Cricket XXXX Cricket E-Book

Frances Edmonds

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 347

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Who can forget Frances Edmonds' explosive cricketing diaries of the 1980s? After the runaway success of Another Bloody Tour, Frances Edmonds returned to terrorise the England cricket team in 1987, heading to Australia to join husband Phil for three and a half months Down Under. While watching England retain the Ashes, and one or two other incidental one-day competitions, she once again lifted the lid on all the behind-the-scenes shenanigans in her inimitable and wickedly irreverent style. Against the decidedly unpromising backcloth of the disastrous defeat in the West Indies the previous year, this time the England team managed to pull themselves up by their boot-straps and turn their fortunes around. The tour of Australia was an unmitigated triumph. This was a very different story: there was fun, focus and good fellowship. And her account of it is outrageous, funny, perceptive and honest: Frances Edmonds at her best. But now, nearly thirty years on, updated with a new Introduction, this diary is more than a rollicking good read (which it is): on this tour we see in embryonic form the burgeoning phenomenon of the celebrity superstar player, which has gradually morphed into its now far more toxic iteration: the unchecked super-ego. And the game of cricket has of course changed in numerous other ways - the rise of mega-money, along with the changing character of the gentleman's game; and the continuous on-tour presence of WAGs, families, and an entourage that would make Cleopatra blush. Nothing less than sensational, Cricket XXXX Cricket continues to reveal as much about cricketing life off the field as on it.

Leseprobe

FRANCES EDMONDS

CRICKET XXXXCRICKET

For my mother, Patricia

Contents

Acknowledgements

Glossary

Preface 2015

Preface

1 The ex-Prime Minister’s trousers

2 The Melbourne Cup

3 G’day from WA

4 Brisbane: some cricket, at last

5 Perth via Newcastle

6 The Big Sleep and then Adelaide

7 Canberra and Melbourne

8 Perth – the Benson and Hedges Challenge

9 The great Australian ginger-nut debacle

10 The America’s Cup

11 The Grand Slam

12 Pillow talk

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

IN AUSTRALIA

Carol Bennetto – William Heinemann

Sandy Grant – MD, William Heinemann

Eileen ‘Red’ Bond

David Michael – Bond Corporation, Australia

Jane Adams – News Corporation Ltd

Mark Hopkinson – Schroder’s Australia Ltd

Carol Aamodt – Hyatt Hotel, Sydney

Rod and Fran Lugton – William Heinemann

Queensland and Torres Strait Islander Consultative Committee (QUATSICC)

Robert Mayne et al. – Thomas Hardy & Sons Pty Ltd

Andrew ‘Spud’ Spedding (and White Crusader) – shore manager of the British challenge for the America’s Cup, Fremantle

Channel 10’s Good Morning Australia Team, |Sydney

Brendan and Pat Redden, Melbourne

Hughie and Trish Wallace-Smith, Melbourne

Bollinger Champagne

Ansett Airlines

IN ENGLAND

Mark Lucas and Virginia Allan – Fraser & Dunlop Scripts Tom Clarke – Sports Editor, The Times

Castlemaine XXXX – Allied Lyons

Johnnie Walker Whisky and Hine Cognac

Margot Richardson – Kingswood Press

Rachel Ward Lilley – Kingswood Press

Derek Wyatt – Kingswood Press

Bill Bell – Copy-editor

Kate Gay – British Airways

Francis de Souza – British Airways

David Hooper – Biddle & Co Adrian Murrell – All Sport

AND ESPECIALLY

Philippe-Henri Edmonds – whose sleeping patterns ensure that there are enough hours in the day.

Glossary

Although I have made every effort to write this diary in English, my trusty copy-editor has pointed out various instances of linguistic interference. This is no doubt due to a protracted period of exposure to the local Australian patois, ‘Stryne’.

Here, in non-alphabetical order, are a few of the most common colloquial expressions assimilated:

Stubbies

Small receptacles for beer or lager

Tinnies

Large receptacles for beer or lager

Eskies

Large receptacles for stubbies and tinnies

Akubra

Type of hat worn by a Crocodile Dundee

Crocodile Dundee

Type of man who wears an Akubra hat

Scam

Fraud

Banana benders

Queenslanders

Larrikin Yobbo

Ratted Inebriated

To chunder

To perform a ‘pavement pizza’, a ‘Technicolor yawn’: to be sick

Vegemite

Essential element of Australian staple diet: a vegetable extract-based version of Marmite

Funnelweb spider

One of Australia’s most dangerous Arachnida

Preface 2015

Consider those twin imposters, triumph and disaster, and ask yourself in all honesty who has ever truly managed to treat them both the same? As chronicled in my first diary, Another Bloody Tour, the England cricket team’s tour of the West Indies in 1986 was an unmitigated disaster. Confronted by an all-conquering West Indian team at the height of its pomp, an England team riven by cliques, fifth columnists and self-absorbed superstars disintegrated and kept on disintegrating until it almost reached the realms of particle physics. From rock-bottom, this disaffected group somehow managed to keep on excavating and to burrow themselves down to hitherto undiscovered depths. It was an ugly phenomenon to observe but the richest of seams to mine for a woman covering the shambolic sequence of events.

