by Lynne Truss
My mother had recited parts of ‘Horatius’ to me when I was a child - usually when I was ill in bed and too weak to stop her - and it had made an impression. Neither of us knew who ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium’ might have been, incidentally, and all I know now is that he was a first-century Etruscan whose fabled attempt to invade Rome was turned back by the equally fabled heroism of Horatius. But it’s a name that can truly stick in the mind when it comes in the first line of such excellent verse.
Lars Porsena of Clusium By the Nine Gods he swore That the great house of Tarquin Should suffer wrong no more. By the Nine Gods he swore it, And named a trysting day, And bade his messengers ride forth, East and west and south and north, To summon his array.
As things were later to turn out for the staunch Lance Klusener, the poem about Horatius holding the bridge all on his own (while it was destroyed around him) got more and more relevant as time went on. But this is to get ahead of ourselves.
My second match was England v South Africa on a pleasantly warm Saturday at The Oval. You may remember this occasion. It was a bit like Armageddon. Sports fans never quite prepare themselves for outcomes as horrifying as this one was. We go along cheerfully thinking we know the extent of what can occur (‘We won the toss, tiddly-pom; what can go wrong, tiddly-pom’), and end up screaming, ‘Make it stop! For God’s sake, make it stop!’ The thing was, England opted to bowl first, then had a hard time making any headway against the opening batsmen (Kirsten and Gibbs had reached 111 runs before the first wicket fell), but then did a fair job keeping the South Africa total down to 225 for seven. Mullally bowled Kallis for a duck; Pollock (admittedly batting at eight) was out to Darren Gough first ball. I noticed that my new best friend Klusener was not out for 48. Apparently he was a terrific all-rounder, this stolid, sandy, bun-faced chap. He also spoke Zulu. He got more interesting all the time.
But I soon wished I hadn’t known about that Zulu connection, because what happened next was pretty much the story of Rorke’s Drift. England’s openers Nasser Hussain and Alec Stewart went out (which in cricket should strictly be ‘went in’) and came staggering back almost immediately, in a state of dumb shock, with the cricketing equivalent of six-foot spears sticking out of their chests. We watched in horror. They had got only two runs between them. Stewart had got none at all - and he was the captain! And from then on, well, it was a scene of carnage, basically. A classic, humiliating batting catastrophe. With terrific efficiency, the South African bowlers got the whole side out for 103 in 41 overs, the highest individual scores coming from Graham Hick and Neil Fairbrother, who each clocked up a measly 21. It was Fairbrother I felt most sorry for on the day, despite his relative success with the bat. His honourable longevity at the wicket meant he had to watch at close range while, sickeningly, Hick fell, and then Flintoff, then Croft, then Gough. To adapt the famous line, he counted them all in, and he counted them all out again. Such a waste of young life, he must have thought. (Or alternatively, I suppose, what a bunch of tossers.)
My next match was quite an oddity, again involving South Africa. For reasons lost to history, the Kenya-South Africa first-round match was played in Amsterdam, which was more than a bit surreal. ‘Which way to the cricket?’ is the sort of question that, in Holland, makes people assume you’ve been at the dodgy fags again. But it was true. In Amstelveen (a leafy suburb, with rustling trees) there was a serviceable cricket ground where a match could be played in an exceptionally laid-back atmosphere, if you know what I mean. ‘TEST STATUS FOR HOLLAND NOW’ said a hopeful sign, and it got quite a few appreciative laughs. Had there not been a local transport strike that day (oh yes), a few more spectators might have shown up. But there were 3,500 people there, which was fine. There was a curious but familiar scent on the breeze. I spent most of the day sitting next to the Duckworth-Lewis official - a graduate of Brainbox University with a slide rule and calculator whose job was to apply a complex mathematical formula in the event of rain stopping play. He was extremely entertaining, this Duckworth-Lewis man. We had a great time. But so did everyone in Amstelveen that day, I think, aside from the hapless Kenyan team. In the end, when the South Africans had won by seven wickets, we all said, ‘Is it finished?’ and then we said, ‘Hang on, remind me where I am again,’ and then we said, ‘Seven wickets? Wow. That’s like, I mean, wow, seven. Seven? That’s like, wow.’
