1954/5, Sydney: This was the game that sparked that rarity, a comprehensive England win in a series in Australia. Christmas was approaching, it was cold at home and I remember my father in his dressing-gown coming in to tell me that Tyson, Statham, Bailey and Appleyard – but especially the ferociously fast Frank Tyson – had bowled Australia out.
1956: Jim Laker’s incredible nineteen wickets at Old Trafford. I have clear memories of every phase of that extraordinary match, and of going outside to play cricket in the garden as soon as Len Maddocks had been lbw to complete the rout. Off went Jim to his immortality with his sweater over his left shoulder, and everyone’s ecstasy carefully suppressed.
1958: Surrey’s seventh Championship title in a row. All the usual suspects: Peter May, the smiling amateur with a professional’s ruthlessness; Kenny Barrington on the rise; Bedser and Loader, Laker and Lock. Micky Stewart brilliant at short-leg. Arthur McIntyre neat as a pin behind the stumps. An efficient, confident team with all the necessary talent and self-belief to keep on winning.
1960: The tied Test in Brisbane. Three wickets in the last over, Wes Hall with his shirt hanging out and mayhem. Frank Worrell, the personification of dignity. Joey Solomon the unlikely hero at the denouement. I saw him in the clubhouse of the golf course in Georgetown, Guyana, a few years ago, now just a local hero.
1963: The never-to-be-forgotten draw at Lord’s. Ted Dexter in his pomp. Hall and Worrell again; Brian Close in his finest hour. A radio experience this time: I was listening in the pavilion in my last year at school. John Arlott, Robert Hudson and, at the death, Alan Gibson, calmly and extremely clearly taking us through that last, pulsating over by Hall. The run out of Derek Shackleton, the appearance of Colin Cowdrey with his arm in plaster, the mild anti-climax of the final ball, blocked by David Allen. Yet the satisfying appropriateness of the result, honours even, all passion spent.
1966: Hove and Lord’s. The West Indies again and two matches to savour: Sussex beating them by nine wickets when John Snow took seven for 29; then Gary Sobers in supreme form when it mattered most, baling his team out with his cousin, David Holford, when they were 95 for five in the second Test at Lord’s, after Colin Milburn had made 126 not out.
1968: Derek Underwood’s ruthless hounding of Australia after the rain. Nine fieldsmen round the bat and sawdust everywhere. No Ashes but a drawn series, and justice at last, one felt, after a succession of series in which England were as good as their rivals but could not finish them off.
1973: Trent Bridge, the friendliest ground of all. Bevan Congden scores the first of two successive Test innings of 170 odd to delay an England victory under Ray Illingworth. I have to dash down the MI to be in time for our first child to be delivered. Brian Johnston announces the birth and an astrologist writes to say the stars portend that he will become a cricket commentator. Close: James became a barrister.
1974: Sabina Park. Dennis Amiss saves England with a noble innings of 262 not out on my first tour for the BBC. There is a romance about breaking such news and telling how it happened. Radio had the broadcasting of overseas Tests to itself then.
1975: Lord’s on a glorious summer’s day. The first World Cup final. Clive Lloyd in his pomp, Viv Richards brilliant in the covers, the West Indies triumphant but Australia tough to beat as always. A long and happy exhibition of the limited-over game at its captivating best, in the days before it became tired and overdone.
1981: Headingley. This has to be the Dom Perignon 2000. Ian Botham’s wonderfully free-spirited innings and Bob Willis’s sensational fast bowling on a horribly tricky pitch on the last day. There is nothing in cricket so exciting as a close fourth innings run chase and in all the circumstances, after Australia’s customary victory at Lord’s and Botham’s pair, this was simply amazing. As in 2005 the games that followed, at Edgbaston and Old Trafford, were scarcely less inspiring and Botham, as bowler and batsman, was no less inspired.
1985: Edgbaston in glorious weather and more Aussie bashing! David Gower easing into the ball like a sailing boat on the breeze, ten wickets in the match for Richard Ellison, and Edmonds and Emburey in happy harness.
