Can Anyone Hear Me? (7 page)

I had another problem, in that I was putting the final touches to a book on cricket's World Cups, with the seventh tournament due in England that year. I had included interviews with all the winning captains except the most recent – Arjuna Ranatunga. In the past I had always found him very approachable for interview, but on this tour he was proving more elusive and I had rather earmarked our time in Adelaide, while three one-day games were played, as my best chance to pin him down. Now I felt I had no chance at all.

Australia played Sri Lanka the day after that acrimonious game. ICC hearings and legal consultations were in the air and even on the Monday when I rang Arjuna at his hotel I was sure he would be reluctant to speak. In fact he agreed to do it immediately and I got just the piece I needed, though when I broached the question of a comment on the events of Saturday evening (having made sure of my bit for the book) all I got was a smile and a shake of the head.

The hearing with the match referee over Ranatunga's conduct was three days later in Perth on the eve of England's next meeting with Sri Lanka. My abiding memory is of a
very sad Peter van der Merwe regretting bitterly that the game had come to this, with lawyers far too heavily involved. They had tied his hands over the extent of the penalties he could impose, so that a six-match ban had to be a suspended sentence.

Many Englishmen who were in Adelaide at the beginning of December in 2006 will carry the mental scars of what they witnessed there. It was the second Test of what was an unhappy winter for England, who were defending the Ashes they had won back at long last in 2005. Australia had already won the first Test in Brisbane by a crushing 277 runs.

After that, to make 266 for three on the first day in Adelaide was something of a relief. Paul Collingwood was 98 not out overnight and the next day he went on to a double hundred, putting on 310 for the fourth wicket with Kevin Pietersen, who made 158. This was heady stuff for beleaguered Poms, as England declared on the second evening at 551 for six and even snatched a wicket before the close.

It took Australia until late on the fourth day to get to their eventual reply of 513, with centuries from Ponting and Clarke.

Barring something extraordinary, the Test is heading for a draw.

The extraordinary thing happened. England collapsed and in between the wickets they became completely strokeless, so that when they were all out at tea, Australia turned it into a cakewalk and won with three overs to spare.

It
was a shattering finish, which has left us all feeling numb.

Shane Warne had been at the heart of it. Perhaps he was lucky to be given Strauss's wicket to start him off, when England were looking secure enough at 69 for one, but he also bowled Pietersen round his legs and ran out Bell. He seemed to be willing Australia to victory. England were dismissed for 129, having lost nine wickets for 70 in the day.

Australia needed 168 to win from 36 overs and despite losing four wickets, the force was very much with them. They went on, of course, to take the series five-nil.

I did not cross the Tasman Sea to New Zealand until the 1992 World Cup and only ever covered one Test tour there – that in 2002. Starting that tour in Christchurch, I stayed in an hotel right by the cathedral, the shattered tower of which would become a symbol of the devastating earthquake of 2011. I watched the live television pictures of that destruction from Australia in horror.

Many of the principal New Zealand grounds are also rugby stadiums, which makes them not always ideal cricket venues, not least because of the reliance on drop-in pitches. The character of these changes during the course of a game in a very different way from conventional pitches.

Lancaster Park in Christchurch (officially known as Jade Stadium in 2002) was a case in point. The Super Rugby tournament of teams from New Zealand, Australia and South Africa was growing in strength and popularity at that stage and we were approaching the start of that season when we were there, so all the gearing up at the ground was for their home team, the Crusaders.

Our commentary on the first one-day international was abruptly
interrupted. A mechanical digger had apparently severed a cable in Sacramento, California. Astonishingly, this put us off the air in Christchurch, New Zealand.

