Can Anyone Hear Me? (26 page)

Another team member who would go on to join
TMS
was Chris Cowdrey. I was obviously very disappointed when he decided to throw in his hat with Talk Sport, but I know that he had the ambition to move his radio career from expert
summarising, at which he was excellent, with a nice, light touch and quick wit, into the job of the ball-by-ball commentator.

In commentaries on county knockout matches subsequently, I also used the likes of Paul Downton, Richard Ellison and Pat Pocock, who were all vital parts of David Gower's team.

Gower himself, as captain, had a successful Ashes series at home in 1985, followed by suffering a whitewash in the West Indies. When that happens, critics are hard on a laid-back style. His replacement by Mike Gatting would not be long delayed.

Mike and Micky Stewart were a very close-knit captain/coach combination and it is possible that that closeness allowed an understandable outrage at some of the things that went on in Pakistan at the end of 1987 to overcome what might have been a more cautious path of diplomacy. Still, I could not help but admire the straightforwardness of ‘Gatt'.

The tales of his capacity to eat are legion and he does not deny them. So I don't think I am breaking any confidence by saying that, when I went to his room for an interview during the height of the Faisalabad confrontation with Shakoor Rana, I saw on the desk the largest jar of Branston Pickle I have ever seen anywhere. He did not object to my laughing at it.

Gatting's openness could get him into trouble, always saying a little bit more than would be wise in the face of a voracious press. When Graham Gooch took over he had learned that lesson. When I joined the 1990 tour of the West Indies in Trinidad it had been going for a couple of weeks already. I went to one of the captain's press briefings on my first day and found that he was certainly not going to give anything away.

As we left the room, one of the journalists moaned: ‘That's what it's been like. He doesn't give us anything.' I could not help
feeling that, while it might not help our job, it was only wise for Gooch.

Graham was utterly dedicated to driving himself to physical fitness. I came across him bursting out of the door from the fire stairs on the twelfth floor of our hotel in Jamaica, having run up them several times and on his way down to do it yet again. Still I got a breathless ‘Good morning'. Not all his team quite embraced his work ethic all the time. Most notably there was never a meeting of minds on this with David Gower.

And he probably would not have been unique among captains to have torn his hair out over Phil Tufnell. In Visakapatnam, on India's east coast, in 1993, I came across Vic Marks at breakfast on a Saturday morning. I asked if he was fully geared up to fill the space he commanded in the next day's
Observer
. ‘I've got the feature done,' he said, ‘and I'll be all right, provided Tufnell doesn't take none for a hundred and get fined for bad behaviour.'

Prophetic words. Tufnell had a bad day with the ball and did indeed pick up a £500 fine, so that the next morning's
Observer
had articles on facing pages expressing the reasons why he must and must not play in the next Test. As it turned out, that day Tufnell bowled beautifully and picked up four wickets.

Subsequently – and since my retirement – Phil has been one of the recent successes of
Test Match Special
, closely guarding the secret that he is not the fool he likes to pretend he is.

Gooch's successor, Mike Atherton, took the policy of never volunteering any information even further, frustrating journalists at press conferences, though I always found him easy enough in the one-to-one situation of a radio interview. A practice grew up at this time, treated warily by the press, of having
the radio interview lead the press conference. In some circumstances, as far as we were concerned, it was the only way we were going to get our interview and I could see that, for a harassed media manager, it made sense in his attempt to get the captain or selected player in and out of the press conference as quickly as possible.

It was not ideal for us, but better than having a grumpy captain feeling he should not have to answer the same questions over again. I found on occasions that the writers would have few questions for Atherton when I had finished. He would appear to be quite amused by the notion that he might have intimidated them. And yet he was one of the most delightfully honest captains I have dealt with. I came across him having a quiet beer in the bar of our hotel in East London, South Africa in 1996. England had just lost yet another one-day international and instead of taking the short journey back in the team coach, Mike had opted to walk the direct route through the cemetery. I saw he had taken the precaution of turning his shirt inside out. ‘It would be too good a photo opportunity,' he said with a wry grin. ‘The Atherton shirt walking through the graveyard.'

