Cricket XXXX Cricket

by Frances Edmonds

  The European Parliament does not participate in GATT talks, and neither do its members (apart from visits to the odd numbered bank account) ever go anywhere near Geneva.

  This exhausting two-week Australasian mission ended in Perth, in the Sheraton-Perth Hotel, to be exact, the very pub we are staying in for the state match against Western Australia. I felt a pang of nostalgia as I walked into the lobby, and thought of my Dutch interpreter colleague, Tineke, and her Paris-based sister, Jeanette, who had suffered that punishing schedule in giddy sorority with me. Other members of the delegation had flown home immediately; we on the contrary elected to stay. After a few days’ rest and recuperation in Perth, we would soak up the odd ray on the paradise island of Bali before returning to the miseries of a north European winter.

  We did all the things tourists are supposed to do. We bought opals, which turned out to be twice as expensive as analogous stones readily available at places like Asprey’s. We took a boat trip down the river, and we shopped in a rather naff little parade, London Court, where developers have gone to great pains to be wrong in every historical detail. The most glaring anachronism is a replica of Big Ben, carefully juxtaposed with fake black-and-white cement ‘shoppes’ cavorting as Tudor timber structures. It ranks fairly high on the Richter scale of execrable taste, but, deprived as we had been of consumer opportunities, we enjoyed it nevertheless.

  Jeanette, at that time, was in her Céline phase. Every season she decides on a designer, and the entire collection is then duly purchased. This trip she had Céline everything, from her sewing-kit to her sunglasses, clothes, shoes, luggage, scarves, accessories, jewellery, everything. She was a symphony in Céline, each item carefully coordinated, matched, toned and selected . . . très quinzième.

  We decided to have dinner at the hotel. It was Saturday night, and patently this Saturday night was the night for the Australian Rules team of some province or other to take their respective sheilas out for a do. Jeanette watched, sartorially startled, as some of the definitely non-couture creations wafted past her in the lobby bar . . . the sort of incandescent green crimplenes and electric fuchsia Treviras still much in evidence four years later at the Melbourne Cup.

  ‘Mon Dieu!’ she exclaimed finally, a Parisian resident truly rattled by this insouciant Aussie mix ’n’ match, by this generalised laissez-aller vestimentaire.

  ‘]e sais que pas tout le monde peut s’habiller chez Céline, mais entre ça, et ce que je vois la, ma fille, il y a un monde . . . UN MONDE.’ (I know we can’t all dress at Céline, but between Céline and THAT – a world of difference, my dear, a world.)

  Despite her initial shock at some of the more casual aspects of Australian life, however, Jeanette fell deeply in love with the place, and comes back to Australia every year on an annual pilgrimage from Paris. Far more sympathetic perhaps, the laid-back Aussies, than the uptight French.

  Such were the thoughts of fun times shared, and dear friends sorely missed, as I descended on the Sheraton-Perth Hotel. The team arrived a few hours later, having won the rain-affected fixture at Kalgoorlie. A sepia-tinted turn-of-the-century photograph of the Kalgoorlie cricket team shows the umpire carrying a shotgun, an eloquent indication, perhaps, of the type of behaviour prevalent on the field in those days. Civilisation, by all accounts, has taken a tighter grip on the place now, and the town council is even trying to clean up the notorious image of the place as a gold-mining town studded with tin-shack whorehouses. Business is apparently still thriving in both fields of activity, and it takes the ladies of the night no more than a year to eighteen months to earn enough loot to up and off on the compulsory overseas tour. The council has currently taken to bulldozing down these rather tacky brothels, though graciously they do forewarn the inmates and their clients. Who knows, otherwise, how many other eminent persons might be inadvertently caught with their pants down? It does seem a shame though that such a celebrated tourist attraction should be so summarily flattened . . . sort of thing the old Greater London Council (God rest its soul) would slap a preservation order on . . . probably even give a grant to as well . . .