So what were the agencies at play? In the first instance, until the 1986 West Indies tour, media coverage of overseas tours had been confined to the relatively avuncular care of dedicated cricket correspondents. No matter how seismically significant the upheavals and shenanigans taking place off the field, such distractions were resolutely ignored as no concern of theirs. The 1986 tour, however, witnessed a sea change in this hitherto cosy convention. Driven by international media baron wars and the real-time immediacy required by new technology, a very different pack of predatory pressmen was on the prowl. Drawn mainly from the shock-horror school of tabloid journalism, news correspondents uninhibited by the omertà of long-term personal relationships with members of the England team were parachuted in and air-lifted out of the tour with a single, simple objective: to dig the dirt . . . and of that, there was plenty!

Humiliated by the media mauling meted out the previous year, the England touring team to Australia in 1987 was still understandably paranoid and prickly about the press. Added to that, whatever the state of the opposition and whatever the circumstances, an Ashes series against Australia in Australia is always a tough tour. In the heyday of cricket-playing public schools, Englishmen imbibed the Corinthian adage: ‘It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose; it’s how you play the game.’ Aussie cricketers, it seems, were never taught that lesson, not even Aussie cricketers who went to school. Aussie cricketers are hard-wired to succeed and, when it comes to Poms touring God’s Own Country, they are teeth-grittingly determined to win at all costs.

Against this decidedly unpromising backcloth, Cricket XXXX Cricket is a tale of unmitigated triumph. From the sloughs of their Caribbean despond, a media-excoriated team of England cricketers managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and turn their fortunes around. Not only did they retain the Ashes in Australia and win the Benson & Hedges Challenge and the Benson & Hedges World Series Cup, but they also regained their self-respect, their touring team spirit and their long-lost joie de vivre. It is the stuff of MBA courses delivered in business schools all across the world. What creates a winning team? What are the hallmarks of great leadership? What, in a nutshell, is the essence of success? In Cricket XXXX Cricket, I assure you, you will find the answers to none of these questions.

There are any number of self-appointed leadership ‘gurus’ (for ‘gurus,’ read people too stupid to spell the word ‘charlatan’) who will claim to teach you the secrets of success. They will invoke everything – vision, charisma, empathy, focus, resilience – everything except the key component: luck. Napoleon’s preference for ‘lucky’ generals to run his military campaigns is well attested, but Lady Luck is rarely given her full due in the weighty tomes devoted to sporting, business and political success. For the England cricket team, it was in the first instance luck that turned a bunch of bickering losers into a motivated, focused and highly galvanised team: the luck to be playing against an Australian team in a period of transition after the retirement of some legends of the game. And yet luck, as the Roman philosopher Seneca once observed, is when preparation meets opportunity and this England squad was indeed prepared, both mentally and physically, for the rigours of this Australian tour. ‘The blow that doesn’t break you, makes you,’ so the old Spanish saying goes, and this team’s mettle had been tested and tempered in the heat of the previous year’s Caribbean cricket cauldron. Their individual and collegiate discipline paid swift dividends in terms of success at home and that success in turn, with its attendant bonhomie and team spirit, generated further success overseas. It was a joy to witness the energy and ebullience of a team of men intent on turning their fortunes around.

Despite the successes outlined in Cricket XXXX Cricket, re-reading a diary that I wrote almost thirty years ago has been an unexpectedly disturbing experience. In terms of tragedy, two of the cricketers mentioned in this account, both friends and both terrific men, have subsequently committed suicide. This is not the place to dissect the reasons why one larger than life, loveable character and another quite brilliant scholar and writer should have been moved to take their own lives. Suffice it to say that one tragedy served to demonstrate the depression that many people, especially men, experience when they can no longer exercise the profession they love and no longer feel the warmth and fellowship of a once all-embracing, all-consuming team; the other showed the devastation wrought in the lives of those tortured, usually highly sensitive individuals who cannot or dare not come to terms with their own sexuality. The desire to feel relevant professionally and the need to be authentic personally are fundamental to our wellness and wellbeing. These are lessons that hold true whatever the area of endeavour but in sport, where professional lives are short and macho culture is so deeply embedded, the distress and dilemmas encountered are even more acute and traumatic.