Obviously, the main feature of the day was its weirdness - partly because it was de facto weird, but also because it was May 26, 1999, a date that lives in the memory of many English football fans because it was on May 26, 1999 that Manchester United played Bayern Munich in Barcelona in the Champions League final. Naturally, passing the day in a peaceful woody enclave outside Amsterdam, I had a very clear sense of being in the wrong place for the wrong fixture. On the plus side, however, I knew that if I could only overcome the serious transport difficulties of getting back to my hotel in time (the late Ian Wooldridge and I exhausted all our combined ingenuity to achieve this, and it was still touch and go), I could watch the match in the evening in my room on Dutch tv. A nearby bar in the heart of Amsterdam would have been a better setting, but as usual my hotel was sterile and out-of-town and didn’t have a nearby anything, so watching in the room would have to do. And the great thing was, I could have a beer or two and get into my jim-jams. Best of all, I wouldn’t have to make notes, because no one was expecting me to write about it.
So I was just dancing round the room afterwards shouting ‘Unbelievable, two goals in added time, amazing, what a very strange day, what a very, very, very strange day,’ when my phone rang and the office said, ‘Did you watch it?’ And I said yes of course I’d watched it, what did they take me for, and by the way the pillows weren’t halfway fluffy enough, if they really wanted to know. And they said, how about writing it up for the front of the paper? And I said, puzzled, ‘You do remember I’m in Amsterdam, not Barcelona?’ And they said patiently that they did know this, yes. ‘I watched it in Dutch,’ I explained. ‘Yes, but football is an international language,’ they reminded me. So I switched on the laptop and turned in 800 criminally under-informed words in about half an hour, with an especially sinking heart because I knew my piece was destined for the front of the paper, rather than the back.
Writing for News when you are a sports columnist, I should explain, is like laying your babies in front of a combine harvester and then having to look at their mangled bits and pieces prominently displayed in a national newspaper the next morning. In fact, it’s worse than that, because the mangled bits are presented under your byline, in a manner to suggest you are the person responsible for them. If you tell a fellow sports writer that you are filing ‘for the front’, they pat you on the back and say they’re sorry. But I couldn’t really say no - or not after making the initial mistake of answering the mobile, anyway. In the piece I made it very clear that I was not in Barcelona, because I can’t abide deception of that sort. But the news subs automatically stripped out all such irrelevant sticking-to-the-truth nonsense, so that the next day - at a literary event in Sussex - people asked me all about the match, convinced that I’d been our woman on the scene of sporting history, when in fact I’d been our woman in a deck-chair in the Netherlands, having a snooze in a glade.
Two or three days after Amsterdam, the scene was Edgbaston. Bowing to the inevitable, I nowadays found the hotel by going first to that woman’s house in Redditch and letting her lead me in. India were playing England this time, and I’ll save you the misery of suspense by admitting at once that, in a match spread over two days due to rain, India beat England by 63 runs. Again we failed to bowl out the opposing side in 50 overs. Again they got us all out, although Hussain survived 89 minutes and scored a paltry 33 (from 63 balls), but Stewart was out for two (from nine balls). This time, however, the stakes were a bit higher: with Zimbabwe beating South Africa elsewhere, against all the odds, England had needed to beat India to get through to the next stage of the competition (called the Super Sixes). Their failu
re to do this meant they left the competition. The remaining teams in the World Cup were Pakistan, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Zimbabwe and India.
After the match, David Lloyd, the England coach, accused his disgraced players of not standing up to be counted, but in the context of cricket it was a stunningly bad choice of metaphor. Cricketers are counted the whole bloody time, surely, and that’s the very beauty of it. I had started to realise that the zen moment of cricket was the scoreboard set at Total 0, For 0, Overs 0. It was necessary to gaze at the board in that state, breathe deeply, and meditate. After that, once there were any numbers at all to look at (any numbers at all), one set about mentally dividing and subtracting and adding up - but whereas I disliked this aspect of basketball, I saw it as the great boon of cricket, perhaps because cricket gave you more time to do the calculations, and to ponder their significance for the game. The numbers told the story so far; they kept it completely alive in your mind; but they also teased you, led you on, tempted you to anticipate what was still to come. And the positive thing was, the mental activity was somehow its own reward, even when it confirmed that India were going to win this and you really might just as well get back to your tiny Dairylea-shaped room at the Edgbaston Thistle and set about sawing your head off.
