repaired to a buffet dinner in the beautiful courtyard of the hall – one of the Nizam of Hyderabad's former palaces.

During the course of the meal, Bob Taylor and Bernard Thomas, the physiotherapist, encouraged me to try paan – betel nuts wrapped in a leaf.

‘Keep chewing, it gets better,' was Bob's mischievous advice. It doesn't. It gets considerably worse and at last I saw the amusement on their faces, showing that they knew this.
Keith Fletcher, the captain on that tour, would usually have to introduce his team publicly to whatever VIP was hosting the reception. Being someone who can never remember a name, this was something of a torture for him, but it gave his team a great deal of fun, as they waited to see if he would forget who they were.

It is inevitable that you get to know the captain best, as you are going to interview him more than the rest of his team. Fletcher was brought back to captain this touring side, having not played a Test for four and a half years. He followed Mike Brearley, who had returned to replace Botham in the previous English summer but had made it clear that he was not available for the winter tour.

I always found Keith a very good man, though I am not sure that the way in which he was able to bind together an Essex side to win its first County Championship was quite so successful at international level, and he must surely have found it difficult to come into the side that had just won the Ashes, when he had been out of Test cricket for a period. I went on to renew dealings with him when he later became England coach and I can remember interviewing him in various hotel rooms as he indulged his hobby of tying elaborate fishing flies.

Five of Fletcher's next six successors as England captain were on that 1981 tour and at the time it was being suggested that Geoff Cook, then captain of Northamptonshire, who did not get a Test match until the seventh of the tour, the one-off Test in Colombo, might be the next candidate for the job. The role he played in elevating Durham to a Championship-winning side might suggest that he would have been a good England captain, if only he had the runs to back him up. He was on standby to make his Test debut in Madras, where Ian Botham was
due to have a fitness test on the morning of the match. He was fairly late in the bar the night before, when his concerned room-mate, Derek Underwood, appeared to remind him that he might be playing next day. Geoff pointed out – accurately as it turned out – that there was no chance that Botham would not play.

As it was, it was the vice captain on the tour, Bob Willis, who took over the captaincy at the start of the next English summer and took the team to Australia for the next tour. His occasional interventions in India were telling. Doing an interview with me when he was leading the side in the up-country match at Jammu, he expressed his exasperation with David Gower, whose rapid scampering down the pitch had led to a spate of run-outs. ‘That's not a dismissal I have very much time for,' said Bob. Then, in Sri Lanka, his dressing room lecture was reckoned to have triggered England's only Test win of the tour. By the next England Test, having turned down the rebel trip to South Africa, he was captain.

Geoff Boycott, it subsequently transpired, had been at the heart of the planning of that rebel tour, though the players who went on it were to elect Graham Gooch as their captain. Fletcher cannot have found the presence of Boycott easy in India, and he also had the man who had started the year as captain, Ian Botham, there. Certainly a couple of members of the team suggested to me that, rather than a united team, they were fifteen players plus Boycott. His hundred in Delhi gave him what was at that stage the highest Test aggregate in the world and it also drew him level with Wally Hammond and Colin Cowdrey in the number of centuries scored for England. But he was to play no further part after the following Test in Calcutta.

The 24-year-old Mike Gatting, with his pudding-basin mop of
hair, was increasingly frustrated at the fragility of his position as an all-rounder in the side, though he did play in five of the seven Tests.

Graham Gooch and John Emburey and their wives were a constant foursome. Most of the wives who came on the tour saved their appearance for the more relaxed end of it in Sri Lanka.

Those who did not make it into the Test side were frequent visitors to the commentary box as expert summarisers, along with the manager. That was a practice that I only used regularly on that 1981 Indian tour, with the notable exception of the emergency recruitment of Vic Marks in Delhi in 1984.

After the experience of being cheek by jowl with the players in India, there was a different feel about the tour of Australia in 1982, though I did find myself being mistaken for one of them in Melbourne. The previous winter, young Indians had tugged my sleeve, apparently thinking I was Mike Brearley. Now, on my way to the MCG, I was asked to sign an autograph book as Bob Taylor. A week after that, in Adelaide, I was pursued by another autograph hunter.

‘Look,' I said, ‘I'm not Mike Brearley and I'm not Bob Taylor.'

‘No, I know that,' said the slightly bemused man. ‘You're Vladimir Ashkenazy, aren't you?'