In terms of sociological developments, on this tour we saw in embryonic form the burgeoning phenomenon of the celebrity superstar player, a phenomenon which has gradually morphed into its now far more toxic iteration; the unchecked super-ego. Of course, this is not a phenomenon confined exclusively to sport. Daily we witness protagonists in all areas of endeavour, from Oscar Pistorius to Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, who share those quintessentially alpha-male characteristics historically required to reach the highest echelons and whose super-ego excesses are allowed to go unchallenged until either they self-destruct or, worse still, destroy the team, the business or the people around them. Cricket has always fielded its fair share of super-egos and there can be no doubt that, judiciously handled, these characters are game-changers. However, the vast amounts of sponsorship and appearance money that now transforms talented cricketers into multi-million pound ‘brands’ seems increasingly to challenge those individuals’ primary loyalty to the team. Furthermore, the impact of the massive influx of money for England cricketers generally combined with the concomitant overload of cricketing fixtures nowadays and a new breed of ‘Pick ’n’ Mix’ England cricketers appears to be emerging. There was a time when any cricketer would metaphorically kill for the honour of a wearing an England blazer. Today’s players, however, seem increasingly inclined to leave overseas tours and pop home for any number of personal and domestic reasons. Those Corinthian spirits motivated by the ribbon’d coat, let alone nothing more tangible than the captain’s encouraging hand, seem to belong to an ever dwindling band.

Allied to the increased abundance of spondulicks now splashing around for any England cricketer, there is one further development that has made me revisit the arguments I so vigorously deployed thirty years ago. In the eighties, due to the relatively modest incomes of the majority of professional cricketers, the number of WAGs on tour was minimal and manageable and I truly believed that such a numerically restricted WAG element not only did nothing to disrupt the harmony of the team but positively reinforced it. Nowadays, tours have become logistical nightmares for management as significant others (in some cases even wives) plus an attendant phalanx of babies, nannies, chief cooks, bottle washers, Old Uncle Tom Cobleys and all etc pile on to the touring cricketing juggernaut. It is a painful dilemma, especially given today’s non-stop cricketing schedule, but it perhaps now time to determine whether the intrusion of entire young families with their inevitable disruption is a welcome adjunct or a dangerous distraction to any professional touring team.

Yes, cricket is a microcosm in which life in all its aspects is played out under the media microscope. In my first cricket diary, Another Bloody Tour, I witnessed the fall-out of a failing England team imploding in the West Indies. Now, as you read Cricket XXXX Cricket, I hope that you feel the fun, the focus and the massively good fellowship that informed a resurrected England team in Oz. Triumph vs Disaster? I have yet to meet the cricketer who could treat them both the same.

Frances Edmonds

London, 2015

Preface

Never ever believe anything you read in the newspapers. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. On occasion I write for them.

Take conference interpreting, for example. That certainly is not all it is cracked up to be. It is not all duty-free Hermès scarves and Chanel No. 5; jet-setting around the world making boring, banal, superficial and ill-informed politicians sound riveting, innovative, outstanding and brill . . . or, indeed, from time to time, vice versa.

No. Sometimes you come across the real thing, the people who really know what they are talking about, the experts. And inevitably, when you do, they are talking about something incomprehensibly esoteric such as plasma physics, and when they are, it is in exotic locations such as a laboratory in Culham, not a million miles away from such exciting railway stations as Didcot.

Not that nuclear fusion is not a fascinating topic, on the contrary. And not that the relative merits of ion cyclotron resonance heating, lower hybrid resonance heating, electron cyclotron resonance heating, Alfvén-wave heating, turbulent heating and adiabatic heating are not subjects worthy of protracted ponder on a cold, misty October afternoon. Dear me, no.

It may, perhaps, have had more to do with the cumulative effect of a pharmaceutical conference in Portsmouth the week prior, epitomised in awfulness by a Spaniard with a cleft palate, semi-intelligible in five European Community languages, telling us all about benzodiazepine in his own highly individualistic brand of French. That, and the conference a fortnight before in Milan, an unspeakable meeting on pre-impregnated gas-pressure assisted cables, dominated by an unstoppable flow of manic Italians – that was probably what did it.

My thoughts turned to the workers on the other side of the world: to the old man, stretched out on a beach on the Gold Coast, exhausted after a heavy thirty minutes turning his arm over in the nets.

I rang my travel agent in London, and booked myself a seat on the next flight to Australia.

1 / The ex-Prime Minister’s trousers

I must admit to being somewhat miffed. No, not somewhat. That is far too pusillanimous an adverb to convey my current state of displeasure. Extremely.

You have all, no doubt, heard the story of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. Of course you have. Even people educated in Queensland have heard the story of the Emperor’s new clothes. Well, my arrival in Australia has been totally upstaged by a better one than that: two television and three radio interviews cancelled – and all because of the saga of ‘The Ex-Prime Minister’s Old Trousers’.

