A Beautiful Game

by Mark Nicholas

  My favourite filing memory comes from Adelaide on England’s 2002–03 tour of Australia. I wrote at the close of play, in between sending links for Channel 4’s highlights package of the day. I pressed send, into the Telegraph’s embryonic ‘direct input system’ and set off for the bar. Then dinner. Then the bar again. A moment or two before the clock struck midnight, I returned to my room and found a message from the sub on the desk in London asking when they might expect my piece. Initially calm, I pressed send again, and called the office. Nothing. I immediately recalled a story of the cricket correspondent of the moment so frustrated by this system that he threw his laptop into the hotel swimming-pool. I squirmed and, though mine was old and faulty, I chose to keep it dry. It was 1 pm in the UK, a little too early for the skeleton crew of copytakers to have arrived and, anyway, there were few of them left by the dawn of the 21st century. It was a line of work made almost redundant by the power of the internet. Midnight in Adelaide, lunchtime in London and no subeditor likely to bail me out by taking 1000 words of dictation, so what to do?

  Bravely, I emailed my piece to Tony Greig, who was staying in the same hotel, and then telephoned his room. Greig is early to bed and to rise. He was in the deepest shiraz-infused slumber and took a while to register my stupidity. However, one tiny thing lay in my favour. A week or two earlier, I had written an enthusiastic tribute to him and, especially, to his Herculean efforts against Lillee and Thomson in 1974–75. He had liked that and puffed out his chest. Trembling, I explained my dilemma. He was neither best pleased nor much interested, but he sensed my distress. He asked what the hell he could do about it and I said, ‘File it for me from your laptop,’ which was a rather more recent and reliable piece of kit than mine. He agreed. Phew.

  Up the lift I went, down the corridor of the fifth floor and knocked on 517. I shall never forget what I saw. At 6 feet and 7 inches, the former captain of England and now the most prominent voice and face on global cricket television, was standing half-asleep in his striped pyjamas. I resisted the photograph. He asked me in. The room was freezing cold, a condition I was later to find applied to any commentary box he could so influence and to the inside of his car and home. Greigy loved aircon; ice-cold aircon loved Greigy. The engines of his sparkling new computer roared into life. I shivered. He saw my email. We typed in the Telegraph sports desk direct-input address and he pressed ‘send’. Eureka! Then he said, ‘Now fuck off.’ Fair call.

  THE FOURTH ESTATE

  The cricket writing in Australia has always been superb. Arguably, Peter Roebuck became the most irresistible read in the land. Even Greig wanted to know his take. Certainly, no other cricket writer has managed to invade the players’ space and mind with such authority. Martin Crowe once said that Roebuck’s insight was eerie and off-putting, which I suppose is a compliment. The finest essayist is Gideon Haigh, who takes the game into a parallel universe. His intellectual approach is often misunderstood, for it challenges the prosaic and one-dimensional thinking of which many players, administrators and television folk are guilty. The game would do well to hear him more clearly. Greg Baum is another who hits the mark more often than not. His consistency and slick use of language and phrasing are a treat. Mike Coward provided a neat combination of history and romanticism. Today, Malcolm Knox and Peter Lalor lead the way for other aspiring correspondents.

  Their founding fathers were Jack Fingleton, Ray Robinson and Bill O’Reilly. Fingleton retired from playing on the eve of the Second World War and soon found himself at the right hand of powerful politicians in Canberra. He was to forge close relationships with several prime ministers and begin a career that combined his role as political correspondent for the ABC’s Radio Australia with cricket journalism. A disciple of Cardus, he wrote a number of stylish and influential books, some of which were at first condemned for their persistent attacks on Bradman. The one that really got Bradman’s goat was Cricket in Crisis, long considered the best first-hand account of the Bodyline controversy. In it he criticised Bradman’s unorthodox approach of backing away to leg against Harold Larwood. This was one of only a very few occasions when Bradman was moved to reply in a book of his own, Farewell to Cricket, where he questioned Fingleton’s own ability and therefore his authority on the subject.

