I was invited to a reception in Canberra on the evening before the State Opening where I had the great thrill of talking to the Monarch for a minute or so. Beautifully dressed in blue, she was, I thought, dazzlingly pretty and much younger looking than her photographs. Of course, too, she was disarmingly at ease and perfectly briefed about why I was there, so we talked of England’s success in India and the game in Melbourne the following week. I had been made to feel at home already by one of her ladies-in-waiting, the charming Susan Hussey, whose husband, ‘Duke’, became chairman of the BBC Governors and would make occasional ‘royal’ visits of his own to the commentary box in later years.
All I had to do in Canberra was to record a ‘package’ rather than to describe events ‘live’ but the best way of doing that was to attempt a commentary along the lines of those famously done by the likes of Hudson and Tom Fleming. I have no idea what the reaction was to my efforts at Bush House but I subsequently did something similar at the start of the State visit of President Ceauçescu of Romania, this time from the roof of a building opposite Victoria Station as the subsequently disgraced dictator was met by the Queen after his arrival by train. There were police snipers beside me on the roof, my first close experience of the realities of security for political figures.
I enjoyed these experiences because in both cases the Royal press officials had armed me with plenty of material for ‘waffling’. I would cheerfully have done much more of this sort of broadcasting but the fact was that being cricket correspondent was, by now, a full-time, non-stop job.
It certainly became so from the moment that the ‘Packer Revolution’ erupted in England the following May. There has never been a cricket story to match it in my lifetime and only the Bodyline controversy of 1932/3 has done so in the game’s history as an international sport.
Greig was, from the outset, a central figure. I had arranged to meet him in his room at the Hilton hotel during the rest day of that Centenary Test. Before we discussed the relatively mundane matter of the game itself – although it was, happily, a wonderful game of cricket and a great, efficiently organised occasion – he told me of his meeting with ‘a guy called Kerry Packer’ and advised me that his interest in the game could lead to something ‘very big’.
He could not tell me more but I should have followed up his friendly hint more assiduously than I did. It came to light only two months later that Tony had played a central role as a go-between between Packer and many of the world’s best players, signing them on for matches that Packer had hoped might run simultaneously with ‘established’ international cricket.
That was never going to happen and the reaction amongst most cricket followers when the news broke at Hove in May 1977 was largely hostile. Greig was seen as the betrayer of a system that had elevated him to the highest honour in the English game. Although John Woodcock was vilified by some for suggesting that he was not an Englishman ‘through and through’, the observation was spot on in that Greig did not feel that deep loyalty to the established order of English cricket that would have prevented him from – in essence – following Mammon rather than honour.
The great majority of people in his position, presented with the same set of circumstances, would have done the same thing as he did in dancing to Packer’s tune, but others, with a different background and upbringing, might have felt compelled to say ‘thanks but no thanks’. I know that I would have been in the latter category, which is not to say that I do not entirely understand why he acted as he did.
In Sussex Greig is remembered as someone who had bigger fish to fry and who ultimately failed to deliver as a captain. He was incapable of giving less than 100 per cent to any game of cricket because of his competitive nature but once he had become an important England player he was not one of those who, like Mike Brearley or Graham Gooch, could give county cricket his undivided attention at the appropriate time
The Centenary match, and various receptions and dinners, were attended by practically every surviving cricketer of each country, which was a joy and fascination in itself. The Queen was famously asked for her autograph by the mischievous iconoclast Dennis Lillee as she met the players at tea-time on the final day. That she saw some cricket – and, by an extraordinary coincidence, an Australian victory by precisely the forty-five runs that had separated the sides in the original match at Melbourne in 1877, was due largely to an innings of marvellous style, character and elan by Derek Randall.
I was on the air when Alan Knott was lbw to Lillee to complete a victory that had looked far from certain while England were chasing their 463 to win. Wisden’s report of the game, by Reg Hayter, records that it was not until ‘after some time’ the match was over that someone spotted the identical result. In fact I had told my listeners in both countries at the time thanks to the sharpness of my bubbly friend Graham Dawson, then a rising star with ABC Radio, who whispered the fact in my ear.