1986/7: The MCG. The last series victory in Australia. I am on the air when Gladstone Small takes the catch off Phil Edmonds that wins the Ashes.
1994: In my time winning in the West Indies has been as hard as in India or Australia. They had been invincible for a decade so the Barbados Test, when Alec Stewart scores a hundred in each innings and Angus Fraser takes eight for 75, is Michael Atherton’s finest hour as captain.
1994: Antigua. Brian Lara breaks the Sobers Test record score, for the first time. No batsman gave me more pleasure.
1995/6: Atherton again: the famous rearguard at the Wanderers. Ten hours and forty-five minutes of unyielding concentration
2001: A day when reporting required exquisite objectivity. Robin Martin-Jenkins, down breeze (for once) from the Denne Hill End, takes seven for 51 against Leicestershire at Horsham in a season when he also scores a double hundred against Somerset at Taunton. His captain, Chris Adams, calls him ‘a complete cricketer now who could play for England’. Somebody more influential disagrees.
2003: Sussex’s long-awaited first County Championship title. Murray Goodwin scores the winning runs early on a sunlit final afternoon at Eaton Road. Inveigled away for a rare lunchtime pint, I almost miss it. A few more go down the hatch when the words have been written. The ultimate team performance.
2004: Kensington Oval. Matthew Hoggard takes a hat-trick and soon the work started by Steve Harmison at Sabina Park is completed. Winning the Ashes has started in the Caribbean.
2005: Australia win the Lord’s Test as usual but only after being shocked by the ferocious Harmison at the start of an exalted series. Edgbaston, Old Trafford and Trent Bridge follow; three of the best Tests of all packed into a few heady weeks followed by Kevin Pietersen’s clinching tour de force at The Oval. Edgbaston has to be the pick: that desperate finish and the intense relief when Geraint Jones clings onto the final catch to enable victory by two runs. Had a review system been in place, the catch might not have been allowed.
2006: Bombay. An England victory against the odds, always the most exciting. It all goes wrong for Andrew Flintoff, the captain and all-rounder, soon after but this is a great team effort, with Andrew Strauss, Monty Panesar and Shaun Udal also to the fore.
2006: Sussex, again. James Kirtley’s sensational burst of bowling to win the C&G Final at Lord’s.
2009: The two Andys, Flower and Strauss, begin their alliance in the Caribbean with defeat in Jamaica – all out fifty-one – but Strauss unveils to those who do not know him the high quality of his character and talent with a dominating hundred in the first innings of the next Test, played on the old Recreation ground in Antigua after a false start on the new one. Simultaneous signs of a deep and lamentable West Indian decline, but also of far better things to come for England.
2010: The revival confirmed. Victory for the old country against Australia in Adelaide as Graeme Swann, the best English finger-spinner since Derek Underwood and a sunny character who loves life and cricket, seizes his chance to take five wickets on a wearing pitch. At Melbourne the Ashes are regained after a typical Australian comeback at Perth; at Sydney the series is concluded by a third innings victory and a third big hundred for Alastair Cook, the captain in waiting. Not a bad time to be visiting Australia as BBC commentator and MCC President!
23
CHANGE – BUT NOT ALL DECAY
Cream-flannelled cricketers on green-grassed grounds unsullied by garish sponsors’ logos. No chanting from the crowd, just a gentle murmur and polite applause as a clean-bladed bat flows through the oncoming line of a crimson cricket ball and a fielder bends nimbly in the covers, eschewing any dive if he can, to avoid a cleaning bill. In the commentary box the description is restrained, dispassionate; in the press box there is total concentration on the game. There has to be, because there are no television monitors. No laptops either;
nor bloggers and twitterers. It is a simpler, less hurried world.
‘Evolution’ in cricket actually came closer to revolution at the end of the 1970s, due largely to the ambitions of a television mogul.
