The Second One Day International was, according to people who know about these things, ‘the most exciting game of cricket ever’. People who know about these things make sure they never get the time to know about anything else by endlessly reminiscing about all these multifarious ‘most exciting games of cricket ever’. It is a repetitive process which gradually anaesthetises the brain into amnesing all those even more multifarious ‘most terribly turgid games of cricket ever’, a useful phenomenon which ensures that the noble art of cricket can stagger on supported.
Anyway, this was definitely another ‘most exciting game of cricket ever’. A brilliant knock by Viv Richards (eighty-two runs off thirty-nine balls) seemed to have guaranteed another West Indian victory. Protestors outside hearing the excited and enthusiastic cheers were seen to drop their placards in an indecent ‘bugger the demo, we want to see the master’ hurry to purchase late-entry tickets. The Queen’s Park Oval, despite official boycotts and PNM threats of reprisal on any government employee seen lurking there, was filled to capacity. The West Indian love of cricket had once again superseded petty politics and pusillanimous politicians.
Aspects of Black Power were also festering not far from the surface. People turned up to see the cricket, yes, but some came to see a white humiliation, to see ‘West Indies . . . grind England to the dust’, as the eponymous Eddy Odingi put it so charmingly in the 10 March edition of the Trinidad Express. ‘Grinding folk to dust’, in our social, democratic and we’re-all-so-terribly-liberal days is the sort of nauseating vocabulary common only to extremes of white and black. All extremes end up preaching the same lessons of physical oppression and colour hatred. Sport may well succeed in breaking barriers down. The tragedy is that there are always the partisan supporters, the black-and-white viewers of life to build them all up again.
The most glorious of ironies inevitably happened: Graham Gooch, the villain of the Trinidadian piece, made 129 brilliant runs to become their overnight darling. Superlatives fail for his magnificent, virtually single-handed achievement: his victory. No one individual could have done more to restore England’s pride, and pull the team from its slough of ‘can’t face the fast bowlers’ despond, to the pinnacles of gung-ho ‘in and at them’ optimism.
While the English popular press hastily turned the pages of the communal Roget’s Thesaurus from synonyms for excruciatingly execrable to synonyms for exquisitely exhilarating exhibition – pages A– D and F–Z were lost on the 1981 trip, which explains the paucity of vocabulary in certain tabloids – Viv Richards, apparently in some cosmic Caribbean sulk, was refusing to give interviews.
All this was in sharp contrast, however, to the way in which two of my dearest colleagues, Geoffrey Boycott and Matthew Engel, were welcomed to this lovely island.
Geoff left Kingston the day before the team, and Matthew ‘I-too-can-be-a-sleuth-especially-when-there-is-no-cricket-to-write-about’ Engel decided there might be a story in Geoff’s reception at Piarco Airport, Trinidad. Geoff’s South African connections had been causing much controversy, and politicians, trade union leaders, customs and immigration officials, waiters, porters and upstairs maids had all threatened to give him a hard time, though I do have it on excellent authority from a highly placed diplomatic source that not a single one of them was in the pay of the Yorkshire CCC.
Sure enough, Geoff was stopped by an immigration official, who looked at his passport and made an immediate phone call. ‘Ah-ha,’ thought Matthew, taking copious mental notes, ‘this is an interesting development.’
Two minutes later, Matthew, still taking copious notes, was himself an integral part of the same interesting development, as the Ministry of National Security decided to deport the pair of them. The spurious reason given for this disgracefully cavalier treatment of Yorkshire’s finest bat and England’s Sportswriter of the Year was the fact that they had no work permits. Journalists and cricket correspondents visiting Trinidad for short periods, covering specific occasions, have never before needed permits, and the authorities’ attitude to English pressmen was dolefully reminiscent of the most counter-productive excesses of the Pretoria government itself.
