Cricket XXXX Cricket

by Frances Edmonds

  Dimattina. Some critics went so far as to suggest that they would rather see anyone else, even the New South Welshman Dyer, behind the stumps, which for Victorians was saying something.

  When Phil returned that evening and recounted the episode to me, I thought it was amusing enough to deserve a few limericks, and accordingly penned the following:

  There was a young glove-man named Zoehrer,

  Whose keeping got poorer and poorer,

  Said AB from first slip,

  ‘Please stop giving such lip,

  And with extras, stop troubling the scorer!’

  With a glorious indifference to even the most elementary rules of scansion, the England dressing room got hold of this, and rear-ranged the last line to embrace as many ‘fucks’ as possible.

  The second limerick, which had my preference, found less favour:

  Bay Thirteen, they shout ‘Dimattina,

  This Zoehrer keeps like a cretina.

  And we’d rather,’ they choir,

  ‘Have that other clown, Dyer,

  Than Zoehrer, who is a has-beener.’

  In any event, Phil, after consultation with the England middle-order Muses, took the verses into the Australian dressing room and read them both out. It occasioned, apparently, some degree of mirth. The Australian team, don’t forget, are not all Western Australians either.

  To Zoehrer’s credit, he responded in kind, and by lunchtime had composed his own riposte:

  There was a balding old man called Philippe,

  Who stands in the gully too deep.

  When his turn came to bat

  He opened his trap,

  And his innings just fell in a heap.

  It was unfortunate that a couple of Australian papers got hold of this exchange of literature, and turned the good-humoured mickey-taking into an Edmonds–Zoehrer hate campaign. Some of the papers concerned went even so far as to give to Botham, of all people, the paternity of the original limericks. Not for the first time I was encouraged to dwell on the dislocation between the facts and what people read in the newspapers. And not for the last time were my poetic efforts to occasion a few sparks.

  8 / Perth – the Benson and Hedges Challenge

  Inured, as the England team was in the West Indies series, to two-and-a-half-day Test matches, the truncated Melbourne game came as a particularly welcome respite to them in this dizzy Australian itinerary. Two genuine free days. No nets. No hiding from the press in the bar. The sweet and unaccustomed taste of success at last.

  Two days later, however, we were on the transcontinental move again, back to Perth for the Benson and Hedges so-called ‘Spinnaker’ Challenge.

  Manager Peter Lush was his jovial self as usual, but nevertheless admitting to no mean degree of disappointment over an inexplicable silence from the corridors of power in London. If Bob Hawke had been the present incumbent of Number 10, all members of the victorious England team would no doubt have been awarded grace and favour homes by now, and Mike Gatting would doubtless have been elevated to the peerage: Lord Gatting of Branston (with due deference to his proclivities in pickle) would have made a very suitable title. As it was, the boys were surprised that they had failed to receive either a telex or a telegram of congratulations from either the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, or the Sports Minister, Richard Tracey. I mentioned this in my Times diary, a full fortnight later, just to make sure that the Sir Humphrey Applebys of life had had a fair span to do the necessary.

  About a month later (presumably after the offending article had been spotted in Cheltenham as subversive), Peter was duly informed that the Sports Minister had indeed despatched a telex, but it had apparently missed us. It is, of course, not very difficult to miss the England cricket team. They are an eminently missable group of sixteen players, three management, a hundred and thirty-five pieces of luggage weighing over three and a half thousand pounds, six crates of wine, three crates of Johnny Walker Whisky, two crates of Hine cognac, a crate of ‘Fender’s Fizz’, a large Liberty’s hat box (mine), thirty items of hand luggage, a dozen wives and consorts, and about forty accompanying press and media folk. We slip in and out of airports and hotels with all the unobtrusive discretion of a Shirley Bassey frock. Anyway, miss us that telex certainly did!

  Perth is fast becoming a second home to us, so often have we been here. As we flew in around 10 pm local time, we could see the illuminated WACA, where the Pakistanis were playing the West Indians in a day/night game, shining like a molten pool of platinum in the surrounding darkness.

