Can Anyone Hear Me? (33 page)

Twice I was referred to ‘Room 209' where I found members of the Indian cricket board handling large bundles of rupees. I was roundly abused when I asked for guidance there.

The first planeload – largely made up of Indian officials – left in the early afternoon and rumours mounted that there would indeed be a later flight, when the aircraft had been to Lahore and returned.

There was a melee inside the airport, when I eventually decided to go there. All sorts of ICC dignitaries, a few with wives, were milling around, none with any idea of what was going on. The Australian journalists had come along, too.

At last a voice started shouting out names to hand out tickets and I saw that it was Rajesh, who I had been looking for all day. He was standing on a crate to deliver the bounty. There
was a pathetic anxiety amongst everyone to hear their names called. I was certainly grateful and amazed when I heard mine.

As Chandigarh is not an international airport, this was a big day for the staff and it was clear they were going for glory. My passport number was written in ledgers at three different desks and the security and customs checks were more thorough than ever.

There was a long wait in the bleak departure lounge and then a further hold up when the doors were at last opened because, the security guard told me, ‘Some important people have to get on plane first.'

I passed that news to the President of the MCC and the chairmen of the Australian and West Indies boards, who were just behind me. On boarding the plane, there, sitting in seat 1A, was Sunil Gavaskar, grinning all over his face.

I had stayed in the Lahore hotel many times over the previous six weeks, observing the progress of building works on a huge new wing, which, I was told, would be full for the final. I never believed that it could be finished in time, which would leave a lot of people without accommodation. Arriving on the second plane seemed a little dangerous.

I had repeatedly underlined with the hotel on my last visit that I would be there and they had confirmed it, getting to know me quite well anyway, after my many visits. What I did not know as I headed westwards from Chandigarh was that Jonathan Agnew had also been warning them all day that I was coming in.

My heart sank as I looked at a noisy crowd of frustrated people,
five deep round the reception desk. But my talks with the staff had worked and from behind the throng I was hailed, ‘Mr Peter! Here is your key.' And it was passed to me over the envious crowd.

Such mayhem inevitably led on to a chaotic final, with many of these same dignitaries finding that, when they went off to get some interval refreshment, on their return, their seats had been occupied by people with apparently perfectly genuine tickets.

Despite Sri Lanka's unbeaten run, Australia were made favourites for the Lahore final.

It was to be the first game under lights at the Gadaffi Stadium and I had watched the slow progress of the erection of the floodlight towers on every visit I had made to Lahore, thinking all the while that they would never have them ready in time. It was said on the night that a good section of Lahore had to be blacked out to keep them going.

In the commentary box we were joined by Michael Slater, omitted from the Australian playing eleven and therefore given the chance to continue the early steps in a broadcasting career, which has since blossomed on Channel Nine television. His side – and probably the cricketing world – were taken by surprise by the outcome, as Sri Lanka took that world by storm.

Despite the overnight thunderstorm, the match started on time. We had a commentary team of Aggers, CMJ, Maxwell and me, with summaries from Mike Selvey and Peter Roebuck and contributions during the day from Michael Slater, up from the Australian dressing room, Lucien
Wijesinghe, our old friend from Sri Lanka and the Australian journalist, Mike Coward.

Sri Lanka caused some surprise by putting Australia in, but they bowled and fielded well to keep them down to 241 for seven, with Mark Taylor making 74 and Ponting 45. Bevan was 36 not out at the end.

The two dangerous openers, Jayasuriya and Kaluwitharana, again went early, but the partnership of Gurusinha and Aravinda de Silva just seemed to make the outcome appear a foregone conclusion, pacing themselves more carefully than in previous games. When Gurusinha was out, Ranatunga played himself in without panic, seeing Aravinda to his century and Sri Lanka to the World Cup and a coming of age.

The presentations that followed seemed to involve a competition to see how many people you could cram onto a small platform. But somewhere in the middle of it the Pakistan Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, handed Arjuna Ranatunga the Wills World Cup trophy.

Three years later the World Cup – now taken over by the ICC, rather than commercial sponsorship – was staged again in England, with games in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Holland. But in 2003 South Africa had their first chance to stage the event.

It was bigger than ever. Now there were fourteen teams involved, to be resolved from two pools in the first stage to a ‘Super Six' league for the second part, before semi-finals and a final. But again it was politics that dominated the lead-in to the opening matches.

This time it was England refusing to go to Zimbabwe after various threats had been received, a crisis that continued to rumble
on after the extravagant opening ceremony and the opening match. It overshadowed New Zealand's refusal to go to Kenya to play a match because of security fears.

Our coverage of the tournament was based on what we had done for the 1999 World Cup at home, bolstered by the fact that we were in the midst of the period when so many rights for overseas tours were being lost to Talk Sport. Thus we had a team of engineers with us and an operations centre at the Wanderers in Johannesburg.

For a few days in Cape Town, following on from the opening game there, our attention was on the diplomatic arguments over the question of Zimbabwe. England's game there was to be their first in the tournament. Aggers and I hung around the team hotel, outside which I found a patch of grass from which we could get a signal via the satellite. We covered two press conferences live for Radio 5 Live, both of which they took for granted, not knowing the short-notice scramble that had to be gone through to set them up.

The second of these was in the centre of the city, where I had to borrow a drum of cable from television news to run down a fire escape and across a street to a ledge from which the satellite dish could be aimed between the skyscrapers. I had to hire a security guard to watch the equipment in the street.

The press conference upstairs at the
Cape Sun
announced England's definite withdrawal from the trip to Zimbabwe. We broadcast it live by the skin of our teeth. Then Aggers and I set about re-arranging our plans.

