Cricket XXXX Cricket

by Frances Edmonds

  ‘And I, as another fellow Oxford graduate, I suppose I could be defined as sophisticated too?’ hypothesised Malcolm.

  Again, Sir Robert concurred, with a more grudging inclination of the head.

  ‘So you as an Oxford graduate, and I as an Oxford graduate, we could both be defined as sophisticated?’ asked Malcolm, who has clearly also attended a Berlitz school of advocacy.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Sir Robert.

  ‘Only difference being,’ added Malcolm, landing his prey after a few minutes teasing, ‘that I got a First.’

  Whether these stories be true or false, they certainly make highly entertaining reading for the Pom-bashing Aussies, and for anyone who believes that the Armstrongs of life are professionally inimical to ‘open government’, and it is good to have them rumbled on occasion.

  Somewhat less entertaining, however, was the break-in at the Heinemann premises in Melbourne, soon after the Wright manuscript had been delivered, when files were stolen and the safe tampered with. It would, of course, be nothing but circumstantial to attribute the attempted larceny to British security forces, but educated MI5/MI6 watchers felt that the degree of incompetent cock-up displayed seemed disturbingly liable to indicate just them. In the meantime, the irrepressible Tam Dalyell, he of Belgrano notoriety, has again been asking embarrassing questions on the floor of the house at Westminster.

  The circus is on the move again, back to Adelaide for the Third Test. The hostess on our flight suggested over the intercom system that passengers should moderate their voices, as Mr Gatting was trying to get some sleep. People read and people dozed. Our three English-West Indians, Gladstone Small, Phillip DeFreitas and Wilf Slack, affectionately known as the ‘Three Degrees’, played cards. Graham Dilley, ever petrified of flying, sat as usual with his Walkman firmly affixed to his head, clenched knuckles white with panic. Peter Lush, none too impressed with flying either, walked up and down the plane, chatting amicably. Allan Lamb, relentlessly mischievous, was busily squirting magic ink on whomsoever should cross his path. One wretched and overworked air hostess was less than impressed when a large, black blob was splashed across the front of her blouse, but was confused when it faded to invisibility before she could enjoin the captain to have Lamby thrown off the plane. We all ate the in-flight plastic airline food which none of us really wanted, and wondered why. In short it was the usual team transfer.

  Next day, Phil and I went off to visit Hardy’s Winery at Reynella, with Jack and Birjitta Richards. Birjitta has been with the tour since Newcastle, and is such a welcome addition to any party. She is Dutch, with that thick, curly blonde hair, pretty face and faultless complexion which so epitomises the beauties of that nation. Despite all that, I cannot help but like her. Both she and Jack were apparently astounded when he was selected for the tour, and Jack’s projected plans to become an optician have had to be put on the optical back burner for the time being. Birjitta too is working hard in preparation for a business studies course back home in England. It is a great, albeit dog-in-a-manger, comfort to know that when I am hard at it whilst the other girls are soaking up the rays on the beach, Birjitta is also swotting away somewhere down the team corridor.

  Most of the wives and loved ones are out here by now. My partner in many a giddy caper, Mrs Lindsay Lamb, has been keeping us all amused, especially with her exhibition of Olympic dressage skills on the pedigree horse. Romany Foster, another inmate of the ‘Not the Team Room’ I arranged for the girls last year in Barbados, and a dab hand with the rum punches and the banana daiquiris, arrived in Melbourne. The Botham family have flown out, complete with nanny. The Emburey family is here, with two children. Janet Athey, a bright, French-speaking lady, who flies with Air France, joined us in Adelaide. Ellen French is also here, with the children, and Gladstone Small’s Australian fiancée, Lois, is with us too, a real fun-loving, bubbly character. She would have to be. She told me that her Perth-based parents had been obliged to change their telephone number after a series of obscene and obnoxious calls subsequent to a picture of herself and West Indian-born Gladstone appearing in the local rag. We both tried flippantly to make light of the incident, dispensing with Aussies in general, and Western Australians in particular, as a crowd of xenophobic racists. Exaggerated though such statements patently are, they are unfortunately not quite as far from the truth as one would like to believe. It certainly seems that Australians are far more ethnocentric than we are in the United Kingdom, and doubtless the poorer for it.