  The Sheraton-Perth lobby was in a mild state of bedlam. Accommodating one cricket team is bad enough, but accommodating four of them, plus the entire Channel 9 contingent, is stretching any hotel’s reserves of goodwill to the limit.

  Our corridor was a true league of nations: some members of the England team; some of the West Indian team; the ebullient Pakistani team; and stuck unaccountably in the midst of us all, a newly-wed Japanese couple on honeymoon. It would be distressing to think that they left Australia with the impression that this set-up was a fair reflection of Western mores.

  There is no point in pretending that these one-day games are anything other than a complete lottery. Bill ‘Tiger’ O’Reilly, the great Australian leg-spinner and googly purveyor and the only Aussie to have played in all matches of the controversial Bodyline series, constantly dismisses these limited over knock-abouts as ‘The Pyjama Game’. He is a grand old man. Tiger and I had the pleasure of a long chat to him over dinner last time we were here. He is a delightful mixture of the conservative and the controversial, with that anti-establishment penchant so many of us second or third generation Irish seem to harbour. In his eighties he still stands very tall and erect, retains that certain Gaelic twinkle in the eye and readiness with the tongue which delights many and infuriates a few, and continues to write an extremely hard-hitting regular column for The Sydney Morning Herald.

  The Pyjama Game is not an inaccurate visual assessment of the one-day international, Aussie style. Purists of the game still gag visibly at the sight of the gaily striped garb in which the teams are obliged to perform. England, in truth, do not look so bad. Their kit is predominantly light blue, sporting discreet yet distinctive dark-blue stripes. The trousers have never seen a natural fibre in their lives, and at 30˚C in the shade must surely be responsible for many an adult version of nappy rash and galloping jock rot. Only men could dream up the idea of wearing synthetic fibres in these kinds of temperatures.

  The Aussies must surely feel themselves at a distinct psychological disadvantage as they march on to the pitch trying to feel aggressive, and on the contrary looking distinctly emasculated, swathed as they are in canary-yellow with a green stripe. Bearing a marked resemblance to a clump of etiolated daffodils hardly does much to reinforce the much sought-after macho Oz sportsman image.

  The Pakistanis, a very young side, look like the enthusiastic products of an expensive prep school in their bright green outfits slashed by counter-distinct blue stripes.

  Maroon with grey, on the other hand, would have to be the last colours on earth any thoughtful couturier would slap together, but this is the dreadfully dull combination in which the West Indians appear. In normal circumstances the brightness of their cricket would outshine the drabness of their gear, but then, this occasion was far from normal.

  On New Year’s Eve, the England team was obliged to practise in the afternoon, prior to their first match against Australia the following day. That evening, Elton John was throwing a party for us at the house of Lancashire and ex-England cricketer Graeme Fowler. Foxy, who seems, in cricketing terms at least, to have sunk without trace since a magnificent double century in Madras during England’s triumphant 1984–5 tour of India, is currently working in a PR capacity here in Perth.

  It was not entirely felicitous, therefore, that my publisher, Derek Wyatt, should have dropped in around about fourish for a cup of tea. Derek was out here from London for various reasons. First, he wa
nted to sign up Harold Cudmore for a book on twelve-metre racing; second, he wanted to ascertain what his two protégés, Le Roebuck and La Edmonds, were up to; third, he wanted to see Vic Marks (Somerset and England) at present doing extremely well for Western Australia; fourth, he wanted to catch up with Engel; fifth, he wanted to see some cricket; and sixth, it was -10˚F in London.

  ‘I’d like a cup of tea,’ said Derek.

  ‘I’d like a cup of tea too,’ said I.

  ‘Waiter,’ we chorused as one, ‘bring us a bottle of something bubbly.’

  It was a classic case of history repeating itself. Last year in the West Indies I should have learned the folly of trying to match an ex-England rugby international player drink for drink . . .

  I am given to believe that Elton’s party was superb, with magnificent food and drink supplied by the Orchard hotel. I cannot remember too much about it, however, except being rock ‘n’ rolled into the disco, and creating no small amount of fairly irreparable damage. Some time late the next morning, the list of New Year’s resolutions started off in the time-honoured way . . .