But for an accident of timetable scheduling, and the fact that there was no plane back to England that night, the Ministry of National Security would have sent Geoff and Matthew home, deported unceremoniously as illegal immigrants and undesirable aliens. Had Geoff and Matthew not taken the forward flak and alerted the British authorities to the situation, a similar fate would have attended the entire English press corps the next day and the Ministry would have had them all deported, lock, stock and venomous ‘tripewriter’. I have been given unequivocally to understand, however, that there is absolutely no truth in the rumours that anyone in the Ministry is in the pay of either Ian Botham or Bob Willis, and it is comforting to ascertain that paranoid dislike and neurotic suspicion of the press is not confined merely to cricketing circles.
Rumours abounded, the more unsubstantiated the better, amongst the departing press corps in Kingston. First, we learned that Geoff and Matthew actually had been deported. Then we heard that they had been thrown in the slammer. They had, in fact, been placed under house arrest in the Holiday Inn, which although it has gone down in the past few years, is still not really as bad as all that. Matthew was staggered to find that the phone had not been cut off and he had not been left totally incommunicado. Could he phone his copy, he asked the telephonist, through to the Guardian? It really was important. The telephonist, as it happened, was an Indian lady.
‘I think it is a scandal, the way they are treating you,’ she opined sympathetically, and gave his call top-priority treatment.
Meanwhile, back in Kingston, there was no shortage of suggestions for Matthew’s headline; ‘My night of torment and terror in the slammer with Geoffrey’ seemed to be gathering support as a goodie from the popular press corps. Matthew was just the slightest bit peeved two days later when Peter Smith of the Mail appeared to know more about the entire incident than Matthew himself. Quite a revelation for a journalist, no doubt, to be on the wrong end of a news story for once!
The British High Commissioner, Sir Martin Berthoud, was immediately informed of the two men’s arrest, and diplomatic telexes between London and Port of Spain were whizzing back and forth all night, as Geoff and Matthew slept soundly under the watchful eyes of personal armed guards. It seemed a bit like a Trinidadian hammer to crack an Islington walnut: Matthew is not built in the Palaeolithic Edmonds–Botham mould, and is as likely to confront a police guard, armed or otherwise, as Graham Gooch is to indulge in social niceties with me.
‘The night of torment and terror’ was mercifully short-lived. Sir Geoffrey himself (Howe not Boycott) asked to be kept personally informed of developments, and the High Commissioner was told to lodge the strongest possible protest with the Trinidadian authorities, which in diplomatic parlance would probably read something like this:
Dear Trinidadian Authorities,
We think this is a jolly poor show.
Yours ever,
British High Commissioner
PS Sir Geoffrey is awfully cross too.
PPS Thanks for an absolutely wonderful cocktail party last Tuesday.
It is just this kind of Palmerstonian ‘send in the gunboats and bugger up the cocktail party’ talk that made the British Empire great, and made the British Imperial Army what it was: a bunch of party-wrecking fight-pickers.
The Trinidadian authorities were obviously shaken to the deepest profundities of their reverberating maracas, and quivered under the full force of British opprobrium. The fact that the entire Trinidadian press corps threw an absolutely major wobbly (concerned, quite rightly about the freedom of the press in general, and retaliatory measures against themselves in particular), was probably not entirely irrelevant either, and the Trinidadian government was obliged to make a major climb-down in this monumental cock-up. The Empire struck back and Boycott and Engel were free men.
The government, of course, had to save face, and therefore insisted that since they could not deport the members of the press, they would at least charge them £120 each for the privilege of working. £120 to work for a fortnight! It’s the kind of wheeze the Tories could contemplate to improve the economy!
Peter Smith, who looks after the press corps’ material needs and coordinates travel arrangements in a gently patriarchal sort of way, showed me the list of English journalists for whom work permits had finally been granted. The Ministry of National Security had placed a black mark by the name of any journalist who had been to South Africa. The fact that many if not most of the people concerned had been filing exactly the sort of copy that is undermining the Pretoria regime, and is making people (including West Indians) all over the world react to the system of apartheid, was patently of no relevance to these bureaucratic, bi-neurone minds. Tarring journalists who had put their personal safety on the line to write vehemently anti-apartheid pieces with the same mindless brush as the ‘I only wanted to play cricket and the money was good’ brigade, seemed to me a fundamentally despicable and unforgivable injustice.
