Cricket XXXX Cricket

by Frances Edmonds

  The cocktail nibbles were based on the Pritikin formula, a diet craze that has not yet hit the United Kingdom with quite the force it seems to have acquired here in Oz: ‘Pritikin’ baby pizzas, ‘Pritikin’ chicken balls and all the ‘Pritikin’ equivalents of the noxious junk we generally eat. The diet is simple enough: no fat, no salt and no sugar, and if Bob Hawke is anything to go by, it has a lot to recommend it. He is quite indisputably a charming man, not as tall as I had imagined, with thick, wavy grey hair and rugged, lined features which speak volumes for his pre-Pritikin days. A Rhodes scholar who rose through the Australian Council of Trades Unions (ACTU) to leadership of the Australian Labor Party, he was on election in 1983 hailed as Australia’s most popular politician ever. Three years in office had done plenty to put paid to such claims, and many people now feel he is losing the grass-roots support of the party. He has until 1988, however, to turn the tide of popularity in his favour once more, and sorting out the currently dicey Australian economy must remain his number-one priority. A treasurer who goes around shooting his mouth off about the country being on the brink of banana republicanism does not, unfortunately, tend to help Mr Hawke in this onerous endeavour.

  There was much collegiate wincing in the ranks of the British High Commission contingent as Mike Gatting made his thank-you speech. Unlike the British press corps they did not so much take exception to the many ‘tremendouslies’ and ‘basicallies’, but more to Gatt’s constant and erroneous lapsus linguae in referring to the Prime Minister as the ‘Premier’. It patently takes more than Rhodes-scholar prime ministers to impress our chaps, but the best was yet to come. Phillip DeFreitas, perhaps a trifle confused by the putting green the Hawkes had just installed at the bottom of the garden, rang home excitedly to relate that he had just had the privilege of meeting Bob Hope!

  The next day, a capacity crowd of 8,000 packed the Makuna Oval for the most delightful day of cricket this tour. Police in tracksuits and Charlie Brown hats, the usual cricketer mufti, mingled discreetly with the crowd, as the Prime Minister sat quite relaxed outside the members’ pavilion. It is difficult to think of too many countries in the world where this almost security-free movement is possible for a head of government.

  A local radio station sponsor provided the skydivers who descended on the pitch to deliver the coin which the Prime Minister duly tossed before the start of play. Nubile young females in bikinis and shorts, sporting gaily coloured hats, sun visors and sun-deflecting parasols were much in evidence. It was a scorcher. Photographers wearing Foreign Legion caps, complete with protective back flaps, broiled lobster-red in the relentless sunshine. The pungent smell of meat barbecuing on the charcoal grills around the periphery of the ground hung heavily in the sultry atmosphere. Radio commentary references to the swimming pool end came as welcome aural refreshment. The ‘Jack Fingleton’ scoreboard, the only comprehensible scoreboard I have seen in Australia, stood stark and massive in its black-and-white simplicity. Scoreboards at the Melbourne and the Sydney Cricket grounds speak silent volumes of the thrusting technological developments that have so infiltrated the glorious summer game of late. As if the sight of Tony Greig and his Rexona Weather Wall (complete with temperature meter, humidity meter, wind direction meter, light meter and players’ comfort meter . . . whatever that may mean) were not sufficient to strike apoplexy into the more conservative breasts of NW8, these monumental sports stadia now boast scoreboards with more dials than the Concorde and more lights than Sunday Night at the London Palladium. There are instant replays, a source of often excruciating embarrassment to the often excruciating umpires. There are little yellow ducks that waddle on and off, blubbing, when a chap is out without making a score. There are advertisements for Diet Coke starring that most refreshingly extrovert of the Aussie cricketers, off-spinner Greg Matthews, and advertisements for the ‘Clashes for the Ashes’ starring ‘my dear old thing’ Henry ‘Blowers’ Blofeld, one of my favourite whimsical commentators. There is an instant statistical recall function, which will tell you everything bar a player’s inside leg measurement, but is probably even programmed to do that as well if requested. Often the only thing that interrupts the entertainment is the cricket being played out in the middle.

  Gaggles of children, more intent on collecting autographs than paying any attention to the game in progress, clustered around the players’ enclosure.