Former Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm (‘Rectitude’ used to be my middle name) Fraser has been very busy on the after-dinner speaking circuit since his elevation to Chairman of the Eminent Persons’ Group. The EPG is an eclectic selection of sometime somebodies and current busybodies, mandated by Commonwealth leaders to report on the South African problem in general and apartheid in particular. Australia, with its erstwhile whites-only immigration policy and a healthy track record in wiping out its own indigenous Aboriginal population, was the obvious country to field a chairperson for such an egregious body. Malcolm was back, if not centre-stage, then at least in the wings of international diplomacy.

It was therefore a trifle unfortunate, after one such speaking assignment in Memphis, Tennessee, that Mr Fraser should somehow lose his trousers, his wallet and his diplomatic passport during a nocturnal sojourn at the Admiral Benbow Motel. The Admiral Benbow Motel, according to Memphis Tennessee Tourist Board Officials more inured to dealing with Elvis Presley groupies wetting their pants rather than ex-Prime Ministers losing them, is a perfectly – almost totally – respectable hotel. Not quite the sort of establishment in which you would expect an eminent person to lay his weary wallet and diplomatic passport, but the right side of kosher at least. What does seem extremely odd about the place is that it would not appear to provide telephones in the bedrooms. Why on earth, otherwise, would the debagged ex-premier arrive in eminenta persona at the reception desk to report the loss, with only a towel to swathe his lower regions – hardly a step designed to ward off unwelcome publicity from the probing eyes of the world’s media? Another mystery is why Mr Fraser would sign himself into the good Admiral’s residence as one ‘Joan Jones’. ‘We thought Joan was the Australian way of spelling John,’ obfuscated the motel’s receptionist nicely. With such a thorough grasp of international diplomacy, maybe she should be chairing the Eminent Persons’ Group.

Australian marketing men recognise a good wheeze when they see one, and a Melbourne men’s underwear company is already advertising extra-durable, guaranteed against holes, executive underpants, just in case you ever get caught with your pants down. Whatever happened to good taste? At all events, the episode does not appear to have ruined the elder statesman’s hitherto unsullied reputation. On the contrary, informed pundits who believe that Malcolm’s stiff-and-starchy never-put-a-foot-wrong image won him little sympathy Down Under are now convinced that this rather louche little episode could herald a complete renaissance of his political career. Yes, folks, Cecil Parkinson would assuredly have been better off in Australia, and so, for that matter, am I. The end of October in England, when the clocks go back, and the nights close in at five o’clock, is the most depressing time of the year, and five months in the Antipodean sunshine seems no bad way to spend an English winter. I arrived in Adelaide on 31 October, three weeks after the England cricket team had left our green and pleasant land in an all-out effort to continue the glorious summer game in warmer climes, to retain the Ashes, and to break the spell of disasters which has dogged them since their disastrous tour of the West Indies in early 1986. A home season spent losing to the Indians and New Zealanders has done little to revive confidence, or restore morale, and all-rounder Ian Botham’s subsequent exclusion from the team on drugs offences was, perhaps excessively, sorely felt.

The British Airways inaugural flight from London to Adelaide was twenty-seven hours of complete relaxation. Unlike most people, I thoroughly enjoy long-haul flights. Responsibility for your own life is wrested from you for the duration, and all you can do is sit back and relax. One of the stewardesses on the London–Bangkok sector was the ex-wife of Geoff Howarth, former captain of New Zealand, but as a tribute to her sheer professionalism on a chock-a-block flight, she only managed to come and chat to me when the plane had actually landed. It was another of those sad tales of cricketing marriages, where long and enforced absences create a gradual and irretrievable breakdown. It is nevertheless the number of such marriages that survive that continue to surprise me, not the number that fail.

As the plane circled to land in Adelaide, rows upon rows of Formula One racing cars hove into view, like so many multicoloured Dinky toys, waiting to be freighted back to their respective workshops. The entire city, hitherto better known for its multiplicity of churches, was still in the throes of post-Grand Prix euphoria. With the few exceptions of people who objected to the inevitable traffic jams, the noise and the influx of the racing world’s ritzy razzamatazz, the majority of the good burghers of Adelaide had been immersed in the hopes of Britain’s Nigel Mansell and his bid for the world championship. Mansell had only to secure third place in the race, and the title would have been his. Tragically, his aspirations burst along with his left rear tyre, and he narrowly escaped with his life. Alain Prost carried off the championship. But in all honesty who cares? Alain Prost is not an Englishman.