The
competition had started with the West Indies beating South Africa in Cape Town, in a match on which we mounted a full commentary, as we did for several selected matches in the group stage. It became our practice for me to handle a newsy interval session whenever we were doing commentary on a match, wherever it was and wherever I was. Thus, for instance, after arriving in East London for England's game against Holland, I was doing the programme from the commentary box there, as Australia were playing India at Centurion.

It meant that we could have all the England news and interviews the day before their game against Holland. And the news on that day was that England had officially been docked the points for refusing to go to Zimbabwe and that Nasser Hussain was contemplating resigning the one-day captaincy.

The security check here turned out to be the silliest yet. Although the ground is not far from the hotel, I had decided to take the car, just to reduce the length of the carry for getting the equipment to the box. So I drove the long way round to the vehicle entry.

There I had to get out of the car and stand in a cage, while a large dog sniffed the vehicle. ‘He is trained for sniffing and for attack and he might forget which he's doing,' said the policeman.

Then I had to drive up a very high inspection ramp and open the bonnet and boot.

Then I was directed to the traffic lights back on the road I had just turned off. I went past the hotel and back to the ground.
I wondered why. And the security man on the gate also wondered why.

At least after that, England's win over Holland was fairly straightforward. In Port Elizabeth three days later they were given a bit of a scare by one of three Burgers in the Namibian side. This one made 85 and was christened ‘the Burger King' by Henry Blofeld.

Back in Cape Town they had a good win against Pakistan, in which the young Jimmy Anderson announced himself with a fine four for 29.

Sadly, this World Cup was partly memorable for me for various thefts. I had a bag of bits and pieces stolen from the Cape Town commentary box during the opening game and my mobile phone lifted in the security check at Durban airport. My laptop was very effectively sabotaged by someone with a can of Coca-Cola. Not much effort was made to make it look like an accident, either.

But the most spectacular theft was the portable satellite dish. Aggers and I were staying in neighbouring hotels in Durban for England's game against India. He needed to do various preview pieces before the match while I was busy with other duties, so he took the kit back to his hotel.

The next morning, after India's comfortable win and with our paths about to separate again, he came round, as I was having breakfast, to return the dish. As he handed me the black case I knew that something was wrong. It was a different case, stuffed with magazines to give it the weight of a laptop. He could not work out where the switch had been done. As we talked to the local police, I tried to imagine the reaction of the criminal opening the case. What would he make of a ‘World Communicator' satellite dish?

England's
game against Australia in Port Elizabeth was something of a crunch and it turned out to be exciting, too, with Australia only sneaking home in a remarkable ninth-wicket stand, with two balls to spare. Still, England were not quite out of the competition yet.

The next evening, in Johannesburg, Aggers and I were able to watch on a restaurant television as South Africa went out of their own World Cup in the Durban rain, after misunderstanding the requirements of the Duckworth-Lewis system. They had settled for a tie under that method against Sri Lanka, not appreciating that that was not enough.

England's failure to qualify for the next stage of the tournament – the ‘Super Six' – was sealed by rain in Bulawayo, where Zimbabwe gained the points from an abandonment against Pakistan that took them through with the same number of wins – three – as England.

It meant that the ‘Super Six' had a rather odd look. Kenya were second in the starting table, credited with four wins, two of them against other qualifiers – Sri Lanka, who had contrived to fall to Collins Obuya's leg spin, and New Zealand, who had forfeited the points by refusing to go to Nairobi. New Zealand themselves and Zimbabwe were both there with very few points, as their wins had been against non-qualifiers and were therefore more lightly weighted.

Re-drawing the plans for the extensive coverage we were committed to for this phase, without my irreparably damaged laptop, was an interesting exercise. My own participation seemed to involve all too many of the long drives between Johannesburg and Bloemfontein. It was there that I saw Kenya secure a remarkable semi-final place, which they did by overwhelming Zimbabwe.

At least sanity prevailed in the resolving of the finalists –
Australia and India – but as we came to the 54th and final match of the 2003 World Cup, at least for neutral observers the prevailing feeling was just a desire for the threatening weather in Johannesburg to hold off long enough for the match to be completed on the scheduled date.

I woke to wet streets, having apparently slept through a thunderstorm. But it was fine as we arrived early at the Wanderers and when India put Australia in, only to see them run up a massive 359 for five, with Gilchrist and Ponting to the fore. There was an interruption for rain, but only for half an hour.

India, though, were slaughtered and in the evening we toasted Jim Maxwell as the eighth commentator to commentate on a World Cup win in as many tournaments.

For Aggers, like the rest of us, keen to get home after two months, the final sting in the tail of the trip came from a dodgy oyster, which laid him low and forced him to delay departure for 24 hours.

If we felt that the eighth World Cup had been too long, the ICC must have had other ideas, because for 2007 they increased the number of teams to sixteen. They were organised into four groups of four for the first stage, this time to go into a ‘Super Eight'.

Several years before I had been talking to an experienced West Indian administrator and had expressed the view that a World Cup in the Caribbean could be great fun. He reckoned that it could never be done for economic and logistic reasons. In 2007 it was done.

It
was only three weeks after the last game of England's tour of Australia that I arrived in Jamaica in advance of an opening ceremony held at a remote ground – the romantically named ‘Trelawny Multi-Purpose Stadium', on the north coast.

Aggers and I went to the hotel where all the teams are staying in the morning, for a conveyor belt of captains' press conferences. We recorded Michael Vaughan's one and also managed to beat the system enough to get a proper interview with him.

His appearance was due to be followed by Inzamam and a charming press man from Pakistan told us with a smile that Inzamam and the rest of the team would only be giving press conferences in Urdu, ‘To avoid misunderstanding'.

The opening ceremony was a concert until the entry of the teams. Then there were some speeches and a carnival party on the outfield.