Graham and his wife, Shelagh, kindly saved me some hard-earned tour money more than once when I stayed with them in Melbourne and Judy’s cousins, Ian and Susan Hayman, often did the same for me in Sydney, allowing a welcome break from the routines of hotel life. Ian had been the youngest brigadier in the Australian army when he suffered a stroke in his forties but Susan, from the well-known MaCarthur-Onslow family, showed as much stoicism as her husband in nursing him for the rest of his life.
For the players there has never been an easy tour of Australia. In both 1978/9 and 1986/7 there were reasons why the home country was not at its strongest, although that, of course, is no excuse because England at home are seldom able to field their best possible side. Usually it is a simple matter of key players being injured but in 1978/9 several of the best Australians were otherwise engaged in Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket. When Mike Brearley reluctantly returned with his team the following winter to play the full Australian side – and the West Indies too – in matches that were not for the Ashes but were played with just the same intensity, Australia won easily. It was an indication, however, of the soundness of their cricketing system that some very good players had filled the breach, men who, like others since, might otherwise have languished in State cricket without getting the chance to wear the ‘baggy green’. They included Rodney Hogg, Bruce Yardley and Allan Border.
It was the two three-month stints in Australian winters in successive years that pushed me into my career switch in the 1980s. Judy had given birth to our third child, Lucy, in 1979 and had no wish to spend another few weeks in hotels. As usual I was split between the fun of the job and the desire to be with my family.
Eight years later I was BBC cricket correspondent again and back on the road – or, more accurately, back in the air and on it. This time it was unofficial rebel tours to South Africa that, to a limited extent at least, diluted the strength of Australia’s attempt to regain the Ashes. It did not make the 1986/7 series any the less enjoyable to report. Not only did England successfully retain the Ashes but they swept the board in two separate one-day tournaments as well. They started the tour ingloriously (remember Martin Johnson’s ‘can’t bat, can’t bowl and can’t field) and lost the last Test to leave a deceptively close-looking final score of two matches to one, but in between they had a ball, on and off the field. So much so that their Henry VIII of a captain, Mike Gatting, never short of things to do after dark, got away with oversleeping one day and missing the team bus so that someone else had to call heads or tails at the toss. On some tours that would have been a major incident. On this one it was an amusing sideline.
There was an element of complacency about England’s performance in the final Test in Sydney, on one of those typical Bulli soil pitches that turn with increasing viciousness as they wear under a hot sun. Would that there were more of them these days. I remember especially the way in which Ian Botham decided to try to conquer the hitherto completely unknown Peter Taylor – ‘Peter Who?’ as one evening paper dubbed him in a cruel headline when his selection was first announced.
It was typical Botham to be so confident and belligerent, of course, but having been caught behind for sixteen off the red-haired off-spinner in the first innings, he tried to hit him out of the ground immediately he got to the crease in the second. Beaten in the flight, he succeeded only in lofting the ball high towards the Ladies’ Stand, in front of which he was caught for a duck. Great was the Aussie rejoicing, both then and when the leg-spinner Peter Sleep shot a ball through John Emburey’s defences to win the game by fifty-five runs.
Later in that winter of 1986/7 Australia beat England in the final of the World Cup at Eden Gardens in Calcutta and they did not relinquish their grip on the old country for the better part of twenty years afterwards. It was a dispiriting era for England, with humiliations such as the two defeats by the Australian Academy that Mike Atherton’s team suffered in 1994/5 all too sharp a reminder of the gulf that had opened up between the two countries.
In a way it was nothing new. It took some time after the burning of that bail near Melbourne for Australians to establish their mastery – indeed it was not until their fifth home series that they did so – but England captains from Gubby Allen to Andrew Flintoff have generally come home with empty hands and their leonine tails firmly tucked between their legs. Between the earth-shaking series in 1932/3, famous or infamous according to your point of view, and the 2010/11 tour, England played seventeen series for the Ashes in Australia. They lost eleven and won only four of them.