When Mike started on Sky and writing for the
Telegraph
and then
The
Times
, there were still some in the press box who seemed to have been scarred by their time trying to get a word out of him. But if anyone is his own man, it is Mike Atherton.

Alec Stewart had probably seen enough of his predecessors in action to appreciate the potential pitfalls. He had a very friendly relationship with the press, while not actually giving away too much, and he is another who has gone on to be part of a few radio teams on both Five Live and
Test Match Special
.

Nasser Hussain's approach was intriguing. I would not have
thought it was in his nature to embrace the media, but, as Atherton's vice captain in the West Indies in 1998, I found him encouragingly open and interesting to interview, often apparently volunteering to appear when there was no other obvious candidate. Soon after arriving in Pakistan in 2000, when he had become captain, I attended one of his press briefings. The comment of one of the journalists this time was that he must be the best at a press conference since Tony Greig. Unlike the writer in question, I had often interviewed Greig when he was England captain, so I could make the comparison, which was probably fair enough, though in an entirely different style. I am sure that Hussain was more pragmatic about the need to do it and more controlled in what he gave away.

He and Atherton have, I believe, been excellent on Sky, avoiding the blandness that has become a problem in, for instance, Australia's Channel Nine commentary team. As Atherton must have found it strange – and certainly his first victim, Stephen Fleming, did – to be on the other side of the interview microphone, I found it interesting to be waiting with Nasser Hussain most evenings for the close of play interview in South Africa in 2004–05. The pair of us would often have to negotiate with the team's media manager for the player we wanted. If Nasser found the position ironic, he did not show it.

Nasser Hussain's tenure as captain coincided with the appointment of Duncan Fletcher as coach. In Fletcher there was a very entertaining and friendly man in private, who put up an impenetrable public façade to deter those who might want to see inside the team ‘bubble'.

Fletcher had the job of handling the fall-out from Marcus Trescothick's withdrawal from two consecutive tours. Now the team management would be likely to acknowledge that the player was suffering from depression at an early stage, as
happened in the case of Mike Yardy in 2011. Then, the fog of disinformation led to far too much unwarranted speculation.

On the first occasion, in India, it had seemed odd when every gruesome detail of every other player's internal health problems was being given to us, that this one was not. In Sydney in 2006, when we knew what the problem was, it was not revealed that he had gone until he had already left. A call very late at night had Jonathan Agnew broadcasting from the roof of our hotel on the eve of a very early departure for Adelaide.

The loss of Trescothick from those two tours was worse than just his runs. There was a presence about him that Somerset have benefited from and I believe England did too. I remember him taking part in one of our
TMS Report
programmes from my hotel room in Colombo and being fascinated by everything that went into putting a live radio programme on the air via a small satellite dish in an ordinary hotel room. He does well in the Sky studio, so when the time comes, which I hope is much delayed by his playing career, my successors in
TMS
might look to him to join the team.

Other players were more inclined to take such miracle technology for granted. The team management have encouraged a bit of coverage of some of their charitable doings and so I put Andrew Flintoff live on the air from a playing field in Bombay, where he was visiting the Magic Bus charity in 2006, and Kevin Pietersen had broadcast from an orphanage playground in Multan in Pakistan a few months before.

Both those broadcasts were for Radio 5 Live and the thrust of the arrival of that rolling news and sport network called for more personal contributions from players. John Crawley recorded regular newsletters from the 1998 tour of Australia. I had no editorial input to those at all, but was just required
to send what were fairly lengthy epistles down the line to London.

It was perhaps more sensible in 2006 in India when they decided that Steve Harmison's newsletters should be recorded with me prompting him. They would be edited in London anyway. It did mean that he could be guided in what people might be interested in. Inevitably we had to have the team's media man sitting in most of the time to monitor what he might say.