  The Australians played quite horribly, and were duly rewarded with the wooden spoon of the competition. The man on whom the fickle Australian supporters’ opprobrium was most focused was the luckless Tasmanian opener, David Boon. In the match against the West Indies, for instance, this out-of-form batsman was hooted and jeered as he walked on to the pitch, not perhaps the sort of reception ideally designed to encourage a man to lift his game to new heights. Near the scoreboard, the wit and repartee flowed with the beer, as Boon managed to get off the mark with the first ball of the innings. ‘You’re seeing it like a watermelon, Boonie,’ shouted one sarcastic fan; ‘See the over out, David!’ encouraged another.

  It seemed like eternities later when the poor fellow, with a mere two to his name on the scoreboard, had his middle stump removed by a dazzler from Joel Garner. This precipitated even more flak from the WACA crowd. ‘No wonder Tasmania is not a part of Australia,’ harried the ultimate wag as Boon walked disconsolately back to the dressing room. Inter-state knocking is indeed as cruel as anything the Aussies mete out to us.

  The Aussie opening combinations were so consistently bad that David Gower’s fiancée, Vicki, came up with the definition of an optimist: an Australian opening batsman who bothers to put zinc cream on his nose.

  Neither was their bowling particularly penetrative, and the one enduring highlight of the entire challenge was the sight of Ian Botham laying into the new young Victorian medium pace-man, Simon Davis, knocking twenty-four off one over and Davis off the selectors’ short list for a while to come.

  With few exceptions, however, this superabundance of one-day internationals means that they all have a tendency to merge indistinguishably into one another. Even Henry Blofeld freely admits, ‘We can all remember what happened in the Test matches, but, my dear old thing, who on earth can remember what went on in all those one-dayers?’

  What we can, of course, remember is that England beat the Australians, the West Indies (oh, sweet revenge), and the Pakistanis, to win the series. That was all very well and good, but did it really mean anything? For a start the boisterously youthful Pakistanis, on a one-week release from the savage strictures of Islam fundamentalism and the ever watchful eye of the President General Zia-ul-Haq, were busily giving it their very best shot until all hours in the Sheraton disco. The chances are that they could well prove an entirely different proposition in the full-blown Test series against England in the summer of 1987.

  More significant still in putting the English victory in a less-hyperbolic-than-the-British-tabloids context, was the veto placed on bowling bouncers. The West Indians, in particular, were psychologically stumped by this blanket prohibition, and their team without that relentless mean-machine quartet of pace bowlers was certainly not the same animal which had so badly mauled us in the Caribbean on the last tour: Samson without the hair. The banning of all those intimidatory exocets constantly whistling around the batsman’s head had a salutary effect on the English line-up, but it was simultaneously instrumental in frustrating and depressing the Windies’ fast bowlers. Negative sentiments (as England themselves saw in the Caribbean) have a distressing tendency to permeate an entire side, and the West Indian batsmen, who were already out of touch, were in turn affected. Once again, however, whilst the West Indies may not appear to be quite the force they were, particularly in the absence of Clive Lloyd, cricketers everywhere would be foolish to assume that an unbridled West Indian team would necessarily be the same toothless opponents in Test matches.

  The Pakistani captain, Imran Khan, was inconsolable at his team’s final loss to England, although admittedly it must be difficult for anyone to drown his sorrows in orange juice. At thirty-four, I have seen him quoted in various women’s magazines (which of course I never purchase, but only ever read at friends’ houses or in the dentist’s) as one of the most eligible bachelors in the world. Certainly, women’s magazines’ goo apart, he would have to rate as the most eligible bachelor in the cricketing world, where the competition is somewhat more restricted. Oxford-educated, affluent, with those chiselled good looks of the Pakistani warrior caste, he was constantly inundated with female autograph-or-whatever-else-might-be-available hunters as he sat having a depressed chat with Phil and me. Actually, he was not so much surprised at the result. Last year, a palmist had foretold his future, and this was all part of it. No, his depression was far more deeply rooted than that. He had just suffered the break-up of a long-standing relationship with an English girl who eventually discovered that she could not embrace the Pakistani way of life, and Imran, arguably the most eligible bachelor in the world, had decided that he was now irretrievably on the shelf.