The flight had been full as far as Sydney, but we who emerged at the final destination, ‘The City of Churches and Light’, were few. My copious amounts of baggage arrived almost immediately, thanks to the special ministrations of British Airways Special Services Executive, Francis de Souza. The cricket team had flown out heavily subsidised by British Airways, but the national flag-carrier’s well-tapped munificence embraces even sports less familiar, and the British challenge in the America’s Cup is also being generously sponsored by the self-confessed World’s Favourite Airline. Francis’ VIP attentions are reserved not merely for the superstars, but even extend to the vicarious extrusions of same, the wives, and I was unreservedly grateful for the ‘hand’ with my twenty kilos of excess baggage. Most of this comprised gear my husband, spin-bowler Phil, had failed to remember, items any professional cricketer could easily forget: cricket trousers, thigh pads, cricket shirts, England sweaters, spikes, helmet, an extra bat, chest pad, you know, all those relatively redundant peripherals to a four-month tour of Australia.

Hypnotising myself into a Bob Willis-like catatonic trance, watching other people’s luggage swirl around on the black rubber carousel, I noticed gossip columnist Auberon Waugh. His avuncular physiognomy belies his often gloriously malicious mind. He is the sort of elegantly satirical, brilliantly vituperative, unashamed misogynist, whose ‘tripe-writer’ ribbons mere part-time mickey-takers, such as myself, are unworthy to change.

Had he been sent here to report, in his inimitably excoriating fashion, on the ‘Clashes for the Ashes’? I savoured the thought. Sadly not. The distinguished progeny of the author of Brideshead Revisited, Scoop and Black Mischief had been invited to Adelaide in his capacity as wine connoisseur extraordinaire. An indignant Australian senator was so incensed when Waugh failed sufficiently to differentiate between South Australian and Hunter Valley wines in his essays on the Australian grape, she invited him over to rectify any confusion. I should like to put it on record here and now (just in case the good senator is reading), that I too am rather hazy on the organoleptic nuances of said varieties, and would be perfectly delighted to have my confusion dispelled as well.

I was met at the airport by a correspondent from the local press, who inquired whether I would be joining the team on its forthcoming up-country match in Kalgoorlie. Kalgoorlie is celebrated throughout Australia for its gold mines, and for that apparently indispensable adjunct to towns where lonesome men get too rich, too quick: its brothels. Unfortunately, the logistics of taking in the forthcoming Melbourne Cup and making it up to this indubitably colourful fixture were too awkward to contemplate, and I had elected to go for the former.

‘I’d rather go to the Melbourne Cup,’ I explained to the baby hackette in a jet-lagged attempt at flippancy, ‘You get a better class of horse.’

This did not net me too many friends amongst the doyennes of Melbourne society, where it was widely and faithfully misreported as ‘a better class of whore’. If the press want you to be out-spoken, you can bet your bottom, devalued Australian dollar, you are going to be out-spoken.

I arrived at the new and commensurately sumptuous Adelaide Hilton. It was midday, and Phil was playing at the Oval in the state match against South Australia.

He had remembered. There, in the bedroom, on top of the television, lovingly juxtaposed between a pile of laundered (at least we’re making progress) jock-straps and cricket socks, was a floral display. Nothing too ostentatious, mind you. No, indeed on reflexion about exactly the same size as the floral displays ubiquitously dotted throughout the entire hotel. And the same selection. ‘Happy Tenth Anniversary, darling’, it proclaimed, in suitably non-person-specific terms of endearment. It was signed ‘PH EDMONDS’.

I was appropriately overwhelmed, and reflected that even if Philippe-Henri had forgotten how to sign his name in anything other than autograph, room-service or credit-card fashion, at least he had remembered that it was ten years since the outbreak of inter-Edmonds hostilities. Ten years and one day to be exact. I had left England on 29 October, and arrived in Australia on 31 October. Somewhere in between a twenty-seven-hour international flight and an eight-hour time difference, 30 October, the actual day of the original mental aberration, had been lost, snaffled up by lines of longitude.

Well, the darling boy, whose memory is about as good as Kurt Waldheim’s when it comes to remembering emotional occasions which involve expenditure on small tokens of undying love and affection, had at least not forgotten this decadal notch on the yardstick of conjugal bliss. I have to admit that underneath this taut exterior of armadillo-feminism, I had been missing him.

‘And I’ve been missing you too,’ he admitted, in one of those intimate moments when, according to women’s magazines, men are supposed to tell you you’re wonderful, beautiful, adorable, desirable, etc. ‘There’s been nobody here to aggravate me.’

The tour so far has been fairly eventless. The management’s blanket ban on players writing, broadcasting or giving interviews to the press has resulted in fairly lacklustre, if occasionally critical, media coverage. Every member of the press corps shall henceforth be receiving exactly the same statement from the manager, Peter Lush, the assistant manager, Micky Stewart, or the captain, Mike Gatting. According to many of the hardened journos who have already decided to dispense with the press conferences, the ‘Gattysburg Addresses’ (as the captain’s desperately non-sensational, well-coached and relentlessly innocuous statements have been christened), are ‘basically tremendously wise’. There is a lot of ‘cricket-wise’, ‘batting-wise’, ‘bowling-wise’, ‘Ashes-wise’, ‘fielding-wise’, and ‘practice-wise’, together with a ‘tremendous’ amount of ‘basically’. Gatt, patently, has assimilated the art of saying much which means nothing; with such a thorough grasp of international diplomacy, maybe he should be chairing the Eminent Persons’ Group.