Those media managers have assumed a great importance between the team and the accompanying press. They appeared in the nineties, treading the awkward line of trying to be trusted by both sides. Unfortunately, the size of the press party nowadays makes them more necessary, but their need to control things has driven a wedge between dressing room and press box. A journalist with an imaginative idea cannot decide on his interview and get it to himself. The daily interview is agreed between the two sides and carefully monitored by the media manager.

Thus, when England are on tour, you know that the player quoted in the
Telegraph
will be the same one whose words appear in
The
Times
, the
Mail
and the
Sun
, even if the angle put on his remarks may vary a little.

At one time, journalists could make friends with a player and get him to talk, having just cleared permission with the manager or the captain. That was probably an age of greater trust, though. I always looked forward to the chance to interview players who were friends, but funnily that could often be far more difficult than recording those I barely knew. It does, I suppose, sharpen you up to the task that bit more.

I had never really spoken to Angus Fraser until I had to interview him following a magnificent spell of bowling in Jamaica in 1990. I told him that in the press box he was being
likened to Alec Bedser at his best and was impressed by the way he seemed genuinely touched by the comparison. He became a stalwart of the
TMS
summariser's chair and a good friend, though I wonder if he found the move to the writing side of the media a little harder than he had expected.

One little on-the-field exchange came back to us in the press box during that 1990 tour. At Pointe-à-Pierre in Trinidad, England seemed to be facing defeat on the final day of their match against the West Indies Board President's XI. What held up the opposition bowlers was Robin Smith. He was 76 when the ninth wicket in England's second innings fell, with England just past a lead of 200. His last partner was Devon Malcolm, whose batting was not his greatest attribute.

Robin manoeuvred the strike well enough to make 23 of a last-wicket stand of 29 and take himself to 99. Eventually, Malcolm had to face the last two balls of an over from Patrick Patterson. He took a huge swipe and lost all three stumps. Smith's reaction was to throw back his head and laugh.

At the end of the game, which England won comfortably enough in the end, thanks to the bowling of DeFreitas and Malcolm, I interviewed Robin as the players were leaving the field. He told me that Devon had said to him, as he approached his hundred: ‘Don't worry, Judge. I'll play for you.' Hence the laughter at the ambitious Malcolm air shot.

It was a typical reaction from an always-cheerful character. He seems an ideal person to have organised supporters' tours on subsequent trips.

Playing in that match among the oil tanks at Guaracara Park was a twenty-year-old who Trinidadians reckoned should be getting into the West Indies Test side. He made 134 in the first innings to underline his case. His name was Brian Lara.

The relationship with the opposition Test captain is
variable. I suppose the closest I had was with Sunil Gavaskar, who, despite having god-like status in India, was always very accommodating. Perhaps that was because no one there treated him as a normal human being.

Lara, when he became captain, was one of those who believed that radio should just take their chances with press conferences and not be granted any special favours. He could look furiously at his media manager when I ambushed him as he was leaving such a press briefing, but he always gave a good interview, even if we had to do it while on the rapid walk back towards the dressing room. He also had the grace to pop into my farewell dinner at Lord's and say a few kind words.

Just occasionally an overseas player might seem to be remarkably flattered just to be interviewed by the BBC, as was the case with the Bangladesh captain, Khaled Mahmud. But generally outside England an undue (in my view) preference is given to television, probably not helped by the proliferation of small radio stations in some places. Captains need to be reminded that radio rights holders have also paid substantial sums into their boards' coffers.

The managers on tour and their attitude can make a big difference. Raman Subba Row and Doug Insole, who were on my first two tours, were always charming and helpful. Tony Brown, who managed the 1984–85 tour of India that started with Mrs Gandhi's assassination, was probably surprised to find that in that sort of situation, the press can be quite helpful.