  ‘And what is worse,’ he confided morosely, ‘is that I am even too old for an arranged marriage now. All the best ones have gone.’

  We told Imran not to despair, and bought him another orange juice. Somehow it was difficult to avoid the feeling that he would finally make out.

  Along the coast in Fremantle there was no shortage of gloom, doom and despondency either. Just about everybody was worried about the apparently unbeatable form of the New Zealanders’ fibreglass yachts, not least the mammoth fleet of American TV people who were petrified at the prospect of an Australian–Kiwi final. If the Kiwis were to beat Dennis Conner’s Stars and Stripes for the right to challenge for the America’s Cup, stateside networks stood to lose up to US$150 million in advertising revenues and telecast outlays.

  Quite a deal of anti-Kiwi feeling was being generated by the Australians themselves, and at least one of the syndicates was making no secret of the fact that they would rather lose the Cup to Big Bad Dennis and the San Diego Yacht Club than see it carried off to Auckland.

  Maybe Conner himself, who has openly questioned the legitimacy of the fibreglass hulls, started the ball rolling in earnest. Last week he was heard to dismiss a tenacious reporter, off-handedly: ‘I’ve already said “no comment”. What are you – stupid? Or are you just from New Zealand?’

  The shopkeepers, hoteliers and restaurateurs of Freo are all in agreement, however. From a financial and tourist point of view, the final has to be between one of the Australian syndicates, and the Americans’ Stars and Stripes.

  Depression, however, as you may readily imagine, was not the abiding characteristic of the England squad, as they boarded yet another plane for yet another transcontinental flight the morning after the final.

  9 / The great Australian ginger-nut debacle

  Spirits were still buoyant as we reached the Sebel Town House in Sydney. Beating the Australians has become a commonplace event, but beating the Pakistanis, and, a fortiori, beating our erstwhile drubbers, the mighty West Indians, albeit in a one-day lottery, was balm to last year’s wounded team soul.

  Released from hospital after throat surgery, and awaiting our arrival at the hotel, was Elton John. His childlike and unsophisticated pleasure at being with the crick
eters is both touching and endearing, and he appears to enjoy the camaraderie of this extended family. I wonder, sometimes, whether, despite his being surrounded by the usual superstar’s coterie, the life of the successful pop idol is not an extremely lonely one. Much press speculation is being expended on the reasons why his wife Renata left Australia halfway through his tour, and on why she was not in attendance by his sickbed in his hour of need. We leave such society gossip to the relevant columnists. All we know is that Elton loves us, and we all love him.

  He was waiting for us in the lobby, barred by his ENT consultant from talking for ten days after having nodules removed from his vocal cords. Wearing one of his large collection of wacky hats (this one sort of fez-shaped in ersatz zebra skin), he was hopping Ariel-like through the reception area, holding a placard on which he had carefully inscribed the words ‘Great Result’.

  It is an interesting mutual admiration society, that of Elton and the team. He likes being in their company, and they like being in his: symbiotic groupies, really.

  The Sebel Town House is not your common or garden cricket tour hotel. In no way ostentatious, it is small, understated and discreet, but is nevertheless the favourite watering hole of many showbiz personalities, whose autographed photographs adorn the small and even excessively cosy bar. Megastars Dire Straits had even left a golden disc, which now adorns the lobby, in gratitude for the gracious hospitality and ‘nothing too much trouble’ service they had received there. Certainly the Sebel was a welcome change from all those vast and impersonal establishments we have been wont to rest our weary cricket coffins in. It put me in mind of my favourite London hotel, the Berkeley, in Knightsbridge, where swimming around in the rooftop pool one day, I spied a rather corpulent Henry Kissinger heaving, anonymously, in the one direction, and a recently married, unremarked-upon Dustin Hoffman racing in the other.