The old practice of the Christmas Day drinks party given by the press for the team was part of an Australian tour until 1994. The manager on that tour, M.J.K. Smith, seemed very reluctant to have his team enjoying our hospitality and by the next visit to Australia the tradition had rather sadly ended.

It was simple enough in 1982. We all gathered round the hotel pool. The
Daily Mirror
correspondent, Chris Lander, and the photographer, Graham Morris, dressed up in tail coats
to act as waiters – and Messrs Botham and Lamb duly threw them in the water.

Allan Lamb was a great integrator with the press, just taking everyone as he found them, even when there was a management warning out to be wary of too much contact. (I can remember giving a young player a cheery ‘Good morning' in a hotel lift in Australia and being given a terrified look in return, as if I was about to swallow his soul.) ‘Lamb's Tours' became something of a feature on tour, as his entrepreneurial spirit would find an expedition worth doing in the most unpromising of places.

In India on the 1984–85 tour he was sent on one occasion down to the boundary to replace Phil Edmonds, who had been having problems fielding there. Lamb was able to entertain an unruly crowd who had been beginning to get under the Edmonds' skin.

Lamb was the vice captain on the 1990 West Indies tour. In the hotel pool in Guyana, when another day's play had been called off for the waterlogged outfield, he was letting out his usual high spirits in loud and extrovert fashion. I was with David Gower, who was broadcasting with us and writing for
The
Times
. We watched Lamb's antics and I saw a smile on David's face.

‘It would only take a broken finger and we're looking at the England captain,' he said. And we both laughed heartily. Within a fortnight it had happened and Allan Lamb replaced Gooch as captain for the last two Tests of the series.

The 1984 India tour was my favourite to a large extent because of the players who were on it. It was in David Gower's character to tolerate independent thought in his team. He had held out for the inclusion of two who probably would not have been there on the selectors' say-so alone – Phil Edmonds and
Mike Gatting. He made the latter his vice captain. Both were to have considerable influence on the success of the tour.

For all the laid-back appearance, Gower can have a short fuse when he thinks he is being messed around. An informal rest day press conference in Madras turned sour when he was pushed about the decision to employ two nightwatchmen before he came in himself at seven. From my point of view, interviewing him was never a problem. In later years interviews with the captain were rather rationed to before and after a Test unless he himself performed spectacularly. David was always prepared to talk if there was no other obvious candidate.

Left out of the touring team to the West Indies in 1990, Gower was there anyway, doing a column for
The Times
and summarising on
Test Match Special
. After the injury that Gooch suffered in the Trinidad Test, David was summoned to the colours for the game against Barbados, which preceded the fourth Test there. Although the management played down the possibility, it was clear that, if he made runs, he would be likely to play in the Test. As it was, he only got one innings and made four. But I did present him with his
TMS
tie in the nets.

At the end of that same year, included in the England team again, but clearly disaffected with the new ethos, he approached me about the then vacant job of BBC cricket correspondent. We walked round the boundary of a practice game in which he was playing to talk it through, but I could not see him – as I told him – waiting in dressing room corridors for prima donna cricketers to give him an interview.

The majority of the players on his 1984–85 tour of India had had the benefit of either public school or university education and I remember speculating about whether the advantages gained from those better sporting facilities might make that
the norm for future England teams. That has not really proved the case until quite recently.

It is probably no coincidence that several members of that touring team went on to join
Test Match Special
. Most notable, of course, was Jonathan Agnew, who actually arrived at Christmas in Calcutta as the replacement for the injured Paul Allott. Allott himself, having cut his teeth with us in India in 1981, did a tour of the West Indies working in the
TMS
box in 1994. Mike Atherton was captain by then and I recall sign language between them, which was translated by Allott to give us an insight into the captain's thinking in the field.

Vic Marks' debut in Delhi was, as I told him a few days later when we were having a Christmas Eve beer in Calcutta, always going to be the start of a new post-playing career. His wife, I am afraid, was not keen on that idea then, so my belated apologies to Anna Marks, but Victor has been a jewel in the crowns of both
The
Observer
and
Test Match Special
.

He and Aggers formed part of a
TMS
teatime feature I started soon after that trip, called ‘County Talk'. The third member was also on the tour – Graeme Fowler. ‘Foxy's' ebullient and irreverent personality made a good contrast – as did the Accrington humour. I remember him making a point of travelling on the press bus on one sight-seeing excursion in India, in order to talk to the photographers in our party about the techniques of using his new camera. And he has contributed a quotation which appears in most anthologies of cricketers' sayings: ‘It's Friday night. What the hell am I doing in Ahmedabad?'