  Phil had been twelfth-man for the match, and so had taken the opportunity to visit a gold mine. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? In fairness, he did bring me back a gold nugget for the much-vaunted wedding anniversary. Nothing to get hysterical about, girls, it was hardly a boulder, but I suppose I can have it made up into something suitably gaudy and crass if we stop off in Hong Kong on our way back. In fact, I am given to believe that Phil actually has some small interest in the opencast mine he visited. When I say small, it is probably nugatory, but who cares if I have got the one nugget? Anyway, be the interest large or small, I always wanted a husband who owns a gold mine.

  Perth, at the moment, is vibrant, seething with excitement over the America’s Cup, which is being bitterly contested up the coast in Fremantle. Even those of you who know little of this somewhat esoteric, rich man’s sport of twelve-metre yacht racing will nevertheless recall the tremendous national jubilation surrounding Australia’s victory over the Americans at Newport in 1983. Self-made Pom-done-good-Perth-multimillionaire Alan Bond and the crew of Australia II did the impossible in capturing the Auld Mug (as the priceless Garrard’s trophy is affectionately called), from the United States, after the Americans’ 132 years’ dominance in the competition. The Bond syndicate employed genius Ben Lexcen to design the boat, with its radical winged keel, and no expense was spared on sailmakers, sports psychologists and technical back-up staff in an effort to guarantee success over the man many people still believe to be the best twelve-metre sailor in the world, maestro skipper Dennis Conner, and his ‘Red Boat’, Liberty.

  The story of the commitment, the heartache, the joys and the pains of that epic victory are well documented in the controversial book Born to Win, written by, or at least ghost-written for, the Australia II skipper John Bertrand. Bertrand’s version of events is not entirely accepted by all parties concerned, and is, quite forgivably, a fairly free exercise in self-promotion. It is nevertheless an intriguing insight even for non-aficionados like myself, and the passages on sports psychology make quite revealing reading. It may come as a shock for example, that Australians, for all their ostentatiously brash, macho and assertive profile, apparently feel themselves deep-down to be second-best. The ‘tall poppy’ syndrome predominates in the Australian consciousness – a philosophy which advises: don’t be a tall poppy, don’t be head and shoulders above the rest; don’t strive for excellence; accept the position as second best; remember that the tall poppies are usually the ones that get their heads blown off. On reflection the Australians are certainly far from being alone in granting this attitude such widespread currency.

  Bertrand explains how years of defeat had inured the Australians into feeling, and therefore into being, inferior to the Americans. From the beginning of the 1983 series, even though the American defender, Liberty, was in most conditions nowhere near as fast as Australia II, the Australian crew nevertheless had to overcome the psychological disadvantage of expecting to be beaten by the Yanks. How Bertrand melded his crew into a galvanised – if not invincible, then at least never-say-die – fighting force is perhaps a tract to which losing cricket captains Gatting and Border might usefully devote a few hours’ bedtime reading. The fundamental message of the biography is that many people often have to learn to believe in the idea of winning.

  The cricket. It does crop up, a tedious leitmotif in my life, like period pains, hangovers, tax returns and publishing deadlines. But who on earth can be bothered, however, to watch England, in their present state of casual incompetence, playing woeful cricket against a team of virtual teenagers at the WACA (Western Australian Cricket Association), when ten minutes away in Freo (as in Freemantle) the town is knee-deep in multimillionaires? Twelve-metre racing, it is true, is generally perceived as a rich man’s sport, but that is not to say that all members of the respective crews are themselves loaded. On the contrary, many yachtsmen will
find themselves seriously out of pocket by the end of this Cup series. Although the syndicates either challenging for, or defending the Auld Mug are positively awash with sponsors’ spondulicks, many of the men subjected to the back-breaking effort of sailing the boats are Olympic yachtsmen, and at pains to maintain their amateur status. Indeed Bertrand even maintains that the day he won the America’s Cup, he was stony broke. He resigned immediately, knowing full well that having reached his personal pinnacle of sporting achievement, there was only one inexorable way to go. He then hired himself a good promotions agent, and is currently commentating on the series for Channel 9 television.

  On the free day, Phil and I went off to Freo to visit the British challenger, White Crusader. Why on earth the cricket team persists in calling these days ‘free’ is a mystery to me. The concept of a free day would seem to posit an element of work, commitment, sweat and toil on other de facto non-free days. Unfortunately, England’s performances to date, particularly against Queensland and Western Australia, have been characterised by nothing but the very opposite. There are three minor niggles with the current England touring side, wrote Martin Johnson of The Independent newspaper.