It is arguable at least that nothing, not even computers and the internet, changed life in the 20th century more fundamentally than television. Its influence has dictated every development in cricket since Kerry Packer, the inheritor from his pioneering father Frank of Australia’s Channel Nine, decided that he wanted Australia’s Test cricket on his own channel, at any price.
Superficially cricket and its professional players benefited hugely from the ramifications but the other side of the equation is that administrators everywhere are dependent on income from television. It is, of course, no different for any of the other professional sports. How do they all expand awareness, attract the young and generate publicity? It can only be done through wide television coverage. How do they finance the grass roots? Through television income. But television tends to want more and more for its contracts, especially more of the big names and the most famous or fashionable countries and clubs.
How the media game has changed since I first gained a foothold on its outer rim. For a whole generation after the war the news got to Ghent, from press boxes round the cricket world, by means of typewriter and dictation to a copy-taker at the newspaper office.
Much patience was required on both sides, and there were frequent misunderstandings, such as the occasion when the back page of the Brighton Evening Argus reported all the batsmen at Hove having difficulty with the ball moving around off a lamp-post on a length. The second edition changed the lamp-post to ‘damp spot’.
Crackly lines were as bad as the often disinterested, but usually highly professional, copy-takers. An unfortunate equestrian correspondent by the name of Horsley-Porter, with a suitably plummy voice, once had to repeat the ‘Horsley-Porter’ three times down a bad line from Badminton or Burleigh, with increasing exasperation, before the bored cockney voice at the other end came back: ‘I know you’re a flippin ’orse reporter, mate, but what’s your bleedin’ name?’
Technology has altered the process of cricket writing, and to a lesser extent broadcasting, as it has changed so many other aspects of life. The facility to communicate instantly has plenty of advantages but it does not necessarily make for an easier life than the one enjoyed by correspondents on the first tours after the war, when typewriter and telex were the means by which an account of the day’s play would be conveyed home, after a delay that was unavoidable. For a start many more words are demanded of all correspondents these days, especially since online newspapers became almost as important as their newsprint versions. The faster the words appear, the happier everyone is, but life for the journalists is much more hectic at both ends of the operation. There is, alas, less laughter.
I have torn out more of what remains of my hair since laptop computers became essential equipment for the journalist than ever I did when accompanied by my Olympia ‘Traveller De Luxe’. I have a better ability than most to lose words that I have sweated pints to assemble, by pressing the wrong key at the wrong time, but there is no other way now.
One became as wedded to and dependent on a laptop as to a treasured spouse. One of the most traumatic days of my life was the one early in 2004 when a pair of professional thieves stole mine (the computer, not the spouse) at Gatwick Airport on my way to cover England’s tour of the West Indies. One gentleman with an East Mediterranean accent and appearance distracted my attention with an unfathomable question whilst another, quite unseen by this polite Englishman trying to understand what he was saying, whisked away, in one black bag, my traveller’s cheques, my camera, my binoculars, my driving licence, a generous supply of American dollars just collected at the Bureau de Change, and, worst by far, the little machine that held all my cricket writing in the previous three years or so and a small library of emails and email addresses.
I alerted an airport official as quickly as I could and over a telephone gave a member of the airport police a description of the man I had seen. ‘Sallow-skinned, East Mediterranean perhaps’ I told him. ‘Wearing a dark blue overcoat; thickset; about forty-five to fifty I’d say.’ I knew I had no hope of seeing my possessions again when an officer appeared at least twenty minutes later and began his inquiries with: ‘So it was a couple of black fellows, was it?’
The only consolation that I had was the sympathetic reaction from people at The Times. David Chappell, the sports editor and later managing editor, quickly made sure that essentials such as money were shipped out to me. Traveller’s cheques were stopped and a replacement laptop was sent out with my colleague, Pat Gibson, who, happily, was following me to Jamaica a day or two later. The Sports Room secretary immediately began the process of getting a new driving licence. She improved my morale, too, by assuring me that journalists were quite often parted from their laptops through misfortune or carelessness.