  The Hardy’s Winery folk invited me to the South Australian Winemakers versus Press cocktail competition the following day, as honorary captain of the McLaren Vale team. It was certainly a more interesting and enriching experience than the repeat tedium of the Test match trundling along down the road at the Adelaide Oval. You know full well, when you start reading regular cricket correspondents making much of ‘an interesting day’, ‘an intriguing session’, or worse still, ‘a match pregnant with possibilities’, that you have probably been watching the dreariest cricket that folk have been subjected to for some time. The protracted ennui of the Second Test in Perth was bad enough, but Adelaide took the proverbial boredom biscuit. The impeccable batting track at the Oval was certainly a credit to its curator, Les Burdett, but from the rain-affected outset it was clear that a draw was inevitable. Burdett, incidentally, is the groundsman who has long criticised batsmen’s use of rubber-soled shoes, the infamous ‘nipples’, and maintains that the less popular spikes aerate the pitch rather than merely tear off the top-grass, whilst also giving the spin-bowlers some rough to bowl at on the fourth and fifth days. Burdett has produced such perfect pitches that his argument is gaining currency, and spikes are now mandatory in Sheffield Shield matches at the Oval. The message is now being preached for Test matches too.

  The ground (should one even dare suggest such a thing?) was perhaps even too perfect, too good a batting track for both sides for a result to be possible. A lady spectator even produced an ironing board at one stage, plugged the Rowenta into an outside broadcasting van, and started to do the week’s ironing!

  Down at the cocktail competition, things were very different. Our concoction, entered under the appellation of ‘Foxy Fizz’, was subtitled ‘Iridescent Mediocrity’, an expression which had crossed my mind whilst watching the England and Australian teams staggering along sluggishly at the Oval. Conceived and created by Hardy’s chief wine maker, Geoff Weaver, group PR manager, Robert Mayne and moi-même, it featured a mystery aphrodisiac, which one judge decided was the ephemeral taste of fox piss. It was in fact a fine, complex, delicate blend of gin, méthode champenoise, sparkling white wine and exotic tropical fruits. The nose was dominated by lifted amyl acetate and lemon, while its palate had a balance of sugar, acid and alcohol, rare in its subtle nuances. This was a cocktail to be drunk immediately, to be kept for several minutes, or to be chundered within the hour. It was a cocktail to reward the patient, and true connoisseurs would note the juniper berry backbone.

  There were various other cocktails on offer. ‘The Papal Cocktail’ – one slug and you fall flat on your face and kiss the ground; ‘Acid Test’; ‘Mouldy Bubbles’; ‘Boo Lagoon’; and ‘Passionate Plunge’. The winner was fielded by the opposition, ‘The Presstitutes’, who came up with ‘Rupert’s Revenge’. Whether or not this was a subtle reference to Rupert Murdoch’s current designs to win back his lost birthright, the Herald and Weekly Times, was unclear. At all events it was a very professional effort, sugar on the outer rim, but a fierce punch locked in the complicated and sophisticated mixture below. Nobody, and certainly not the Presstitutes, was admitting to any metaphors.

  Five consecutive days on a feather-bed pitch was taking its toll on the bowlers. Phil and Embers certainly toiled away for an England team suffering from the loss of Ian Botham, still unfit with a strained intercostal muscle. Phil too had sustained a strained intercostal muscle, contracted from reading a report in a copy of the Zimbabwe Herald. A Muzarabani housewife, it ran, was shot dead
by her husband when he woke in the middle of the night and mistook her for a wild pig. I thought the report was moderately funny, but for some reason Phil found it hysterically so. The piece, sadly in both our views, did not include a photo of the lady concerned.

  The Test ended up as another drearily depressing draw, and it seems perhaps high time that PBL marketing reworked some of its hyperbolic advertising slogans. Television slots featuring a lion and a kangaroo in dramatic and exciting ‘Clashes for the Ashes’ are perhaps a trifle over-the-top even by PR standards. Certainly the radio publicity, boasting of the Australian team going lion catching, has lost a degree of its street cred, if ever it had any to begin with. It is unlikely on current form that such claims will see out the last two Tests.