The British High Commissioner was delighted that the situation had been so neatly and successfully defused. He knows, unlike the Trinis, that we do not have that many gunboats left. No one in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, not even in the wildest allowable diplomatic hyperbole, would describe Trinidad as a hive of mega-politic activity, and the Boycott–Engel episode had created quite a stir.
‘It’s all been so exciting,’ Sir Martin Berthoud confided to me at his cocktail party. ‘I’ve only been here eighteen months and so much has happened. First George Chambers went to England. Then the Queen came here. And now this. I’ve been on the front of all the English dailies, photographs of me and Michael Boycott.’
‘Geoffrey,’ corrected Phil gently.
‘Quite so, John,’ Sir Martin smiled at Phil, ‘Geoffrey.’
As one who has always felt that games should end with puberty, I was pleased to ascertain that Our Man in Port of Spain had placed cricket and cricketers in their proper perspective, as significant per se as Jenkin’s ear, but capable of causing just as much aggro. Geoffrey was at the party, and looking as impeccably smart as always. Many people accuse Geoff of being selfish and self-centred, and a player who could remain nameless but who is sometimes known as Neil Foster took the trouble to underline every ‘I’, ‘myself’ and ‘me’ in Geoff’s Mail on Sunday account of the affair. Admittedly, there were quite a few, and Matthew was much miffed that Geoff had not mentioned him even half as much as he had mentioned Geoff. I find Geoff great fun, however, and his conversation certainly holds no trace of those self-pitying recriminations that seem to inform other anti-apartheid targets’ every utterance.
‘They had to let me go, Frances,’ he laughed. ‘Too hot to handle.’
I’d rather have a jokey egotist than a surly whinger any day. Dear Matthew, however, is now suffering from a bad dose of fame, and is taking the mickey out of himself unmercifully.
‘Can’t write today,’ he announced in a world-weary, megastar sort of way. ‘Lost my black medium-gauge BIC ballpoint.’
Judging by the seven o’clock shadow he now seems to be affecting, he must have mislaid his disposable BIC razor as well. Despite all efforts however, he looks no more like an ex-con than . . . than . . . well, it is difficult off-hand, but there are one or two of the press corps who could finish my simile neatly.
To everyone’s surprise, and to the ‘we’re sick of touring and want to go home’ lobby’s disappointment, the actual demonstrations were rather an anodyne chapter after such a fulminating exordium. One almost felt tempted to feel that the Trinis were in a post-carnival depression, and basically just needed something to make a song and dance about.
‘They’ve got some really catchy little tunes,’ Phil remarked impressed. In fact, they’re so catchy we’ve got Allan Lamb joining in. ‘Taylor, Thomas, go home,’ he keeps singing at the top of his voice, his clipped South African accent reverberating gaily from the hollow depths of the shower room.
The irony of the situation is not lost on Legga. (Legga Lamb. Get it? The team’s inventive genius, not mine.) He is the only South African in the England team, and it has fortunately not occurred to even the most rabid of protestors to complain about him. He is growing constantly in everyone’s esteem on this tour. His indefatigable determination in the practice nets, his stalwart and gutsy performances in the middle, and his perennially cheerful good humour are shining examples to some of the moaners.
I have only ever heard him complain once this tour, and that was the morning after I apparently forced him to drink an entire bottle of Phil’s Hine Vieille Fine Champagne antique cognac. It was during that evening that he told me he was walking around the island the next day for the benefit of leukaemia research. I had done sufficiently well out of Phil’s second bottle of Hine Vieille Fine Champagne antique cognac to sponsor him for five dollars a mile, and was not a trifle confused the next day when I heard on the radio that one A. Lamb was fielding at slip . . .