  ‘Mr DeFreitas!’ shouted one precocious, if polite, ten-year-old with a spiky, lavatory brush crew cut. ‘Mr DeFreitas, please sign this for my autistic sister!’

  ‘I’ll set my wife on you,’ threatened Philippe-Henri, suddenly tired of his quota of requests. ‘You’re Emburey, aren’t you?’ asked one real aficionado, incomprehensibly proffering Phil a copy of Allan Border’s book for signature.

  ‘Edmonds,’ corrected Phil.

  ‘Yes,’ nodded the fan knowledgeably, ‘John Edmonds.’

  In deference to the fellow’s patently encyclopaedic knowledge of the game and its exponents, Phil signed the book ‘Don Bradman’.

  Meanwhile I was busily interviewing the Prime Minister outside the members’ pavilion. There is no doubt about it, he is a most approachable and personable politician. His current lifestyle, based on a strict regime – plenty of exercise, absolutely no booze and little sleep – has resulted in a certain Dorian Gray in reverse effect: past pictures of him look fairly decadent, whilst the current model looks extremely good. He is generous in his praise of the administrative team that supports him, and reckons that one of the lessons he has learned over the years is the ability to delegate combined with the intuition to delegate to the right people.

  ‘I’ve also learned how to catnap. During my time at the ACTU I often used to sleep through lunch, and even now I manage to catch the odd fifteen or twenty minutes’ catnap.’

  I could sympathise with him readily. Sleeping through trade union lunches seemed the only sensible way of dealing with them.

  ‘What,’ I asked the Prime Minister, ‘were the differences between Bob Hawke, most popular Australian politician ever in 1983, and Bob Hawke 1987 vintage?’

  ‘Well, I’m older,’ he remarked wryly, a classic politician’s statement of the obvious, ‘and of course I am so much healthier than I was when I came to power.’

  Mr Hawke has clearly learned, along with the Kissingers and the Thatchers, that relentless stamina, possibly even more than genuine genius, is the quality which stamps most achievers, and certainly the majority of politicians who make it to the top.

  I asked him about that nagging issue of Aboriginal land rights. With state governments’ paltry track records, shouldn’t something have been done at federal level when he came into office?

  ‘You can’t impose policy on the states,’ he replied, ‘or else, as experience has shown, there will be a popular backlash against the Aborigines themselves. I think the Aboriginal people understand that.’

  A skier from Gower hit the boundary fence for four. Hoping my dissent would be camouflaged by the thunderous applause, I hastened to differ.

  ‘What we really have to get right,’ added the PM, ‘is the economy. When we have sorted that problem out, there will be more money available for all these other policies . . . social and regional.’

  That ‘when’, I suggested might well be the operative word. A recent survey had shown that Australia, once the envy of the entire world, was now the largest debtor country on earth after Mexico and Brazil.

  Such statistics seemed to have a dampening effect on the interview, so we watched the cricket for a while, and chatted amiably to the British High Commissioner, Sir John Leahy, the most affable of diplomats, and not the sort of chap you’d expect to thump photographers at Heathrow. I left the PM to enjoy the rest of David’s innings in peace. It was, after all, Bob’s day off, and we were, after all, playing Bob’s own team, and no one, after all, would have asked Mrs Thatcher about Merseyside unemployment at her own son’s wedding.

  ‘Percy Fender’ Gower incidentally won t
he Man of the Match award for that sparkling performance. It was, quite appropriately, a champagne bucket.

  It was the day before Christmas Eve, and hot mince pies and Christmas cake were doing the rounds in the Ansett Golden Wings lounge as we waited for our flight to Melbourne. On this occasion, peace and goodwill to all men even extended as far as the press corps, and they too were allowed in to partake of the festal spirit.

  We were staying once again in the Menzies at Rialto Hotel, where a disembodied synthetic voice in the lift, sounding disturbingly similar to Ted Heath at his most pompous, aggravatingly apprises you of every floor you reach. Surely the real Ted cannot have fallen so far out of favour as to be reduced to this? Voices in lifts, and omnipresent muzak penetrating coffee shops, restaurants and even the deepest recesses of the bathroom seem to be a common feature of Australian, indeed nowadays of most international, hotels. I find this constant noise nuisance perfectly infuriating, even tension-creating – surely the very opposite of the atmosphere it is designed to encourage.