For example, say your team has got 47 for two after 14 overs (in a 50-over match), and needs 233 to win. Forty-seven from 14 overs isn’t much, is it? In fact it is a rather poor 3.35 runs per over. The team now needs 186 from 36, which works out at 5.16 runs per over. ‘Is this poss?’ you write on your notepad. ‘Given measly 3.35 up to now?’ Later, when the team is facing the reality of 118 for five from 31 overs, you do the calculation again. The run rate has improved slightly (to 3.8) but they now need just over six runs per over, which would be a jolly fine thing, but only in a flying-pig kind of way, given their record so far. At Edgbaston on those two fateful days the situation got steadily worse, until the figure required was nine or ten per over, and it was officially hopeless. The last men standing were Gough, Mullally and Fraser (all bowlers). Ultimately, there was no escaping the maths.
While England was folding to India, we watched the scoreboard for the Zimbabwe-South Africa game with considerable alarm - especially when it started off with: 0 for 1 off 0.1, which looked at first glance like binary code, but in fact meant that a South African batsman had been dismissed with the very first ball of the match. We kept looking, and we couldn’t believe our eyes. After
7.3 overs, they were 25 for three. After 8.2 overs, they were 25 for four. In the 12th over, they were 34 for five, then 40 for six! Those bastard South Africans were shafting us again - but this time by pretending they didn’t know how to bat! Klusener would have no part of this rotten strategy, I was relieved to see. He was not out for 52. But on the other hand, in Zimbabwe’s innings he had taken only one wicket from nine overs, which was piffle by his usual high standards.
On Thursday June 17, 1999, the second semi-final of the cricket World Cup took place between South Africa and Australia at Edgbaston, and I was there. A shiver runs up my back as I type those words, because it was the great match of the tournament and one of the best things I ever saw. Australia had finished fractionally higher than South Africa in the Super Six stage of the competition (it was a tiny matter of run rate), which meant that in the extremely unlikely event of a dead heat, they would go through to the final. They had also met South Africa already, just a few days before, at Headingley, and beaten them in a very close game. Steve Waugh, the Australian captain, had notched up 120 runs on that day - helped by a famous dropped catch. Herschelle Gibbs has apparently never lived down the fact that he fumbled and dropped the catch that made that century possible. ‘Mate, you just dropped the World Cup,’ Waugh is supposed to have said to Gibbs, by way of manly comfort. Interestingly, however, he has always insisted that he didn’t.
It was a variable day, sunshine-wise. At the start, when Australia went in to bat, there was no sun. On a shadowless and heavy sort of pitch, they lost Mark Waugh almost immediately (for a duck from four balls), but then Gilchrist and Ponting got 50 fairly comfortable runs between them, making them 54 for one from 13 overs. At this point, of course, it was too early to extrapolate from these figures the likely outcome of the match, although naturally it was tempting. Then Allan Donald - wearing a fetching war-paint combination of Breathe-Right plaster on his nose and ghastly white zinc sun protection on his thick lower lip - bowled his first over, and shook things up considerably. Off the first ball of the 14th over, Ponting was caught by Kirsten; off the last, Lehmann was caught behind. So, suddenly, Australia were 58 for three from 14 overs, which looked a bit wobbly; but on the other hand, Steve Waugh was coming on, which looked great. I mean, it’s all very well for batsmen to survive and protect their wickets, but when overs are limited they have to score runs as well, surely - if you’ll pardon me for being controversial. As I may have mentioned, cricket is a terribly thought-provoking game.
So Australia just needed to dig in for a bit and get some runs - which is largely what happened. True, Gilchrist bought it in the 17th over (caught by Donald, off Kallis), but since this brought the excellent Michael Bevan to the crease, it turned out to be quite a good thing. The usually devastating Gilchrist had been in for ages, but had scored only 20 runs, so was the cricketing equivalent of a bed blocker, in my view (see highly original runs-v-wicket argument above). With the sun out now, Steve Waugh and Bevan steadily pushed up the total to 158 - but by this time 39 overs had been used up, so it wasn’t spectacular. In the 40th over, Waugh was out for 56 (caught behind off Pollock), and Australia seemed to be in trouble again. Suddenly that score looked a bit weak. 158 for five off 39.3 overs? With just ten overs to go?