When this sort of thing happens, we make do with some commentary on the telephone while we assess the scale of the problem. These days our portable satellite dish – a wonderful technological breakthrough – then comes into play. On this occasion, so confident was I of the excellent technical service that we had so far enjoyed, that I had left the equipment back in the hotel. That meant a hasty dash was needed, followed by the dismantling of a louvred window that faced in the right direction to find the satellite, which is stationed more or less over the Equator. From the South Island of New Zealand, that means you are pointing your dish at a comparatively shallow angle and buildings or tall trees can offer an obstruction. However, on this occasion, with miles of the outside broadcast producer's best friend, gaffer tape, holding the dish precariously out of the window, we got the commentary back on the air in decent quality.

For the Test Match there, the new drop-in pitch provided a steady clatter of wickets for the first two innings, with a century from Nasser Hussain separating the sides. Then, from the middle of the third day, the pitch seemed to flatten out dramatically and from 106 for five, we saw Andrew Flintoff making a rapid first Test hundred and Graham Thorpe racing to 200 in 231 balls. For only a matter of hours it was the third fastest double hundred in Test history.

Then, on the fourth day, needing 550 to win and despite losing their sixth wicket when they were still 300 adrift, New Zealand gave England quite a scare. Nathan Astle made the fastest ever Test double century. It took him only 153 balls and his second hundred came in 39 balls. He made his
last 88 runs batting with the number eleven, an injured Chris Cairns.

England did win and the margin of 98 sounds comfortable enough, but the abiding memory was of England's fast bowlers craning their necks as successive deliveries were smacked out of the ground by Astle in his 222.

Over the last ten years or so, one-day internationals in Wellington have been played at the Westpac Stadium, known to one and all, because of its shape, as the Cake Tin. It is a multi-purpose stadium, principally – this being New Zealand – used for rugby. And it feels even less like a cricket ground than the other similar grounds.

My only experience of cricket in this stadium was a rain-affected one-day international in which England's demise was dramatic enough to attract the local headline, which is so beloved in the Antipodes, ‘THESE PATHETIC POMS'. In the interval the crowd were invited to contribute to the sound effects for the second ‘Lord of the Rings' film, which was being made at the time. By stamping their feet and beating their chests, they became the Orc Army. I was trying to conduct the
Test Match Special
interval programme at the time and had to explain to listeners what was going on, but I think of that evening whenever I see the orcs marching on Helm's Deep in
The Two Towers
.

By contrast, Wellington's Test ground, the Basin Reserve, is very much a cricket ground. It does, however, have the dubious distinction of being a traffic roundabout. The Test match there in 2002 was blighted by the news that arrived with us during the third morning, that Ben Hollioake, who had been part of the touring team for the one-day internationals at the start of the tour and in India before that, had been killed in a car crash in Western Australia overnight. Such a sudden loss seemed
to knock the stuffing out of England even more than the southerly gale, which can be the curse of Wellington.

That tour ended with a Test in Auckland at Eden Park, another ground famed for rugby, having staged two world cup finals, in 1987 and 2011, both won by New Zealand. As a result the ground has a special place in New Zealanders' hearts.

It is not a great cricket ground, though. To play cricket, the pitch – another drop-in these days – is orientated on a diagonal corner-to-corner line. That can mean, for instance, that fine leg is practically in the batsman's back pocket, while the square leg boundary is in a far-distant corner. That seems to create more of a problem with field settings in one-day cricket.

The most bizarre thing I saw there, though, was the cold and rain-interrupted third Test of the 2002 tour. On the fourth day, New Zealand were batting with a first innings lead of forty under their belts. With playing hours extended to make up for lost time, the floodlights came on during a gloomy afternoon and, probably sensing the fielders' desire not to continue, the batsmen turned down offers of bad light from the umpires and continued to build their lead past 300.

It was apparent that fielders simply could not see the red ball against the dark stands, but play continued into the evening in a way that was subsequently ruled out by the guidelines for Test umpires.

That lead enabled New Zealand to give themselves a day to bowl England out and they managed it before the tea interval.

These days, tours of Australia have lost something, with the paucity of up-country games, when everyone could see a bit more of the nation than the increasingly sophisticated major cities. Touring teams are less likely now to hear the
cheerfully partisan public address announcement once delivered, ‘From the Piggeries End it's gonna be Stormy Gale. And let's hope he puts the wind up the Poms.'