  It is quite possible, of course, that some people need constant external distraction. I was comparing notes with Lindsay Lamb the other day, and discovered that both Philippe-Henri and Lamby operate in the same way in the morning: that is, on the basis of maximum possible noise. Immediately on waking, they switch on both the television and the radio, just to ensure that neither is completely intelligible, and then, having woken up the sleeping partner with the resultant racket, they retire to the bathroom to read the paper in peace. Peace! There would be no need of peace if they had not unleashed the broadcasting babble in the first place.

  Similarly, in transit more than half the team feels the need to keep the old Walkman plugged into the pinna, although the quality of conversation perpetrated by the other half proves this to be no bad idea. It often seems, however, that all this extraneous input is merely a substitute for any real cerebral activity. Myself, I have never been sucked into this Walkman craze. I far prefer to sit and think. Ideally, of course, I prefer just to sit.

  Christmas Eve was spent putting the finishing touches to the costumes for the fancy dress party. Such a degree of painstaking effort, of finely focused attention to detail, of well-rehearsed strategy and orchestrated design, has certainly never been a feature of England’s preparations for a mere Test match.

  We awoke on Christmas Day to open our presents. In the case of Les Edmonds this did not take long. Scrooge Edmonds had bought me nothing. Miraculously, all his credit cards expired two weeks after the inception of the tour, which is presumably why he wanted me along in the first place. Conscious of this parlous pecuniary state of affairs, I had bought him nothing in return. I am not a woman to embarrass a man in penury.

  Festivities kicked off at eleven o’clock with a pre-luncheon cocktail party given for the team by the press.

  Cynics in the team wonder whether this is a tacit act of contrition (without any accompanying firm purpose of amendment), for all the times the press has stuffed them over the past twelve months. Cynics in the press wonder why they should be wasting their money on a bunch of people who would rather do anything than talk to them anyway. Three Buck’s Fizzes apiece, however, and the twenty-four-hour yuletide bonhomie starts to flourish. ‘The Street of Shame’ moves swiftly into its production of A Christmas Carol, subtitled ‘The Big Sleep’, in honour of Mike Gatting’s now celebrated lie-in during the state match against Victoria.

  Dominic Allen, whose mellifluous tones will be familiar to listeners of LBC Radio, is doing a splendidly stentorian job as narrator in setting the scene. There, in the middle of a Menzies at Rialto bedroom, stands a Menzies at Rialto lookalike bed, on which, covered completely by a large Menzies at Rialto duvet, lies an amorphous, heaving heap, which from time to time emits a loud, sonorous snore.

  Littered around the bedroom are half a dozen breakfast trays piled high with, amongst other things, a couple of dozen bread rolls.

  Buttons (presumably on loan from another pantomime, and anyway this has been written by the press, so who on earth expects the facts to be absolutely straight?) enters the bedroom carrying yet another breakfast tray. In a previous incarnation, Buttons may well have been Graham Otway of Today.

  Loud banging on the door and ringing at the bell ensues. Enter Burke and Hare, super-sleuths, looking for a titillating titbit, on this so far excruciatingly well-behaved tour.

  Again, Burke and Hare bear more than a passing resemblance to Paul Weaver of the Mirror, and Graham Morris, freelance sports photographer.

  Frantic efforts are made to wake the captain, but to no avail. For it is time for Martin Johnson of The Independent to have his own words come back to haunt both him and the dormant England cricket captain.

  The Three Ghosts of English Cricket appear in sequence. First, the Ghost of ‘Can’t Bat’, played by Johnson himself. ‘Can’t bat’, says the Ghost to the snoring shapeless mound. ‘I used to dog you in your early years.’

  Then the second Ghost of ‘Can’t Bowl’ appears, played by Peter Smith of the Mail, with his arm ostentatiously in a sling. He wants to know why Phil Edmonds never gets a bowl before tea. (Offstage a raucous woman’s voice is shouting, ‘Phil, you boring old fart!’ ‘It’s the wicked witch of the press box,’ they all chorus. ‘She’s been at the EEC wine lake again!’)

  Finally, trying unsuccessfully to upstage everyone else, is Chris Lander of the Sun, usually Ian Botham’s ghost, now appearing, by his kind permission, as the Ghost of ‘Can’t Field’.