New batsman Tom Moody fell to Pollock in the same over as Steve Waugh. He went in; he stuck his leg in front of his wicket to stop the ball (novice mistake, surely); he was out again. Australia were now 158 for six, with ten overs to go, and were starting to look a bit pants - but that’s how cricket goes, you see. Even those of us who have no direct experience of cinematography know all about the ‘zoom in, dolly out’ technique made famous by Steven Spielberg in Jaws, when he closed in on the face of Roy Scheider when someone shouted, ‘Shark!’ on the beach at Amity. The effect is that the subject remains in focus, and doesn’t even get any bigger in the frame - but the background falls away, and it’s like an attack of vertigo. A perceptual, grip-the-arm-of-the-seat ‘zoom in, dolly out’ thing happens umpteen times in the course of a dramatic cricket match. It happened when Tom Moody was dismissed for 0 in three balls. I mean to say, hang on, so that means 158 for six?
Bevan was still batting, of course. Shane Warne was the next man in. Between them, Bevan and Warne got 31 off 30 deliveries, but Warne was eventually caught in the 48th over by South Africa’s captain Hansie Cronje, who performed a flying somersault to secure the ball - although he probably knew that, had he dropped it, he wouldn’t have dropped the World Cup, because there were only two overs left. Warne had made 18 runs from 24 balls, which wasn’t bad. His dismissal meant that Australia were 207 for seven, with only 12 balls left. Seven? Mm, suddenly there seemed to be more than enough Australians in reserve; in fact, one wondered whether they’d been a bit too careful with them. What were they saving them for? Christmas? But then Reiffel was bowled by Donald off the first ball of the 49th over, and Fleming followed just two balls later. Neither of them had scored a run. Good grief, it was so hard to know what to think. A little while ago the Australians were 207 for seven. Now they were 207 for nine. There were virtually no Australians left to come in. Just the willowy Glenn McGrath, in fact, who craftily took the first opportunity (without having struck the ball) of getting to the non-striker’s end, thus putting Bevan in the firing line. Bevan upped the score to 213 and was then caught behind by Boucher (who did all the other catching behind for South Africa, by the way - I just didn’t want to keep repeating that information).
So that was that for Australia’
s batsmen. All out for 213 in 49.2 overs. At this very interesting halfway point, it was still much too early to extrapolate from those figures anything remotely resembling the outcome of this match. You will notice I never mention fielding positions, incidentally; or types of delivery. ‘It was a full toss driven to extra cover.’ I just think it would sound bogus if I did.
With a target of 214 runs from 50 overs, the South Africans went in to bat. Kirsten and Gibbs - who you may remember notched up 111 together against England at The Oval before a wicket was lost - got settled in again. Wise heads were saying that such a low total was not one the Australians would try to defend. Instead, they would be going for wickets. However, they waited until the 13th over to bring on the brilliant leg-spinning wicket-taker Shane Warne, which seemed a bit perverse, but probably had a perfectly good technical explanation involving advanced theories of propulsion, lateral revolution, flight and bounce. Or perhaps he had a headache. Anyway, with the score standing at 48 for 0, Warne came in to bowl, and got Gibbs out with his second ball. Shortly after this, in the 15th over, he bowled out Kirsten, and two balls later he got Cronje as well (caught by Mark Waugh for 0). Extrapolating from these figures, this looked like curtains for South Africa - or at least with Warney coming at them. They certainly looked quite shaken by what had happened. For a long period, Rhodes and Kallis stayed in together, raising the score to 145, but the play was nervy and there seemed to be countless dashes towards exploding stumps. In terms of the run rate, moreover, they were trailing their opponents. Rhodes was eventually caught in the 41st over, and I think most of us around this time opened our laptops with a little sigh of resignation and started to write our pieces about what a disappointingly one-sided semi-final this was. At which point Shaun Pollock went in and started to hit sixes and fours off Shane Warne.