  The root of this mutual dislike was religion. In the 1930s, Australia was largely divided along sectarian lines. Those of Irish Catholic descent—Fingleton, O’Reilly, Stan McCabe, Leo O’Brien and Chuck Fleetwood-Smith—were in one corner of the dressing room, while the Protestants, led by Bradman, were in the other. Bradman and the ACB accused Fingleton of leading a group who were undermining his captaincy. This left a sour taste and their relationship never recovered. Legend has it that Fingleton and O’Reilly laughed hysterically when Bradman was bowled by Eric Hollies for a duck in his final Test innings at the Oval.

  O’Reilly, by all accounts, was an extraordinary man with a biting wit. He wrote in the same aggressive manner as he bowled leg spin. He was an Australian cricketer of the old school, his talent nurtured in the bush and hardened by the realities of life. His fiery Catholicism got him into various levels of trouble but the more they disciplined him, the more he attacked them. I sat next to him in the press box once, for about half an hour, while he chatted with Roebuck. He was 80 years old, wore a collar and tie, and asked where I was from. He seemed to know more about London than I did.

  He first encountered Bradman at Bowral. Bradman was a diminutive teenage figure then, whose pads came almost to his waist, but he made 234 not out nonetheless. There was no friendship between them but there was immense respect. O’Reilly described the little master as the supreme genius of cricket. Bradman said O’Reilly was the best bowler he ever saw or played against.

  Ray Robinson was thought of as the man who changed the face of Australian cricket writing. His attention to detail was Swantonesque, and his descriptions of mannerisms and performances so accurate as to be almost real, though never romanticised. He enjoyed the complete trust of the players, something that no journalist today can claim. According to Bradman, ‘Ray lived as he wrote, honestly, modestly, sincerely and always respected a confidence.’

  His book On Top Down Under is considered among the finest about the game, capturing as it does the essence of all the Australian cricket captains. Namely: ‘Bradman made the purple patches of others look like washed-out lilac’; ‘Bob Simpson had a mind no easier to change than a £100 note’; ‘Richie Benaud had the faculty of making snap decisions that did not snap back’. The latest edition has been updated to include the captains until the end of Mark Taylor’s reign and, suitably, that work was completed by Gideon Haigh. Perhaps Gideon will keep going.

  Robinson made a single hiccup in an otherwise long and exemplary career, and it brings me back to the issue of slip-ups. In his book The Wildest Tests he described a dozen Test matches that had been disrupted by crowd violence. In it, he misquoted a proverb when writing about a riot-filled Eden Gardens in Kolkata: ‘If a Bengali and a Cobra confront one on the road, one should kill the more dangerous first—the Bengali.’ In the original proverb, a different community, not the Bengalis, is described as more dangerous; this comment, coming as it did from a respected author, put noses out of joint. It was an honest mistake, but were such a thing to be written today, we can only begin to imagine the outrage on the many social media platforms available now.

  I was recently guilty of a damaging error myself. Writing a preview of the World T20 tournament for Cricinfo, I spoke of India as unbackable favourites and, specifically, M.S. Dhoni as a Caesar figure, in line for a triumph granted by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). Towards the end of the piece I felt obliged to mention the other teams too, suggesting that England could upset the odds and, maybe, Australia too. I suggested that South Africa would fall at a knockout hurdle and lazily gave the rest a sentence each. Collectively: Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh were short of class, I wrote, but useful in the conditions; ‘West Indies are short o
f brains but have IPL [Indian Premier League] experience in their ranks,’ I continued, ‘and New Zealand are worth a look, strong and savvy.’

  Having seen the West Indies capitulate in Australia the previous summer and, worse, noticed how the senior players failed to support Jason Holder’s courageous efforts, I wrote them off with an inconsiderate stroke of a pen. I had not even researched the West Indian team to see who remained from the 2012 champions or to digest the fact that Darren Sammy was still captain in the T20 format. I have long been a Sammy fan.