No, there has been little yet of the ex-Miss Barbados variety of copy for the press to get hot in the word-processor over. There have been a few up-country matches, one in Bundaberg against a Queensland Country XI where the odd bottle of the notorious local rum was dutifully downed, one in Lawes against SE Queensland Country, and another against a South Australia XI at Wudinna which was rather more colourful. The tiny plane chartered for the flight from Adelaide hit a storm, and pavement pizzas of the ongoing variety were in fairly generalised production throughout the England camp. The manager, Peter Lush, was even fined by the team’s social committee for succumbing like the rest. At the back of the plane, not entirely unamused by their faint-hearted Pommie teammates’ gastroenterological turmoil, sat the non-pukers, Zambian Edmonds and South African Allan Lamb – iron constitutions, these colonials.

It would be hard work not to like Allan Lamb, and he certainly rates as one of most people’s favourite tourists. I have never met anyone with quite as much energy, merriment and good-humoured mischief in him.

At the very beginning of the tour, five of the team – John Emburey, Ian Botham, David Gower, Phil and Allan Lamb – took a seaplane excursion off the coast of Queensland. Thus confined, there was not a lot anybody could do when ‘Beefy’ Botham took the controls, other than stare hopefully at the aquatic environment and say a few earnest prayers. Starboard, they noticed a pelican, following them with interest. Suddenly the bird started to hover, its beady eye focused meaningfully. Finally, with an unerring sense of direction, it swooped on its unsuspecting prey, engulfing the unfortunate creature in its capacious mouth. ‘Henri!’ shouted Lamby to my husband. ‘Looks like Frances has arrived!’

Lamby and David Gower seem closer than ever on this trip. In bygone days, Botham and former England captain, ‘una tantum’ assistant manager, Bob Willis comprised the Gang of Four. Willis, after England’s last disastrous tour to the West Indies, is no longer administratively with us, whilst Botham seems to be keeping very much to himself and his Australian promotions agent. This leaves the Allan and David duo together, as tour veterans of many years’ standing.

David, whom Lamb has nicknamed ‘Shaggy’, a not entirely inappropriate sobriquet, designed to convey the deep-pile carpet effect of David’s unruly, blond curls, seems lost. It is received wisdom that I have all the maternal instincts of a funnel-web spider, but I do have an extremely soft spot for David.

Last year had been such a traumatic year for him. An only child, whose father died many years ago, it came as a body-blow when his mother died weeks before the England team set off to the West Indies. That uncompromisingly dreadful tour ensued, and David, as captain, was inevitably first in the media firing line when it came to handing out the brickbats: no team discipline; want of application; lack of leadership; failure to implement anything even vaguely analogous to a strategy; and so on. He took it all with that indefatigable good humour and charm which uninformed pundits often perceive as indifference. It must be difficult for captains in adversity to know quite how to react to the cricket world’s vultures in the face of unremitting criticism. Some, such as ex-Australian captain, Kim Hughes, break down and cry. Some, such as current Australian captain, Allan Border, become uncommunicative, refuse to field press questions, threaten to resign and earn the nickname ‘Grumpy’. Throughout the press onslaught David remained his own laid-back, superficially insouciant self. However, absence of overt, aggressive histrionics drove the bloodlusters even wilder. Any layperson, picking up a British newspaper during that period, would have been forgiven for believing that David had done something rather ill-defined, but nevertheless deeply reprehensible. What in truth he had done was to lose to the best team on earth in its own Caribbean backyard. No one else, in the circumstances, could have done a better job. The noose however was already around his neck, and he was given but a short-term, probationary home captaincy against the Indians the following summer.

The rest is history. Chairman of Selectors, Peter May, who has done for the art of communication what Benson and Hedges have done for world health, summarily dismissed David after the First Test defeat at Lord’s. It is not, as the old adage runs, what you do, it’s the way that you do it, and the many people who have grown to admire and respect David will never forgive the ungracious ineptitude with which he was given the push.

Vice-captain Mike Gatting was duly appointed captain in his place. Mike, who had had his nose broken by Malcolm Marshall in the first One Day International in Jamaica had returned to the West Indies to play in only one Test match, the last. His reputation therefore, if not his good looks, had managed to survive the Caribbean experience intact.