  Indeed, the deprecating humour now focused on the hapless Aussies is more than vaguely reminiscent of England’s unhappier days last year in the Windies. Former Australian skipper and leg-spinner Richie Benaud has just come up with a revolutionary new practice method to improve the leg spin of Peter Sleep, and the off-spin of Greg Matthews. These two were expected to play a major role in Australia’s bowling attack in the Third Test, and in an effort to give them a mental picture of a perfect line and length, Richie took the pair off to the nets and obliged them to bowl with their eyes closed. Wags in the England team declared that they thought the Australian opening attack had already been doing just that, in Perth.

  The rain came and, all in all, it was a fairly dismal display. Just a fortnight prior, a freak storm of mini-cyclone proportions had swept through the Oval taking the roof off the stand, and leaving a huge girder deposited like a Zeus-hurled thunderbolt in the middle of the pitch. Unfortunately, nothing quite so theatrical happened during the game, as the two teams went through the redundant motions. Entertainment rating of the Third Test . . . nil.

  Far more fun, in fact, was to be had elsewhere at, of all places, the Payneham City Library, where I ended up one day for a book signing session. As is the case in England, libraries in Australia are shamefully under-utilised, except by elderly folk who often come along for the community atmosphere, and by hidebound young mothers who know they can grab a few minutes’ respite by lobbing the little ankle-biters for half an hour into the crèche provided.

  In Adelaide some radical thinking had been devoted to ways of attracting youngsters along to the library to teach them how to use the institution, to locate a book and to learn how to enjoy the fading art of reading. So many children nowadays are brought up in the world of passive entertainment, processed and packaged for them on the dreaded box, or in the higher technology world of mindlessly repetitive computer games. Such developments indicate that the art of reading may well end up severely jeopardised.

  And it came to pass that one of the libraries devised a ‘Chuck a Barbara Cartland’ competition. The idea was self-evident. Children were simply encouraged to chuck a tome of the works of that queen of schmaltz as far as possible. The sheer impertinence of the game created absolute furore amongst many of the more narrow-minded citizens of Adelaide, but others felt that it was the best thing suggestible adolescents could possibly do with such volumes. The number of sentimental ladies who have had their expectations raised, their brains addled and their grasp on reality undermined by such cloud cuckoo land twaddle is a figure hard to contemplate. It is hardly harmful porn, and it is possible that its saccharine distortions of life as she is lived provide many with a welcome release from the mundane banality of their own lives. On the whole, however, chucking a Barbara Cartland seems a far less heinous literary offence than splitting an infinitive.

  The jeunesse dorée of South Australia was, by all accounts, vastly amused, decided that libraries were not the stuffy, boring old places they had assumed them to be, and are now thronging them during the long, hot summer holidays. They have, of course, realised subsequently that the book chucking was a one-off exercise, and would be ill-advised to indulge in similar behaviour with any F. E. Edmonds opus.

  It never rains but it pours. Not only was the cricket profoundly disappointing but then we heard that Britain’s White Crusader had been knocked out of the elimination rounds for the America’s Cup, and would therefore not be contesting the semi-finals. Far more of a shock to the world of twelve-metre racing was the elimination of the New York Yacht Club’s America II by young Kiwi genius Chris Dickson. Proving that Australian cricket captains are not the only breed of sportsmen liable to break down and sob, John Kolius, the NYYC skipper, could hardly conceal his emotion as he was obliged to concede defeat. After twenty-four successful defences of the Cup in the 132 years preceding Australia II’s 1983 victory in Newport, it seemed almost inconceivable that the NYYC should be eliminated from the competition at such an early stage. For five of the eight legs of the course, Kolius looked set to keep the glimmering hopes of reaching the semis burning, but in the end the vagaries of the sea breeze, the moody Fremantle Doctor, delivered the death blow. Twenty million dollars’ expenditure and two years’ preparation down the New York equivalent of the Swanee, their syndicate spokesman nevertheless managed an attempt at humour. The NYYC, he stated, was considering suing the Doctor for malpractice.