  ‘They can’t bat, they can’t bowl and they can’t field.’ It is one of those brilliantly uncompromising one-liners he may have to learn to live with, especially if the tides of cricketing fortune turn. For the sake of historical accuracy, however, it must be admitted that the day Martin penned that obituary, it was all absolutely and incontrovertibly true. Most worrying in the England camp is the continuing lack of form demonstrated by David Gower. In the match against Perth he was dismissed twice without managing to trouble the scoreboard. Ever-sympathetic to a man in trauma, the team’s in-house sports psychologists have nicknamed the hapless former captain ‘Run-Glut’.

  Fremantle is a charming little town, some thirty minutes away from Perth on the freeway. It has certainly become a hive of cosmopolitan activity since the thirteen challenging syndicates from six different nations arrived. Apart from the Australian defenders of the Cup, there are challengers from the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, France and Italy, and each has left its nationalistic imprint on the place. Several syndicates, for example, have constituted their own clubs. The Royal Thames Yacht Club, that is to say, the 1987 British challenger for the America’s Cup, has organised for itself and privileged guests a Crusade Club (after the syndicate’s yachts Crusader 1 and II). It is a delightfully, terribly, terribly, quintessentially English gentlemen’s club, more in place in Pall Mall, London, than Fremantle, Western Australia. Two large, varnished oak doors, a highly polished brass plate discreetly proclaiming its identity and an illuminated bell are its only concessions to ostentation in a row of otherwise nondescript terraced houses. Inside, you could well be on British soil. There is a royal-blue fitted carpet, with an anchor motif, and an abundance of brass and oak. Blazers and cravats seem very much to be the order of the day, although depressed sailors drowning their day’s maritime sorrows (on the night we were there it happened to be the badly beaten South Australia syndicate), are permitted less formal attire.

  Not all syndicates have set up private clubs, although the ever flash and extrovert Italians lead the field. The Costa Smeralda Yacht Club, Consorzio Azzurra, whose major sponsors include Giovanni Agnelli (he of Fiat fame) and His Highness the Aga Khan, are certainly not to be outdone. The Aga Khan, finding nowhere sufficiently be-Michelin-starred in Fremantle to accommodate his sophisticated billionaire tastes, created his own restaurant, Le Maschere, where the food is as overpriced as it is proportionately underwhelming. He has also renovated, in birthday cake icing pinks and whites, a hotel which belongs to his celebrated CIGA chain of expensive watering holes.

  There is no shortage of Italians in Australia – indeed after Poms and Greeks they form the largest expatriate population. However, the good burghers of Freo have not taken quite as warmly to the Costa Smeralda super-suave sophisticates as they have to the other Italian contingent, the Italia syndicate. This syndicate is heavily sponsored by Gucci heir, Maurizio Gucci, and is beloved by all for being so totally, utterly and uncompromisingly Italian. During the launch of the syndicate’s newest, boat, Italia II, in La Spezia, for instance, a crane dropped on the multimillion-lira creation and irretrievably sank it. Their spokesman, phlegmatic for anyone under the circumstances, but particularly so for an Italian, a race which as all we Anglo-Saxons know is readily given to histrionics and hyperbolics at the merest drop of a cappello, commented that the accident had obviously delayed the yacht’s development. Sadly, it was never salvaged.

  A few weeks later, on a lay day, a few of the crew, dressed up to the nines in all their Gucci-sponsored designer gear, went out sightseeing in their brand new Alfa Romeo sports car. Hurtling around a blind corner, very much all’italiano, they ran straight into a huge kangaroo. Leaping out of their somewhat dented vehicle, resplendent in the afternoon sun in their red, white and green yachting uniforms, they were initially horrified at having killed Australia’s greatest symbol. But tourists after all are tourists, and Italians after all are Italians, and so they hoisted up the old roo and took a few photographs, posing beside him. One of the culprits even went so far as to dress the demised marsupial in his Via-Condotti-eat-your-heart-out designer jacket. Suddenly, however, the kangaroo, who had only been stunned, came to his senses and hopped off back into the bush, taking with him the Gucci coat, and the driver’s licence, credit cards, cheque book, wallet and car keys. The poor Italians had to hitch a lift back into Freo, trying to explain their hilarious tale in broken English to an incredulous local.