Never has there been a bigger or longer build-up to a Test series than the one in Australia in 2006/7. Never, too, has there been a greater or swifter anti-climax. The Australia side that utterly overwhelmed and virtually humiliated Andrew Flintoff’s hapless team, regaining the Ashes after only fifteen days of cricket, undoubtedly ranks with some of the best XIs of all time.
Australia and the Caribbean have been the favoured tours for British supporters, as for the media. Their numbers have grown almost exponentially. In the early 1970s there were very few camp followers. Two of the stalwarts were the late Spen Cama, an Anglo-Indian with a penchant for snuff, and Bernie Coleman, a benign soul who made a small fortune as landlord of the best pub in Wimbledon and has used it with great generosity. So, when he died, did Cama, who left large legacies to Sussex and to his own Sussex club, the Preston Nomads. (Cricket has been lucky to attract many wealthy patrons who adored the game without being any good at playing it. In my time Sir Tim Rice, who charmed his Australian audience when he gave a brilliant ‘Bradman Oration’ before the Adelaide Test in 2010, has also given extremely generously to many cricketing causes, but Sir John Paul Getty II, a shy recluse by the time that I knew him, was probably the greatest philanthropist. He contributed a big sum towards the building of the new Mound Stand at Lord’s and created his own beautiful ground at Wormsley, where he was also responsible for enabling the reintroduction of the majestic Red Kite.
As far as I know, Getty never watched Test cricket abroad, but there was a sudden surge in the number of travelling supporters cheering on Mike Gatting’s team to rare success in Australia in 1986/7. They paved the way for the first recruits to the Barmy Army, who started giving such vocal support to Mike Atherton’s various touring sides. The ‘Army’ have generally been popular with the locals wherever they have been and, of course, they provide pubs, hotels and restaurants abroad with good business, as do the more upmarket touring groups, invariably including parties from MCC.
The ‘barmies’ are undoubtedly much appreciated by the players. In Barbados in particular it has probably made the difference between success and failure in a couple of Test matches. I greatly admire their loyalty to England through thick and thin, and their sense of humour. I don’t mind their songs in moderation but I do resent their monotonous chanting. It is both self-regarding and inconsiderate. Undoubtedly a lot of listeners to Test Match Special dislike it too.
The noise level at international matches everywhere now is vastly greater than it was everywhere except India and in some islands of the Caribbean. Personally I miss the hush of suspense and the bursts of applause that followed an outstanding piece of cricket. But cricket mirrors society. Peace and decorum are harder to find than they once were.
If I had to pick just one of the various individual clashes of titans I have witnessed during forty years of Anglo/Australian rivalry, it would be Botham versus Lillee; muscle versus menace; valour versus venom. Their duels, between Ian Botham’s third series against Australia in 1979/80 and Dennis Lillee’s retirement a year after a final Ashes fling in 1982/3, were relatively few given the long and distinguished careers they both enjoyed, but they were also microcosms of the stirring tradition of Anglo/Australian rivalry.
It was not just that these two proud warriors were amongst the greatest cricketers ever to represent their countries. It was the fact that they recognised in one another key figures in the opposing camp, on whose individual battles the outcome of the war itself might depend, a little like those individual contests between Andrew Flintoff and Ricky Ponting, or Kevin Pietersen and Shane Warne, in more recent Ashes series.
It was the electricity that invariably accompanied their duels, whether Lillee was bowling to Botham or Botham to Lillee, that heightened the fascination. They were similar characters, with a trace of the larrikin in their approach to cricket and life. Like poles repel, so there were sparks when they met, invariably eyeballing one another like rutting stags before the first clash of antlers. Once the battle was lost or won, they enjoyed many a glass in each other’s company, first of beer, then, in sophisticated retirement, of wine.