  Sammy saw the piece and latched onto my three words ‘short of brains’. He fed them to his players and to the press conferences in the lead-up to the semifinal and final. He fuelled the fire that was already blazing in West Indies cricket: board versus players; players association versus some of the players; Mark Nicholas versus players; whole world versus us. I could hardly blame him.

  On the Saturday evening before the final, I wrote another piece for Cricinfo, apologising to Sammy and his team. I was not happy with the finished version, so left it overnight. When in doubt, do nowt. I had also tried to get Sammy’s private email address but failed. On the Sunday, the situation changed. Ian Bishop replied to my email with Sammy’s address. West Indies beat England in a thriller to win the tournament.

  At the post-match interview he let rip, sparing no one and certainly not me. My words, he said, were a strong motivation for his team.

  This is an excerpt from the piece I filed to Cricinfo.

  The first thing is to loudly applaud West Indies cricket on a golden day. The women were magnificent. The men more than matched them. The finish was a miracle: a thing of devastating power, of a certain beauty, and of destiny.

  The second thing is to say that the West Indies cricketers who beat England in Kolkata today and triumphantly lifted the T20 World Cup play smart cricket that is both entertaining and hard to resist. There were scatty, improbable turning points that swung the match this way and that—so many of them that it was hard to keep track. In the end, the very fact that West Indies pulled it off was the most epic thing about it.

  The third is to offer an unreserved apology to Darren Sammy, a man I hold in the highest regard, to his team and to the coaches around them for the throwaway phrase I used in a recent column on these pages. I would have made the same apology whatever the results of the day but I do so now in the knowledge that the people of the Caribbean will be celebrating long into the night and well into tomorrow. The spirit of the romantics will be with them and from thousands of miles away the rest of us can almost taste the rum, feel its punch and dream of the day when we return to the lapping shores of those incomparable islands.

  I also wrote a personal letter of apology to Sammy via email. He will have received it about three hours after Carlos Brathwaite’s winning hit in Kolkata. India is five hours ahead of London. When I awoke the next morning he had replied:

  Thank you so much for this email. I must admit I was truly disappointed to see that a man who I truly respect and admire could write such about our team. But I’m also a believer that everything in life happens for a reason and this was one of the driving forces that drew us closer as a unit. Once again thank you for the apology. It is greatly appreciated. I will pass on your message to my teammates. Hope all is well on your side. God bless you and your family.

  The following day, he wrote again to say that his team also accepted the apology and that most of them had read the piece on Cricinfo. ‘We have all moved on,’ he said. Right there is proof that cricket is a beautiful game.

  The players make it so, while the writers and commentators paint the pictures and spread the gospel. The go-to conscience of the game during my time in cricket has been John Woodcock. He began as a BBC cameraman on Freddie Brown’s tour to Australia in 1950 –51 and graduated quickly enough to have become cricket correspondent for The Times by 1954, a position he held until 1988. Eloquent, always sprightly and driven by history’s long counsel, the Sage of Longparish saw that the game belongs to the players, and that their responsibility is to pass it on to the spectators and to the next generation. The Times is lucky to have Michael Atherton continuing John’s line of entertaining prose, intuitive analysis and reason. Mike Selvey has done much the same for The Guardian.

  There is no doubt that a previous life playing cricket matters to many readers who have played it themselves. There are superb writers who can turn a phrase but not unravel a technique, or give a sense of how an innings, or over, is crafted. But it takes a variety of styles and approaches, not to say backgrounds and accents, to bring cricket off the page. No one ever wrote in a more beguiling fashion than C.L.R. James, for example, and his book Beyond a Boundary is widely considered to be the finest written about the game. The book’s key question is inspired by a line in Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘English Flag’: ‘What do they know of England who only England know?’ James, an Afro-Trinidadian, asks in his preface: ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ To answer the question, he puts the game into both historical and social context, discussing the strong influence it had on his life and explaining how it helped his understanding of class and race.