The choice of England vice-captain for the home series proved conclusively, to me at least, that certain cricketers’ peccadillos are far more easily forgiven than others. Graham Gooch, who having led a rebel tour to South Africa, spent much of his time in the West Indies feeling mortally aggrieved that a few black politicians should make a few moral points about ‘Judas money’, had finally to be persuaded forcibly to stay on the tour at all. Donald Carr, then secretary of the Test and County Cricket Board (TCCB), was obliged to fly out to Trinidad after the fourth Test to convince Graham to continue on to the final Test in Antigua. Who will ever know what was said or promised? Suffice it to say that the man who led a breakaway rebel tour to South Africa, the man who was not entirely sure whether or not he ever wanted to be on tour in the West Indies, the man who subsequently decided that he was not available to tour Australia, was nevertheless granted the honour of the vice-captaincy of England. David Gower, meanwhile, was left completely out in the cold.

And that is how things stand at the moment. David, who has three full tours of Australia to his name, who has more Test experience than the entire touring selection committee put together, has not even been made a selector. There is fairly generalised outrage in the roving press corps at this glaring, almost insulting omission. It is interesting, is it not, how a certain ineffable sense of fair play tends to triumph in the British media? Once a chap has been trampled on sufficiently, suddenly everybody decides it is high time to rehabilitate him. Erstwhile hatchet-job men are now realising what an extremely good and decent person David Gower is. Indeed, in the idle hours I spend counting how many clichés Bob Willis can fit into one sentence of his Channel 9 television Test match commentary, I often wonder how much better David would have fared as captain if he had had the current managerial support group. The combination of manager Peter Lush’s public relations background, his confidence in dealing with the press and (perhaps his greatest asset) his inalienable common sense, together with assistant manager Micky Stewart’s reputation as a no-nonsense disciplinarian, removes many extraneous pressures from a captain’s shoulders. The skipper is thus left free to devote himself to the job in hand: leading his men on the field. On overseas tours, nowadays, that it is more than sufficient. But enough of all that for the moment. Back to a favourite, and exponentially more interesting topic: MOI!

I am finding it very difficult to establish a regular sleeping pattern, since my circadian rhythms would appear to be seriously out of kilter. I assume this is what other folk advert to as jet-lagged. It does not help sharing a room with Philippe-Henri Edmonds, whose insomniac idiosyncrasies are legendary in the England cricket camp. Four players have been granted the privilege of a single room this tour: Mike Gatting, the captain; John Emburey, the vice-captain; David Gower, in appreciation of his seniority; and Phil Edmonds, by virtue of the fact that he is such an impossibly awkward blighter that nobody else will share with him. His relentless attempts to tune into the BBC’s World Service on the radio are positively Heath Robinsonian. Coils of wire, attached to extruded coat-hangers, wrapped around television aerials, affixed with drawing pins to the ceiling and festooned across the outside balcony make the Edmonds’ hotel love-nest appear more like an electricity generating station, or a nuclear fusion power plant, than a connubial boudoir. He is awake every morning at 5 am, and orders that Aussie/American favourite, steak and eggs. Being woken up at 5.15 by some fifteen-stone nutter watching breakfast TV and eating steak and eggs in bed beside you certainly adds a completely new dimension to the phenomenon of morning sickness.

Australian television is dominated to a large extent by commercial channels. The ABC (the Australian equivalent of our BBC) would appear to have a hard time competing with the Murdoch, Packer, Fairfax, Bond, and Holmes à Court media empires. The copious amount of advertising is most intrusive for a newcomer. Not only do the channels devote a lot of time and airspace to advertising products, but even more energy seems to be devoted to promoting themselves. Channel 9, Kerry Packer’s old outfit, which generally achieves the top ratings, is a case in point. Most of the evening news time is devoted to the message that the news is coming and that it will be absolutely spiffing when it arrives. Consumers, I believe, should be allowed to make such quality assessments for themselves, and not have them gratuitously foisted upon them. Perhaps the marketing whizz-kids are not sufficiently convinced of the value of their own product. Or maybe this is just the Aussie way. With luck Alan Bond’s buy-out of the Packer TV empire will change matters.