  ‘Do you have a sister?’ asks another member of the cast. An embarrassed, hushed silence suddenly descends over the entire audience, as everyone waits to see how that will be received in the Botham camp. Ghosts of Miss ex-Barbadoses Past still loom extremely large.

  Next, there is a guest appearance by David Gower, doing a perfect take-off of himself clutching a bottle of Bollinger, tossing a coin, incomprehensibly murmuring ‘Peter May says this. Peter May says that’, and wandering on and off the set quite aimlessly lost. (Yet another Ghost, of West Indies Past.)

  Suddenly, Mike Gatting (portrayed by David Norrie of the News of the World, playwright extraordinaire, and impresario behind this entire production), awakens. His face is white with fear. The three Ghosts of England Cricket have shaken him badly. He is, nevertheless, still extremely well padded with help from a few extra pillows. Terror, in this instance, had involved no weight loss. He promises that if the Ghosts will cease to haunt him, he will renounce all clichés during press conferences, and presumably all ‘basicallies’, ‘tremendouslies’, and ‘lads-doing-good-jobs’ as well.

  It was good-humoured stuff, with that little didactic sting in the tail which relatively uncommunicative captains would ignore at their peril. Let us face it. Every pressman in the business needs his x hundred words by a deadline, and as the brighter Foreign Office spokesmen in delicate situations have learned, the more of those words you give to the majority of those as-lazy-as-the-rest-of-us journalists, the more chance your version of events has of percolating through.

  Watered and humoured, members of the team then withdrew to change. Phil and I donned our jailbird convict outfits, complete with ball-and-chain and manacles, and descended to the function room. The entire Australian press and an avalanche of photographers was waiting for us all as we arrived. I told them we had come as Australians. When all is said and done, Aussies like to be reminded that they do have a cultural heritage.

  People had gone to quite unconscionable lengths to come up with a winner. David Gower, secretary of the Social Committee, looked disgracefully good as a Nazi SS officer, and demonstrated a masterful dominance and discipline in conducting proceedings which six months earlier would have kept him in the England captaincy job. Boyishly slim in black leather jackboots, tight-fitting jodhpurs, with unruly blond curls springing from underneath his uniform cap, he looked every inch the ascetic Arian. An equivalent of ‘Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells’ wrote to the Mail deploring such an outfit, but coming from the reader
of a paper whose views are not infrequently to the right of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, we all found that quite amusing.

  Vicki, David’s fiancée, instantly converted to a nun, looked most fetching, though the fag hanging out of the side of her mouth was a bit of a giveaway.

  Mike Gatting emerged with a flourish of silk and feathers as a musketeer. ‘All for one and one for all,’ he shouted enthusiastically. It was abundantly clear that certain members of the England camp hadn’t the foggiest what he was talking about.

  Pushed along in wheelchair by Gatt was Graham Dilley, leaving a foaming trail of bubbly behind him. He had somehow managed to excavate large holes out of a rubbery white bathing cap, and had pulled it close on to his head so that his own thick blond hair only appeared in sporadic tufts. He was also linked up to an intravenous drip of Bollinger, presumably to cut out the middle man. The press erroneously assumed Graham to be playing an intensive-care case, but far from being a common or garden patient, he was, in fact, impersonating our own dear Fender, whose golden locks are apparently going the way of PHE’s.

  Chris Broad looked tall and dignified as a splendid Wise Man, the role he has played all tour in his stalwart opening bat position. Bill Athey, serious and meticulous by nature, made an excellent schoolteacher, and Janet, his wife, charmingly cheeky in a very short gymslip, was billed as teacher’s pet.

  The Lambs’ appearance as the Sugar Plum Fairies created a commotion. I had watched Lindsay, whose stores of patience and application seem boundless, as she stitched the costumes by hand one rainy afternoon in Tasmania. From two pink T-shirts, an infinity of tulle and a couple of cans of spray glitter, she had managed to create tutus that would not have disgraced Fonteyn in Swan Lake.

  Lamby, on the other hand, who had refused to wear his coordinated pink tights, and was from time to time showing the odd flash of bare buttock juxtaposed with bright white jockstrap and whatever it encompassed, was presumably playing a middle-order Nureyev in The Nutcracker.