  The book I most dip into is The Highlights: Frank Keating, edited by Matthew Engel. In the introduction, Engel writes that Frank’s ‘imagery was breathtaking and vocabulary audacious: he was indeed the “onliest Frank”’. He offers three reasons for the love affair between Frank and his readers. One is the writing: ‘As Winston Churchill said of Harrow, his education was interrupted only by his schooling. And like Neville Cardus 50 years before, he marched into The Guardian, always a paper full of posh university men, and, with barely an O-level to his name, wrote them under the table. He didn’t seem to know how things weren’t meant to be done.’

  Second was his charm:

  He made lasting friendships . . . often improbable ones: the convivial Frank hit it off with the stoical and abstemious Graham Gooch as he did with his more regular bar-companion, Ian Botham. It is true (and the great Cardus had a similar habit) that the quotes he extracted were inclined to sound a bit, well, Keatingesque. But I never heard anyone actually complain. He never misrepresented anyone’s thoughts; he just made them more eloquent.

  As Mike Atherton pointed out in a characteristically perceptive piece in The Times, this would be impossible nowadays. In the major sports, press and performers are rigidly segregated; there is minimal contact, controlled by public relations officers. The drivel that results, Mike might have added, is not just bland and boring, but—though accurately transcribed—inherently falser than Frank’s cavalier interpretations.

  The third ‘and most important’ is that his charm came across to the readers: ‘They sensed that Frank was as starry-eyed and uncynical about sport as they were and shared their own delight in the personalities and their character. He was their representative at court side, touchline and boundary’s edge. In all of that, he was the onliest.’

  I have the happiest memory of driving from London to Herefordshire to speak at Frank’s request at the annual end-of-season dinner of his local cricket club. We had the most marvellous evening, for there has been no one in cricket with whom I would rather spend a night of beery banter and festive feast.

  BSKYB

  It was on my first tour to Australia as a journalist for the London Daily Telegraph, in 1994–95, that I badgered Sky’s producer of cricket to give me a run on air. John Gayleard, a red-bearded and red-blooded Australian, was no pushover—far from it. But he could feel my enthusiasm. Throughout my life I had copied and mimicked Benaud, Lewis and Laker; Arlott, Johnston and Trueman. I thought I had a story to tell. The game had not come so easily to me as to, say, David Gower or Mark Waugh, but I was certain I could explain how they, and their like, had got there and what they were now doing out in the middle.

  The First Test was at the Gabba and finished with England, and me, well beaten by Australians. I stayed on in Brisbane with the former Wallaby captain and sports journ
alist Andrew Slack, playing golf, talking cricket and rugby, and saving on hotel rooms. Early on the first morning of the Second Test in Adelaide, Gayleard called Slack’s home and asked for me. One of his commentary team was ill, he said. If I got my backside to Adelaide in a hurry, he would pay me £200 to work on the day’s play. Slacky drove me to the airport in some haste. I walked into the Adelaide Oval around midday. Nervously, I settled beside Bob Willis and began the audition for a career.

  At the close of play, Gayleard asked me to do the next day too. Then in Melbourne, he told me I had three days’ work. In Sydney, three became five. In Perth I was straight-up offered the whole match. It was there that he took me to the director’s truck and made me watch the moment when Graham Thorpe went to a splendid hundred. He played the tape back and asked what I thought of my own commentary. I cringed and said that I wished I wasn’t talking over Thorpe’s celebration. ‘Exactly,’ he replied and then played it back with the commentary taken off. Since that day, I have tried to announce and applaud a cricketer’s landmark as it happens, often ecstatically, and then let the pictures of the players and the crowd do the rest.

  A few weeks later, he called from London in the middle of the Australian night. I was in Melbourne covering the Australian Masters golf for the Telegraph, and in the deepest, most satisfied sleep having interviewed Tom Watson that afternoon. John offered me a job with Sky. That woke me up. I was contracted to Hampshire for a final year, so could not accept it. That shut him up. I said I could start in October. We agreed to talk again. The very next day, Sky’s head of sport, Vic Wakeling, called. He said October was fine but that he wanted me on hand to do stuff on camera whenever available during the summer. Vic and I then met up in a Hampshire pub in May, when he said that, in time, he wanted me to present the cricket.