Chris Tavaré looked careworn at the crease from the moment he arrived.
But for Gideon Haigh that just added to the allure
Some years ago I adjourned with a friend to a nearby schoolyard net for a recreational hit. On the way we exchanged philosophies of cricket and a few personal partialities. What, my friend asked, did I consider my favourite shot? “Easy,” I replied ingenuously. “Back-foot defensive stroke.”
My friend did a double-take and demanded a serious response. When I told him he had one, he scoffed: “You’ll be telling me that Chris Tavaré’s your favourite player next.” My guilty hesitation gave me away. “You Poms!” he protested. “You all stick together.”
Twenty-two years since Tavaré’s only tour of Australia, mention of him still occasions winces and groans. Despite its continental lilt, his name translates into Australian as a very British brand of obduracy, that Trevor Baileyesque quality of making every ditch a last one. He is an unconventional adoption as a favourite cricketer, I admit, yet all the more reason to make him a personal choice.
Tavaré did not score
runs, he smuggled
them out by stealth
Tavaré played 30 Tests for England between 1980 and 1984, adding a final cap five years later. He filled for much of that period the role of opening batsman, even though the bulk of his first-class career was spent at Nos. 3 and 4. He was, in that sense, a typical selection in a period of chronic English indecision and improvisation, filling a hole rather than commanding a place. But he tried – how he tried. Ranji once spoke of players who “went grey in the service of the game”; Tavaré, slim, round-shouldered, with a feint moustache, looked careworn and world-weary from the moment he graduated to international cricket.
In his second Test he existed almost five hours for 42; in his third, his 69 and 78 spanned nearly 12 hours. At the other end for not quite an hour and a half of the last was Ian Botham, who ransacked 118 while Tavaré pickpocketed 28. As an ersatz opening batsman Tavaré did not so much score runs as smuggle them out by stealth. In the Madras Test at the start of 1982 he eked out 35 in nearly a day; in the Perth Test at the end of 1982 he endured almost eight hours for 89. At one stage of the latter innings he did not score for more than an hour.
Watching on television in the east of Australia, I was simultaneously aching for his next run and spellbound by Tavaré’s trance-like absorption in his task. First came his pad, gingerly, hesitantly; then came the bat, laid alongside it, almost as furtively; with the completion of each prod would commence a circular perumbulation to leg to marshal his thoughts and his strength for the next challenge.
That tour, I learned later, had been a peculiarly tough one for Tavaré. An uxorious man, he had brought to Australia his wife Vanessa, despite her phobia about flying. Bob Willis, his captain, wrote in his diary: “He clearly lives every moment with her on a plane and comes off the flight exhausted. Add to that the fact that he finds Test cricket a great mental strain and his state of mind can be readily imagined.” You did not have to imagine it; you could watch him bat it out of his system.
I saw us both as
aliens, maligned
and misunderstood
Tavaré could probably have done with a psychiatrist that summer; so could I. Our parallels were obvious in a cricket sense: I was a dour opening batsman, willing enough, but who also thought longingly of the freedoms available down the list. But I – born in England, growing up in Australia and destined to not feel quite at home in either place – also felt a curious personal kinship. I saw us both as aliens – maligned, misunderstood – doing our best in a harsh and sometimes hostile environment. The disdain my peers expressed for “the boring Pommy” only toughened my allegiance; it hardened to unbreakability after his 89 at Melbourne.
Batting, for once, in his accustomed slot at No. 3, Tavaré took his usual session to get settled but after lunch opened out boldly. He manhandled Bruce Yardley, who had hitherto bowled his offbreaks with impunity. He coolly asserted himself against the pace bowlers who had elsewhere given him such hurry. I have often hoped on behalf of cricketers, though never with such intensity as that day, and never afterwards have felt so validated. Even his failure to reach a hundred was somehow right: life, I was learning, never quite delivered all the goods. But occasionally – just occasionally – it offered something to keep you interested.
GIDEON HAIGH is Australia’s leading cricket writer and the author of several books