Much the worst experience of my professional life, however, occurred on the day of a totally unprecedented event in Test cricket. I refer to the previous England tour of the West Indies, the first day of the first Test in Kingston, abandoned after 61 balls and 56 minutes because of a dangerous pitch. This was obviously a front-page as well as back-page story. Getting the balance right was important. With all information gathered and all press conferences concluded, I sweated a few pints through the hot, humid late morning and afternoon, seated a trifle uncomfortably in the unsophisticated, but perfectly adequate and excellently positioned, old press box at Sabina Park. One by one I wrote carefully crafted pieces for both the news and cricket sections of the Daily Telegraph.
My crisis came out of the blue. To this day I have only an uncertain theory about what I did but one touch of the wrong button, as I was in the process of transmitting my copy electronically to London, proved fatal. I had highlighted both stories and suspect that I simply hit the ‘X’ button rather than the ‘C’ next door to it. Instead of copying the words, I therefore obliterated the lot. No doubt the subsequent touch of the correct button would have saved me from the agony that followed and I would know what to do now, but then I still had to learn the lesson. All the words that I had so painstakingly put together disappeared in an instant and my increasingly panicky attempts to retrieve them proved fruitless.
By now I was melting from a combination of the heat and stress, the latter made much worse by the terrifying truth that, given a time difference of some six hours, the deadline for the first edition was imminent. Well-meaning colleagues and an expert in the Systems department at the Telegraph made various suggestions as to how the stories might be summoned back from the computer’s hard disk but the fact was that they could not.
There was nothing for it but to dictate my copy from scratch, some 3000 words in all, down a by no means perfectly clear line. This had to be done against the clock, approaching the hot topic from different angles for the two stories. Any hope that I had of retrieving at least some of what I had written with a clear mind, of delivering some sort of balance of fact and opinion in lucid sentences, disappeared when someone suddenly turned on reggae music and blasted it forth at an unbelievably high level of decibels over the PA system.
There was a loudspeaker next door to the open press box and the din thundered around the virtually deserted ground, roaring into my ears and drowning what remained in my head. Thank goodness I had an intelligent and helpful copy-taker in London who sensed my desperation, but there was no real coherence to what I offered him and my unfortunate readers next morning. This for one of the most dramatic cricket stories ever!
If I had known from the start that I was going to dictate my copy, as would have been the case in typewriter days, I would have planned accordingly and it would have been, relatively speaking, no problem, always provided that phone communications had been working. There were countries where, once upon a time, they seldom did. As I have mentioned, the subcontinent and Guyana used to be particularly
unreliable, ironically in the former case given India’s pre-eminence in technology these days.
Any disadvantages of using laptops, especially now that wireless links have become so common and simple, are at least balanced, probably outweighed by the help that modern communications offer to any member of the media. To give but one example, there are now statistical packages covering almost any aspect of Test cricket that can be updated after every game and called up more or less instantly. They are extremely useful and they save carrying more than the latest Wisden around in bags that already seem heavy enough.
The changes have been less marked in radio cricket commentary. The pattern was laid down long ago, especially by Howard Marshall in the years before the Second World War. He was a model and remains so but he might not have appreciated the encroaching presence of the ‘expert summariser’. Gradually the former player has, with the best intentions, taken some of the commentator’s ground. I have never found anyone unsympathetic to work alongside, although some have a better idea than others of when to resist talking and let the commentator dictate the rhythm of the dramatic events that may be unfolding. Even on radio there is room for a pause occasionally.
Whatever the medium, everyone is more ‘news conscious’ these days. When Brian Johnston was in his pomp, controversy could be avoided if he thought it was bad for the game. It is no longer possible to ignore such issues as patently incorrect umpiring decisions, bowlers with suspect actions, or, since the dreadful revelations of recent years, the outside possibility that, unless everyone is on guard, aspects of some international matches might still be fixed in various ways by cricketers prepared to take the money of unscrupulous punters or bookmakers.
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