  The highly gregarious Italia syndicate has a club as well. It is called Casa Italia, all white, red, green and jolly, and looks like nothing so much as a huge spaghetti parlour. They also have a shop, where pretty girls unable to charm one off the more susceptible crew members, may buy their own Gucci T-shirts, sweaters and down-lined vests. In fact, for a price the entire range is available right down to the Gucci-designer underpants!

  We went to visit the British challenge on not, perhaps, the most propitious of days. White Crusader’s mast had been badly bent, and the race had inevitably been lost. Shore manager Andrew ‘Spud’ Spedding, whom Phil and I have known over some four years, was nevertheless in good spirits and generally pleased with the way things were shaping up. We had met Spud, along with mutual friends, in a pub in Devon during the 1983 America’s Cup in Newport. He had just parted company, not entirely amicably, with Peter de Savary, the leading sponsorship light in that particular failed British effort. Current White Crusader skipper, Harold Cudmore, had also resigned, unable to take any more of de Savary’s unsavoury philosophy of creative tension, i.e. not telling people what they were doing the next day, or indeed whether or not they even had a job, in perverse efforts to keep them on their toes. This British challenge has certainly rid itself of individual and dominant patriarchs, a common enough feature in yacht racing, and is managing itself as a listed company along Business Expansion Scheme lines.

  Yes, indeed, times have certainly changed since the days of Sir Thomas Lipton, that Grand Old Man of America’s Cup challengers. Sir Thomas was denied membership of Britain’s Royal Yacht Squadron until he was virtually dead, because he was ‘in trade’, a cardinal sin for those ever-so-amateur chaps running things in Cowes in the 1920s and 1930s. Although ‘Sir Tea’, as he was affectionately known, never directly used any one of his five Cup challengers to promote his product directly (they were all named ‘Shamrock’ . . . Heaven knows what riot the marketing boys would have today, with combined concepts of ‘Cup and Tea’ to work on), it was nevertheless obvious that his involvement in these competitions did his corporate profits no harm whatsoever.

  It is therefore more than passingly ironic that it is none other than the British themselves, those watchdogs of the ‘play up, play up, and play the game’ Corinthian ethic, who have used their best endeavours to allow the trade in on the twelve-metre act and all that t
hat signifies in terms of creeping commercialism. Initiatives have been implemented to do away with rule twenty-six of the Cup, the last barrier to overt sponsorship/public relations packages. The British challenge, relatively impecunious compared to many of the syndicates in Freo, was obliged to accept over a million pounds from the manufacturers of White Horse Whisky for changing their boat’s name from Crusader to White Crusader. Nothing too offensive, really, and certainly not half as provocative as the Société des Régates Rochelaises, whose challenge is heavily sponsored by a French photographic company, KIS France. They have named their boat French Kiss, and during press conferences their skipper, Marc Pajot, talks in delightful double entendre Inspector Clouseau-like English about improving our French Kiss techniques.

  The British, of course, do not want anything even half so vaguely vulgar and nasty. Perhaps a nice, inoffensive, generic word such as ‘White’ incorporated into the boat’s name, discreet sponsors’ logos on the spinnakers, but nothing in any way crass or flashy on the mainsails or headsails. It remains to be seen whether sponsors, whose financial commitments run into millions of pounds, will be satisfied with that. At all events, a life-sized white horse adorns the British challenger’s yard, and the gaily painted sheds pay ample tribute to another red, white and blue sponsor, British Airways.

  It is difficult to know what, besides the Peter de Savarys of life, could ruffle Spud Spedding. The bent mast had cost White Crusader her hard-earned third position in the challenger series, but slots in the table tend to change on a daily basis, and Spud, for one, was not going to spend the rest of the day crying over a spilt mainsail. As we waited for the disabled yacht to be towed in, he regaled us with even more stories about the wild and wonderful Italia syndicate.