I have liked Lillee a lot in occasional meetings since – he is president of the WACA now; full of fun and a willing raconteur – but I saw his less attractive side at close quarters immediately after his contretemps with Mike Brearley in the 1979/80 series, when the England captain, a bit testy himself during that tour, objected to his experimental use of an aluminium bat during the Perth Test. He had faced four balls from Ian Botham before Brearley objected to the umpires on the grounds that it was damaging the ball. Lillee was told to change his bat but argued the issue for ten minutes, for which flagrant disregard for authority I had given him unequivocal verbal stick. Clearly he had not got over his annoyance when, after play on a later day in that game, I went into the dressing-room to interview Ian Botham about the state of play. Lillee was sharing a beer with his rival and greeted me with: ‘Here comes Christopher Wankin-Jenkins.’
Ian laughed, but with me not at me. To me his generosity of spirit has always been his greatest feature and if he has sometimes given his wonderfully loyal wife Kathy a few causes for regret (or worse) he absolutely deserves his iconic status and his knighthood. This is not only the national hero of, in particular, 1981, but the man who, until recently, still made large advertising money by eating what look like small bales of hay for breakfast, who has periodically walked vast distances to raise huge sums of money in aid of leukaemia research, who drives a Bentley and a Jaguar because they are ‘British’ cars (and perhaps because he receives some other benefits for the privilege) and who hits a golf ball, sometimes, like a professional (he probably plays as often as the average pro!).
It was always a question of close debate whether Ian or one of his three outstanding contemporaries, Imran Khan, Kapil Dev and Richard Hadlee, was the best all-rounder. Gary Sobers was ahead of them all but Ian’s status is written in figures: he scored 5200 runs in Test cricket alone, hit 80 sixes in the season of 1985 and was the first all-rounder to take both 300 Test wickets and score more than 5000 runs. As a catcher at second slip there has been no one better.
1981 immortalised him, as everyone knows. That year is to English cricket as 1415, and Agincourt, to English history. The all Western Australian partnership of Lillee and Terry Alderman started the first chapter by dismissing the tender England captain (Botham was the youngest since Monty Bowden in 1888/9) for one and thirty-three at Trent Bridge, where England lost a tense, close match. A crestfallen Botham lost the le
adership to Brearley after his pair in the drawn game at Lord’s.
I was in the BBC television, rather than radio, box when he scored 50 out of 174 in response to Australia’s 401 (Botham six for 95), then went out to bat in England’s follow-on innings at 105 for five. The situation was beyond desperate, but Botham’s audacious century off 87 balls, enabling England to set Australia 130 to win in the fourth innings, would have been part of a glorious failure but for Bob Willis’s ferocious fast bowling in the final act of the match. Commentators should be neutral and the hardest thing to do as that bouleversement unfolded was to keep the emotion out of my voice.
I was on TV again, still ‘subbing’ for Jim Laker, when the titans had their last great confrontation at Manchester. Lillee hurled himself into the duel when Botham came out to bat, this time at 104 for five. Both he and Alderman, swinging the ball off a length, had their tails up. The series itself depended, almost certainly, on an England recovery, now or never. Botham responded with an exhilarating display of attacking batting, highly skilled and, more than just bold, physically courageous. Time and again he hooked Lillee’s bouncers from in front of his temple, unguarded by a cap, let alone a helmet. In two hours he scored another hundred, this time off eighty-six balls, smiting six sixes. Twenty-four years would pass before English crowds saw such a spectacle again in an Ashes series.
No wonder we celebrated the astonishing series of 2005. Every match was wonderful and each of the five unforgettable, unpredictable contests, at Lord’s, Edgbaston, Old Trafford, Trent Bridge and The Oval, could so easily have produced a different result. For England the eventual two-one margin was a blessed redemption and even Australians appreciated that it was good for the game. Many of those who took part, like Warne, Gilchrist and Brett Lee, say that they enjoyed it as much as any of their victorious campaigns.
CMJ Page 22