At least most major tours do start with a festival game at Lilac Hill in a Perth suburb, the home of the Midland Guildford club, where sponsors' tents round the boundary make for an apparently relaxed atmosphere, belying the determination of whatever scratch XI has been put together to embarrass the Poms. The first of these fixtures came on the 1990–91 England tour, two days after a rather calamitous start at another Perth club.

That was a delightful ground in an affluent suburb – the Melvista Oval. Mobile phones were still not part of our kit then, so the lack of any telephone on the ground had the potential to be slightly problematic. Things became a bit more urgent, though, when Graham Gooch, the captain on that tour, injured his hand, going for a return catch off his own bowling and had to go off to hospital for an X-ray.

There was talk of a phone box nearby, but I could find no sign of it. I asked a gardener who was trimming some bushes. ‘People round here have phones in their houses,' he informed me curtly.

There was a golf course bordering the cricket ground and so I tried that and found a payphone in the upstairs bar. A ladies' medal tournament was in full swing, but they seemed happy for me to use their phone and as the Gooch injury scare became the lead item in all the morning sports bulletins, we got to know each other very well.

Though
Gooch returned to the ground later and the story was rather played down, his wound became infected and he was out of action for a month.

There was another up-country match before we encountered a major ground on that tour, with England taking on a Western Australian Country XI in Geraldton, about 250 miles north of Perth, where a penetrating gale seemed to blow constantly. One rather novel feature of an otherwise undistinguished place and its cricket ground, Wonthella Park, was the vertical ladder out of the gents' loo that took me up to the ABC broadcasting point.

That 1990 tour was probably the last one with a full five weeks' run-up to the first Test. After leaving Perth, we went to Port Pirie, about 135 miles north of Adelaide, for which journey we crammed four of us and our luggage into a car, stopping en route at a lonely pub called the Dublin Hotel to watch the Melbourne Cup, the race that brings the whole of Australia to a standstill. In an otherwise seemingly deserted cluster of houses the pub was packed with drinkers, all slightly surprised to find four English journalists coming in out of the dust and heat.

While we were taking the low road, the team had an alarmingly bumpy flight through an electrical storm in a small aircraft. They arrived at the civic dinner (a grand name for generous helpings of beef stroganoff on paper plates) to which we had all been summoned, very late and looking rather shaken.

On the same tour England had a couple of games against the Australian Cricket Academy at a school ground in Adelaide, in preparation for the one-day series.

St Peter's College ground turned out to be more like an English public school idyll than anything actually in England. There were beautiful trees and a small stand at midwicket where the press gathered, the headmaster's house bordered the ground and there was a comparatively ancient chapel across an adjacent lawn.

I found a phone in the tuck shop for early morning live reports back home, but they were locking up before the close, so I had to do a rushed return to the hotel in time for 7 a.m. in Britain.

The following day, the tuck shop and the school switchboard both shut down much earlier and a nearby petrol station had to become my studio. How much easier life became with the advent of mobile phones!

Tasmania would be aggrieved to be referred to as ‘up-country'. The Bellerive Oval stages Test matches after all, though England have never played one there. When I first went to the island state in 1982, the main Tasmanian Cricket Association ground was up a hill on the edge of Hobart, where a fierce wind made the huge teapot which greeted us in the old wooden press box every morning very welcome indeed. The ABC radio box (which I needed to access for close of play reports) was a hut on tall stilts with a vertical ladder to reach it. Negotiating this in the gale was an interesting exercise, to say the least.

On that tour the three-day match against Tasmania in Hobart was followed by a one-day game in Launceston on the far north side of the island. There, what should have been an enjoyable day's cricket on a delightful ground was rather spoiled
by a very sub-standard pitch. Michael Holding was playing for Tasmania at the time and a ball from him reared to take Derek Randall in the face, after which Holding finished his spell bowling at half-pace. The incident inspired Ian Botham to bat in a helmet for the first time.