The Aussie way of depicting history, incidentally, is possibly worth a mention. Not that I can blame the Australians for their somewhat distorted account of the infamous 1932–3 ‘Bodyline’ series; all chauvinists play with facts. The Hayes–Schultz film of that name however, is currently being screened as I write, and although I was not personally doing the rounds in the heyday of Bradman and Jardine, I am none the less prepared to take it on higher authority that the entire production bears as much relation to the truth of the matter as Marilyn Monroe’s death certificate. There is such a thing, of course, as dramatic licence, but in this case dramatic licence moves into the realms, if not on occasions of invention, then perilously close to fiction. On a purely physical level, for instance, the public sympathy odds are stacked heavily in Australia’s favour from the outset. Australian batsman Don Bradman is tall, dark, seraphically good-looking, with incandescent watery blue eyes and a fair monopoly on righteousness. In truth, Bradman was never more than of very average physical stature, and was to conventional film-star good looks what Robert Redford is to Test cricket. The English, on the other hand, are with few exceptions an irretrievably dastardly bunch. Jardine is depicted as a demonic obsessive, whose ears stick out at forty-five degrees to his head and wiggle satanically as he plots the ‘leg-theory’ downfall of ‘Bradmin’ and the entire Australian ‘crickit’ team. Apparently the real Jardine was an elegant patrician, and by no means the unequivocal bounder and cad he would appear to be in the film. None of this, however, is half as significant as the actual timing of the screening. Old resentments for things which happened over fifty years ago still run deep. Jardine’s restricted use of leg-theory, which compared to the relentlessly murderous assaults of Lillee and Thomson in their heyday was a positive picnic, continues, nevertheless, to be a controversy which epitomises the perennial and not always entirely friendly rivalries between the mother country and her former colony. As the 1986–7 ‘Clashes for the Ashes’ begin to warm up it is interesting that certain sectors of the Australian media see fit to remind us that when all is said and done, all Aussies are fine, bonza folk, and equally all Pommies are bastards. Come to think of it, one day that might make a good title for a book.

2 / The Melbourne Cup

Two consecutive days is quite enough time to devote to any one man. Indeed the World Health Organisation would probably rule that anything more than a one-night per annum exposure level to the insomniac shenanigans of PHE could seriously damage your health. On the third morning after my arrival in Australia I therefore flew off to Melbourne, while the England team emplaned for Kalgoorlie, materialistic Mecca of gold-mines and whore-houses. That disciplinarian, Micky Stewart, would just have to find a way of keeping the boys out of the gold-mines. Phil and David Gower, however, elected to make the journey by overnight train. Beefy Botham had implied that he too would like to take the twenty-six-hour train trip, but the management decided otherwise. Twenty-six hours of the irrepressible Beefy in a confined space with gratis booze was not considered to be a terribly good idea.

On the flight from Adelaide to Melbourne I read Thommo Declares, the ghosted biography of Jeff Thompson, erstwhile pace bowler, and enfant terrible of Australian cricket. I am not too wild about the genre of ghosted biographies. To my lights only people who are dead should invoke the privilege of opting out of the hassle of recounting their own version of events. Unfortunately, with one or two remarkable exceptions (Peter Roebuck, Vic Marks, Mike Brearley, all Oxbridge men), most cricketers take the easy option, pick up the loot, and let some other poor bloke do the graft. Too often the results tend to be of fairly iridescent mediocrity, with oleaginous sycophancy as the major hallmark. Until such times, however, as cricketers develop the time, the inclination and sufficient words in their vocabulary to write their own stuff this is the type of sports book we shall tend to be saddled with.

Thommo’s book makes interesting if not consistently edifying reading. Frequent expletives have patently been deleted, but there is nonetheless an obvious effort by biographer John Byrell to promote an uncompromisingly macho image. The book pays joyous tribute to those quintessential Aussie values of playing cricket, swilling beer, swearing voraciously, and bonking oneself stupid. ‘Ian Botham’, says Thommo, ‘would make a great Aussie’. It is still not known whether Mr Botham will be taking legal action.

The book continues very much along the only-good-Pommie-is-a-dead-Pommie line. England is dispensed with as a ‘shithole’, since there are no beaches to speak of. In fairness I suppose one has to admit that there are not too many surfers’ paradises in the immediate vicinity of Lord’s, The Oval, Edgbaston, Trent Bridge or Headingley. The one-time fastest man on earth has a more serious complaint, however, in that the wild pigs in England ‘had all been cleaned out by something like the fourteenth century’. To tell the truth, it seems perfectly incredible that someone who played cricket against England teams until as late as 1985 should have come to the conclusion that the species has died out completely.

Most of this, of course, is designed to reinforce the received image of the Aussie fast bowler, but it is, in fact, a far cry from the man himself. Thommo spent a brief period with my husband’s county cricket team, Middlesex, some five years ago, and far from being a loud-mouthed lout, everyone found him a most polite and personable character (for an Australian, that is). In retirement, Thommo now runs his own landscape gardening company, devotes much time to his favourite hobby of growing orchids, and readily admits that he too is becoming a trifle weary of the well-hyped ‘gorilla’ image. Sadly, these stereotypes are often the only images of Australia promulgated abroad. Currently being promoted is a huge ‘Buy Australian’ campaign, and many marketing consultants are trying hard to gainsay the predominantly ‘ocker’ impression created by such advertisements as Paul Hogan’s amusing Fosters’ lager series, and the Castlemaine XXXX publicity, which is now taking a very definite turn for the better!

The phenomenal box-office success of the film Crocodile Dundee