  The Bond syndicate’s executive director, Warren Jones, whose sense of history laudably outweighed any residual bitter memories he may have harboured of vicious squabbles with the NYYC over Australia II’s winged keel, went so far as to admit that he ‘felt quite sad about it’. Not half as sad as John Kolius, clearly, but an admirable expression of sentiment all the same.

  Less melancholic were two Sydney ex-pats now living in New York, who turned up at the 142-year-old NYYC in their cups to offer the establishment a replacement one. The Club declined their alternative trophy. It was a wooden spoon and Aussie flag sticking out of an empty can of Fosters.

  On to Tasmania. From the air, it reminded me of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Tasmania was surrounded by mists and icy water, a verdant green island mounted like an emerald in uncompromising black onyx. The white-capped sea looked fierce as we circled over Hobart, and thoughts turned to all those characters, a few sandwiches short of a picnic, who would set off on the Sydney to Hobart yacht race on Boxing Day whilst the rest of us were in bed nursing well-earned hangovers.

  The Australians tell jokes about the Tasmanians the way the English tell jokes about the Irish, the French Belgians tell jokes about the Flemish Belgians, the Americans tell jokes about the Puerto Ricans, and everybody tells jokes about the Jews. The butts of the jibes are generally far brighter than the perpetrators, but there are nevertheless some good Tazzie tales worth repeating. For example, Tasmania is such a small and under-populated island that stories of inter-marriage, incest, cleft palates and clubbed feet are rife. Every Tasmanian is supposed to bear a scar, the resultant keloid tissue from the extra head the surgeons are obliged to remove at birth.

  My favourite bad taste story is the one about the young man who came home one evening and told his father that he was not going to marry the girl next door after all.

  ‘And why not?’ queried the father, a friend of the fiancée’s family.

  ‘She’s a virgin,’ answered the son.

  ‘Then you are quite right,’ said the father. ‘If she’s not good enough for them, she’s not good enough for us.’

  7 / Canberra and Melbourne

  Spirits were high to the point of giddiness as we reached the manufactured Australian capital of Canberra to play a one-day fixture against the Prime Minister’s Invitation XI. A pillow fight erupted spontaneously on the bus and hitherto unspoken alliances demonstrated themselves more tangibly in the battle lines drawn. Beefy Botham at the back was immediately joined by Graham Dilley to launch a blistering attack on the front. There is, perhaps because of the blond wavy hair and the perennial sun specs, an uncanny clone resemblance developing between the two of them, and certainly Dilley seems smitten with no uncertain degree of hero-worship.

  Canberra is one of those soulless cities specifically created as
capitals to obviate the interstate rivalries of more obvious candidates. Neither Melbourne nor Sydney would ever agree to the appointment of the other, and so an entirely new place had to be put on the map. Few people seem wont to spend much time there, and a cross-section of population would probably reveal an average of about ten civil servants to every normal citizen. For a swift visit, however, the tree-lined boulevards are far from ugly, and the many manifestations of civic pride are suitably impressive. The new Parliament building currently under construction is causing no small degree of resentment, however, as price estimates are gobbled up with the speed of comestibles anywhere within the physical proximity of Mike Gatting. An exorbitantly expensive new flagpole is also causing ructions, and it is interesting to see how bureaucrats living in ivory towers succumb to excesses with the poor taxpayers’ money.

  Spirits were still high even as the manager organised a three-line whip to round up the team for a cocktail party at the prime minister’s residence, The Lodge. It was, after all, only three days away from Christmas, and the festive spirit had already begun in earnest. The booze flowed freely, although reformed character Bob Hawke partook of none. A gifted cricketer himself, the Prime Minister takes great delight in spotting new talent, and his Invitation XI has been the launch pad for many young aspiring Australian hopefuls.

  Of aspiring young Australian hopefuls there were indeed many, but not half as many as there were of press men, television men and camera crews trailing their coils of spaghetti wire behind them. Mr Hawke is certainly not unaware of the value of public relations, although whether constant hobnobbing with sportsmen of variegated degrees of brilliance is the right PR for a head of state or government is a moot point. Certainly I would not expect our own leaderene, Mrs Thatcher, to know who every member of the England cricket team was, which is fair enough. It is debatable whether every member of the England cricket team would know who she was either.